Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse reacts to ‘Torquemada’ essay
Guest Blogger / 18 hours ago October 26, 2015
David Rothbard writes:
It looks like CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen touched a nerve in a recent column when he compared U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to “Torquemada” for wanting to use the RICO Act to silence climate skeptics.
Torquemada, of course, spearheaded the infamous Spanish Inquisition of the 15th Century – a comparison Driessen made noting the Senator’s desire to use intimidation and fear to impose conformity on climate thinking.
Such an analogy, feisty but not uncommon in policy debate, nevertheless got Whitehouse in a huff, and he spouted off about it on the floor of the Senate late last week.
After defending his call to use RICO laws against climate heretics, he then accused skeptics like Driessen of “setting off criminal smokescreens and launching … ‘Torquemada’ hysterics.”
If Whitehouse doesn’t like the comparison, perhaps he should read the First Amendment to the Constitution and respect every citizen’s right to speak freely.
In the meantime, if the Senator wants to play political hardball, he should expect his opponents to bring their rhetorical bats.
wattsupwiththat.com
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MarkW says:
October 26, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Libs have long defined hatred as any opposition to their plans.
If you don’t want an increase in welfare, then you want children to starve.
If you don’t think the govt should be running the health care system, then you don’t want anyone but the rich to have medical care.
If you oppose affirmative action you are a racist.
If you don’t believe the lie about women making 73% what men make, you are a sexist.
If you haven’t been taking in by the CAGW scare, then you are in the pay of big oil and you don’t care about the environment.
And so on.
Liberals find it impossible to believe that anyone can disagree with them for honest reasons.
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Tucci78 says:
October 26, 2015 at 7:36 pm
Liberals find it impossible to believe that anyone can disagree with them for honest reasons.
The positions taken by “Liberals” are without honestly reasoned support.
Objective reality, honestly perceived and remarked, is toxic to them.
In the universities, in the churches, in the corporations, in the professional organizations, in the editorial offices, in the game studios, and just about everywhere else you can imagine, free speech and free thought are under siege by a group of fanatics as self-righteous as Savanarola, as ruthless as Stalin, as ambitious as Napoleon, and as crazy as Caligula. They are the Social Justice Warriors, the SJWs, the self-appointed thought police who have been running amok throughout the West since the dawn of the politically correct era in the 1990s. Their defining characteristics:
• a philosophy of activism for activism’s sake
• a dedication to rooting out behavior they deem problematic, offensive, or unacceptable in others
• a custom of primarily identifying individuals by their sex, race, and sexual orientation
• a hierarchy of intrinsic morality based on the identity politics of sex, race, and sexual orientation
• a quasi-religious belief in equality, diversity, and the inevitability of progress
• an assumption of bad faith on the part of all non-social justice warriors
• an opinion that motivation matters more than consequences
• a certainty that they are the only true and valid defenders of the oppressed
• a habit of demanding that their opinions be enshrined as social custom and law
• a tendency to possess a left-wing political identity
• a willingness to deny science, history, logic, their past words, or any other aspect of reality that contradicts their current Narrative.
— Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (2015)
(I know that I keep citing this analysis, but as long as we have Social Justice Warriors like this Whitehouse thug abusing the powers of public office, the diagnostic criteria bear recapitulation.)
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