We should have seen it coming

The Global Warming Thought Police Want Climate Skeptics In ‘Jail’

Guest opinion by Kerry Jackson

Conform or else! That’s the message of the global warming alarmists. Those who don’t buy into the man-made climate change narrative should be prosecuted as criminals.

“Put officials who reject science in jail,” someone named Brad Johnson who says he’s executive director of something called Climate Hawks Vote tweeted last month.

At roughly the same time, Mark Hertsgaard typed a screed in The Nation which ran under the headline:

“Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us: The victims of Hurricane Harvey have a murderer — and it’s not the storm.​”

“How long,” Hertsgaard asked, “before we hold the ultimate authors of such climate catastrophes accountable for the miseries they inflict?”

And then there’s Bill Nye, the Junk Science Guy, who hasn’t been able to cover up his apparent desire to see “criminal investigations” against those ignoring his truth. It’s not hard to see through him, though. He dissembles like a politician but his appetite is clear.

The urge to prosecute and imprison those who don’t believe as they have been commanded to is not a new wrinkle among the alarmist tribe. Three years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sounding like, well, a Kennedy, said the Koch brothers “should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals.”

“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it.”

The Kochs’ crime? Selling energy resources to willing buyers and funding organizations that have reservations about the climate change story we’re constantly being told.

Of course Kennedy’s wild man rant isn’t new either. The history of mankind is marked with incidents of one group forcing its beliefs on another at the point of the sword — and more lately at the strike of a U.S. passenger jet.

Kennedy, Johnson, Hertsgaard and others probably don’t see themselves as runaway zealots. But what zealot has ever recognized his or her own fanaticism?

Maybe the worst case of zealotry from one who refuses to see his own intolerance is British funnyman Eric Idle, who tweeted earlier this year that the skeptics who hold their position due to “stupidity and ignorance” should be punished “humanely. Put down gently.” Idle, we can’t forget, was part of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was responsible the famous line: “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

Sadly, that line just isn’t as funny anymore. All the air went out of it when one of the team members who co-wrote and acted in the skit decided to support a modern inquisition led by climate radicals. We should have seen it coming.

Original article published in Investors Business Daily

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