The sanctioned punishment of climate skeptics becomes more than just a few aberrant ideas, and is following some historical parallels
First, I loathe having to write essays like this, but I think it is necessary given the hostile social climate now seen to be emerging.
Yesterday, WUWT highlighted the NYT cartoon depicting killing “deniers” for having a different opinion, today I want to highlight Naomi Orekses and Suzanne Goldenberg, who seem seem to like the idea of having climate “deniers” arrested under RICO act for thought collusion, all under the approving eye of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.
Watch the video: The RICO quote is about 1:12:30 in the video. Note that none of the panelists blinks an eye at the suggestion. They are all smiling after Oreskes finishes.
From the description of the video:
The science is clear: drastic global climate change due to human activities threatens our planet. Yet, a well-funded international campaign continues to deny the scientific consensus, foment public doubt and oppose action. The media—especially social media—have helped fuel false controversy and climate skepticism. How can climate change communication be improved?
Panel discussion with:
Suzanne Goldberg, U.S. Environment Correspondent, The Guardian
Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
Dr. Peter Frumhoff, Director of Science & Policy, Union of Concerned Scientists
Moderated by:
Cristine Russell, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Environment and Natural Resources Program
Introduction by:
Henry Lee, Director, Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program
February 13, 2014
Of course, no prominent climate skeptics were invited to give a counterpoint, though WUWT does make an appearance.
An actual quote from Goldenberg in the video at 2:50
“I don’t know what CAGW was”
This makes me wonder just how competent she is to write about the topic. The irony is completed full circle though. At 2:20 she claims WUWT “actually isn’t about science” while our “best science blog” banners are projected near her head and while highlighting Justin Gillis, tell us again about “the Bigger Picture” (an opinion piece) and A relationship between Sea Ice Anomalies, SSTs, and the ENSO? (a science piece).
At least we know they are reading WUWT.
Goldenberg won’t cover the topics we cover, simply because she isn’t capable and is in the employ of a newspaper (the Guardian) with a clear goal to push only one viewpoint about climate. And, her objectivity, now that she runs in this circle of friends, is blown out of the water.
Oreskes, who authored the book Merchants of Doubt, seems to think that climate skeptics are little more than paid shills, deserving of criminal status, while Goldenberg works tirelessly to create strawmen houses out of the thinnest of research, which she publishes in the Guardian. She also follows the Oreskes mindset in thinking that we all must be on somebody’s payroll and that we are all part of a “secret network” of well funded climate resistance.
Lately, this sort of hateful and distorted thinking is getting a bit worrisome as statistician William Briggs observes:
=========================================================
RICO-style prosecution. For what tangible crime? Well, heresy.
(Has to be heresy. The amount of money I have extorted from my skepticism hovers between nada and nil.)
This put me in mind of a passage from from Dawn to Decadence by the indispensable Jacques Barzun (pp 271-272):
The smallest divergence from the absolute is grave error and wickedness. From there it is a short step to declaring war on the misbelievers. When faith is both intellectual and visceral, the overwhelming justification is that heresy imperils other souls. If the erring sheep will not recant, he or she becomes a source of error in others….[P]ersecution is a health measure that stops the spread of an infectious disease—all the more necessary that souls matter more than bodies.
Even though not all admit this, their actions prove that souls are more important than bodies. Thought crimes are in many senses worse than physical crimes; they excite more comment and are more difficult to be forgiven for. Perhaps the worst crime is to be accused of racism (the charges needn’t be, and frequently are not, true; the accusation makes the charge true enough). It is now a thought crime to speak out against sodomy (and to say you personally are a participant is a matter of media celebration).
Barzun said that sins against political correctness “so far” have only been punished by “opprobrium, loss of employment, and virtual exclusion from the profession.” (I can confirm these.) Barzun said, “any form of persecution implies an amazing belief in the power of ideas, indeed of mere words casually spoken.”
The Enlightened, who simper when calling each other “free thinkers”, in one of their favorite myths tell us how they left the crime of heresy behind. The word has been forgotten, maybe, but not the idea.
Stalin sent his victims to the firing squad for the crime of “counter-revolution”, not heresy. Being repulsed by sodomy is not heresy, it is “homophobic”. Believing in God and practicing that belief is not heresy, but “fundamentalism.” Cautioning that affirmative action may cause the pains the program is meant to alleviate isn’t heresy, but “racism.” Saying that unskillful Climate models which routinely bust their predictions should not be trusted is not heresy, but is “anti-science.”
