Hey, remember earlier this month when Newsweek did a 1990s throwback “Debate” between a professional climate denier and a real climate expert? And we were like, "Oh hey remember that not only is Newskweek owned by a cult and often peddles rightwing conspiracy theories for clicks, but also Newsweek’s opinion editor Josh Hammer also happens to be a professional rightwing operative?"
Well Hammer’s clearly still hard at work watering down what’s left of Newsweek’s once-prestigious reputation, this time with an op-ed by Joel Kotkin (who happens to also be a contributing editor at the tobacco/Koch/Exxon/etc-funded Manhattan Institute’s City Journal).
“While we in the West look at the Taliban with horror, a similar kind of fanaticism is taking hold here at home,” Kotkin writes at the outset of this exercise in ridiculous self-parody. He sets up a comparison between the “marauding and medieval cult … famous for banning education for women, forcing young girls into marriage and vicious corporal punishment or worse for those who fail to adhrere to the strictures of their religious fanaticism” and those in the “the West” who are “falling prey to a new form of clericalism.”
What’s on par with child marriage? Apparently “university faculties, media outlets, and most egregiously, social media oligarchs.”
Yes, really.
Social media oligarchs are, apparently, the “most egregiously” like the “clerical class” of the Middle Ages who “enforced the orthodoxy of the day from the Pope and the Bishops.” (We’re hardly Zuck’s biggest fans, but even we think this is a bit much.) However, it's somehow “the green movement” that “offers the best analog to the new Medievalism,” because it “foresees impending doom caused by human activity” and supposedly “much of the climate change prognostications have not, so far, proven enormously accurate.” This is simply false.
After that, Kotkin (hilariously) describes Roger Pielke (a political scientist) Patrick Moore (not a scientist) and Judith Curry (retired) as “the best credentialed academic climate experts” who are “demonized and marginalized for deviating” from the consensus on climate change.
Why, though, would universities welcome claims that have — like Kotkin’s claim that climate models haven’t been accurate — have been repeatedly proven to be wrong?
Apparently they should though, because “you know you’re dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent.” So, not only is climate denial actually the modern choice and not entertaining it even though we know it’s wrong is Medieval, but “other central issues, like the pandemic, or ‘systemic racism’” are also apparently things that Kotkin is mad people face repercussions for spreading hateful disinformation about.
Now, fortunately, because he’s not a total hack, Kotkin does admit at the end of his piece premised on comparing the green movement to the Taliban that “there is still a big difference between the Taliban and the green movement” because “it’s better to be ignored or censored than beaten or beheaded.”
Ya think?
But still, “one need not minimize that difference to sound the alarm.” And that alarm is not that a faction of the country is in the grip of a politically-correct delusion that’s enabling a deadly pandemic to kill thousands more children and vulnerable people because their unvaccinated-by-choice comrades are spreading the disease and hogging ICU beds. Instead, apparently, it's that the basically equally bad “Trump-addled conspiracists on the Right” are just as bad as “our own Medievalists” on the “far Left” who “represent a profound threat to [W]estern civilization’s spirit of inquiry and openness that is so critical to historic growth.”
Reading Kotkin’s piece is definitely alarming. Though more for what it says about the decline and fall of a once-reputable publication than “Western civilization.”