The Mean Girls of Global Warming

“Show business is high school with money,” comedian Martin Mull famously said. And the news media is ultimately a form of show business as well, particularly with its chromium or chroma-keyed virtual sets to create the proper theatrics and faux-gravitas around men reading from teleprompters, computer graphics, and reliance on prefab narratives in which the left are always the winners. Which is why, when it comes to the MSM’s attack on global warming skeptics, “You know what this is?”, Robert Tracinski asks at the Federalist, “This is high school:”

It’s not your high school science class, but the high school of cliques, snubbing, ostracism, and mockery as an all-powerful weapon.

Now we can fully understand the contemporary phenomenon of the satirical fake news show—Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and the rest—and why it’s so popular on the left. These shows are created by and for people who never really graduated from high school, the ones who wanted to be part of the clique and to ostracize those who didn’t fit in. These guys weren’t the kind of bullies who beat you up outside the girls’ locker room. (John Oliver looks more like the type who was beaten up.) Instead, they’re the kind who rose in the clique through mockery and humiliation directed at their rivals.

Think of them as the “mean girls” of global warming.

But notice that they’re not using mockery directly as a weapon against the skeptics. Remember back to high school, if you can. If you didn’t really care about being in the clique, they were pretty much irrelevant to you. It was only those who really wanted to fit in and be popular who got caught up in all of the manufactured drama. The mean girls are always meanest to each other.

So the real target on which our mean girls of global warming train the power of their mockery is not the general public, nor is it the ideological right. Their target is the mainstream media.

Read the whole thing. You sort of get the feeling that deep down inside, everyone on the left is terrified of letting his inner Sheldon Cooper emerge and risk an atomic wedgie in the locker room. No wonder “real” “journalists” on the left — aka Democrat operatives with bylines — have such admiration for the smug postmodern pantomime of Stewart, Colbert, and more recently John Oliver, whom Tracinski dubs Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s “nebbishy British version of Jon Stewart” — their staff writers always ensure they win the argument.

And when they fail, their editors will always save them.