A Liberal is a Conservative Who Just Got Selfish

There is an old saying, “A conservative is a liberal who just got mugged.” In a pathetic attempt to reverse this path to enlightenment, Yahoo News is highlighting an op-ed by one Jerry Adler, opining that “perhaps tomorrow’s liberal is a conservative whose house just got flooded.”

The flood reference is a lame attempt to exploit Hurricane Harvey as some sort of wake-up call for “Trump voters” who have hitherto denied any need for “action” (read “oppression”) on manmade climate change. 

The author cites a Washington Post propaganda piece article, in which:

The reporter found that some Trump voters, confronted with evidence that climate change may pose a risk to environments closer to home than the North Pole, were rethinking their opposition to measures to reduce carbon emissions. But it seems to be rather a close call.

One man, who described himself as an evangelical Christian and conservative Republican, had a poignant comment on this dilemma: “It’s a Catch-22 kind of thing,” he said. “Do you want to build your economy, or do you want to save the world?”

First of all, identifying a Trump voter as a conservative, or even treating one isolated Trump voter as exemplary of the conservative mind, is a rich demonstration of how little the faux nouvelles media (it sounds prettier in French, doesn’t it?) understand the concept of conservatism. While it is certainly true that some conservatives voted for Trump as a matter of practical fact, no one who would be comfortable with the identifier “Trump voter” can properly be called a conservative, as Trump himself is about as far from representing the principles and character of a conservative as a Republican politician can be. (And Republican politicians can be very far indeed from that target, and usually are.)

As for the “poignant comment,” cited in the Washington Post article, by a supposed evangelical Christian and conservative Republican, a cursory glance at the wording indicates that the speaker (if any such person exists) is neither a conservative nor, in all likelihood, a recently converted “climate denier,” but rather a committed believer in the progressive fraud settled science of global warming.

“It’s a Catch-22 kind of thing,” he allegedly says. “Do you want to build your economy, or do you want to save the world?”

Nope. No conservative or “climate skeptic” ever said any such thing. This speaker’s rhetorical question so obviously loads the dice in favor of the global warming agenda that it suggests a deliberate effort to belittle or trivialize the anti-global warming position. The idea that oppressive regulations (despotism) and government rigging of the free market (crony capitalism, i.e., democratic fascism) constitute “saving the world,” such that only the amoral profit motive would prevent one from pursuing the moral position of regulations and cronyism, stands in total contradiction to the actual “climate denier” position, which is that climate change is, at best, an unproven and highly questionable hypothesis, and hardly sufficient warrant for permanently undermining liberty and economic prosperity.

As for the idea that Hurricane Harvey is converting Trump voters into Agenda 21-spouting global socialists, I can only say that insofar as it may do so, this kind of conversion could only appear at the intersection of extremely suggestible, weak minds — Trump’s hardcore supporters certainly fulfill that requirement — and a propagandizing mainstream media prepared to exploit any passing event to promote environmental neo-Marxism. 

Moreover, such a conversion would be an obvious case of narrow-minded perspectivism: “My personal life has been disrupted — the world has to do something about this!” In other words, only the combination of the pettiest self-interest and susceptibility to emotional bullying or irrational browbeating could cause a normal person to throw reason to the wind and suddenly flip to being a global warming activist, merely because his own house was flooded. 

This would be the same kind of narrow-minded self-absorption that would lead an alleged constitutionalist who has been a victim of a gun crime to suddenly decide that all guns should be confiscated tomorrow, or an alleged religious person whose family has died in a car accident to suddenly declare himself an atheist.

Immoderate kneejerk selfishness is not a legitimate grounds for intellectual conversion of any kind, and no one who claims to have been converted on such grounds ought to be taken as exemplary of the position from which he has supposedly converted.

Global Warming Shrinks Romania!

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