The Deniers by Lawrence Solomon, Richard Vigilante Books, 2008, 239 pp., hardback.A Book Reviewby Tom Gow, FFS VP In our research of the global warming topic we came across a gem of a book, The Deniers, written by Canadian columnist Lawrence Solomon. Solomon forthrightly subtitled his book: “The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud* *And those who are fearful to do so.” When your pro-nuclear power reviewer began reading The Deniers, he was initially quite skeptical of the book’s value, for Lawrence Solomon proudly acknowledges strong environmentalist credentials. Indeed, Solomon works for an environmental group called Energy Probe, which in 1974 began opposing Canada’s nuclear power establishment. In the late 1980s, Energy Probe was “also among the first organizations in Canada to sound the alarm on global warming.” But as we read further, we were pleased to discover the intellectual honesty and quality of research Solomon brings to the topic of his very readable book. Although Solomon refuses to take a position in areas of disputed or uncertain science, he very strongly disputes the global warming doomsayers’ claim that the science is settled. Solomon argues that the intelligent layman must look to scientific authority for guidance in this technical area. And he insists that, contrary to media reports, the exaggerated claims regarding global warming simply do not responsibly reflect the opinion of the most competent scientific authorities. And he has absolutely no truck with Al Gore. Indeed, playing off the title of Al Gore’s irresponsible “documentary,” Solomon includes a chapter in his book entitled “Some Inconvenient Persons.” In that chapter, he highlights several scientists who had huge reputations in the environmentalist movement prior to coming out against the global warming scare and who were subsequently maligned or pushed down the memory hole. As the title and subtitle indicate, The Deniers is largely about people — the scientists who defend their science against political orthodoxy, their impressive credentials, and the expert opinions they offer. And Solomon has assembled a sterling cast of characters to dispute the science-is-settled claim. Virtually every chapter introduces the reader to internationally recognized authorities at the top of their fields who dispute elements of the global warming crisis case. As The Deniers overwhelmingly demonstrates: “Only by pretending that serious theorists don’t exist can Al Gore get away with quips about how global warming deniers ‘get together on a Saturday night and party with’ people who believe the Earth is flat and that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot.” Even though The Deniers started out as a series of newspaper columns, the book is very well organized, turning the spotlight on each of the major building blocks for the global warming scare. As Solomon points out, the thesis that we are facing catastrophic manmade global warming rests on a number of independent foundations. Although he discovered top scientists who credibly disputed each of these foundations individually, he also found that many were not ready to take on the entire theory, as the other building blocks were outside their particular area of expertise, and so they resisted being described as deniers: Like other smart people, and like most everyone, scientists accept the conventional wisdom in areas they know little about. Put another way, people are predisposed to accept what they believe to be a consensus. Readers of The Deniers will quickly recognize that what the public has been told bears little resemblance to what Solomon’s experts tell us. Let’s take a brief look at several of the topics Solomon examines. Improper Manipulation of the Data Solomon titles his second chapter “The Case of the Disappearing Hockey-Stick.” The famous “hockey-stick chart,” included in the Summary for Policymakers of the 2001 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, purports to show an unusual correlation between rising industrial CO2 and historical warming. The Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked Dr. Edward Wegman to assess the chart. Dr. Edward Wegman is a past president of the International Association of Statistical Computing and past chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences. Likely due to Dr. Wegman’s persistence in exposing the errors in composing the chart, the IPCC dropped the hockey-stick chart from the Summary for Policymakers for its 2007 Report. Solomon regards this omission as “fairly damning” but notes that “the hockey stick did its main work years ago and is still widely cited by advocates of the science-is-settled position.” The Search for CO2 As the story in The Deniers unfolds, one discovers that many forces interact to impact our climate. But the global warming scare has focused largely on CO2 and the greenhouse effect as the principal drivers of climate change. Solomon’s authorities reveal the danger in such oversimplification of nature’s complexity. Dr. Nir Shaviv is an accomplished astrophysicist. “The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System credits his works with a total of 613 citations.” Shaviv argues that CO2 plays only a subordinate role in global warming. He further insists that, whereas the impact of CO2 in a simple system is apparent, the factors determining Earth’s climate do not form such a simple system. And those other factors are much less understood. Or in Solomon’s words: “A climate scientist focusing on CO2 is a bit like the man who lost his keys half a block away but looks under the light post because that is where he can see.” (See “Carbon Dioxide or Solar Forcing?” by Nir J. Shaviv). In bringing forth the opinions of informed authorities, unknown to most of the public, Solomon directs our attention to Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Akasofu has twice been named one of the “1,000 Most Cited Scientists.” In telephone and email exchanges with Solomon, Akasofu concluded: “Indeed, there is so far no definitive proof that ‘most’ of the present warming is due to the greenhouse effect, as is stated in the recently published IPCC report (2007).” Ice-Core Samples However scientifically invalid, the campaign to brand manmade CO2 as the culprit in global warming requires some evidence that CO2 levels in the atmosphere during the past several decades are historically unusual. To reconstruct