Jonah Goldberg - August 25, 2009

Well, it was a nice run. But I think it’s time to turn out the lights on the Liberal Fascism blog. Alas, turning out the lights on liberal fascism might take a bit longer.

As only the most loyal readers may have noticed, I haven’t been updating the blog much this summer. I fell out of the habit while I was on the NR Cruise and never got back into it. One reason for that might be that if you wanted to read about the themes of my book, all you had to do was open a newspaper.

Let’s see. Off the top of my head, in the first six months of Obama’s presidency we’ve seen corporatism  and “state capitalism”   run amok, in the government takeover of two car companies and numerous banks. Labor unions have become increasingly indistinguishable from the government and the party that controls it. Herbert Croly  and the Progressives have once again been rehabilitated as founding fathers of the New Age. The entire liberal intellectual class is convinced that this the time for a new New Deal. Critics of statism are vilified by liberal elites as racists and fascists. (And those who refuse to get with the Gorian program are guilty of “treason against the planet“). When out of power, liberals lionized free speech and celebrated dissent as the highest form of patriotism. Now, they label dissent “un-American” and the president insists he doesn’t want to hear a lot of talking from anyone who disagrees with him. While the stench of eugenics and euthanasia do not quite sting the nostrils yet, the odor is detectable and the  liberal impulse for controlling the lives of others has been re-exposed.

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Terry Melanson (August 9, 2009)

…they had to pursue a strategy … called “crypto-eugenics.” In essence, “You seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word.” This is how the Eugenics Society conceived of its funding for the IPPF.

- Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 163

Zombietime, the site that documented the totalitarian proclivities of Obama’s Science Czar John P. Holdren, has a new article. It turns out that the policies advocated in Holdren’s now-legendary Ecoscience (1973) were directly influenced by The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954) by eugenicist Harrison Brown.

Harrison Brown’s book, Holdren admitted in 1986, “transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue.” As documented by Zombietime, the type of “thinking about the world” espoused in The Challenge of Man’s Future, includes such wisdom as:

The feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. … Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. … A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates.

(more…)

John Holdren dreams up some scathingly brilliant, super-gigantic-expialidocious projects to head off global warming.

James Lewis - April 13, 2009

How often have we seen the picture of Galileo Galilei facing the Office of the Inquisition in 1632? Galileo is held up as a scientific martyr today, because he fiercely defended the Copernican solar system against the Inquisition, which finally ordered him to stop publishing those ideas. Cardinal Bellarmine denounced Copernican theory as “a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the philosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false.”

Today we have a radical role reversal. Climate heretics like Dr. Fred Singer and MIT’s Prof. Richard Lindzen are telling truth to power — and they are bitterly criticized by our science politicians, just as the pope criticized Galileo. Singer and Lindzen are our Galileos, telling a truth that the leftist establishment and its organs of propaganda do not want to hear.

Today we have our own official science czar in the White House. John Holdren is a true believer in the imaginary faith of global warming. We even have an office for the propagation of the faith, spearheaded by NASA’s James Hansen. It is Hansen who goes around saying that the oceans could rise by 20 feet and that heretics — like oil company execs — deserve to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.” This witch-hunting talk apparently passes for normal scientific discourse in Dr. Hansen’s mind. Hansen has not yet proposed burning oil company execs at the stake, but he is no longer a scientist — he is a true believer, just like a Scientologist. Real scientists don’t know the answers before the evidence is in. Hansen and Holdren know the answers — their faith passeth mere human understanding.

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William Yeatman & Jeremy Lott on 2.25.09

In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama took a dig at his backward predecessor by promising to “restore science to its rightful place” in America. So why, days before he was sworn in, did Obama choose a failed prophet of the apocalypse to become his most influential scientist?

Obama nominated Dr. John P. Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, for chief White House Science Advisor. The Science Advisor’s job is to give impartial scientific analysis to the President on major federal policies.

Holdren’s particular brand of science is infected by what we can only call a doomsday bias. Over the past 40 years, he has warned of population-growth induced “ecocide,” “global cooling,” global warming due to heat dissipation from power plants, nuclear Armageddon, and — this week — “climate disruption” caused by increased concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

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Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com
Friday, February 27, 2009

When Barack Obama nominated John P. Holdren as his Science Adviser last December 20, the president-elect stated “promoting science isn’t just about providing resources” but “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.” In nominating John Holdren, his words could scarcely have taken a more Orwellian ring.

Some critics have noted Holdren’s penchant for making apocalyptic predictions that never come to pass, and categorizing all criticism of his alarmist views as not only wrong but dangerous. What none has yet noted is that Holdren is a globalist who has endorsed “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would control all the world’s resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the “de-development” of the West, control a World Army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits. He has castigated the United States as “the meanest of wealthy countries,” written a justification of compulsory abortion for American women, advocated drastically lowering the U.S. standard of living, and left the door open to trying global warming “deniers” for crimes against humanity. Such is Barack Obama’s idea of a clear-headed adviser on matters of scientific policy.

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