Once upon a time, there were three little pigs: Liberty, Prosperity, and Freedom of Speech. They lived peacefully in a vibrant village, working hard and building lives rooted in common sense. But then came the Big Bad Wolf, a self-proclaimed climate savior in a hemp hoodie, dragging a solar panel and a stack of IPCC reports behind him.
The Wolf wasn’t there to help. He was there to huff, puff, and tear down everything the pigs had built, all in the name of “saving the planet.”
The First Pig: Liberty
Liberty was a proud, independent pig who built her house with traditional materials—wood and bricks. She cherished the open marketplace of ideas, unencumbered by top-down control. But the Big Bad Wolf came knocking.
“Your house is a threat to the planet!” he howled. “Wood? Bricks? These are carbon-intensive materials! I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll regulate you into oblivion!”
With each gust, the Wolf blew legislation Liberty’s way: zoning restrictions, carbon credits, and energy mandates. Liberty’s house buckled under the weight of red tape. The Wolf smirked as Liberty was forced to move into a cramped, “green-certified” cubicle. “This is progress!” the Wolf declared.
The Second Pig: Prosperity
Prosperity had built a beautiful house of steel and concrete, representing industry, innovation, and economic growth. But the Wolf wasn’t impressed.
“Steel and concrete are destroying the planet!” he snarled. “Your industrial pursuits are unsustainable! I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll defund your way of life!”
And huff he did: carbon taxes on manufacturing, subsidies that made fossil fuels unaffordable, and trade policies favoring wind turbines made in faraway lands. Prosperity watched in despair as jobs vanished, factories shuttered, and his house of industry crumbled. The Wolf, now smug as ever, handed Prosperity a bamboo yurt. “This is sustainable living,” the Wolf declared, as a solar panel on the roof promptly failed to charge.
The Third Pig: Freedom of Speech
The third pig, Freedom of Speech, had observed the Wolf’s tactics and decided to build his house differently. Instead of bricks or steel, he fortified his home with the most indestructible material of all: the right to question the narrative. He constructed his house on a foundation of open debate and reinforced it with diverse opinions and hard evidence.
When the Wolf came knocking, Freedom of Speech was ready.
“Your house is dangerous!” the Wolf screamed. “You’re spreading misinformation! The science is settled! I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll censor you into silence!”
The Wolf unleashed his full arsenal: shadow bans, demonetization, and accusations of climate denial. But the harder he blew, the more Freedom of Speech stood firm. Every time the Wolf tried to suppress dissent, the pig’s house grew stronger.
Freedom of Speech had a secret weapon: the Streisand effect. Each attempt to silence him only drew more villagers to his cause. “Why is the Wolf so afraid of questions?” they wondered. The harder the Wolf huffed, the more the pigs and villagers began to see through his bluster.
The Wolf’s Collapse
Eventually, the Wolf’s relentless huffing started to backfire. Liberty and Prosperity, having suffered under his previous gusts, teamed up with Freedom of Speech. Together, they rebuilt their village with transparency, ingenuity, and an unyielding commitment to asking why.
The villagers rallied around Freedom of Speech’s house, which had become a hub for lively discussion and critical thinking. The Wolf, now exposed for what he truly was—a loudmouth with flimsy data—fled the village, muttering about “climate deniers” and “conspiracy theories.”
The pigs rebuilt their homes—stronger, freer, and smarter this time. Liberty regained her independence, Prosperity saw his house of industry thrive again, and Freedom of Speech ensured that no Wolf would ever dominate their village unchecked.
Moral of the Story
The moral of this tale is simple: When a self-righteous Wolf comes knocking, huffing and puffing about “settled science” and “emergency measures,” remember the third pig. Build your house on a foundation of open discourse, critical thinking, and the right to question.
Because without Freedom of Speech, the Wolf wins. And if the Wolf wins, everyone’s house—Liberty, Prosperity, and beyond—comes tumbling down.