the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere over millennia, the UN’s IPCC has relied on data from ice-core samples. For an evaluation of the ice-core record, Solomon turns to Zbigniew Jaworowski. Jaworowski is “past chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Environmental Program.” These are hardly the credentials you would expect to find of someone in the pocket of industry. The story that for millennia prior to the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels were low and stable is a fable says Zbigniew Jaworowski: “The IPCC relies on ice-core data — on air that has been trapped for hundreds or thousands of years deep below the surface,” Dr. Jaworowski explains. “These ice cores are the foundation of the global warming hypothesis, but the foundation is groundless — the IPCC has based its global warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false.” As Jaworowski points out, the ice does not preserve the ancient air with sufficient precision to allow historical reconstruction of the composition of the atmosphere. In fact, he says, the samples are fraught with errors. The Myth of Scientific ConsensusThe Deniers very capably exposes the myth that the overwhelming majority of informed scientists believes we face catastrophic manmade global warming. But Solomon goes even further in illuminating the state of the infant science of climate. To that end he cites several very insightful statements by Dr. Robert Carter, a research professor at the University of Adelaide. Dr. Carter “has published more than a hundred papers in international science journals and received numerous awards and prizes….” In a paper entitled “The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change” (presented to The 2007 AusIMM New Leader’s Conference in Brisbane, QLD, May 2-3, 2007), Dr. Carter points out: Much public discussion on global-warming is underpinned by two partly self-contradictory assumptions. The first is that there is a “consensus” of qualified scientists that dangerous human-caused global warming is upon us; and the second is that although there are “two sides to the debate,” the dangerous-warming side is overwhelmingly the stronger. Both assertions are unsustainable. The first because science is not, nor ever has been, about consensus, but about experimental and observational data and testable hypotheses. Second, regarding the number of sides to the debate, the reality is that small parts of the immensely complex climate system are better or less understood — depending on the subject — by many different groups of experts. No one scientist, however brilliant, “understands” climate change, and there is no general theory of climate nor likely to be one in the near future. In effect, there are nearly as many sides to the climate-change debate as there are expert scientists who consider it. Those Pesky Martians After discussing scientific research into other potential causes of climate change (such as the Sun), Solomon begins a new chapter with this thought: The cosmic ray/cloud connection is complex and intriguing, but there may be a less complex and more intuitive way to tell that the Sun is responsible for global warming. Consider this: Mars has been warming too. Its polar ice cap is shrinking, deep gullies in its landscape are now laid bare, and the Martian climate is the warmest it has been in decades or centuries. One of the scientists, Solomon cites to develop this idea is Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of the Space Research Laboratory at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory: “To … Abdussamatov … the evidence from Mars destroys in terms the layman can understand the notion that humans are responsible for warming Earth. ‘Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians,’ he states matter-of-factly.” Solomon proceeds to explore some of the complications climate scientists face in analyzing cause and effect: “The oceans — whose upper regions contain many times the CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere — are also responsible for confusing climate scientists about the role that CO2 plays in the warming of the planet.” And he defers again to Abdussamatov: If the temperature of the ocean rises even a little, gigantic amounts of CO2 are released into the atmosphere through evaporation of water…. It’s no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth’s oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause-and-effect relations. Computer Climate Models In his research into the global warming controversy, Solomon discovered that “no aspect of the doomsday case came in for so much criticism as the immensely complex and comprehensive computer models with which the IPCC and others claim to be able to predict climate change hundreds of years into the future.” Yet, as Solomon points out, “the case for manmade catastrophic global warming overwhelmingly depends on these models.” Assessing the criticism, Solomon writes: “In blunt layman’s terms, the criticism of models that I encountered again and again comes down to this: global-climate models bite off more than they can chew…. Rather, as Hendrik Tennekes explains, the problem is that global-climate models reach a level of complexity so great that the predictions they issue can no longer be called scientific propositions.” Solomon details several of Tennekes’ impressive achievements, noting that he “has touched an extraordinary number of lives in his own distinquished career, among academics and laymen alike.” In particular, Tennekes was formerly “director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and later chairman of the august Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts….” However, Solomon informs us that: Because [Tennekes’] critiques of climate science ran afoul of the orthodoxy required by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, he was forced to leave. Lesser scientists, seeing that even a man of Tenneke’s reputation was not free to dissent, learned their lesson. Those who harbor doubts about climate science do better to bite their tongues and keep their heads down. Solomon writes extensively about specific scientists and their accomplisments to establish their credentials in support of his thesis that in highly technical matters the intelligent layman should listen to the top people in any discipline. One of the impressive scientists Solomon cites is