The Massachusetts Undersecretary for Climate, David Ismay, was caught on a hot mic. In the clip below, he talks about the fact that in his state, 60% of carbon emissions come from average citizens using their cars and using energy in their homes. Then he proposes a solution: break the citizens’ will.
“60% of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person up the street, the senior on a fixed income, right? There is no bad guy left. At least in Massachusetts to point the finger at or turn the screws on and break their will so they stop emitting. That’s you. We have to break your will.”
When he says this is something he can’t say publicly, it is pretty ironic. Socially distanced Zoom meetings have made more than one careless comment public. Perhaps the most shocking thing about this video is that none of the other participants look remotely surprised or shocked.
They sip coffee and stare into their screens like nothing Ismay just said is startling at all. He is talking about making it painful for you to operate your vehicle and making it challenging for senior citizens to heat their homes well. Perhaps he is not aware, but more elderly adults die from exposure to cold than heat exposure. Their tolerance for temperature variation is not what it is in younger people. That is just sick.
Can Ismay and his team of merry climate cops accomplish that mission? Breaking the will of people who live in Massachusetts to drive them to use less energy? Of course, they can. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has already said a mileage-based tax could be on the table. And Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo said the government might need to levy taxes on those making far less than the $400,000 a year Joe Biden promised to fund infrastructure projects. Imposing costs that deter use is one method.
You may say that few taxes won’t change anything since they have been taxing gas and energy for years, and consumption is the same while efficiency went up. This assertion is true, but in case you’ve been asleep since March of last year, taxes are not the only weapon the government has. In particular, the political left has several weapons at their disposal to make citizens behave the way they prefer and is willing to use them all. We all saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic.
First, they have the bureaucracy. From that behemoth structure, they can select who will speak to the country, and they will choose those individuals carefully. During COVID-19, the bureaucracy decided on Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Deborah Birx quickly fell from grace when she was not critical enough of President Trump. These lifetime government employees asked Americans to take special precautions for 15 days to slow the spread of COVID-19 in April of 2020.
Many areas of the country are now on approximately day 300 to slow the spread without significant complaints. That is because the government used its second weapon, the corporate media. Dr. Fauci was the only government official who was ubiquitous in the media and he provided never-ending fodder for panic porn.
For everything Fauci suggested or hinted at to be accurate, COVID-19 is unlike any other respiratory virus in the history of modern medical science. Yet, he has never provided any evidence for why that would be the case. COVID-19 is a coronavirus, and we have some baseline ideas about how that class of virus should behave. Some of his advice has been outright contradictory. Yet anyone who does not follow it can be suppressed, vilified, or ruined by a video posted on social media.
It was easy to find dissenting opinions if you were motivated to look, but many people aren’t. The corporate media never covered them and worked to discredit anyone who contradicted Fauci. Dr. Scott Atlas, a health policy expert from the Hoover Institution on the White House Task Force, was regularly targeted for sharing peer-reviewed research. Far more Americans than anyone would have predicted obediently went into their homes and stayed there for months on end. People gave up their small businesses and continue to allow their children to learn remotely, primarily because they hear a consistent message that breeds fear.
Then there is the opposite approach, which we saw applied to the unrest and violence in Portland and Seattle this summer. Elected officials allowed lawlessness to persist, sending law-abiding citizens into their homes, and businesses were destroyed and boarded up. Seattle had an “autonomous zone” where radicals took over a section of the city, and leaders allowed it. The corporate media ignored it until President Trump sent federal officers to protect a federal courthouse in Portland. Then they called him an “authoritarian.”
The silence is so bad that on January 31st, left-wing radicals took over a hotel in Olympia, Washington. They brought knives, hatchets, and clubs, assaulted at least one staff member, and took over the building. They demanded the city government stop clearing homeless tent encampments and house the homeless in the hotel. They were eventually cleared by police, but there was almost no coverage. For residents in the Pacific Northwest, normalizing political violence breaks residents’ will to demand a government that protects them.
So, while you may think Ismay sounds crazy, think again. There seem to be fewer Americans willing to stand up and preserve their freedoms when the government convinces them their security is at risk.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member