If someone says something unkind, report it to the police - Pravda edition

This thuggish suppression of diversity of opinion and free speech is getting out of hand. Two samples that should be dismissed as unrepresentative except that you wouldn't have thought either was possible in America in the first place.

The Climate Change Inquisition Begins by Robert Tracinski.

New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has started an investigation of Exxon Mobil “to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.” According to The New York Times, its sources “said the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science.” See what they did there? To have a different view of climate science is to “undermine” it because there is no scientific study of the climate except that which they agree with.

We should start with the observation that Exxon could not possibly have “lied” about climate change, even if it intended to, because first there would have to be a proven truth on the subject. If the company later contradicted warnings about global warming issued by scientists it funded in the 1980s, that would be justified by the fact that those warnings were almost certainly wrong. The arguments for global warming have been undercut — not by anything Exxon did — but by what the earth didn’t do. It didn’t keep warming, with global temperatures leveling off for the past 15 to 20 years. Global temperatures are now trending at or below the lowest, least dire predictions of warming.

But this isn’t really about the science, is it? To make it clear that this is entirely a political witch hunt, the Times explains that “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology. Thus, any potential fraud prosecution might depend on exactly how big a role company executives can be shown to have played in directing campaigns of climate denial, usually by libertarian-leaning political groups.”

A Bloomberg analysis describes the “weird theory” needed to transform this into a case of securities fraud but gets down to the nub of why Schneiderman is pursuing that theory: to evade the First Amendment. “[S]ecurities fraud is perhaps the least protected speech of all. Securities law fits notoriously uncomfortably with the First Amendment; the Securities and Exchange Commission forbids even truthful speech by companies in many situations.”

So there you go. This is about suppressing political speech by using the threat of government prosecution to intimidate corporations into withdrawing funding from pro-free-market advocates.

Despicable, un-American, and totalitarian. Run them out of town on rails.

But Schneiderman is just a man of his authoritarian times.

In Missouri you have this alarming example of Leviathan trying to police its unruly individual citizens from thinking for themselves. From Missouri U. Police: Call us about ‘harmful’ or ‘hurtful speech’. You can't get much more Maoist than that it would seem. How could a sentient adult even begin to think that this was appropriate?

From the memo sent by the Missouri University Police:

From: MU POLICE
Date: November 10, 2015 at 9:52:16 AM CST
To: MU POLICE
Subject: Reporting Hateful and/or Hurtful Speech

To continue to ensure that the University of Missouri campus remains safe, the MU Police Department (MUPD) is asking individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions to:

* Call the police immediately at 573-882-7201. (If you are in an emergency situation, dial 911.)

* Give the communications operator a summary of the incident, including location.

* Provide a detailed description of the individual(s) involved.

* Provide a license plate and vehicle descriptions (if appropriate).

* If possible and if it can be done safely, take a photo of the individual(s) with your cell phone.

For those of us who grew up in Europe at the time of the Soviet Union, this is familiar stuff. But this is America and memos like this would seem to be more appropriate to an Onion satire than a real-life police agency.

Absurd. Hopefully the wake-up calls from the Yale (and Columbia, and Duke, and UVA, and UCLA, etc.) incidents will be heard this time and the responsible stakeholders will act to reign in this nonsense and inject some sanity and maturity back into higher education.