Boy, has Science come up in the world to be a personage one can sin against.
=========================================================
And AlexJC notes in Der Ewige “Denier” on the NYT cartoon depicting killing “deniers” that a pattern is emerging.
=========================================================
Some commentators on WUWT have likened this little scene to Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda in the 1930s, and I’m inclined to agree. There’s a pertinent article, called “Defining the Enemy” on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
One crucial factor in creating a cohesive group is to define who is excluded from membership. Nazi propagandists contributed to the regime’s policies by publicly identifying groups for exclusion, inciting hatred or cultivating indifference, and justifying their pariah status to the populace.
There’s a picture you can find online of the “stereotypical Jew”, which was drawn by Nazi cartoonist Philipp “Fips” Rupprecht and published in the newspaper Der Stürmer sometime before the end of World War II. Although different in some respects to the “stereotypical Denier” in the NYT, there are a number of similarities. Both subjects are male, well-dressed, rather plump and well-fed and standing with their chests slightly thrust out. Both have distinctive noses – the Jew has a large hooked nose and the Denier has one that is more reminiscent of a pig’s snout. Both are smoking a cigar, which is clearly the mark of an evil plutocrat anywhere, Jewish or otherwise. The similarities are quite unsettling.
=========================================================
Indeed, they are, and worse yet, few if any, in the general science community seem to have the courage to stand up and say anything about these people and the actions they do and/or suggest as being inappropriate or antithetical to science.
Roy Spencer is the exception for scientists who have decided to speak out against this hate and smear, and has decided to fight back by labeling anyone who calls him a “climate denier” as a “climate Nazi”. I’m not sure how effective or useful that will be, but clearly he’s reached a tipping point. He adds:
A couple people in comments have questioned my use of “Nazi”, which might be considered over the top. Considering the fact that these people are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did — all in the name of what they consider to be a righteous cause — I think it is very appropriate. Again, I didn’t start the name-calling.
The parallels with what occurred in pre-WWII Germany seem to be emerging with the constant smearing of climate skeptics for the purpose of social isolation, and now Oreskes is calling for members of this group to be charged with crimes under RICO. This isn’t new, we’ve heard these calls for climate skeptics to be arrested before, such as Grist’s David Roberts who proposed Nuremberg style trials for climate skeptics, but lately it seems to be picking up speed.
We even have people in the same climate clique playing virtual dress up as Nazis, such as we’ve learned recently from the “Skeptical Science” forum showing proprietor John Cook in full Nazi uniform in the image seen at right. There were several Nazi images depicting SkS.
And, there’s the call for removing dissenting opinion from the press, such as from “Forecast the Facts” (a funded NGO that attacks media)
“Brad Johnson (@ClimateBrad), the editor of HillHeat.com and a former Think Progress staffer, boasted on Twitter that 110,000 people had urged the newspaper “to stop publishing climate lies” like the Krauthammer piece.”
We’ve already seen one prominent newspaper refuse to publish letters from climate skeptics with others following suit.
What is most troubling to me is that Oreskes and Goldenberg appear to be of Jewish descent (as does Dr. Michael Mann) and yet they all seem blind to the pattern of behavior they are engaging in and advocating; the social isolation and prosecution of climate skeptics which seems so reminiscent of the ugliness in times past. I honestly don’t understand how they can’t see what they are doing to silence climate skeptics is so very wrong.
It does seem true, that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
From my viewpoint, the only way to combat this ugliness is with taking a stand. These tactics must be called out when they are used. I urge readers to write thoughtful and factual letters, guest commentary where accepted, and blog posts, countering such smear whenever appropriate.
MODERATION NOTE: Comments will be heavily scrutinized, keep it civil.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
What would you expect from a cause created primarily by public relations firms?
Projection of their vile fantasies is the one thing these people do well.
As much as I enjoy snark, lets not get sucked too deeply into these poor peoples psychosis.
The wheels have fallen off this buggy, the sky refuses to fall, the planet will not warm.
As the cycle of northern weather continues into the cool phase, desperation has developed at the Cult of Calamitous Climate.
The words of their oracle was the gas shall spread, the planet shall warm, it is written in the holy gospel of the computer models.
Doom will fall upon us all.
Salvation is only to be found in damning the magic gas.
Now their Howard Camping moment is upon them, whither the warming?
They have returned to the gospel, reinterpreted the holy script of their computer modelling, the world has not obeyed the scripture, hence the world must be wrong.