Hemp hoodie indeed. Bravo! Now introduce us to the Wolf’s girlfriend Chicken Little.
Actually, the Wolf, being a climate advocate, is far more likely to be wearing a vinyl hoody with polyester filling.
I’m hoping Mr. Rotter comes up with a parable about the Climate Advocate vs. the Climate Denier. Here’s an outline:
The Advocate runs around getting blue in the face because he insists there is a climate. Since nobody ever said, “There isn’t,” there’s no one to argue with. It’s all straw men.
The Denier — according to the Advocate — says there is no climate. Except the Denier never said that. It’s all straw men. All the Denier said is that maybe we shouldn’t throw a massive, global, hairy canary just yet, until we gather more facts.
“Facts?” barked the Advocate, with incandescent, righteous indignation. “Who needs facts? I don’t need no stinking facts. I have an agenda!”
Charles Rotter writes better parables than I do, but this is a place to start.
I try and avoid silly strawmen. While the term Climate Denier is a vile pejorative, the people using it are not accusing the object of their bile of not believing that there is a climate. That is just stupid word play. Word logic is the weakest kind of logic.
Well, I find it rather difficult to relate to this one and |’m sure it is rather obvious why. The UK doesn’t have freedom of speech (it doesn’t have prosperity or real liberty, either).
“Labour has been blasted over the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s decision to axe the Free Speech Act – a bill that encourages debate and free expression in our increasingly left-wing universities. ”
https://order-order.com/2024/07/26/labour-slammed-over-axing-free-speech-act/
Universities… that drink the [US academia’s critical theory} kool aid copiously. And act accordingly.
I think most might just catch a glimpse of what might have happened in the US had Harris won by watching ‘Starlin’ Starmer’s Britain. And here’s the kicker: All those tax increases – with more in the pipeline to come – have tanked the economy. The answer to that? And bear in mind Miliband wrote to the electricity grid body asking for ideas…
“the prime minister wrote to more than ten regulators – including Ofgem, Ofwat, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Competition and Markets Authority – on Christmas Eve to demand they submit a range of pro-growth initiatives to Downing Street by the middle of January.
One recipient of the letter, which was also signed by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said it was unambiguous in its direction to regulators to prioritise growth and investment.
Ofcom, the Environment Agency and healthcare regulators are also all understood to have been sent it.”
https://news.sky.com/story/starmer-throws-down-gauntlet-to-watchdogs-with-growth-edict-13280738
What can a regulator do, but deregulate…. He’s taking advice from Gordon Brown.
Are you a wolf or a piglet?
I’m a fox
“[US academia’s critical theory}”
Uh oh! Mismatched brackets! The end times are here!
Crap iPhone- essentially my telescreen
🙂
How 1930’s! A socialist government ordering its bureaucracy to increase quotas under the current 5-year plan at the same time its base policies suck the life out of the economy.
Original they ain’t.
Perhaps when Nigel Farage takes over in the next election the Free Speech Act will be resurrected and the UK will finally join the free world.
“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” ― Winston S. Churchill
“The UK doesn’t have freedom of speech (it doesn’t have prosperity or real liberty, either).”
And that’s why America’s Founding Fathers created a Constitutional Republic, which is designed to stand against the “wolf” the Administrative State (Deep State) of the likes of obama and biden administrations. Trump, the hero hunter, goes after the big bad Deep State wolf with the other great Constitutional tool – the right to own lots and lots of firearms with which to chase off the Deep State bully wolfie.
Who wrote this? Well done,
Charles Rotter.
correct.
Do I win a prize? 🙂
How could you not?
Is it OK to envisage an alternative ending less charitable than “fled the village”?
Perhaps
I think it’s a good assumption that there are plenty of chickens and hens running around, so feathers are in abundance. The specific question then becomes – Is there a supply of tar, and a method for the heating of said substance?
Bartholomew and the Oobleck would fit in real nice here..
Great article. I think I’ll become a climate activist too — with a twist.
I like it!
