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Delingpole: Climate Bully Mob Tries to Oust Trump Supporter from Natural History Museum

If, like me, you love the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, here is a question I can guarantee you’ve never asked.

Never once — as you’ve circumnavigated the blue whale or gawped at those marvelous Teddy Roosevelt-style dioramas in the mammal halls or admired the T-Rex’s jagged 6-inch gnashers — have you paused in deep thought and mused to yourself: “Gee. I wonder if the guys who pay for all this stuff are Democrats or Republicans?”

The reason you’ve never had this thought is because you’re not stupid. Or at least, not that stupid.

You understand — because it’s so obvious that even one of the stuffed primates in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals could grasp this basic point — that the collections in the American Museum of Natural History have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. They have to do with science, which is something completely different.

Science is about studying what is. Politics is about what ought to be or what might be. Science is about objectivity. Politics is about subjectivity.

They really don’t mix and when people try to make them mix it’s a disaster. To believe otherwise, you’d have to deny all the evidence of history, know nothing about the scientific method and be really, really thick.

Thicker than a pickled cuttlefish in a jar of surgical spirit; dumber than a lobotomized mollusk; more basic than an amoeba with severe learning difficulties.

o bearing all this mind, what should we feel towards the bunch of 182 self-proclaimed “scientists” who have written an open letter to the AMNH demanding that it cut its links with trustees and donors whose politics they find objectionable?

My suggestion would be: a mix of pity, embarrassment, and disgust.

Plus, maybe, a judicious soupçon of horror that such imbeciles could have been given tenure at any academic institution where the teaching of impressionable young adults is involved even at all, let alone where it’s financed by hard-working U.S. taxpayers.

So that means you, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University; and you, Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University; and you, Kerry Emmanuel, Cecil & Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and you, many of you others among the 182 signatories of this bizarre, outrageous, and embarrassing letter.

You have these ritzy sounding titles which seem to confer on you an aura of gravitas and scientific distinction. But by putting your names to this spectacularly dumb letter — of which more in a moment — you have relinquished all claim to be taken seriously as voices of scientific authority. You are all, basically, frauds.

Why? Because what you are engaging in here patently isn’t about science. Nor is it, as you profess, about the well-being and credibility of the American Museum of Natural History. No, this is about low-down, dirty political activism. It’s Antifa with a PhD.

Let’s examine in more detail what these fake-science terrorists are demanding in their letter.

Headed “Open Letter from Scientists to the American Museum of Natural History,” it begins with a paragraph wreathed in apparent high-mindedness and dispassionate concern.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York (AMNH) is a treasured and influential institution. Museums must be protected as sites that build understanding, help the public make meaning, and serve the common good. We are concerned that the vital role of science education institutions will be eroded by a loss of public trust if museums are associated with individuals and organizations known for rejecting climate science, opposing environmental regulation and clean energy initiatives, and blocking efforts to reduce pollutants and greenhouse gases.

Pretty soon, though, it shows its true colors:

Rebekah Mercer and the Mercer Family Foundation, political kingmakers and the financiers behind Breitbart News, are major funders of climate science denial projects such as the Heartland Institute, where they have donated nearly $6 million since 2008. The Mercer Family Foundation is also a top donor to the C02 Coalition and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, institutions that assert that an increase in C02 emissions from fossil fuels will be a great benefit to plant and animal life on Earth.

Yup. Like I said this has nothing to do with science, let alone with concern for the integrity of the AMNH. This is a political hit job co-ordinated by a bunch of malicious, embittered second-raters. They’ve been losing the scientific argument on climate change for years, so instead they’re fighting back in the only way they know how: using dirty, underhand guerrilla tactics.

To give you an example of how desperately feeble their case is, here’s the Twitter thread that supposedly prompted the letter:

https://twitter.com/jonahbusch/status/949774167276220416/photo/1

This is so obviously a put up job it’s embarrassing. Read the label for yourself. In vain will you find anything “shocking” or “saddening.” It’s restrained, sensible, factually accurate: a model, in fact, of what the displays at the American Museum of Natural History should look like.