Physicist Freeman Dyson: As a mathematician and physicist, Dyson is known for the unification of three versions of quantum electrodynamics, for his work on the Orion project, which proposed space flight using nuclear pulse propulsion, and for developing the TRIGA, a small, inherently safe nuclear reactor used by hospitals and universities worldwide for the production of isotopes. As a theoretician, he is known for the Dyson sphere …, the Dyson transform … and the Dyson tree…. As an activist and visionary, [Dyson] is known for his concern for global poverty, for his promotion of international cooperation, and for his work in furtherance of nuclear disarmament…. But Dyson’s stature has not allowed him to dissent freely when it comes to global warming. As Solomon reports: “[T]hese days the Renaissance man is known as a scientific heretic, chiefly for disagreeing with, as he puts it, ‘all the fluff about global warming.'” In particular, Dyson dismisses the computer models: “They do not begin to describe the real world we live in.” As Solomon further notes: “Professor Dyson argues that the many components of climate models reflect a poor understanding of first principles and thus cannot capture the effects of change in complex interactive systems.” Another impressive critic of the computer models is Dr. Antonio Zichichi, whom Solomon describes as “Italy’s most renowned scientist” and publisher of “more than 800 scientific papers, opening new avenues in Subnuclear Physics at High Energies….” As Solomon discovered, Dr. Zichichi has argued “that models used by the [UN’s] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view…. On the basis of actual scientific fact ‘it is not possible to exclude the idea that climate changes can be due to natural causes,’ and that it is plausible that ‘man is not to blame.'” Readers should ask, why don’t we hear these stories on the nightly news? The United Nations Connection Of particular interest to this reviewer are the authoritative comments Solomon has assembled universally critical of the UN’s IPCC. As we will discuss in a moment, the UN was founded to evolve into an unchallengeable supranational authority possessing eventually even a monopoly on military force. The architects of giving such authority to the UN recognize that this revolution in political arrangements is best driven though crises and by concealing their real agenda. Although Solomon makes no such connection to the global warming scare, those who value freedom and national independence should welcome any reality check on the hype that so often glorifies the UN and argues for giving it more authority to solve “global problems.” One of the IPCC’s most persistent critics is Dr. Vincent Gray. Dr. Gray’s criticism is not so easily dismissed. As Solomon points out, Dr. Gray “has published more than a hundred scientific papers … and has participated in all of the science reviews of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…. [The IPCC] has used Dr. Gray as an expert reviewer for many years…. [In which role he has logged] roughly 1,900 comments on the IPCC’s final draft of its most recent report alone…. [Gray is] aghast at what he sees as an appalling absence of scientific rigor in the IPCC’s review process.” After striving arduously to help the IPCC correct its reports, Dr. Gray concludes: Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organization from the very beginning. Another critic of the IPCC highlighted in The Deniers is Dr. Paul Reiter, professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and chief of its Insects and Infectious Diseases Unit. As Solomon points out, “[Dr. Reiter] has worked for the World Health Organization … and other agencies in the investigations of outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases” and “was also a contributory author for the IPCC Third Assessment Report.” Reiter is dismayed at the attempts to attribute outbreaks in malaria to global warming: I know of no major scientist with any long record in this field [the control of mosquito-borne diseases] who agrees with the pronouncements of the alarmists at the IPCC…. On the contrary, all of us who work in the field are repeatedly stunned by the IPCC pronouncements. We protest, but are rarely quoted, and if so, usually as a codicil to the scary stuff. Solomon suggests: “One problem appears to be that the doomsayers either do not read the [malaria] research in detail, or if they do, they distort it.” And he provides an example of their reference to the findings in a World Health Organization report, which in fact contradicts their claims. Solomon asks, “How can this happen? How could the UN have issued such dangerously amateurish advice on such a crucial issue, one that threatens hundreds of millions?” In answer to his question, he offers Dr. Reiter’s opinion that the IPCC, as an organization of governments, is covering up for the failures of governments. But Solomon also notes: Moreover, the IPCC has twisted the peer-review process — essential to ensuring rigorous science…. In effect, the science is spun, disagreements purged, and results predetermined. Mainstream Media The IPCC is not the only group that draws repeated criticism in The Deniers. The media receives its share of the blame for misleading the public. In his previously referenced paper, Dr. Robert Carter charges: “It is plain that the press have failed in their role as public ‘watchdog’ against the specious pleadings of contemporary climate alarmists; indeed, the media itself is a self-interested party to the debate.” And Solomon provides examples of outrageous media spins, where the media itself is the problem. Solomon regards “the June 2007 ‘Big Thaw’ issue of National Geographic, with its awesome account of the sudden, rapid disappearance of the world’s glaciers” as an anecdote masquerading as evidence: “Brilliantly illustrated with the stunning photography for which the Geographic is famous, it prompted headlines around the world…. Unfortunately, the story as told by the Geographic is simply nonsense, claims [Dr. Cliff] Ollier [a geologist with the University of Western Australia].” “‘Rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets’ in the manner described by the article and constantly repeated in the popular press, ‘is impossible’ [Ollier] declares…. ‘In reality, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins and cannot slide down a plane.’” The Pressure