This morning’s paper brought us Steve DiMarzo, Jr.’s piece (“Liberals throttling right-wing views”) – in which he argues that liberals prevent climate change deniers from expressing their own opinion in the “debate.”
Sadly, climate change deniers – and science deniers, in general – keep pretending there actually is a debate, and that their views have equal scientific weight. But, to illustrate how ridiculous this is, geochemist James Lawrence Powell recently reviewed every scientific study published in peer-reviewed journals in 2013, finding a total of 10,885. Of these, only two challenged man-made global warming. Some “debate.” And DiMarzo fails to demonstrate that science deniers have truly lost their First Amendment rights rather than simply being embarrassed by real science.
One suspects that, for the Right-wing, science plays a subservient role in culture wars, in continuing to justify tax breaks for oil and coal companies, and in keeping corporations from paying for remediation or carbon credits.
Corporate interests, people like the Koch brothers, have plenty of money, media, and opportunity to present their views to the public. And, now thanks to the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling that corporations are now people, we can barely hear the voice of the average citizen for the roar of corporate lobbyists and their propaganda.
True censorship, on the other hand, is fairly easy to find. Just this week a notable Republican seeking the blessing (and a handout) from casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson had to backtrack on calling the West Bank “occupied territory” – which of course it has been for several generations. Unfortunately unprincipled groveling and denying reality is not just a Republican trait, but it seems to have been perfected by the GOP.
No, if you really want freedom of speech in this country, you have to buy it. Not for the average citizen. Both the print and electronic media continue to be consolidated, almost exclusively in the hands of corporate interests – guaranteeing that you’ll never hear all sides of an argument.
What? In the USA? Internet companies are forbidden from revealing the scope of federal spying on civilians. PBS cancelled the broadcast of a documentary on the Koch brothers (turns out they were corporate sponsors). There are now several liberal journalists (not right-wingers, Mr. DiMarzo) who are currently living abroad because of harassment resulting from their investigations of government wrongdoing. Cities are prevented from disclosing – to their own taxpayers! – the purchase of “Stingray cell tower simulators” – surveillance devices an increasing number of police departments use to capture citizens’ “metadata” without warrants.
Freedom of speech and assembly? Peaceful demonstrations are frequently broken up with heavily militarized police, whose implements of war are funded by federal Fusion centers. Progressive organizations are disrupted by police informers. Citizens on the Mexican border are subjected to warrantless searches – hundreds of miles from Mexico – as are minorities with warrantless “stop-and-frisk” searches. When the Fourth Amendment is violated so routinely, it has a chilling affect on the ability of citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights. That’s censorship too.
Sorry, Mr. DiMarzo. We should be worried about climate change. But we should worry even more about the scope of the police state erected since 9/11. The NSA (part of the military) collects civilian data based on four different authorities – not the Constitution – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 (modified in 2004 and 2008), Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. These orders have superseded the Constitution – a document that is supposed to guarantee many more civil liberties than just the right to carry assault weapons or deny science.
So, if we’re going to talk Censorship – by all means, let’s do. But let’s not pretend that science denial is free speech under attack. All it is – is willful ignorance and corporate propaganda being rebutted by real science. There is plenty of REAL censorship we should all be alarmed by.
This was published in the Standard Times on April 8, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20140408/opinion/404080301
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