The Democratic Platform, Building on a Weaponized IRS, Poses a Grave Threat to Freedom of Speech and Enquiry

Once again, I take keyboard in hand for an essentially secondhand post. My brilliant husband Paul Hager is loath to post on his blog, The Hoosier Gadfly, without extensive collection of supporting material -- which means he hasn't posted in years. But his insights are very much worth spreading around, even without that level of detail.

Here is the epiphany which may lead him, despite immense reluctance, to vote (with many an accompanying expletive) for Donald Trump. Rather than paraphrase, as I sometimes have in the past, I'll simply pass along the summary I asked him to send me, with minor edits suggested afterward.

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As you know, I so loathe Trump and his thuggish authoritarianism that I’ve been planning on voting for the Libertarian ticket. Hillary was never acceptable, given her strategic incompetence, reckless criminality, and willingness to sell State Department favors to some of the most unsavory governments on the planet. But something changed today. Call it an epiphany. I was recalling a provision in the Democratic Platform promising to unleash the Justice Department on corporations that have refused to accept catastrophic predictions concerning climate change. I knew this was an attack on free speech when I first read it, but I didn’t really consider the full import until today.

For the first time, I realized that this attack won’t be limited to expanding the unconstitutional RICO law into matters of scientific dispute. After all, the courts should probably resist this, shouldn’t they? As I was contemplating this, I realized I was missing the big picture. It almost doesn’t matter if certain corporations are successfully prosecuted or not. The threat alone will have a chilling effect on corporate R&D that might deviate from official state dogma. But it’s much worse than that.

We know that the IRS has been successfully weaponized by the Obama administration. Under the new diktat, the IRS will go after 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 organizations like Cato, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and a host of other conservative and libertarian think tanks that have presented countervailing data and arguments to the Catastrophic Climate Change cabal. The inconvenient satellite data can be deep-sixed as well. Make it impossible for the University of Alabama at Hunstville to get funding while pressuring Remote Sensing Systems to adjust its data.

This would be the most significant attack on science in the history of the United States. If Hillary and the Democrats have their way, it turns the amalgam of neo-Malthusianism, neo-Luddism, and neo-Paganism known as Environmentalism – I prefer to call it eco-fascism – into an official state dogma. This would be much worse than the Soviet repudiation of Darwinian Evolution in favor of Lysenkoism because that dogma was largely limited to biology and agriculture. Eco-fascism is, at its core, fundamentally anti-human and covers a multitude of scientific disciplines. So-called "climate change" is just the wedge issue that will lead the way to full governmental control of science.

Trump has reversed himself on myriad issues but in recent years he’s been consistently hostile to radical environmentalism. His reasoning - or lack thereof - in arriving at his position is irrelevant. For once he’s on the right side and gives evidence that he’ll stay there.

The Democratic Party I used to belong to has become the enemy of scientific enquiry and free scientific debate. When those go, everything else goes. A Hillary win will be the beginning of a new Dark Age.