Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

The First 100 Days

Politics

I’ve said before that the first 100 days of a new presidency (any presidency, not just Trump’s) is a nonsensical quasi-deadline, an artifice created and imposed upon new presidents by the Jackals Of The Press (JOTP), as though there’s something magical about the number 100 — as opposed to 120, or 86, or 227, for example.

All that said, The Diplomad has an excellent summary of Trump’s first 100 days. While the summary of his achievements is fine, Diplomad also highlights the “achievements” of the Democratic Left and their fascistic cohorts:

Opponents tried to disrupt the inauguration, and have engaged in a consistent pattern of street violence and thuggery aimed at intimidating Trump supporters and trying to give the impression that the country is ungovernable unless the progressives are in charge. Nothing is off limits, including Trump’s family, in this assault on the new president. Unprecedented coarseness, violence, and fake news are all arrows in the progressive quiver and being unleashed on Trump and supporters daily.

Read the whole thing, because it’s better than anything I could have written.

 

Here We Go Again

Politics, Two-Minute Hate

Buckle your seatbelts, folks: this one is going to make the Pussification rant seem like a ladies’ tea party.

Over at some website I’ve never heard of, a guy named Spencer Quinn has some nice (and some not-so-nice) things to say about Your Humble Narrator (and you really need to read the whole article before you read any further). I feel I need to respond, and in so doing, I’ll set the record straight and make my position on some of his discussion points perfectly clear.

My problem with the alt-Right is the same problem I have with libertarians: as commenter “Pat Buchanator” once put it at Instapundit: “This is how it always is with libertarians. No matter how appealing that quart of vanilla ice cream looks, there’s always that tablespoon of dog shit mixed in that turns you off.” Thus it is too with the alt-Right and me:  we start off with some common ground — quite a lot, actually — and then the conversation reaches that “Oh, bloody hell! Why did you have to go and spoil it?” moment, when Teh Crazy comes out of its hole.

My common ground with the alt-Right is this: like them, I think that Western civilization and culture is the greatest thing that ever occurred to mankind. It has elevated our society from brutishness and beastliness into civilization, quite possibly to the zenith of thought, achievement and prosperity. Just taking the period from Ancient Greece to the Internet, it is difficult to imagine how life would exist today were it not for Western culture — the sciences, economy, music, arts, literature, morals, manners and mores, the whole damn thing. Western civilization, in other words, is absolutely worth maintaining, prolonging, venerating and all that.

And here’s the first little roadblock that the alt-Right throws in my way: their distaste, and even hatred for Jews.

I have no idea why that is. Pound for pound, the Jews have contributed as much or more to Western civilization than any other group — it’s even called the “Judeo-Christian tradition”, FFS — and to discount this contribution deliberately, to me, shows a shallow intellect at best. (At worst, Hitler, but I’m not going to go there.) Of course, I know that many Jews are socialists, communists, progressives, one-worlders, and all those things that are not only themselves distasteful, but are contradictory to Western thought. Ending slavery in the Western hemisphere (an action performed solely by Western nations, lest we forget) is not the same as allowing Western culture to be perverted or submerged by inferior cultures — and let’s be perfectly honest, when compared to Western culture, all other cultures are in general absolutely inferior to ours. To say otherwise is to be ignorant of history, or to be able to consciously deny the fact of the matter despite all evidence to the contrary. Judaic culture, by the way, is not inferior to, say, Western culture and civilization because in no small part, theirs is almost indistinguishable from that of Western Europe because of their commonality. That Israeli liberals seem perfectly prepared to help bring about the destruction of Eretz Israel was always a mystery to me until it was explained to me (by one of my good friends, an Orthodox Jew) that these liberals hate the state of Israel because it is culturally closer to Western European democracy than it is to Eastern European socialism. And the liberal Israelis have camp-followers all over the world: in Europe, Britain, the United States and anywhere that Jews can be found in any numbers. Does that mean “conspiracy”? Sure, if you’re a moron, because there are many, many Jews who are conservative, too — but somehow, the Conspiracy seems to have passed them by? Not credible.

So: am I pro-Israel? You betcha. I’m even more supportive of Israel when I look at the nations of assholes who want Israel destroyed.

Do I think that a lot of Jews are liberal assholes? You betcha, again. (Don’t even ask me about Jews and their support for gun control, unless we also mention JPFO, who also seem to have missed the memo.)