to Conform Another revealing theme of The Deniers is the enormous pressure repeatedly brought upon those scientists who would even appear to threaten the global warming orthodoxy. Solomon refers to M.I.T. Professor Richard Lindzen for one explanation: “So how is it that we don’t have more scientists speaking up about this junk science?” [Lindzen] asks. His grim answer: carrots and sticks. Those who toe the partly line are publicly praised and have grants ladled out to them from a funding pot that overflows with more than $1.7 billion per year in the United States alone. Since then, Lindzen says, scientists “who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks, or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.” One of several specific examples of pressure Solomon cites involves scientists who sought to investigate the influence of the Sun on climate change. Two eminent scientists in that category were Dr. Egil Friis-Christensen, director of the Danish National Space Center and his colleague, Dr. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Space Center. Solomon writes: When the IPCC was created, Dr. Friis-Christensen hoped its work would spur interest in the Sun’s influence on climate change…. To his surprise, the IPCC refused to consider the Sun’s influence on Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task as investigating manmade causes of climate change…. At a 1996 conference in Birmingham, England, Friis-Christensen in an invited paper included some results from a recently completed paper of Svensmark and Friis-Christensen tentatively suggesting that cosmic ray flux, regular variations in the Sun’s magnetic field, might be influencing cloud formation and thus temperature…. Bert Bolin, then chairman of the United Nations IPCC, castigated them in the press, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” They were castigated for casting doubt on the greenhouse theory, “though [Svensmark maintained] we did not say at that time that there was no CO2 effect, just that the Sun is also important.” Better-Safe-Than-Sorry Argument A common argument you hear from the doomsayers in response to doubts expressed about their projections is that it is still better to act on the assumption we face serious global warming and possibly be wrong than to risk acting too late. But as Solomon points out, “The problem with the better-safe-than-sorry approach to headline horrors is that the headlines so often finger the wrong culprit.” As one example, he argues that “[f]ollowing Gore’s advice rather than addressing the real causes [of the resurgence of malaria] could mean grave illness or death for millions.” In fact, Solomon argues that there is already a serious cost to the global warming scare. He is particularly dismayed that the doomsayers have not only managed to divert significant resources away from more evident problems, but that in addressing the global warming scare they are actually doing damage to the environment. And he singles out the Kyoto treaty: But Kyoto is not an insurance policy. Just the opposite, it is the single, greatest threat today to the global environment, because it makes carbon into currency. Carbon is the element upon which all living things are built. With carbon a kind of currency — which is what all carbon taxes and carbon trading and similar schemes do — all ecosystems suddenly have a commercial value that makes them subject to manipulation for gain. This is not some abstract theoretical concern. We are already seeing environmental havoc from the new economic order that Kyoto has spawned. True to his determination not to arbitrate genuinely disputed scientific issues, Solomon concludes his investigation with cautious restraint: “Global warming may be a problem, but it’s not a certain problem, and it’s certainly not one of epic proportions, as Al Gore would have us believe. It is one environmental concern among many whose science is far from settled.” Given his green credentials, Solomon’s book should be very effective at convincing sincere policymakers that the hysteria is without merit. The Deniers also serves any layman well who wants to understand enough about what scientific authority can tell us about climate change so as to responsibly evaluate sensational stories in the media. Although a few concepts presented in The Deniers may be more readily grasped by the technically inclined, in general Solomon keeps the book’s narrative very friendly and readable as befits a newspaper column. And for those who want to dig deeper, Solomon provides numerous references to excellent original material posted on the Internet. We highly recommend The Deniers both for self-education and for influencing others. The Rest of the Story Where The Deniers falls short is in explaining, more than superficially, why the global warming scare has been so influential and in identifying the conspiratorial agenda it serves. And that is the critical part of the story, which desperately needs to be understood. For example, Solomon quotes Dr. Richard Lindzen as suggesting that the momentum behind the global warming scare originates because that is where the research money lies. But that just begs the further question as to why the money is there. The answer to that question is crucial. But what Solomon sets out to do, he accomplishes with excellence. And indirectly, his book sets the stage for a larger wake-up call, because it demonstrates that the leaders of public opinion and especially the politicians cannot be trusted. Because we regard the rest of the story as so important to the defense of freedom, we take a moment here to outline some of that story (interested readers can find a more in-depth summary with specific references in our book, Organize for Victory!): • Big money and influence support global warming research and the doomsayers’ movement because “crises” support the ambitions of a well-organized group of high-level Insiders engaged in an unprecedented power grab. • At the end of World War II, a group of long-range planners, many associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, managed to manipulate public revulsion over the horrors and devastation of war into launching the United Nations. Although never advertised as such, the UN was intended to evolve into a world government controlled by these Insiders from behind the scenes. The UN continues to be a tool of the Insiders, particularly those at the