What do you do if you’re a climate activist and a geoscientist speaks at a meeting near you offering scientific evidence against your point of view? Well, of course—you do what any rational person would do. You attend and listen carefully and weigh the arguments and consider whether you should change your views. Maybe you ask some questions during the Q&A at the end of the talk, challenging some of his evidence or reasoning. Maybe, if you’re really confident of your views, you contact the event organizers in advance and offer to debate the speaker, making the event all the more valuable to people of all persuasions.
Or maybe not.
Maybe, instead, you just show up and start shouting slogans like, “When scientists lie, people die!” or “Climate change is killing us!” or “You have the blood of climate refugees on your hands!”
And when you’re asked to leave the premises so the speaker can continue and the audience can hear what he has to say, you keep marching around inside the room, shouting, for as long as you can—and then you keep on shouting your slogans as you’re escorted out of the building.
That’s what happened when Cornwall Alliance Contributing Writer Gregory Wrightstone, a veteran geologist, spoke for Eagle Council in St. Louis, MO, September 15. E. Calvin Beisner, “Antifa Protesters Disrupt Cornwall Alliance Speaker at Eagle Council Meeting” at Cornwall Alliance
Dr. Beisner, let us introduce you to biologist Bret Weinstein. Despite your many differences, you have something in common… the hecklers’ veto.
It’s unsettling that, in this atmosphere, the American Association National Academy of Sciences has chosen to take steps to expel members. We are told that the focus is sexual harassment but it may not rest there. For one thing, as noted earlier, progressives may regard honest differences of opinion about the interpretation of evidence as “unsafe” situations. Thus it is harassment!
The mistake most profs make is that they think that the near (or actual) riot is triggered by the specifics of their opinions. They flatter themselves. That’s only the slogans. The mobs are committed to violence in order to control what everyone else is allowed to think, say, and do on whatever topic incites them. Period.
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See also: AAAS to introduce new policy for expelling members.
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Maybe iGen really IS fragile. Did social media’s troll frenzies trigger the campus war on ideas?