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The New York Times and Upper West Side Segregation By Robert Weissberg

By on May 8th, 2017

In the PC world of the New York Times, it is better not to offend certain sensitivities or raise uncomfortable questions than honestly address educational disasters. One can only be reminded of proper Victorians struggling to discuss venereal diseases as if sex never happened.

Of all of the taboo topics in today’s political landscape, absolutely nothing is more fraught with danger than race. Recall the old joke about how people dance at a nudist camp — carefully, very carefully. Everything from vocabulary to tone of voice must be carefully calculated and the slightest mistake can be career-ending.

A complex etiquette per se is not, however, the problem. Civil society would collapse if everybody spoke bluntly. The question is whether taboos blind us from serious problems that demand forthright, honest discussion.

A perfect illustration of how the race taboo undermines honest discussions of serious social problems can be found in recent New York Times articles (and here) about redrawing school district lines in Manhattan’s über-liberal Upper West Side. These articles abound in euphemisms and omissions guaranteed to obscure awkward truths.

Manhattan’s Upper West Side is home to a multitude of affluent white liberals and large numbers of poor blacks and Hispanics residing in public housing. Some schools, all overwhelmingly white, excel academically. Not surprisingly, “white” schools in this neighborhood have long waiting lists for prospective enrollees. But, often only a few blocks away, are schools with large poor black and Hispanic enrollments plagued by fights (often involving weapons), classroom disorder, and appalling academic outcomes. The polite nonracial euphemism for these schools might be “schools with low test scores.”

For those with school-age children who strongly care about their education, school district demarcations are vital. Having one’s offspring attend a stellar grade-school with bright classmates is seen as the first step to admission to an elite college. Equally crucial is safety — not even the most rabid Bernie Sanders fans would risk their children’s well-being, including the danger of acquiring bad habits (drug use, thievery, a penchant for violence, a rotten work ethic and similar underclass inclinations). As one education-minded parent said about these “diverse” schools, “My husband and I support public school education but not at the expense of our children’s educational and physical well-being,”

There are also major financial costs for parents in a lousy school district. For apartment owners, residing in a “bad school” attendance zone can substantially reduce the value of one’s residence, while the private school alternative can cost upward of $30,000 per child each year. If a private school is unaffordable, the remaining option is relocating to the suburbs, hardly appetizing to many Upper West Side liberals.

Now, what happens when a Department of Education bureaucrat announces that junior may be bounced from his nearly all-white (and often-overcrowded) high-test score school, and instead sent to the nearby “diverse” school that, say the bureaucrats, offers junior a chance to benefit from diversity since “studies show” that such a racial/ethnic mixture is essential mastering today’s multicultural world?

Ironically, these well-educated, affluent “good thinking” Manhattan (white) residents now confront the same tribulations faced by down-market white Southerners over court-ordered integration post Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But, unlike these bigoted Rednecks, white liberal New Yorkers, aided by the racially hypersensitive New York Times, need not block the doorway of junior top-flight nearly all white school and shout, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow….” while the federal government orders the New York City’s police to forcibly enroll residents of nearby public housing as junior’s classmates. These white liberals are expert at walking on eggshells (I’m not a racist but….”) and playing politics to keep their kids in white schools; there is even a website on how to game the system.

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The Nightmare Reality of the Communist Dream Another communist fantasizes that ‘this time’ they’ll get it right. Mark Tapson See note please

By on May 5th, 2017

This is the new meme in academia and the media….Communism is a noble ideology hijacked by some meanies like Stalin, Mao…..just as radical Islam is peaceable and hijacked by some meanies like Bin Laden, Isis, Al Shabaab, Abu Sayef, Hamas, Hezbollah….etc……rsk

With a Republican in the White House threatening to – horrors! – make America great again, nostalgia for the Communist-utopia-that-could-have-been is running high among dejected leftists. Last Monday on May Day, otherwise known among Reds as International Workers’ Day, the New York Times actually published an encomium to those thrilling days of yesteryear “when Communism inspired Americans.” But it’s not just American communists keeping the dream alive; in the run up to May Day the week before, writing for the digital news publication Quartz, Australia’s Helen Razer explained “Why I’m a Communist—and Why You Should Be, Too.”

