RUTHFULLY YOURS

The liberal left is in an uproar. And no, the howls are not coming from the childlike snowflakes on campus, who shut down speakers, or the even from the anarchists. This time, it is coming from the intellectual arm of the left, like the New Republic magazine, Vox, and the readership base of the New York Times.

What has incurred this wrath? Nothing the president has done. It’s that the New York Times has hired Bret Stephens, until recently a deputy editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to add his voice to the Gray Lady’s op-ed page.

Stephens can be best described as a run-of-the-mill establishment conservative from the neocon camp. During this past year or so at the WSJ, he stood out for his hysterical ravings over Donald Trump’s campaign and then his presidency. Of course, being a vociferous anti-Trumper is not what has the liberal base upset at the Times hiring Stephens. It was his first column (and some of the non-Trump-related things he said in the past) that has the liberals on the warpath.

What precipitated this kerfuffle was Stephens’s debut column of April 28 at the Times. There, he had the temerity to question the 100-percent certainty of the proponents of man-made global warming.

And please note: Stephens is not what the left would call a climate denier. In interviews, he says he actually believes in man-made global warming (or maybe it’s man-made climate change now). In his NYT column, Stephens merely questioned the certainty liberals demand that society place in their global warming hypothesis.

That was bad enough, but what got the liberals down on their knees chewing the rug was how Stephens led off his column. It went like this:

“When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use in wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful. it’s great luck, and let him thank God.

But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he is 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worse kind of rascal.”

– An old Jew of Galicia

Essentially, Stephens was saying the radical Greens are fanatics and thugs (all true) – in the pages of the liberal mothership, no less.

To the liberal mind, Stephens committed a high sacrilege, for next to abortion, man-made global warming is most sacred dogma of the left. To have even a hint of doubt on the certainty of this proposition raised in the op-ed pages of the New York Times is akin…well, akin to the supreme ayatollah burning a Koran in the center of Mecca at high noon.

Take Sarah Jones of the New Republic as one example. She unloads, writing that Stephens is the least of the problems at the Times, as the newspaper “is awash in out-of -touch, medicare columnists who are badly out of sync with the era in which we live.”

Over at Vox, Jeff Stein voices the same complaint against Stephens as did Ms. Jones. And to show what a narrow bubble these liberals are in, he writes:

The Times’s editorial page is a bit like the Supreme Court: Its opinions set the framework for the national debate, and its members tend to stay there for decades. so Stephens’s beliefs are about to have a big impact on the national discourse.

On the eve of the Climate March, the New York Times ran Stephens’s first column for them, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede with torches ablaze.

The day before activists took to the streets to blame humankind for causing climate change, a federal court granted President Trump’s request to essentially freeze the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature climate policy. Trump signed an executive order in March that instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to review the plan (already tied up in the courts), which sought to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2050. It’s expected that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will gut if not entirely rescind it.

That same day, the EPA announced its website is “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt” and specifically mentions “content related to climate.” This is kinda like when your boss tells you the company is going in a new direction right before she fires you. Happy marching!

But the real knife in the back came in the form of a column posted by Bret Stephens, a new columnist for The New York Times. On the eve of the Climate March, the Times ran Stephens’s first column since it poached him from the Wall Street Journal, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede to the Times’ headquarters with torches ablaze. The Times hired Stephens, a neoconservative, for his virulent anti-Trump stance. As Byron York noted after the announcement, “seeking diversity, NYT editorial page wants anti-Trump opinion from left, right, and center.”

But the move backfired. Stephens has been labeled a climate denier for his past comments on the issue, such as calling global warming a “mass neurosis” and a “sick-souled religion.” Since the Times announced their hire, people have been demanding Stephens’s ouster; a petition on Change.org to fire him earned more than 28,000 signatures and many more threatened to cancel their subscriptions.
Rain on the Climate Parade Produces Hissing Steam

His April 28 column is a partial retort, if not a slight olive branch, to the climate congregation outraged that a heretic is now singing from their climate hymnal. (The Times just opened an entire bureau dedicated to climate change, brooding that “as the earth’s temperature continues to break records, climate and environmental reporting is taking on new urgency.”)

Stephens makes the wholly logical point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.” He writes how the extremism and arrogance of climate leaders have fueled doubt if not total indifference about manmade climate change among the general public: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he wrote. Irony alert here; keep reading.

If Stephens was trying to advise — if not appease — the climate mob, it didn’t work. The climate Twitterverse imploded Friday afternoon. California billionaire Tom Steyer, whose deep pockets fund climate activism around the world, tweeted that Stephens’s column “is straight out of Exxon playbook” and that it was “no different than a columnist arguing that tobacco use might not cause cancer. Dangerous.”

Ordinarily when war breaks out between the activist Left and the New York Times, the conservative impulse is not to delve too deeply into the substance of the dispute but rather to inquire about the availability of refreshments: When the Ayatollah and Saddam go to war, what is there to do but put one’s feet up and enjoy the carnage?

I invoke Islamism advisedly. After Bret Stephens, the Times’ new conservative op-ed columnist, made the mild-mannered and more or less inarguable point that there are details unsettled within the topic of climate change, his many ideological opponents reacted with a mindless fury characteristic of religious zealotry. Someone tweeted at Stephens that he should share the fate of Daniel Pearl, like Stephens a longtime Wall Street Journal writer, who was denounced for being Jewish and beheaded by men acting in Allah’s name. The web of ties between ordinary global-minded progressives and jihadists grows ever more dense: For both groups, American conservatives pose the principal threat to their goals.

Let’s give credit, though, to the Times’ op-ed editor James Bennet, both for hiring Stephens in the first place — the Times now boasts three right-of-center op-ed columnists, which is more than tokenism — and for standing by his new hire while abuse rained down and some progressives claimed to have canceled their subscriptions. Non-partisan institutions (are you listening, university presidents?) and even the Right should learn this lesson from Bennet’s bracing example: Ignore hecklers. They enjoy veto power only if a cowardly decision-maker grants them that power. After a few days, Stephens’s attackers will move on and find something else to be outraged about.

Stephens’s column arrives at a moment when, culturally speaking, the fulminating Left is feeling pretty upbeat. Its core stratagem of demanding that conservatives either shut up or be shut down is working frighteningly well. Universities from coast to coast are either allowing leftist groups to cancel conservative speech before it occurs or providing such weak and ambivalent protections for speakers that right-wing ideas are effectively squelched. Using Bill O’Reilly’s alleged sexual misconduct as a pretext, Media Matters managed to get him booted off the air. If Bill Clinton had a political talk show, I think we all know the answer to whether leftist pressure groups would publicly denounce any advertisers that sponsored it.

Stephens’s perfectly reasonable column amounted to friendly strategic advice for the climate alarmists: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he noted, and he was immediately treated as a deplorable imbecile. Think Progress compared him to a Holocaust denier and a KKK official. Nate Silver, whose reputation for being a dispassionate data nerd increasingly seems endangered, denounced the column with a barnyard epithet and posted a tweet in which a Times billboard advertising “Truth” was (sarcastically) juxtaposed with a quotation of Stephens’s unassailable point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science.” “Classic climate change denialism,” thundered Slate. “Climate denial wouldn’t get past my desk,” a New Yorker fact-checker tweeted, as if Stephens denied there is a climate. (Stephens also said human influence on global warming was “indisputable.”) The Guardian, as ever the most grievously wounded of them all, called Stephens a “hippie puncher.”