By Tim Graham ~
A British socialist group calling itself the Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on what it calls the “Toxic Ten” – so-called “fringe” websites spreading “climate change denial.” The ten include our group, the Media Research Center, as well as Breitbart, the Daily Wire, Townhall Media, Newsmax, The Washington Times, and The Western Journal.
So any challenge to Greenpeace climate-crackdown orthodoxy is now classified as “toxic” and “digital hate.”
Their solution? To press Facebook and Google to “stop monetizing” these conservative sites, stop allowing them to buy ads, and to “comprehensively label” their climate reporting as misinformation. You don’t have to prove conservatives wrong. Just “comprehensively label” them as false.
Once again, the Left wants to win debates by stopping any debate from happening. The founder of this “Digital Hate” squad is a man named Imran Ahmed, who previously co-authored the book The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them, with Angela Eagle, a Labour Party member of Parliament.
Ayatollah Imran can already count on jihad from the “objective media.” Their British socialist friends at The Guardian newspaper awarded their report with the headline “‘Super polluters’: the top 10 publishers denying the climate crisis on Facebook.”
Offering any criticism of climate panic (and climate policy) is “super polluting.” Does this sound like Science, or does it sound like political hyperbole? Naturally, Ahmed told The Guardian that “Big Tech is once again on the wrong side of science, truth and human progress.”
The Washington Post also provided a pliant piece headlined “Breitbart has outsized influence over climate change denial on Facebook, report says.” Tech reporter Cat Zakrzewski warned “The far-right news and commentary site is one of just ten publishers responsible for nearly 70 percent of interactions with climate change denial content on Facebook.”
On Twitter, Zakrzewski gushed “The nonprofit has been effective in drawing policymakers’ attention to falsehoods on social media, as it did with its ‘disinformation dozen’ report earlier this year.”
The Post reporter avoided any evidence of “falsehoods” by engaging with conservative articles. She blithely wrote that “For years, Facebook has faced pressure to issue a broad ban on climate misinformation,” and that somehow doesn’t strike her as distasteful censorship.
My column on Climate Depot founder Marc Morano’s book Green Fraud was pictured under the Daily Wire section of the report. The MRC section is illustrated with a Joseph Vazquez article on NewsBusters about…Marc Morano. He’s apparently Digital Hater Number One.
In my Morano column, I noted that the Climate Panic lobby is never held accountable for failed predictions of doom from decades ago. In one PBS series called Race to Save the Planet, Meryl Streep claimed “By the year 2000 — that’s less than 10 years away — the earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there’ll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”
In 2021, that can be defined as climate misinformation.
But panic helps Democrats sell a crackdown. The Post story quoted Sen. Sheldon “Whites Only” Whitehouse complaining “Facebook and other social media companies make money when they send users down rabbit holes of climate change denial, That’s a very dangerous business model for the future of the planet.”
Apparently, the “business model” is this: only the leftists get to talk on climate policy. Everyone else should be suppressed. No one is allowed to question the failed predictions and overwrought “solutions” of climate experts like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Washington Post should embrace their business model with the slogan “Climate Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Tim Graham is the Executive Editor at NewsBusters, and he is the Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.
Read more Great Articles at NewsBusters . http://newsbusters.org/
Nick Anaxagoras
Tue 11/09/2021
“When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long enough time, they become mythological and very, very powerful. They create conformity. They intimidate.”
E. L. Doctorow in conversation with Bill Moyers, 1989
And to quote Oppenheimer,
“There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
—Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.-Carl Sagan
It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.-Carl Sagan
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.-Carl Sagan
If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.-Carl Sagan
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.-Carl Sagan
LikeLiked by 2 people
Grumpy Old Man
Tue 11/09/2021
Hello Nick Anaxagoras,
Thank you for visiting and your worthwhile comment.
I love those quotes, from Doctorow, Oppenheimer and Sagan. If the Climate Catastrophe followers don’t believe these highly regarded people they won’t believe anyone.
LikeLiked by 1 person
whatyareckon
Tue 11/09/2021
Reblogged this on whatyareckon and commented:
You are in good company with these ten climate deniers!!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Grumpy Old Man
Tue 11/09/2021
Hello whatyareckon,
Thank you for visiting and commenting. You are right on.
I wonder if the climate chaos followers will ever realize that?
Al
LikeLiked by 2 people