Am I prepared to become an anti-Semite because of The Great Jewish Conspiracy? Think again, Adolf.

Would I stand aside if some anti-Semitic pricks started playing their little neo-Nazi reindeer games with Jews in the streets? Not only would I not stand aside, but I’d be standing between the two groups, telling the anti-Semites that they’d have to get past me first.

Ich habe Dachau gesehen.

And as long as I have breath in my body, “Never again!” will not be just an empty phrase, even if that seems to be the case with some Jews(!), who think that their tribe’s survival of the Holocaust was somehow irrelevant in today’s world.

So the minute some alt-Rightist starts with that anti-Semitic shit, I turn right off, because I will never be part of that insanity. (It doesn’t even have to be the alt-Right; over at Taki’s Magazine — which I generally love — I’ll be reading something amusing or educational, and then the Great Zionist Conspiracy gets mentioned, and figuratively speaking, I toss the magazine across the room.)

The next thing about the alt-Right that gets up my nose is their little unicorn-rainbow dream of a “White ethnostate”.  Once again, oh FFS. Let me tell you this: I grew up in a wannabe-White ethnostate, I knew White supremacists, and oh my gawd, I was even related to a bunch of them. They were all, to a man, mean-spirited, ugly people, and their system of government — apartheid — was even uglier than they were. Even though their philosophical underpinning made apparent sense — the catastrophe that was (and is) Black Africa showed that Blacks were incapable of self-government — but their prescription to protect themselves against that was horrible and ultimately doomed to failure, as events would prove. Forget that shit; I not only hated it, and them, but I rebelled against it, stopping well short of planting bombs and shooting random White people in the streets, however, because those are what we call today terrorists. Even with the best intentions in the world, I was not going to become a White Nelson Mandela (who was, lest we forget, as much of a terrorist as Yasser Arafat despite, like Arafat, becoming somehow acceptable in his later years as a head of state). As much as I loathed apartheid, I was not going to take that next step, because too many innocent people would be harmed. Remember that, because it will be important later.

Now some people, e.g. the aforementioned Mr. Quinn, have trouble reconciling my position with my somewhat trenchant thoughts set out in Let Africa Sink (I told you I’d need to republish it). They all miss the point. Let Africa Sink was written in a mood of profound sadness, pessimism and despair, and was never meant to be some kind of rallying-cry and blueprint for a bunch of sick racists. FFS: I am an African myself; I was born there, I lived there for a third of a century, and my family first arrived in the Cape in 1692. I have every right to call myself an African, as much or even more than Jesse Jackson can call himself an American. I left Africa because I saw absolutely no hope for the whole continent, not just South Africa (which, by the way, is well on the way to joining Zimbabwe, the Congo and all the other little beauty spots over there). I left because all I could see was a future of bloodshed, hatred, venality and human ruin. I have seen nothing since that has made me want to change my opinion by one iota. Africa, as a place and as a human entity, is fucked beyond words, and there is nothing, nothing that will end or even ameliorate that scenario.

Now stay with me here, because what sets me apart from the alt-Right is that I won’t — can’t — make the leap from Africa being so screwed to “Blacks are therefore inferior to Whites”. You know why I can’t? Because of Ben Carson, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Richard Pryor and Denzel Washington (to name but some). Even an idiot like Maxine Waters, despite being a socialist to her core, has not advocated racial violence and anti-White terrorism (so far). In other words, when Black people aren’t Africans but Americans — Americans who moreover believe profoundly that Western European culture is far better than the alternative and who therefore espouse the principles of Western civilization despite their own ethnic heritage — it is impossible for me to say that in general principle, Black people are inferior to White people. Can’t go there, even if Carson et al. are woefully in the minority in the Black community. I can’t go there even in the face of evidence that Black-run cities (or, to be more correct, Democrat-run cities) are pathetic failures and African-style hellholes of poverty, corruption and homicide. I see little difference, by the way, between the looming disaster that is San Francisco (which is not run by Blacks) and the appalling tragedy of Detroit (which is, and has been for a long time). If a majority of Blacks espouse socialism, the fault is not their ethnicity but their education. (Hell, a sizable number of White people espouse socialism, too; don’t get me started on those idiots.)