I’m taking my climate activist to the streets — and my neighbors love it. Here’s another one.
Good post.
I recently formulated a rule of thumb: the more ‘conventional communications’ (MSM, government channels) tries to shut down discourse (mis/mal/dis info, shadow banning) the more the topic is likely true. Climate is not the only such topic. In the past four years, we have witnessed
Lots of things to investigate, now that the Republicans have both Houses of Congress and the presidency.
Now, defying Republican Congressional requests for information might get one thrown in jail for Contempt of Congress.
I think it is time to air out all the Democrat/Swamp corruption that has been going on since Barack Obama was elected.
Americans deserve to know what their governments have been up to in the shadows all these years.
Who was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency when the Wuhan Covid investigation was submitted to President Biden? It appears from reports that the Covid virus was deemed by the American intelligence agencies to have been manufactured at the Wuhan lab from which it eventually escaped, but this was withheld from the Wuhan report and withheld from President Biden. So who did this withholding. Patriotic Americans want to know.
And it also appears that American intelligence agencies knew about the spread of the Wuhan virus in China back in October of 2019, and apparently kept this information to themselves, depriving President Trump of being able to be better prepared for the pandemic. It was more than two months later that Trump became aware of the virus. So who knew this information, and withheld it from the American president and the American people?
These are the kinds of things Congress needs to find the answers to. There are a lot of Democrat politicians and bureaucrats working at tearing down the United States, and we want to know who they are and what is being done to neutralize their corruption and anti-American behavior. We need to know our enemies in order to protect ourselves from them.
We really need to figure out where those aliens came from — they keep trying to get into your house at night.
How many border hoppers do you house in your personal abode?
Beetroot should invite 3 or 4 Venezuelans to come of live with him. 😉
They like sharing other people’s apartments.
^^ self-righteous Wolf ^^
Recently, I found in a Czech newspaper this grain of wisdom:
Justice is like a beefsteak. It is good with no adjectives. Add an adjective, and it morphs into something completely different.
“The Wolf” is already introducing similar legislation aimed at the hero of the story, Freedom of Speech, under the guise of protecting the
ignorant peasantsgeneral public from mis-, dis- and mal-information, often using nebulous terms such as “hate speech”.See the UK’s “Online Safety Bill” (became law in October 2023), the EU’s “Digital Services Act / DSA” (became law in February 2024), Canada’s proposed “Online Harms Act / Bill C-63”, and the upcoming “TokTok ban” in the good old US of A.
In the UK, note also the decision of the new Labour government to “pause” the implementation of the “Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023″, which was supposed to help curb “cancel culture” in British universities.
.
In future it is likely that “the Romanian approach” will be increasing deployed.
Whenever the polls show that the “wrong” candidate might actually win the decisive round of an election then the local equivalent of a Supreme Court will “reluctantly” have to step in and :
1) Invoke the appropriate combination of “Russia ! Russia ! Russia !” and “Mis-information ! DIs-information ! Mal-information !” needed to annul any first-round results, then
2) “Legally” declare the “populist” candidate to be ineligible for the re-run.
Free speech on TikTok is illusory. ByteDance is China-affiliated, China-backed, and China-controlled. Videos critical of China don’t stay up for long. And any promises ByteDance may make about data security or privacy are empty. If Xi wants TikTok’s userbase data, he’ll get it.
The US “ban”, incidentally, would just prohibit future distribution of the app. Existing users will not have access blocked. Compare this to inside China, where it’s banned for real.
Political correctness is the mortal enemy of freedom of speech.
a huperson
my pronouns are lets/go/turdo
Mine are eff/off
Happy Hallidays everyone…
I quite liked this. Charles, you milked the metaphor for every drop. I understand the concerns over the continuing loss of the third pigs super powers, but I suspect that as the loss of trust in institutions, media, political, justice, academia sinks below the waterline, free speech has a better than even chance.
https://ricmarshall.substack.com/
Very nice.
Charles has been busy this holiday season!
Another good one.