According to the website description, the chief focus of Razer’s work “has been what she sees as the crisis of liberalism.” The real crisis is that true liberalism has been shoved aside by a radical left that embraces violent totalitarianism, but that’s not Razer’s take. In her mind, the crisis is that pure communism hasn’t been given enough of a chance to succeed. “Communism is a system of social organization that has never been truly tried and, these days, never truly explained. Yet it inspires fear in some, derision in others, and an almost universal unconcern for what it is actually intended to convey.”

This is the excuse communists repeatedly trot out in the face of a tsunami of evidence that their ideology has indeed been tried all over the world and has proven to be arguably the most devastating, inhumane belief system ever imposed on mankind. Every country where communism has been “tried” has gone to hell because of it. That’s not a coincidence nor is it just a failed effort to get it right; that is the inevitable consequence of communism.

No no no, Razer and other communist hopefuls argue. Marx’s ideas aren’t evil, just misunderstood. All this “fearful European talk about the ‘specter’ of communism,” for example, is nothing but “jittery gossip,” she states. So, “given that a) Marx is tough, and b) you’re pretty busy making profit for capitalists all day,” she has taken it upon herself to enlighten you about this “historical stage vital to the flourishing of all.”

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The New, “Moderate” Hamas: Severe Cruelty to Jewish and Arab Prisoners and Their Families Even an anti-Israeli NGO is appalled. P. David Hornik

By on May 5th, 2017

Hamas is trying to project a new image. At a news conference in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, May 1, it announced a purportedly moderate new document—without indicating in any way that it was abrogating its notoriously anti-Semitic 1988 charter.

The New York Times—at least on the face of it—quickly took the bait. That day its lead headline read: “Hamas Tempers Extreme Stances in Bid for Power”—later revised to “In Palestinian Power Struggle, Hamas Moderates Talk on Israel.”

The article quotes Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum: “The document gives us a chance to connect with the outside world…. We are a pragmatic and civilized movement….”

Yet, elsewhere in the report, even the Times is unable to get too enthused about the new “Document of General Principles and Policies.”

The Times notes that it “reiterates the Hamas leadership’s view that it is open to a Palestinian state along the borders established after the 1967 war, though it does not renounce future claims to Palestinian rule over what is now Israel.” Or in the document’s more emphatic words:

Palestine…extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west…the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do[es] not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do[es] not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

The Times also notes gingerly that the document “does not renounce violence.” Or as the document puts it:

The liberation of Palestine is the duty of the Palestinian people in particular and the duty of the Arab and Islamic Ummah in general…. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.

And the Times says the new document “specifically weakens language from [the] 1988 charter proclaiming Jews as enemies and comparing their views to Nazism.” The new document, however, says: “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”

In other words, no problem with the Jews, as long as their state is destroyed.

And finally, the Times—which, despite all these bows to reality, gave the Doha press conference top billing as if it heralded a major change—acknowledges what all experts confirm: that the new document “does not replace the original charter,” which remains fully in force.

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Celebrating Communism at the New York Times A century after the Bolshevik Revolution, Vivian Gornick is still a fan. by Bruce Bawer

By on May 3rd, 2017

On Sunday night I was up late writing, and so on Monday I slept right up until the moment I was awakened, sometime around midday, by the blaring sound of a marching band in the street. I didn’t need to look out the window to know what was going on. The music was The Internationale. The date was May 1. In the small Norwegian town where I live, the May Day parade was passing by.

The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way – with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma Goldman. The piece – entitled “When Communism Inspired Americans” – is the latest example of what has long since become a genre all its own: the fond look back at American Stalinism.

The essay isn’t Gornick’s first contribution to the genre. Her 1977 book The Romance of American Communism, a collection of interviews with old Party members, was described by Commentary reviewer Marion Magid as an “adoring account” that depicts their perfidy “as a romantic episode in American history.” In the book, Gornick portrayed these old Communists as “the golden children called to Marxism” and claimed that they “feared, hungered, and cared more” than other people and possessed a “wisdom passion alone can purchase.” Noting that most of Gornick’s interviewees were Jews, Magid quite rightly challenged the idea that there was any “wisdom” in their “slavish support of the Soviet Union throughout the long period of Stalinist treachery and the calculated destruction of Soviet Jewish life.”