If so many Blacks vote Democrat instead of Republican, and end up with failure in consequence, is that a reason to think that Blacks are that inferior to Whites? Let me point out a little-known fact: without the White (Afrikaans- and English-speaking) working-class voters, South Africa’s apartheid would have collapsed decades before it did; but like American Blacks were by Democrats, they were promised jobs, job security and social advancement by the Afrikaner nationalists, which meant that the White working classes bought into the eventual promise of apartheid: separate development. The “dumping grounds” of South African apartheid followed shortly thereafter. White voters, in other words, are just as capable of adopting an evil philosophy (apartheid) as Black voters are drawn towards supporting a different evil philosophy (socialism).

And that’s another part of alt-Right philosophy that pisses me off. If I may use the rhetoric of Albert Jay Nock: suppose that you’re right; suppose that we Whites should create an exclusive White ethnostate that bars (among so many others) Blacks and Jews: how, exactly, are you going to create this little White nationalist Nirvana? How are you going to move this from a unicorn’s wet dream to ugly (and it would be ugly) reality? It sure as hell isn’t going to happen in the United States, no matter how much you want to create the White Man’s Paradise in, say, Utah or Idaho, because there will have to be some rearrangement of peoples for that to happen — and I repeat, that ain’t gonna happen anywhere in the U.S. Good luck trying that elsewhere — well, maybe in South Africa’s Orania, but guess what: you alt-Righters won’t be welcome there because you’re not Afrikaans. See how this ethnic superiority thing works?

I saw at first hand how the South African government went about creating the reality of “separateness” in a multi-racial society, and let me tell you, it was revolting, appalling, and made me want to join Mandela’s Spear Of The Nation organization, albeit only for a short while. I’ll tell that story another time, because if I do so now, it will engender a red-hot anger in me that would make Pussification seem like a scholarly discourse.

Let me tell you all: underneath all the words about “White pride”, “promoting Western European values and culture” and “cultural superiority” are some really, really ugly beliefs, philosophies and plans of action; and I want absolutely no part of them.

I know that my way of supporting Western civilization might seem weak and ineffective to the alt-Right. I prefer to vote for politicians who prefer capitalism to socialism, Western culture over, say, Muslim culture or African culture. I prefer to write about Western civilization and extol it, letting people read my stuff and thereby (I hope) being persuaded to follow my example and in turn persuading others to be likewise. I raised my children in the Western tradition, and have drawn maybe thousands of people to my way of thinking — even if only by reading my stuff, they realize that they aren’t alone in their beliefs, and that our mostly-Anglocentric Western way of life is the right one.

Most of the human condition is dealing with The Pendulum: as our societies develop, the pendulum swings from Right to Left and back again. Often, the reverse swing is overly long, and that leads to all kinds of trouble. (The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror is an excellent example, by the way, albeit an example of showing that even Western civilization can screw things up.) The alt-Right, to me, represents just such an over-correction of The Pendulum’s erstwhile swing to the Left, and frankly, I don’t find much to recommend their fantasies.

I am aware that the alt-Right may turn on me and start with the name-calling, e.g. “race-traitor” (which sounds so much better in the original Afrikaans, volks-verraaier, and which has been used on me before), or their favorite, “cuckservative” (one who is nominally conservative, but actually in thrall to liberals), and all the other cute little epithets they’ve come up with to describe those who, if they aren’t with them, must be against them.

Guess what? I am against you. I’m against your anti-Semitism, your White supremacism, and all the other bullshit that you hide under camouflage phrases and euphemisms. I know exactly who you are, and I’m not one of you.

There is no “paradox” in my philosophy; I just refuse to succumb to the temptation of ascribing societal failures to outside influences such as the “Jewish Conspiracy” or “negroid inferiority”. (Historically, it reminds me too much of Weimar Germany and pre-1917 Bolshevism.) As Quinn noted, I don’t take that extra step in “logic” that will move me over to the alt-Right because quite simply, it’s a step too far. Sorry if that puzzles you. Life isn’t a simple case of black and white, or even Black and White: it’s far more complex than that, and I’m sorry if you can’t see it.

And one last thing: in his essay, Spencer Quinn has many kind words to say about my bravery and “brass balls” (as he puts it). Do not for one moment think that any of that is going to disappear should someone decide to confront me in person. Please remember that as a young man, I once stood up against the guns and sjamboks of Afrikaner apartheid; and I’m prepared, even in my old age, to stand up to you. I am a lot meaner now than I was then, and I have a lot less to lose. That’s not a challenge, by the way; as Quinn noted, I really just want to be left alone — and in the alt-Right’s case, that means not co-opting my writings in support of your foolishness.