But the eyeballs of the faithful have been lashed with icy rain, their fingers frozen by record cold, fuel bills of an unprecedented cost rain down upon them.
This can only be the work of their antichrist, that sullen nonbeliever.
Only disbelief could cause such a disconnect, for if the disbelief spreads to the faithful, the high priests will be driven from the temple,cast down to work for a living with the common folk.
Sarc/on/off.?
Human nature has not changed, confidence men always seek a free lunch, the higher they rise, the harder they fall.
The priceless projection of these persons, who are on the record as knowingly promoting the cause, wishing RICO prosecutions upon their imaginary enemies.
Been gazing into their abyss again have they?
Point is name calling is pretty much redundant, what could I label these fools and bandits, that they have not already revealed themselves to be?
When the messenger is the one instigating up the hate, they are no longer the messenger, they are the hateful propagandist.
Actions that should not be applied to the messenger may be applied to the hateful propagandist.
Andrew30 says:
February 24, 2014 at 10:50 am
“There come a point where someone lying in bed asks themselves what they would have done if they were alive in Germany in 1933. Would they have sacraficed their freedom and perhaps their life to try to prevent what they now know happened? ….”
A few young people tried to make a difference
I substituted ‘Warmists’ for ‘State’ but it seems to fit well!
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the Warmists can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the Warmists to use all of their power to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the Warmists.” – Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Nazi Propaganda
Is this the point in history when the Church of Climatology establishes its own Inquisition?
Not exactly on topic, but not exactly irrelevant either:
Met Office storm final briefing – good, bad and ugly
Picked up by Bishophill and GWPF today, has generated quite a lot of interest, especially about the Met Offices extremely flexible view on sea levels. The copy of the report I had said this:
I said this:
But then found out that Dr Ruth Dixon had already challenged the figures resulting in a new report being issued that said this:
I think the actual rate of increase after subtracting isostasy is about 0.6 mm / year.
Beware, both copies of the report are at large.
PS where do we go to get plugged into all this money? 🙂
Most of this is laughable but not all. When you forget the lessons of history, you are doomed to repeat mistakes. Free speech is a precious thing but not a right. It needs to be defended. But so called scientists should be at the forefront of this debate. They are not by and large. Lysenkoism is alive and kicking.
Anthony,
Thank you.
Perhaps I am just a really old (68) Simple Red Neck, but I see it to be worse than you have outlined. Progressives have been in love with violent revolution since 1918. E.g. Bill Ayers is one of HIS closest advisors and HIS administration is enamored by the likes of Castro, Chavez/Maduro, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Stalin. HE and Hillary sold out the democratically elected government in Honduras to support a “wanna-be dictator-for-life” to curry favor with Chaves. They sold out some of our most loyal allies in East Europe to curry favor with Putin, i.e. Hillary’s “Reset” with Russia.
(I capitalize HIS name because, for the left and as Barbara Walters said: we thought he was our Messiah.)
Pray for our country.
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
PS: The most famous politician to smoke a cigar was Winston Churchill; the second most was Bill Clinton. Although, Bill wasn’t known for SMOAKING them. I wonder if that use was more carcinogenic to the hapless bystanders than second hand smoke. An Inquiring mind wants to know!)
Just to be picky, are you sure that is a Nazi uniform? I don’t see any obvious Nazi symbols – swastikas, German eagles, skulls, lightning flashes, etc. It is captioned ‘Reichfuhrer SS’, but from a Google image search I can’t find any such uniform for that rank. And the birds on the cap badge look suspiciously like penguins – not a bird traditionally associated with the Third Reich.
REPLY: If you’ll go to http://skepticalscience.com and look at their logo in the header, you’ll see they’ve substituted those logos into the place where SS and swastikas previously existed on the uniform.
For another example, compare this SkS doctored image here: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/skstroopers_marked.jpg
With the original here: http://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/XD169226/Massed-ranks-of-the-SS-at-the-Nuremberg-Rally-1936
and note the logo changes via Photoshop techniques. – Anthony
The Left frequently falsely accuse others of doing what they themselves are actually doing. By accusing others, they seek to protect themselves from the same charge. It should be possible to pivot 180° and charge them with the same thing. They are the ones actually doing whatever evil thing is being charged. We and the public need to understand, the tactic actually signals what they are doing. If they are caught in their own trap, maybe they’ll stop using the tactic. Thus, it may be the proper tactic is not to become defensive when charged by the Left, but to immediately attack them vigorously with exactly the same charge.
alexjc38 says:
February 24, 2014 at 10:02 am
MikeN: “The Jew has no cigar.”