Nor was there anything “golden” about their ability to keep their Communism intact despite (this is Magid’s list) “The Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Doctors’ Plot, the takeover in Czechoslovakia, the Slansky Trial, the murdered writers, the labor camps, and all the rest.” Not only did American Communists accept all these abominations, noted Magid, “they justified it, those wonderful couples, ‘hungry for justice,’ rushing off to protest meetings and ‘peace’ rallies and picket lines while supper cooled on the stove at home and bullets met their mark in the cellars of the Lubianka. To read this book along with, say, the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam is to become almost physically ill. The romance of Communism, indeed. It is an apology that is required—not an elegy.”

One can understand Magid’s disgust. Back when it was first published, The Romance of American Communism was part of a new wave of books, movies, articles, and other material that treated that subject with sympathy. In The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Public Life (1991), Guenter Lewy cited Gornick’s book, along with films like The Front and Lillian Hellman’s memoir Scoundrel Time (both 1976), as part of a “new attitude” and “revisionist history” that represented American Communists “as persecuted defenders of American democracy.” Lewy quoted historian William O’Neill: “One would not know from seeing such films as The Front or reading books like The Romance of American Communism…that the heroes in them were apologists for Stalin’s death machine.”

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Chelsea Handler, Muslim Beards And No Fun In Islam Has Handler considered that Muslim terrorists might be having fun? Jamie Glazov

By on May 3rd, 2017

Recently, Kumail Nanjiani, the star of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” complained to Chelsea Handler on her Netflix talk show about the supposed negative image of Muslims in American popular culture. A Pakistani-American and Muslim, Nanjiani asked Handler what she sees in her head when she thinks of Muslims and Handler answered that she envisions “serious people” and “…not like …fun.” Nanjiani interjected “there’s a beard” as she was speaking and she agreed and repeated “beard”.

Handler’s answer, apparently, revealed the horrific bigotry of America and its culture — and Nanjiani explained what a big scandal it all represents. This is why, he told Handler, his wife wants to start a Tumblr called, ‘Muslims Having Fun.’ Because, you see, as Nanjiani whined, one never sees Muslims having fun in American popular culture.

Handler got very excited about all of this and subsequently tweeted out in moral indignation: “Why don’t we get to see any fun Muslims?”

Oh, the injustice of it all.

What Nanjiani won’t tell us, of course, and what Handler would never dare say, let alone fathom, is that maybe we see “serious-minded” Muslim men with beards, and we don’t regularly see any Muslims having fun, is because . . . well . . . it may all have something to do with Islam. There is a great value, you see, placed on the wearing of beards in Islamic texts (i.e. Sahih al-Bukhari 7:72:780) and Muslims are required to emulate the example of the Prophet, who is believed to have sported a beard.

In terms of having fun, if Nanjiani and Handler were even remotely interested in, or honest about, Islam, they would know that Islam mandates the polar opposite of the Declaration of Independence’s emphasis on the right of humans to pursue happiness. It is a fundamental difference between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which my book, United in Hate, argues is at the heart of Jihad’s war on the West.

Nanjiani and Handler might do well to focus on why Ayatollah Khomeini stated:

Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.

In my interview on the Nanjiani-Handler comedy fest with Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), he had this to say:

This episode reflects the general tendency of the Leftist intelligentsia to claim that people are suspicious of Islam or Muslims in the U.S. today because of the ‘media,’ which is supposedly ‘Islamophobic.’ The idea that the establishment media, which so assiduously covers for Islam by obscuring in any possible way the Islamic identity and motives of jihad murderers, is ‘Islamophobic’ is laughable, but it nonetheless prevails.

We don’t see Muslims having fun because, you see, ‘Islamophobes’ control the entertainment industry (which gave us, a few years back, the Canadian sitcom ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie,’ a forced exercise in Muslims Having Fun.

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Hijab-Wearing Journalist Awarded for Being Hijab-Wearing Journalist by Robert Spencer

By on May 3rd, 2017

She then preemptively claims victim status.

Sawsan Morrar, says the Washington Post, is “a multimedia journalist at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism,” and “was chosen as a 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association Scholar.” She also wears a hijab. And that is no doubt why she was chosen as a 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association Scholar.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which is overwhelmingly made up of Leftist journalistic propagandists who hate President Trump and will stop at little or nothing to bring him down, quite clearly chose her to tweak the president for his supposed “anti-Muslim bias.”

There is just one problem: Sawsan Morrar doesn’t want people to see her as a symbol.