Sincerely,

Kim du Toit

Breaking Promises

Politics

Okay, it seems like the Left is trying to push the meme that President Trump is a failure because he didn’t do much in his first (artificial deadline of) 100 days in office.

I agree. In fact, I’m holding Trump accountable for breaking some of his electoral promises, to whit:

  1. There have been no mass roundups of homosexuals and shuttling them off to concentration camps in cattle cars.
  2. There have been no reports of mass roundups of illegal Central- and South American aliens, and shuttling them off to Babi Yar-style killing pits for summary execution.
  3. Ditto university professors and -administrators.
  4. Not one woman’s uterus has burst explosively because she was denied a pregnancy termination under the new Trump anti-abortion laws.
  5. You still can’t buy a full-auto assault rifle in Aisle 17 at Wal-Mart without a background check.
  6. It’s still illegal to shoot transsexuals in the street on sight. (Bruce or Shirley Jenner — or whatever xie calls xumself these days — can breathe a sigh of relief.)
  7. Madonna is still at large, unmolested by the newly-created Trump Secret Police force. Ditto Whoopi Goldberg and [300,000-strong list omitted].
  8. Journalists have still not been flogged in the public square according to Trump’s new laws, either.

Now the cynics among my Readers — and there are one or two — may point out that as attractive as some of the above situations might seem to us Deplorables, Trump never promised any of them in his campaign speeches.

All I can say is that during the 2016 presidential campaign, you obviously didn’t read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, then, because they assured us that he did.

Question Of The Day

Politics

From Reader MadJack:

I saw this question on Quora and was intrigued.
“What is the biggest mistake a U.S. President has ever made?”
The number one answer was Watergate, but I’m not so sure I agree with that. I’d be interested to know what you and your readers think — most know more about history than I do, and that includes the parts I lived through.

In modern times, I’d have to say it was George H.W. Bush, who broke his “No New Taxes” promise to the electorate. That mistake cost him a second term and (coupled with Ross fucking Perot) put Bill Bastard Clinton into the White House in 1993.

The other huge mistake was Harry Truman’s acceptance of the United Nations onto U.S. soil, but I’m not sure whether he could have done much to stop it even had he wanted to. He could have refused to sign the Charter — as a Republican president of the time might surely have done — but he went along with it partly from his own conviction and partly because it was a cornerstone of the saintly FDR’s legacy.

One more presidential mistake to consider was JFK’s refusal to allow the U.S. Air Force (or any other branch) to support the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. I know people will say that the USSR might have intervened, but any scrutiny of the history of the time will show that the Commies didn’t have the military capacity to project power that far into the Western Hemisphere, and there was no way they would have used a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.A. just to protect Cuba. But Kennedy’s reluctance, coupled with his disastrous meeting with Kruschev a few months later, did embolden the Soviets to start installing medium-range missiles in Cuba, which in turn led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. While Kennedy did redeem himself on that one by standing up to the Soviets, it was a problem largely of his own making. (One wonders how Urkel Obama would have responded to Kruschev’s ploy… no, I don’t wanna think about it.)

By the way, Watergate was a huge blunder for Nixon — the cover-up was, anyway — but I think Gerald Ford’s preemptive pardon of Nixon was an even bigger one, because it put Jimmy Shitforbrains Carter into the White House in 1977.

Readers are encouraged to add their suggestions in Comments. I’m not an expert on pre-20th century U.S. presidents by any standards, so I’d like to hear thoughts on that era especially.

International Comparisons

Culture, Politics

In my post about laws and traffic laws, Erik of No Pasaran! took me to task in Comments. According to him, I’m an Allyagottado — i.e. a slave to the law. (I should mention that Erik and I go back a long, long way; he’s one of the good guys, a rarity in Eurostan, and I don’t take his criticism of me to heart.) Read his comment first, but let me say at the outset that it’s basically a rant against traffic speed limits, with which I don’t disagree that much. (I should also point out that the entire point of my post was that apart from traffic laws, which to me are a minor irritation, I’m anything but an Allyagottado, but whatever.)

