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OPINION

Our United States of Fear

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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AP Photo/Evan Vucci

In his first Inaugural address to the United States in 1933, the infamous Franklin Delano Roosevelt “borrowed” a line from Sir Francis Bacon, telling Americans that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” He called for Americans to take courage and action, some three years after the Great Depression began and six years before the Second World War. Bacon actually wrote in De Augmentis Scientiarum, Book II, Fortitudo (1623) that "nothing is terrible except fear itself.”

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Progressives and their forgetful, bumbling leader Joe Biden, have picked up on this theme and stuffed it down the throats of American institutions and citizens. Democrats curtsey to this fear, accepting everything that comes from woke politicians and corporate executives as gospel. Permit me to count four ways.

First, our U.S. military top command appear more committed to being woke than protecting us from an expansionist China and its deadly Covid-19 virus that Health Emperor Anthony Fauci helped fund. Phillip Keuhlen dissects the 142-page report of the U.S. Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations and finds its emphasis on wokeness rather than readiness fundamentally flawed. Instead of battle readiness, Biden & Company busies itself with “wokeness” while neglecting to develop a necessary strategy and resources to combat an increasingly bellicose China. Former Undersecretary of the Navy, Seth Cropsey argues the Pentagon with its outdated policies, may not have the luxury of time when a crisis (the new DF-17 hypersonic missile or the likely invasion of Taiwan) occurs. Cropsey says, “There is no articulated plan for the U.S. to defend our allies while conducting offensive operations against China. We build ships, buy aircraft and tanks, and train soldiers with no strategy in mind, lumbering forward under institutional inertia, guided by policies 10 to 30 years out of date…We won’t have five years from China’s first missile launch. We may not have five months.” In the Biden Fantasyland, we should never have to worry about China since son Hunter, the NBA, Hollywood and Joe’s own exceptional statesmanship has made China a trusting American partner. 

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Second, progressives expect obedience as they uphold murder and mayhem, or as the journalistic gold standard for reporting, CNN, has called them “mostly peaceful demonstrations” on our city streets, advocating police defunding. As Alfred E. Newman said, “What me worry?” While defunding the police, the only thing we should fear is conservative fear, not Antifa or other progressive thug brigades. As Jim McCoy and I opined, “Police officers are paid less for some of the riskiest and most important things we Americans enjoy—our personal safety. They rush into life-threatening situations where even angles fear to tread.” Major cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, New York City, Chicago, L.A., Portland, Baltimore and Philadelphia that have engaged in the fashionably woke stupidity of curtailing police protection have experienced a spike in the major crime.

Third, the IRS is doubling down under the Biden Administration to claw back every penny they believe citizens owe them…even if they don’t. This will help fund the $1.2T infrastructure bill just passed by the House with 13 RINOs joining the Pelosi pantheon. This bill contains countless stupidities that we neither need nor want. For example, despite California’s fiasco with highspeed rail, $66B is earmarked for highspeed rail, 5,000 new rail cars and thousands of miles of new train tracks. Trains, except in the Northeast commuter corridor have proved costly and inefficient.

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To accomplish building back more expensively, Biden and Company must ensure you pay what they think you owe our federal government to run exorbitantly and inefficiently. Dan Molinski, a Wall Street Journal reporter presents his case for the dangers of the new policy allowing IRS to view the funds in people’s personal checking accounts. California, the government exemplar for Biden & Company, cleaned out $3400 from his checking account, claiming he owed back taxes. Actually, he had been both living and working in Bogotá, Columbia during that time. He was told that he had to prove a negative--he wasn’t living in California then.

Fourth, is the climate apocalypse-that-really-isn’t, brought to you by Biden & Company. The linguistic value of the term “climate change” is about as meaningful as ”wet rain.“ By definition, climate changes, according to the season and year. Some years are warmer or drier than others. Some years we have more destructive storms—tornados, hurricanes and arctic freezes. As Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus advises, “we’re safer from climate disasters than ever before… Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat and cold.” He points to the International Disaster Database, the world’s largest disaster archive which attempts to include every catastrophe around the globe using reports from sources ranging from the press to insurance companies to United Nations agencies. Certainly, none of these have a dog in the climate fight!

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Lomborg says that the internet and media proliferation have made it so easy to access disaster data from 1980 to the present, revealing weather-related catastrophes that in earlier times wouldn’t have been recorded. The onslaught of weather-related incidences is less indicative of growing climate related calamities than greater ease of reporting them. 

Talk to your children and grandchildren and you will see climate fear and loathing based on what they have learned in school and social media. Lomborg presents a bar chart showing that that climate-related disasters have a monotonically declining effect in world-wide deaths, concluding, “estimates of costly but increasingly frequent climate damages are typically designed to mislead...The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global GDP to 0.18%. A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disaster. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat and cold. Over time and through human ingenuity, the world has learned to adapt quite well.”

The climate alarmists have cleverly renamed their cause from “global warming” to climate change. This is because since 1980 America has experiences some of the coldest winters on record. Also, February 2021 was the coldest February in more than 30 years according to NOAA, but scant mention is made of it in the EPA’s climate hoax website. Let’s keep the nation in fear the Biden way, through climate alarmism, suppressing the truth. Climate catastrophe gets the MSM more viewers and readers, more grants for scientists in the academy, and more ways to spend taxpayer dollars…the progressive way.

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This climate alarm promotes two dubious conclusions. First, that nuclear power is not a viable solution and nuclear power is dirty. Andrew Fillat and Henry Miller argue that politicians peddle apocalypse and demand that Americans accept skyrocketing gasoline and home heating costs, rolling blackouts and brownouts (see California), endless subsidies for uneconomic EVs and wind and solar power generation. Yet U.S. contribution to global greenhouse-gas emissions is substantial but falling. By 2025, it could be 14% to 18% below 2005 levels. We should not put on a self-destructive climate show for the rest of the world. The Greenies fail to mention the dire pollution caused by EV batteries which thus far can’t be recycled, are prohibitively expensive, and harm our earth far more than petrochemical power. Moreover, a much better solution to our electrical grid is atomic energy that is now more efficient and safer than before, and much cleaner with small modular reactors. Fillat & Miller point out that greenhouse emissions for nuclear is 1/7000th of coal, 1/400th of gas and 1/4000 of solar; waste is 1/10,000 of solar and 1/500 of wind.

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