Google’s erasing the photograph of Patrick Moore, former president of Greenpeace, from the list of early founders and organizers of the environmental group, is, like the firing of James Damore a couple of years ago, a reminder of why it’s fitting the tech giant dropped its original motto, “Don’t be evil.”
Google is just that and then some. It is evil and dangerous. When one company controls the world’s flow of information the way they do and can tilt the argument overtly or, more ominously, covertly in their preferred direction, watch out. We are headed for a new form of totalitarianism.
We will soon be living in a homogenized global village out of a Huxley novel and social media will have led the way, been our soma (the drug from Huxley’s Brave New World). It is clearly already happening. We are in the midst of a Cultural Revolution without the dunce caps. And Google, the übermensch of social media, is the managing director of the operation. It is the engine that makes the whole sinister business work—Twitter, Facebook, and its own YouTube.
That slavish, unthinking fealty to “climate change” (né global warming) as a leading factor in this process is particularly disturbing since uniformity of thought in science is in essence anti-science. Right or wrong, Patrick Moore, a Canadian who is an apostate from the church of warming, deserves to be heard, not just because the term “settled science” is a dimwitted oxymoron, but because he has years of experience studying the subject.
Nevertheless, Google wants him dismissed or sidelined. He was never really part of the sainted Greenpeace. He just says he was.
We are left with the likes of Beto O’Rourke, who compares people fighting climate change to “those who were on the beaches in Normandy.” (Don’t laugh—Beto’s had a hard week.) Or Bernie Sanders, who warns that climate change is an “existential threat.” (Never mind that if you followed his program you would leave the developing world in penury. Some socialist!)
Bernie’s old enough to have been around in the 1970s when Time and Newsweek were trumpeting that we were headed for another Ice Age, but again, never mind. Science is not the point. AOC knows we are headed for climate Armageddon from warming in twelve years and she’s “the boss.”
These days, to run for president as a Democrat, you have to pledge the most absolute allegiance to the church of climate. If you don’t—if you dare say something as obvious as did the renowned Danish writer and climate moderate Bjorn Lomborg—you might as well forget about any ambition and return to selling insurance (or bartending).
Decades of climate-change exaggeration in the West have produced frightened children, febrile headlines, and unrealistic political promises. The world needs a cooler approach that addresses climate change smartly without scaring us needlessly and that pays heed to the many other challenges facing the planet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if executives at Google and other Silicon Valley fiefdoms substantially agreed with Lomborg, but would never say so out loud. They want power and profit. They don’t want blowback or to be attacked on Twitter, for gosh sakes. They don’t want to be excommunicated like the intemperate Patrick Moore, who goes around advocating nuclear energy, of all things, and had some pretty bad things to say about the Green New Deal. They’ll excommunicate him first.
Google is, I would imagine, weirdly much like the government of Iran. The mullahs don’t really believe all the 12th imam nonsense (I mean, who could?) but they espouse it for the masses in order to maintain their power over them. Google and the social media companies—and, of course, the Democratic Party—have to proclaim the imminent civilizational danger of climate change to keep their own masses in line.
After a while, however, if you keep on reciting the same palaver, you begin to believe it yourself.
But not to worry. It doesn’t matter in the end. It’s the soma, stupid. We’re all taking it. Pretty soon I’ll be linking this column on Twitter. We’ll all be checking Facebook. It’s what we do.
As Aldous Huxley put it:
“..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…”
Roger L. Simon — co-founder and CEO emeritus of PJ Media — is an award-winning novelist and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.
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