But Busch — an environmental economist, by the way, not a palaeoclimatologist or a geologist: so it’s not like he’s bringing any special expertise to the party — pretends to have been triggered by that stuff about warm cycles and ice ages.

Talk about nitpicking. Talk about chutzpah! Talk about cry-bullying! What is this guy’s problem?

First, we are indeed living in an “interglacial period” — it’s called the Holocene — which is what you call the warm bits between ice ages.

Second, these interglacials do indeed move in roughly 10,000 year cycles.

Third, given that we’re around 11,700 years into this particular interglacial, it is indeed quite possible that — as the label very sensibly concedes — we could be due for another ice age.

Yet even though all the stuff on the label is unexceptionable and factually accurate, Busch claims to be so appalled that he has been forced to throw his toys out of the pram on social media and demand a retraction.

On what basis?

Here — in his follow up tweet — is his attempt at a justification:

https://twitter.com/jonahbusch/status/949774372197330945/photo/1

Oh great. A single paper, published in Nature — an organ notorious for disseminating parti-pris studies pal-reviewed by climate alarmists on the scaremongering global warming gravy train. A paper, furthermore, which is dependent on the kind of computer models — “our simulations” — which have been repeatedly and comprehensively falsified by real world observations.

So, to recap: a climate activist on Twitter cooks up a #fakenews story in which he claims, on no evidence, that the American Museum of Natural History’s scientific integrity is being corrupted by right-wing donors; though the story is factually inaccurate in almost every conceivable way, this #fakenews incident is then used as the pretext for an open letter to the museum by 182 other climate activists demanding that it take action to deal with this non-problem.

Their letter claims:

Last week thousands of people shared a Twitter comment by environmental economist Jonah Busch, PhD, who pointed out misleading information on climate science in an Exxon-funded exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. To its credit, the AMNH’s response was swift: it committed to updating the outdated information to reflect the best available science. But the initial online public anger showed that trust in the museum is undermined by the museum’s association with climate science opponents.

It concludes by demanding:

We ask the American Museum of Natural History, and all public science museums, to end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation, and to have Rebekah Mercer leave the American Museum of Natural History Board of Trustees.

This is outrageous. Allow me to spell out why.

The signatories of that letter make a big deal of the fact that their primary concern is the museum’s credibility.

But what could be more damaging to a museum’s credibility than if it were to fire some of its most generous, committed trustees, to cut off part of its income stream, and to change the factually accurate labelling on its exhibits purely to accommodate the petulant demands of a shrill bully mob of left-leaning academics who have rejected science in favour of political activism?

As Homewood notes:

This attempt by a gang of self appointed, second rate scientists to exclude people from jobs with public bodies, or indeed any sort of association at all, simply because of their politics, is extremely dangerous.
It is the sort of behaviour one would normally associate with communist and fascist juntas, and needs to be fought tooth and nail.

Yes, indeed.

My friend Davis Aurini has been predicting that the U.S.—and the world at large—will break out into war later this year, based on his reading of The Fourth Turning and the churn and conflict that defines the generational cycle. I used to doubt him. I don’t anymore.

The release of the FISA memo last Friday has laid bare the impossibility of uniting America.

There’s enough analysis about the memo itself to fill a book, so I don’t need to write too much about it, other than to say that it’s just as bad as everyone thought it would be. The Obama administration, in collaboration with the FBI, the courts, and the intelligence apparatus of a foreign country, spied on then candidate Donald Trump solely because they did not want him to become president. Their justification for obtaining a warrant was based entirely on partisan opposition research, most of which was fabricated.

This is worse than Watergate. Watergate was just a botched break-in, a 13-year old blowing off toilet seats with cherry bombs. Obama and the FBI openly colluded with a foreign nation to stop a democratically elected candidate—Trump—from assuming his office.

And the sad reality is that it doesn’t matter.

Prior to the memo being released, the Democrats and the fake news memo were attacking it relentlessly, warning anyone who listened not to read it, lest their heads be filled with Satanic thoughts. At no point before or after did the left contest the truthfulness of the memo, instead using only emotional, rhetorical appeals about how the memo was a “smear job” or would undermine Americans’ faith in the justice system (as if that ship hasn’t already sailed). Within hours after its release, leftists were making jokes about it on Twitter.