She doesn’t appear to realize that the Left, for all its preening about tolerance and multiculturalism, couldn’t care less about her as a person. But she senses something is wrong, and so is falling back on that tried-and-true response that so many Muslims in the U.S. have employed before: she is claiming victimhood.

Victimhood status is currency these days. If you’re a victim, all manner of doors open to you that might otherwise have remained closed: doors to the adulation of the Left; doors to free passes from scrutiny (legal or otherwise) that you might otherwise have received; doors to a privileged status that elevates you above ordinary non-victim folk. And few, if any, groups are more skilled and indefatigable at pursuing victim status than U.S. Islamic advocacy groups.

They have successfully established in the public discourse the wholesale fiction that Muslimas who wear hijab are routinely insulted, harassed, and brutalized in the United States.

Her piece in the Washington Post is an extension of that endeavor, sans (as always) evidence of the insults, harassment, and brutalization.

This award-winning, hijab-wearing journalist, award-winning solely because she is hijab-wearing, writes:

Those who tune in to watch this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday will hear my name called as I take the stage to accept a journalism scholarship. They won’t see my portfolio of work, and they will likely forget my name. But they’re sure to notice and remember one thing about me: my headscarf.

Maybe so. But isn’t that the idea?

She continues:

And as I prepare to attend, I know some at the event may not perceive me as a fellow reporter who, like them, relishes the thought of meeting journalists I admire. Muslims don’t have the luxury of being a fusion of their achievements, interests and uniqueness. Rather, in the eyes of others, we are only Muslim.

On what does she base this claim? Nothing whatsoever, of course.

But this is the Washington Post during the Trump administration, so anything goes for Muslims wishing to claim victim status. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The left attacks the New York Times By Peter Skurkiss

By on May 3rd, 2017

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.

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Climate Editors Have a Meltdown How did science reporting get so detached from the underlying science? By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on May 3rd, 2017

I’ll admit it: I would have found it fascinating to be party to the discussions earlier this year that led to oscillating headlines on the New York Times home page referring to the new EPA chief Scott Pruitt alternately as a “denier” or “skeptic.” At least it would have been fascinating for 20 minutes.

Ditto the hysterical discussions undoubtedly now arising from an anodyne piece of climate heterodoxy by the paper’s newest columnist, a former Journal colleague who shall remain nameless, in which he advises, somewhat obscurely, less “certainty” about “data.”

Whether or not this represents progress in how the U.S. media cover the climate debate, a trip down memory lane seems called for. In the 1980s, when climate alarms were first being widely sounded, reporters understood the speculative basis of computer models. We all said to ourselves: Well, in 30 years we’ll certainly have the data to know for sure which model forecasts are valid.

Thirty years later, the data haven’t answered the question. The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, voice of climate orthodoxy, is cited for its claim, with 95% confidence, that humans are responsible for at least half the warming between 1951 and 2010.

Look closely. This is an estimate of the reliability of an estimate. It lacks the most important conjunction in science: “because”—as in “We believe X because of Y.”

Not that the IPCC fails to offer a “because” in footnotes. It turns out this estimate is largely an estimate of how much man-made warming should have taken place if the models used to forecast future warming are broadly correct.

The IPCC has a bad reputation among conservatives for some of its press-release activities, but the reports themselves are basically numbing testimonies to how seriously scientists take their work. “If our models are reliable, then X is true” is a perfectly valid scientific statement. Only leaving out the prefix, as the media routinely does, makes it deceptive.

We don’t know what the IPCC’s next assessment report, due in 2021, will say on this vital point, known as climate sensitivity. But in 2013 it widened the range of uncertainty, and in the direction of less warming. Its current estimate is now identical to that of the 1979 Charney Report. On the key question, then, there has been no progress in 38 years.

For journalists, the climate beat has been singularly unrewarding. It has consisted of waiting for an answer that doesn’t come. By now, thanks to retirements and the mortality tables, the beat’s originators are mostly gone. The job has passed into hands of reporters who don’t even bother to feign interest in science—who think the magic word “consensus” is all the support they need for any climate claim they care to make. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Bret Stephens Is Surprised When The Mob He Fed Turned On Him Julie Kelly

By on May 3rd, 2017

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.”

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Bret Stephens Gives Climate-Change Alarmists Advice, and the Left Erupts His first column for the New York Times elicits shrieks of ‘Denier!’ and ‘Shut up!’ By Kyle Smith

By on May 2nd, 2017

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.”

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