I’ve now found a website which has a number of illustrations by Philipp Rupprecht which he drew for a children’s colouring book in 1934, apparently, and which shows several caricatures of Jewish financiers looking as though they are puffing away at cigars:
http://germanpropaganda.org/literature-for-children/
In the Nazis’ eyes, it seems the Jews were the well-funded “merchants of doubt” of their time.
___________________________________________________________________
Thanks for the link Alexjc.
I am old enough to remember similar treatment of the Japanese in the years following WW2, even extending to children’s cartoons. Very sad stuff, IMO.
Henry.
the inability to solve an imaginary non existent problem is likely to lead to anxiety perhaps ending in hysteria? How can you get rid of something that doesn’t exist?
I think the current ‘A co2 deathstar is coming!’ could make a good film in the style of Airplane!
Interesting post, informative and timely.
What I see is overwhelming desperation as the facts on the ground go against them. Even with massive, wholesale data manipulation by the temperature keeping government agencies we still see no rise in temperatures for almost two decades — even a decline if one looks at raw data and not the “adjusted” stuff they call data. But temperatures should be increasing dramatically given the huge rise in CO2 over the last 20 years if their ‘theory’ of CO2 being the driver of climate was correct.
I have seen similar attempts to shut down debate in other areas. I am a radical libertarian follower of the late Murray Rothbard, so I have been called everything you can think of by all sides of the political spectrum. Little changes.
No one takes action against anyone who says the earth is not round or who claim they see unicorns because people love to make fun of them and want them to make a fool of themselves in public. It is only when the outsiders start to mount credible arguments that the entrencted government loving minions of orthodoxy want to start using the power of the state to help them “win” the argument.
The cold and snowy winters after we were told that CAGW would put an end to the snow is doing more to damage the other side than anything this blog or any of us could do. They are desperate because Mother Nature can be one mean B*tch.
When you look at the shrillness and rabidity of Oreske and the others, it becomes obvious that there must be an AWFUL lot of money at stake. One of the prime funders being George Soros, who was described way back in 1994 by the LA Times (not exactly a conservative bastion):
It seems that Soros believes he was anointed by God. “I fancied myself as some kind of god …” he once wrote. “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble.”
When asked by Britain’s Independent newspaper to elaborate on that passage, Soros said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”
(source: http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/04/opinion/oe-ehrenfeld4 )
A more recent opinion (2010) also has details about Soros’ world-changing ambitions:
http://www.wnd.com/2010/12/243169/
e.g.
“Soros’ donation to Media Matters suggests that intimidating journalists who dare to question his vision is now a top priority,” the report said. “Come down on the wrong side of an issue and risk being labeled ignorant or evil by the smear website.”
Media matters to the warmists, as evidenced by their behaviour. Unfortunate that science (and us) don’t….
7. Tactics
“Tactics are those conscious deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. … Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.” p.126
Always remember the first rule of power tactics (pps.127-134):
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear and retreat…. [and] the collapse of communication.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.”
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time….”
8. “Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.”
11. “If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside… every positive has its negative.”
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and ‘frozen.’…
“…any target can always say, ‘Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?’ When your ‘freeze the target,’ you disregard these [rational but distracting] arguments…. Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all the ‘others’ come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target…’
“One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.” (pps.127-134)
Pick a target and ridicule and polarize them.
Absolutely, I see that all the time and have brought that up on several occasions over many years. Also, their policies often are exactly 180 degrees opposite from what they are sold to the people as being. “Renewable” energy policies in Germany that were sold as reducing CO2 emissions have actually increased those emissions and resulted in burning of more, not less, coal. It goes to their social policies as well. Policies that are sold as easing the disparity of income between richest and poorest actually make it worse. Policies that are sold as allowing a pathway out of poverty actually do the opposite and prevent their working out of it through a series of “benefit cliffs” where if they make a small improvement in their situation they face a much larger loss in the cutoff of a large benefit (rent subsidy, for example). Any attempt to put programs in place that ACTUALLY would provide a way to reduce income disparity or provide a way to work out of poverty is attacked as “mean spirited”. At least in the US, the political left is light years beyond George Orwell. Nobody hurts more people though the generations than they do. It is really so sad.