Council on Foreign Relations, for subverting national independence and authority and accumulating global power. • But many steps would be needed to complete their revolutionary scheme, and, as revolutionary leaders know, these Insiders would need crises or the appearance of crises to gain public acceptance for revolutionary changes. • Initially, the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear holocaust drove their plans. But with the apparent demise of the Communist threat new threats were needed, and the Insiders of this Conspiracy were ready with several candidates: one was terrorism, another was international crime, and still another was environmental crises. (See, for example, A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations written by MIT Professor Lincoln P. Bloomfield, a secret study prepared under contract with the State Department by the private Institute for Defense Analyses in 1962.) • Of course, everyone is familiar with the UN’s involvement with the environmental movement. For example, the UN sponsored the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. That same year, the Security Council sought to enlarge its mandate by declaring that “non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humanitarian, and ecological fields” also constitute “threats to peace and security.” [Emphasis added.] And then there was the UN’s Kyoto Conference on climate change. • But few appreciate the power behind this charade. The image of the UN as a democracy of nations, eager for input from an independent “civil society” is just that — a charade. The principal outcomes of the 1992 Earth Summit, for example, were pre-programmed, mostly by Insiders through the Council on Foreign Relations, and given a semblance of give-and-take democracy in action at Rio. • Following Rio, so-called civil society has played an increasingly larger role at UN conferences. But the independence of this civil society is a sham. Here it is important to follow the money. Where do these groups get their funding? Who pays for aborigines to travel to a UN conference? Even a shallow investigation will disclose that Insider foundations fund many of these groups, who can then be expected to feed back publicly the line the Insiders want the public to hear, while leading the public to believe they are listening to the opinions of representatives of independent grassroots interests. • As the reader may recall, Senator Gore led the U.S. Senate delegation to the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio. A principal outcome of the Rio conference was Agenda 21, an 800-page blueprint for governmental action to set in motion a continuously evolving process of environmental policy formation. An abbreviated 300-page edition of Agenda 21 was prepared by Daniel Sitarz and endorsed by Earth Summit chief Maurice Strong. Sitarz enthusiastically asserts, in 1984 totalitarian fashion: Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth…. Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has every experienced … a major shift in the priorities of both governments and indivdiuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. Admittedly, much more documentation would have to be supplied to make this outline convincing to those unfamiliar with the story. But this brief outline suggests what we are alleging is at stake with the manmade global warming scare. Recommendations • In particular, we recommend reading and sharing The Deniers and its insights with other concerned Americans and with policymakers. Emailing links to this review may interest some in reading Solomon’s book. • Several significant examples in Solomon’s research come from expert testimony provided to committees of Congress. This demonstrates that pressure rules in Washington, not the facts. The public needs to understand where the predominant pressure is coming from and realize its obligation to apply its own pressure and thereby compete for control of our government. It’s all about self-government — use it or lose it. • In corresponding with congressmen, point them to expert testimony presented to their own committees. (See, for example, p. 104 regarding the statement of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski written for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, March 19, 2004.) Congress may just be going through the motions with some of these hearings, but our elected officials, through their staffs, have no excuse for not knowing the substance of what is presented there and recorded at taxpayer expense. • Follow up to help some of those you contact understand the revolutionary objectives that drive the global warming scare. Although The Deniers provides a good start, citizens and policymakers need more than Solomon gives us in order to make responsible decisions regarding the global warming debate. We highly recommend our own book, Organize for Victory!, as a follow-up introduction to the bigger picture of which the global warming scare is a part. • As readers of Organize for Victory! will discover, the larger problem cannot be solved through the efforts of a few individuals acting alone. We must help some individuals see the bigger picture so they will then organize to fight the Conspiracy that would use these ruses to rob us of our freedoms. • Many readers of The Deniers will, we think, be amazed to realize how slanted the news is that constantly bombards Americans. This misinformation is not a trivial issue. If Americans continue to rely on such sources for their information, it is difficult to see how freedom can survive. In support of that contention, we conclude our “review” by pointing readers to some wisdom of James Madison, father of the Constitution: Although all men are born free, and all nations might be so, yet too true it is, that slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant — they have been cheated; asleep — they have been surprised; divided — the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson? That because the people may betray themselves, they ought to give themselves up, blindfolded, to those who have an interest in betraying them? Rather conclude that the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it, as well as obey it. |
The History of The Politician
In December, 1954, I wrote a long letter to a friend, in which I expressed very severe opinions concerning the purposes of some of the top men in Washington.
