An editorial at National Review Online reacts to Democratic U.S. senators’ attacks on groups challenging the alarmist view of global warming.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., John Kerry’s yacht) is leading a marathon of denunciations in the Senate targeting a bunch of groups and institutions that don’t really have anything to do with one another: tobacco companies, chemical producers, think tanks, charitable trusts, oil companies, and, of course, Charles and David Koch. Nine-tenths of that is window-dressing. The targets are the oil companies and their money, and the Koch brothers and their activism.
Senator Whitehouse and the others are lambasting certain oil companies, especially Exxon, and the various activist groups associated (however distantly) with the Koch brothers for having “funded think tanks,” for having “paid public-relations firms,” and having “developed and executed a massive campaign” to spread their own views about global warming and policy questions related to energy and climate change. And they are demanding that their targets “cooperate with active or future investigations” into their spread of “climate denial.” In other words, Senate Democrats are once again using the Capitol as a political forum in which to denounce and threaten private citizens and organizations who dare to speak in the public square.
The relevant context here is that a group of Democratic attorneys general, supported by a network of other Democratic elected officials, donors, and activists, is attempting to criminalize the political activism that Senator Whitehouse is here denouncing. Exxon is the target of an open-ended investigation by the Democratic attorney general of New York, while think tanks and activist groups have been subpoenaed and investigated by the Democratic attorneys general of the U.S. Virgin Islands and California.
Not long ago, it was, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!” Now, it’s, “How dare you engage in politics without our permission!”