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. One of Erik’s points was that speed limits, or rather the lack thereof on Germany’s autobahns makes for efficient driving and few crashes. That’s by and large true, although when you do see a crash on the autobahn, it’s a doozy: seldom fewer than four or five cars totally wrecked, and multiple cases of serious injury and/or deaths. However, there’s a point that is seldom made by people who love the no-speed limit on Germany’s highways: the Germans know how to drive. And that’s a very salient point, because to get a driver’s license in Germany, you don’t just get handed one after a couple weeks of driver’s ed in high school; you have to enroll in a State-authorized Fahrschule and pass both a theory- and practical examination (here’s a decent overview so I don’t have to go into detail). It is not a cheap process, it is extraordinarily difficult, and unlike here in the United States, the Germans treat driving very much as a State-granted privilege and quite definitely not as an individual’s right. It is quite common for licenses to be suspended, sometimes for life, after multiple traffic infractions, and with no appeal. (In Germany, if you get angry at another driver and just make a rude gesture, there’s a good chance that you’ll be photographed by one of the hundreds of thousands of traffic cameras on the autobahns — oh yes, we Americans would just love that degree of privacy invasion — and you’ll lose your German driver’s license, possibly forever if it’s not your first offense.)

To repeat: driving is treated in Germany far more strictly than it is treated Over Here. And thus a comparison of the two countries in this regard is not only difficult, but incongruent. “Why can’t we have highway speed limits like the Germans?” is answered simply by, “We could, if we wanted to live under a Germanic system of licensing and control.”

To get away from the Germans (something we should do as a matter of course anyway*); I’m always amused by people of the gun control persuasion who never tire of comparing the U.S. gunfire homicide rates with those of Japan (a favorite of theirs, by the way). “Why can’t we be more like the Japanese?” they wail as they wave around Japan’s 0.00000001% statistic. Well, we could, if we Americans were prepared to put up with the stifling social conformity and authority-worship of Japanese society, and the complete lack of a Second Amendment in our Constitution. But we wouldn’t, and shouldn’t.

Which brings us, finally, to the point of this particular post. Many foreign countries do certain things better than we do, or at least have it better than we do in certain respects. But as the above examples have shown, that superiority generally comes at a steep price, and is most often a price paid with a profound loss of personal freedom — or else, a profound loss of standard of living and quality of life — all of which are abhorrent to us.

If we are going to make an honest comparison, therefore, I’m not sure we Americans come off that badly, all things considered.

Oh, and Erik, if you read this: I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find too many instances in my writings where I “reflexively defend the authorities” — any authorities. But hey, if it helps you make your argument…

*Of course, I exclude my German Readers from this observation because to a man, they are my kind of people: hard-working, law-abiding, freedom-loving and lovers of firearms, to name but a few common attributes. (And to Reader Sam R. in particular, over in Germanland: Vielen dank  für Ihre Großzügigkeit, if you’ll excuse my schreckliches Deutsch.)

Maskirovka

Politics

The Russian word in the title means “to conceal”. Let me give you a modern-day example thereof.

There is an international group of people whose purpose is to hobble the industrial capability of the advanced nations of the world, so as to “equalize” the outputs of those nations and the “emerging” nations — much as racehorses are handicapped by carrying heavier weights to compensate for their greater ability. There are all sorts of reasons for this group to exist: some members are part of the emerging nations themselves and seek to help their client countries, while other members are citizens of the advanced nations who wish to improve the chances of the emerging nations by slowing or crippling the advanced nations. The motives of the first group (the “emergents”) are obvious, unambiguous and completely understandable. Those of the second group, however, are a lot less so, unless one understands the philosophical underpinnings of their actions.

There is a socio-political philosophy that advancement of one group can only occur at the expense of another; in other words, progress, wealth, development and so on are all finite, and therefore when one group advances, it takes from the “pool” of, say, wealth which by definition will impoverish others. This philosophy is called Marxism.

So while both emergents and Marxists have different motives, their goal is the same: handicapping the progress of advanced industrial economies.