Those who remember personally the founder of The John Birch Society and his tendency towards verbal thoroughness will appreciate the understatement in his reference to “a long letter to a friend.” Though he could be brief when brevity was called for, Robert Welch did not place limits on expanding his thoughts to whatever degree he deemed necessary to prove his case.
In the days before e-mail and other high-speed electronic communications, letter writing was a prime means of sharing ideas. Few had mastered the art like Robert Welch, and he frequently used that ability to maximum advantage. His position as a leader in the business community — serving seven years as a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Manufacturers and two and one-half years as the chairman of NAM’s Education Committee — afforded him a natural forum for the exchange of ideas concerning the state of our nation.
As his circle of personal acquaintances expanded, Mr. Welch became a close confidant of and campaigner for Robert Taft during the senator’s 1952 presidential campaign. He met personally with such world leaders as President Syngman Rhee of Korea, President Chiang Kai-shek of China, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany.
Gregarious by nature, Robert Welch could be a witty conversationalist. He was never at a loss for words or hesitant to express his opinion. But he favored the written word to convey more complex ideas. Therefore, he relied heavily on letter writing to seek the advice of experienced national and world leaders, such as those we’ve mentioned, and to share his own observations in return. The Politician began as just such an observation.
Robert Welch was rarely satisfied with anything he wrote. He constantly edited, rewrote, and updated his work. Such was the case with his letter about “some of the top men in Washington.” As he tells the story:
Carbon copies of my letter were sent to a few other friends, who in turn asked for copies for their friends. So that by 1956 the letter had grown, through revisions and additions at the time of each new typing, to sixty thousand words. And we had begun to refer to it as the manuscript of The Politician. But it was still available in carbon copies only. In 1958, however, when the letter had now become eighty thousand words, and when I had decided not to make any more additions or revisions, I had this final version typed carefully in my own office, ran off a limited number of copies of each page by offset printing, and put those pages together in a punch-hole binding for the convenience of any other readers to whom it would be sent — as well as to save our retyping so long a document.
During the summer and early fall of 1958, Robert Welch continued to mail out five to 15 copies of his printed manuscript each month. Each bore a message on its introductory page explaining that the work was not a book, was never intended for publication, and was still of the nature of “a long letter to a friend.” The writer mailed the manuscripts on loan and in confidence to individuals he regarded as friends, with each copy being numbered and the name of its intended recipient recorded.
Though many who read the work urged Mr. Welch to publish the document in book form, he adamantly resisted their suggestions. Subsequently he recalled: “[B]ecause of new forces and new leaders now appearing on the scene, we were allowing this whole ‘letter’ to fade out of the picture.”
And fade out of the picture it might have — were it not for a new project of its author. Soon after completing the last major revision of his “long letter,” Robert Welch set aside most of his other interests — including a very successful career in candy manufacturing — and spent the months of October and November of 1958 preparing for a two-day presentation that began on December 8th of that year. The purpose of that meeting, to which Welch had invited a handful of (in his words) “influential and very busy men,” was to found an organization that, in its goals and methodology, would have no precedent in recorded history.
The organization, of course, was The John Birch Society, and the complete transcript of Mr. Welch’s two-day presentation has been compiled as The Blue Book of The John Birch Society.
The founding of The John Birch Society did nothing to change the status of The Politician. Robert Welch still regarded the work as his private opinions expressed in an unpublished, confidential manuscript. He did not quote from The Poltician publicly or recommend it to members of the Society.
In July 1960, however, The Politician suddenly and unexpectedly became news. Jack Mabley, a columnist with the Chicago Daily News, unleashed a vicious attack on Robert Welch and The John Birch Society. Mabley’s two consecutive daily columns were timed to coincide with that year’s Republican National Convention, which drew political activists from all over the nation to Chicago. As Mr. Welch recounted the story:
This columnist based his attack on direct quotations from The Blue Book of the Society, and from The Politician. (From the intrinsic evidence of his column we can tell that the copy of the latter document, which he had got hold of through some violation of confidence, was mailed out by us to some friend in the fall of1958 — because certain pages had been removed from copies mailed after that time.) Naturally he selected for quotation the most extreme statements he could find, without the benefit of any of the explanation or modifying import of the context around them. That we would have to expect. What was categorically unfair was that this column quoted me as stating as fact in a booksentences which the whole document clearly revealed were expressions of opinion in an unpublished confidential manuscript of the nature of a letter. Also, he referred to it as “a book written by Welch intended for secret distribution only to the leaders of the Society.” In view of the history of the document, given above, and since at least two-thirds of our Chapter Leaders had never even heard of The Politician, this attempted tying of the Society to the manuscript, or vice versa, is entirely unsupported by the facts. [Emphasis in original.]