Oh well, comment vanished into the web.
The projectile projecting is getting insanely funny.
Home goal after home goal.
The vile ravings of these people is going to hit a crescendo soon.
Let us not get sucked into these poor people psychosis.
While we can come up with pithy descriptors of this unwholesome behaviour, why bother.
Just hold up the mike and camera and let them go.
No sane person, could invent such characters.
No rational person can listen to such ravings without cringing inside.
Best to leave these lovelies talking amongst themselves.
However, they are prone to violent acting out, at this stage of their pain.
So do be on guard.
Alinsky’s rules for radicals:
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
It would seem as though the Alarmist’s have cherry-picked some of these rules to fit their agenda.
Both Naomi Oreskes and Suzanne Goldenberg are feminists, which boils down to a hate movement.
There are numerous similarities between feminism and consensus climacteric movement, though hate narrative is a new addition to the latter.
A famous scientist Al Gore also employed a feminist for his campaign that did not turn too well, see http://www.salon.com/1999/11/01/wolf/
Match made in CAGW hell.
I have no idea what Oreskes is talking about with regard to RICO violations by those she labels deniers and I can’t actually think of anything concrete that those she labels deniers are doing that would violate the RICO statute.
On the other hand one could make a case that the EPA violating its own policy and working in secret with NGOs using false ID to mislead the public would be a better example of racketeering than anything that those she labels deniers have done.
“The smallest divergence from the absolute is grave error and wickedness. From there it is a short step to declaring war on the misbelievers. When faith is both intellectual and visceral, the overwhelming justification is that heresy imperils other souls. If the erring sheep will not recant, he or she becomes a source of error in others….[P]ersecution is a health measure that stops the spread of an infectious disease—all the more necessary that souls matter more than bodies.”
Yes. Because orthodoxy, orthodox narrative to be more precise, is the ‘DNA’ of the cultural entity, be that entity an extreme political system, a religion, or in this case CAGW. Scepticism (or indeed narratives from competing cultural entities) represents a threat to the accurate propagation of that DNA, so is indeed a disease from the PoV of the cultural entity. If narrative divergence gets too large, there won’t be enough coherence to maintain the cultural entity and it may crash, losing it’s grip on millions of adherents and enormous infra-structure. Via iterative selection of memes that hit our psychological hot-buttons (there is no sentient or agential adgenda), ‘immersed’ adherents are rewarded with satisfying brain chemicals for reinforcing orthodoxy and suppressing diversion. The only difference between an agressive cultural entity of this type, and a benign one, is whether it happens to be in relative equilibrium with its hosts and with competeting entities.
Yesterdays cartoon was a SKEPTIC cartoon not a warmist one.
Pretending otherwise doesn’t make it so.
Another scary quote from the LA TImes article describes the megalomaniacal (megalomanniacal?) world these folks live in:
‘In his book, “Soros on Soros,” he says: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others…. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.” Clearly, Soros considers himself to be someone who is able to determine when the “normal rules” should and shouldn’t apply.’
The air must be a bit thin up there…..
andywest2012 says: February 24, 2014 at 12:47 pm
P.S. see ‘The CAGW Memeplex’ here.
Kudos to Anthony for saying what needs to be said.
I agree with crosspatch above, when he says, “They’re scared.”
The problem is that scared people with power are very dangerous. The alarmist crowd is well aware that most reader comments in various forums now lean heavily toward skepticsm of catastrophic AGW and the “carbon” scare. They are ratcheting up their game because they are clearly losing public support, and they know it. They are dangerous because they hold the levers of power, even though they are clearly in the minority.
These people also go out of their way to bar any input from credible scientific skeptics, such as M.I.T.’s Prof. Richard Lindzen, who flatly contradicts their climate alarmism:
Lindzen shows that the current climate is very benign, and provides some history:
Since we don’t fully understand the climate, it is preposterous to assume that Oreskes and the others know more than Prof Lindzen, who continues:
Lindzen’s statement negates all of the climate alarmism being promoted by these “merchants of smear”. There is nothing happening that is either unusual, or unprecedented. What we are observing is simply natural climate variability. In fact, we have been living in a “Goldilocks” climate since the mid-1800’s.
The danger comes from telling the truth to power. These people have been feathering their nests based on the climate scare, and they will react viciously given the chance. If we don’t fight back — each in his/her own way — then they will keep ratcheting up their responses until there is real violence. History is replete with examples. Either we fight back, or we will be the victims.