Photo: President Trump, Frame from CNN video report
By Calvin Freiburger, LifeSiteNews, Set. 14, 2018
September 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Hurricane Florence is the latest storm to threaten the East Coast, and it sounds like serious business. As this is being written, AccuWeather projects heavy winds, significant coastal flooding, widespread power outages, and around $60 billion in economic impact and damage. German astronaut Alexander Gerst called it a “no-kidding nightmare coming for you.” Authorities say residents in parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia should evacuate.
So naturally, Donald Trump is somehow to blame.
No, seriously: the Washington Post’s editorial board, staking out the official position of one of America’s most prominent newspapers, actually wrote on Tuesday that the president “is complicit” in “extreme weather” because he “plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks [of climate change], and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks.”
“The president has cemented the GOP’s legacy as one of reaction and reality denial,” the editorial concludes. “Sadly, few in his party appear to care.”
To give this madness a thin veneer of substance, the editors cite a paper claiming that Hurricane Harvey produced more rain than it should have because climate change supposedly heated up water in the Gulf of Mexico, and a report suggesting that Florence could last longer because climate change may “possibly” be slowing down tropical cyclones.
Never mind that (a fraudulent “consensus” and widespread data manipulation aside) it remains highly disputed whether human activity meaningfully impacts global temperatures, or that even if it does, no American policy change could realistically counteract greenhouse gas emissions from, say, China.
Never mind the multiple mainstream reports that we’re actually in a “hurricane drought” compared to the historical average, or that, as RedState’s Brandon Morse notes, even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration admits that it’s “premature to conclude that human activities […] have already had a detectable impact on hurricane activity” in the Atlantic.
Never mind all of that, because this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, who must be #resisted at every opportunity. That’s doubly true at WaPo, which was so triggered by Trump’s victory that it came up with the tagline “Democracy dies in darkness” to market itself as some heroic bulwark against malevolent forces on the rise.
Reasonable minds can disagree on whether this editorial is more or less embarrassing than that time the Post organized a bunch of children to sing Trump tweets, but perhaps the biggest takeaway isn’t about Trump itself; this editorial is also the latest example of leftists’ highly selective respect for “scientific consensus.”
Despite haranguing the president for not genuflecting to the prevailing climate dogma, this is the same newspaper that denies actual settled science on the subject of embryology. Nobody seriously disputes how we define living things. There’s no serious question that fertilization yields a living human being. Even some abortionists and pro-abortion philosophers admit it.
Yet from Down Syndrome kids and breast cancer to Planned Parenthood’s crimesand more, WaPo rests squarely in the “reaction and reality denial” camp on the issue. Most significantly for our purposes here, in 2014 the Post’s Phillip Bump purported to “fact-check” Marco Rubio on when life begins, but the result was a tour de force of ignorance which Mollie Hemingway destroyed under one of the all-time great headlines, “The Washington Post Is Super Confused About Where Babies Come From.”
Bump mindlessly wrote that “the consensus is that uterine implantation is the moment at which pregnancy begins,” uncritically parroting the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG’s) sleight-of-hand meant to distract from the question of what exactly an embryo is.
“‘Life’ is something of a philosophical question, making Rubio’s dependence on a scientific argument […] politically tricky,” Bump claimed, again trying to pretend long-settled concepts like “what’s an organism” or “how do biologists define life” are somehow unknowable. What’s not tricky, however, is cracking open a medical or biology textbook.
The Washington Post isn’t concerned with scientific literacy. It’s not animated by compassion for future generations. Its sole animating principle, like the vast majority of today’s mainstream media, is feeding its readership a constant diet of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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Calvin Freiburger is a Wisconsin-based conservative writer and 2011 graduate of Hillsdale College. His commentary and analysis have been featured on NewsReal Blog, Live Action, and various other conservative websites. Before joining LifeSiteNews, he spent two years in Washington, DC, working to build support for the Life at Conception Act with the National Pro-Life Alliance, then worked a year and a half as assistant editor of TheFederalistPapers.org. You can follow him on Twitter @CalFreiburger, and check out his personal website, ConservativeStandards.com.