Questions concerning Jack Mabley’s journalistic impartiality towards The John Birch Society were raised the year after his scathing columns — when the May 28, 1961 midwest edition of The Worker, an official Communist newspaper, praised Jack Mabley for extending the hospitality of his home to a group of visiting Soviet journalists. (Remember that in 1961, the only “journalists” permitted in the Soviet Union were those approved by the Communist government.)
Immediately following the publication of an article, “Enter (from stage right) THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY,” in the February 25, 1961 issue of the People’s World — the official Communist paper on the West Coast — the attack on The John Birch Society escalated. A “copycat” article, repeating several mistakes found in the People’s World diatribe, appeared in the March 10, 1961 issue of Time magazine. Many of the articles smearing Robert Welch and the Society took statements from The Politician out of context, even though the work was yet to be published and was largely unknown to JBS members. One “quote” often repeated in the press was that Robert Welch had labeled Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communists.” In fact, the only place in The Politician where the phrase appears it is directed not at Eisenhower, but at General George C. Marshall: “I defy anybody, who is not actually a Communist himself, to read all of the known facts about his career and not decide that since at least sometime in the 1930’s George Catlett Marshall has been a conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent of the Soviet conspiracy.”
While Mr. Welch presented a stinging indictment of Eisenhower in The Politician [e.g., “It is the province of this treatise to show the part played in these treasonous developments, however unwittingly or unwillingly, by Dwight Eisenhower; and how, as the most completely opportunistic and unprincipled politician America has ever raised to high office, he was so supremely fitted for the part.”], he provided carefully researched documentation for his allegations. But when removed from the supporting documentation, some of the statements appeared to be rash and excessive. It was largely for this reason that Mr. Welch originally shared his letter only with personal associates who could be trusted to evaluate his work privately, and in its full context.
In the months that followed, when JBS members attempted to discuss the Society with prospects, they found that what the prospects knew about the JBS was third-hand information based on inaccurate reports in the press. Many such reports had been culled from deliberate smears planted by the likes of Jack Mabley and the editors of openly Communist-controlled papers such as the People’s World. Since many of the smears referred to The Politician, Society members — most of whom had never read the work — faced a dilemma: How could they defend the Society against charges that its founder had made “inaccurate and wild statements” in The Politician, when the manuscript had never been published?
It was to help the members of the Society overcome this difficulty that Robert Welch finally relented and agreed to publish The Politician. As he later explained, “I published The Politician reluctantly, and in self defense, so that people could see for themselves what I had really said.”
The book became available on March 10, 1963. Then a strange thing happened. Again, let us read the story in Robert Welch’s own words:
For years preceding March 10, 1963, there were at least a hundred newspapers in the United States misquoting The Politician every week, or taking some short passage from it out of context and holding that passage up to their readers as a “wild statement.” But on the date of publication a blanket of silence descended and not a single one of those papers ever carried a review of the book, or let the public know that it was available in print. Having the public learn that, far from being a mere collection of “wild statements,” The Politician consisted of over four hundred pages of compact and carefully documented history, in which nobody could find any errors — this was the last thing these same newspapers wanted. In fact, some of them — including one of the very largest — refused to carry small dignified advertisements announcing that the book was available. They even stopped quoting and misquoting from it for a while, for fear that the public might make this discovery.
In addition to the “blanket of silence” that stifled mention of The Politician in most of the nation’s press, the “Establishment Insider”-controlled book distribution network made The Politician virtually unavailable through normal retail outlets. Robert Welch wrote in the June 1964 JBS Bulletin: “The pressure of various kinds, on the 6800 bookstores and the regular book distribution channels of America, have been so sure and so continuous that the total sale of the book through such outlets has not reached a thousand copies.” This despite the fact that the book had gained a great deal of publicity (albeit, unfavorable publicity) as the target of three years of unrelenting attacks in the press. Prior to publication, The Politician was already one of the best known books in America.
Mr. Welch had alluded to leftist control of the publishing industry at the founding meeting of the Society, when he proposed the establishment of American Opinion “reading rooms”:
[T]hose hundred books, so far as they are available, will be the nucleus of the stock of these reading rooms.* And, since Communist pressures have caused the original publishers to allow so many of these valuable books of true history to go out of print, after first small editions, I am delighted to be able to tell you that a good friend of mine, Lyle Munson of The Bookmailer, already has the little company founded and the physical arrangements made for bringing any and all of these books, for which there is any reasonable demand, back into print in inexpensive editions.
It was to overcome the problem of bringing Americanist, anti-Communist books into print that Mr. Welch decided that The John Birch Society should have its own book publishing division. He named the company Western Islands (borrowing the name from Keats’ sonnet, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”) and announced in the November 1961 JBS Bulletin that its first three titles — How to Read the Federalist Papers, by Holmes Alexander; his own The Life of John Birch; and Bullets And Confetti from American Opinion — would be available in time for Christmas.