You cannot reason with people who cannot see objective reality. The left doesn’t care about the abuses of power revealed by the FISA memo because they don’t care about anything but their feeeeeelings, their subjective reality. To them, President Trump is Orange Hitler and he has to be stopped by any means necessary, including rioting, assassination attempts, judicial activism, and trampling all over our civil liberties and the rule of law.

If this is how they feel about the president, it’s also how they feel about you.

I wrote years ago that there is no one more dangerous in this world than the man who considers himself a victim. A man who sees himself as a victim can invent any justification for whatever he wants to do, because he’s been wronged and he needs to exact justice on those who he believes to have harmed him. He is right by virtue of being wronged, and anyone who questions his actions is just as bad as those who he perceives to have hurt him, regardless of how real that hurt was. The greatest villains of history have always wrapped themselves in the cloak of victimhood, whether it was Hitler and the Nazis believing they were victimized by the Jews and the Poles, to communists believing they were victimized by international finance, to Puritans believing they were victimized by the big bad Catholic Church.

The American left—and the global left at large—believe themselves to be victims above all else. Minorities believe they are the victims of whites, women believe they are the victims of men, and sodomites believe they are the victims of heterosexuals. The electoral triumph of 2016, in which an unabashedly heterosexual white man became president when it was “her turn,” has pushed the left into mass psychosis. They feel like they are victimized every moment of every day, and they will not stop until they perceive that victimization to end.

As the rise of antifa and the left’s approval of violently attacking people who offend them shows, the left won’t stop unless the rest of us submit to them or are killed.

As Anonymous Conservative has pointed out, this is due to the defective brain structures of leftists and their inability to handle threat detection and response. Life as a leftist is utter hell. Imagine going around all the time constantly feeling like you’re under assault, interpreting innocuous gestures and comments and minor inconveniences as attacks on your race, sex, or identity. That’s the leftist way of life: existing in a state of permanent agitation, always on the lookout for “microaggressions,” “mansplaining,” or “wypipo” coming to ruin your day.

It’s because of their defective brain chemistry that leftists cannot interpret objective reality. You say one thing and they hear another, making communication with them impossible since we cannot even agree on the meanings of words. For them, communication and basic observation is like a Rorschach test on acid.

For example, a long time ago, there was this soyboy who made a video attacking me as a “pick-up artist” (a term I have never used to describe myself) and accusing me of pretending to be a woman online so I could convince myself that women don’t like cunnilingus. In actuality, I invented a fake female persona years ago so I could troll the manosphere and make fun of “red pill women.” But because this soyboy has brain damage, he sees a satirical article I wrote about women not liking it when men go down on them and assumes I wrote it out of personal insecurity.

It’s entirely possible he knows this full-well and chose to libel me anyway, but nearly ten years of experience writing has shown me that the left is increasingly incapable of perceiving the world correctly and telling truth from fiction.

This is why war is inevitable now. To the average person, it is increasingly obvious that one-half of the political spectrum is totally divorced from reality. When one half of the population hates the other half and can justify doing anything to them—including getting them fired from their jobs, arresting them for hate speech, spying on them, and physically attacking them—no compromise or peace is possible. As the Bible put it, one cannot be unequally yoked.

Similarly, President Trump’s constant fakeouts on DACA and amnesty are also hitting this home. As Trump pointed out in his State of the Union Address last week, the amnesty deal he’s offering is more generous than the one that Obama proposed several years back, yet the Democrats are still rejecting it.

The average voter is seeing this and going, “Why SHOULDN’T we deport them all? The President is trying to compromise with the other side and they absolutely will not cooperate.”

If two groups who hate each other—who can’t even see reality the same way—are forced to inhabit the same space, they will eventually try to wipe each other out. Will it be the right or the left who inherits the Earth? I can’t say; all I can say is that the current paradigm is about to end.

We truly were cursed to live in interesting times.