There is a third group of people who have yet another philosophy, but whose goals (at the moment) are similar to those of the emergents and the Marxists. This last group, whom I’ll call the naturalists, prefer to think of the Earth as a perfect ecosystem that is despoiled by the actions of Man, and therefore will support any initiative or action that lessens the baleful effects of human activity. (These are the people who will oppose electrification of a rural Third World community because electrification will “spoil” the traditional culture of the community, regardless of the fact that the traditional culture causes people to starve in huge numbers and have infant mortality rates six times greater than their own group.) This group is largely ineffectual because their philosophy is ignored not only by thinking people, but by the people in the Third World who believe, rightly, that things like electricity provide a greater chance of survival in their hostile environment. But the naturalists serve an important purpose in the furthering of the three groups’ common goal (handicapping advanced nations’ progress and prosperity): their philosophy can be adopted by all three groups as an umbrella.

Advanced nations are likely to reject attempts to slow them down to allow competition from emerging nations — sentiments like “we welcome competition” are utter nonsense because nobody likes competition except the beneficiaries thereof.

Advanced nations also accept the fact that Marxism is nonsense — wealth is not finite, it’s infinite — and even when advanced nations buy into Marxism slightly (e.g. most of Western Europe, all of Scandinavia and people living in coastal U.S.A.), they will acknowledge privately that Marxism fails utterly wherever it’s practiced in its purest form (e.g. Cuba, the former Soviet Union and lately, Venezuela).

Advanced nations also accept the fact that the entire ethos of human history and endeavor is the exploitation of the Earth’s resources to improve the condition of humankind. Sometimes that exploitation is excessive — the open-pit mines of Kazakhstan, the deforestation of Eastern Africa for farming, and so on — and all recognize the need for responsible and even delicate management of resource exploitation where it can be done. Needless to say, the degree of responsibility is the subject of debate.

All of which brings us to the maskirovka.

I have written extensively as to why all current climate prediction models, the basis of the maskirovka, are a load of junk. Rather than do all that again, therefore, I’ll just refer to this excellent summary.

Update: For some reason, the last part of this post did not appear, so I’ve rewritten it below. Many apologies.

The goal of the three groups cannot garner support from the broad mass of people, for the simple reason that most people (of all skills, nationality and education) will not buy into the disparate philosophies of all three groups. What is therefore needed is a overriding message which can cover and conceal these philosophies and blur the goals into a single thesis. That statement has to have some underpinning, so a set of data — climate data — has been assembled to alarm people into thinking that not only is climate change imminent and catastrophic, it is also man-made (anthropomorphic). That the data is junk is beyond debate; one test of a mathematical algorithm supporting the thesis of “CLIMATE CHANGE SOON! WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” found that not only was the algorithm flawed, but it created precisely the same conclusions regardless of the data fed into it — randomly-generated numbers, in other words, had the same conclusion as actual climate data points. (And the data collection methodology of the latter was also flawed, meaning that the foundation data was junk to start off with, hence the need to jiggle the calculations to provide the required conclusions. In the data analysis business, we used to call this the “K” factor, or to use its proper term, Lies & Bullshit.)

Of course, when people (such as myself) pointed out the inherent fallacy and mendacity of the maskirovka, the hysterical name-calling and insults were bound to follow: “climate-change denier” (consciously linking the term “denier” into the same category as “Holocaust denier”) became the term, rather than the more appropriate “skeptic”. Note too that the original term for “climate change” was “global cooling” in the 1980s, then “global warming” in the early 2000s (Al Gore, call your office), and then when the contradictory terms for the same phenomenon were pointed out, the thesis was quickly renamed into the catch-all “climate change”.

None of this, however, can refute the utter fallaciousness of the climate change data (also proved by the constantly-shifting doomsday dates of global catastrophe, all of which have either been passed or else can plainly be seen to be nonsensical). Further (actual) scientific research has shown that solar activity — which cannot be controlled by human intervention — is largely responsible for the overwhelming number of climate change events. This, then, is the simple reason for the hysteria with which anthropomorphic climate change skeptics are attacked; the mathematical foundation of the thesis is fatally flawed and indefensible, actual climate change is uncontrollable, and therefore the focus has to be shifted to impugn the skeptics. Some have suggested that skeptics be treated as criminals, some in academia have been ostracized by their peers and/or forced out of their jobs, and so on.

None of this matters. The plain fact is that the maskirovka has failed, millions of climate change research dollars are imperiled, and without the figleaf of “science” to support it, the entire coalition of the emergents, Marxists and naturalists is no longer viable.

The Emperor, truly, has no clothes. Anyone claiming otherwise is either a fool, a liar or a villain. There is no other alternative.