By Mr. Curmudgeon
Al Gore once denounced all who disagreed with the “scientific consensus” that the globe is warming and it’s all our fault. Then hackers (not all are bad) broke into the computers at England’s University of East Anglia and discovered e-mail correspondence between the world’s climatologists suggesting Gore’s cherished consensus was manufactured. Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who published a paper in the British medical journal Lancet, claimed a link existed between the MMR vaccine (for mumps, rubella and measles) and autism. The number of vaccinations plummeted in the United Kingdom and the U.S. and occurrences of the dreaded childhood diseases rose. News reports later revealed that Wakefield was paid nearly one million dollars for his fraudulent study by lawyers wanting to sue vaccine manufacturers. Currently, 18 European countries have governing bodies to investigate science fraud. In the U.S., the National Science Foundation and other government bodies have subpoena powers. According to Science Daily, “offenders can be required to take a course in scientific ethics or, in the most serious cases, banned from receiving any federal research funding for up to five years.” That’s a slap on the wrist considering the enormous sway so-called experts have over our lives – cap-and-trade and the Copenhagen climate change treaty.
All one has to do to see the insidious effect experts have on our way of life is to watch C-SPAN. Nine times out of ten, there is some bloodless technocrat peering over his readers and telling eager lawmakers how best to manage our lives. And there is a pre-existing relationship between these so-called experts and Congress; much of their research is funded by the very government that uses their findings as an justification to increase imperial federal power. In other words, the educated class of experts feeds the government’s appetite for power. This is why the left condemns the anti big-government Tea Party movement as anti-intellectual.
“The educated class believes in global warming,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. “The educated class supports abortion rights…The educated class supports gun control…The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high…The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should ‘go our own way’ has risen sharply.” Brooks then adds, “In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction…” Brooks, a Republican establishmentarian, misses the point completely.
Today’s Tea Party is as horrified at being ruled by an educated class of “experts” as the original Tea Party was at being ruled by a deluded English king who believed he governed by “divine right.” The outrage over “climategate” and ObamaCare represents a revolution against the rulers by the ruled, not the uneducated against the “educated class.” Free men and women bow to no one. Obama, Pelosi and Reid have a hard time dealing with this revolutionary idea.