Because Mr. Welch wanted to keep The Politician distinctly separate from The John Birch Society, however, he formed his own company, Belmont Publishing, to publish it. The book became an instant staple for Birchers and other conservatives and has remained so ever since.
Why The Politician Is Timeless
Dwight Eisenhower, the principal subject of The Politician, has long disappeared from politics and from this Earth. So, what is the relevance of this book to our own time?
Within months of its publication, it became evident to those who evaluated it impartially that The Politicianwas not merely a biography of Dwight David Eisenhower, but an exposé of a systemic national illness. Furthermore, those who gave this work their studied attention invariably arrived at the conclusion that this national malaise was not the result of natural ignorance or indifference, but was brought about through the deliberate machinations of a powerful, self-perpetuating Conspiracy. As Robert Welch stated in The Politician: “The firm grip on our government, of the forces that have worked through Eisenhower, is more important than Eisenhower himself.”
A reviewer in the August 1963 U.S./France Report began with unstinting praise:
The publication of The Politician by Robert Welch, founder of The John Birch Society, is a unique event in the political history of the United States. There is no precedent with which it can be compared. It is a daring and courageous political act on the part of a single, independent citizen who knows fully the significance of what he is doing and the magnitude of the consequences which may result from it. When the history of this incredible century is finally written, this act alone may well be regarded as the decisive one in the American people’s struggle to halt a vast, well-organized and well financed conspiracy from destroying its magnificent, free republic.
Insofar as Eisenhower cooperated in some way with members of this Conspiracy, the fact that he had already left office when The Politician was published did not diminish the significance of the work. Our nation’s movement towards the consolidation of federal power at home and capitulation to Communist expansion abroad was well underway during Eisenhower’s administration, and the president himself played a major role in implementing these self-destructive national policies. But just as those policies did not begin when he took office, neither would they end when he retired from the presidency.
In the days when the words “Communist” and “conspiracy” were as linked as “chrome” and “bumper,” any suggestion of President Eisenhower’s participation in underhanded intrigue was unacceptable to most Americans. Communism was viewed as a political movement that was, by definition, diametrically opposite to “Republicanism”; it was a movement so politically unpalatable to the American people that it could accomplish its objectives only through espionage agents operating outside of mainstream society. The very idea that “Ike” could serve the cause of the Communists was laughable. Professor Russell Kirk, an ivory tower academic contributor to National Review magazine, made sport of what Robert Welch was falsely alleged to have written in The Politician when he quipped: “Eisenhower isn’t a communist; he’s a golfer.”
Kirk’s comment about Eisenhower reflected the image of “Ike” that had been carefully crafted by the nation’s Establishment-controlled media. That same media had earlier provided the public relations campaign required to convince the world that Eisenhower’s mediocre performance in the European theater of World War II somehow exemplified military brilliance. Building on this image, the media audaciously promoted Eisenhower, the lifelong Democrat, as a Republican presidential candidate, in order to deny the nomination to Senator Robert Taft. The candidacy of Taft, a genuinely conservative American leader, posed a serious threat to the policies the conspirators had managed to implement during the Roosevelt and Truman years.
By the time Eisenhower was in the White House, the media spin doctors had created such a larger-than-life public image of the former general that he was virtually immune from any serious public criticism. Mr. Welch’s examination of Eisenhower tackled that deception head-on. The Politician continues to serve as an invaluable eye-opener as to how a powerful conspiracy can craft a totally false image for the man who will fill the highest position of trust in our land. As readers will undoubtedly recognize, much to their consternation, the tactics employed to create a false image for Eisenhower have been used with prominent contemporary figures as well.
In his biography, The Life and Words of Robert Welch, G. Edward Griffin discussed the semantic shenanigans played by Welch’s detractors in taking statements about Eisenhower in The Politician out of context:
In the manuscript that later became known as The Politician, as we shall see, Welch offered three possible explanations of Eisenhower’s behavior and career: (1) He was an opportunist who collaborated with the Conspiracy for personal political advantage; (2) he simply was too dumb to realize he was doing so; and (3) he was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist Conspiracy.” It should be emphasized … that Welch said it was possible to believe Eisenhower was any one of these, but he made it clear that he chose the last. When he used the word “agent,” he meant exactly what the dictionary says it means, “a person governed, guided, or instigated by another in some action,” or “one that acts for or in the place of another by authority from him.”
According to Karl Marx himself it was not necessary for someone to belong even to one organization in order to be called a Communist. One had only to believe in Communism and work to bring it about. Indeed, Marx himself was certainly a Communist, yet he died in 1883, thirty-five years before Lenin founded the latest version of the Communist Party in 1918. In recent years, however, American courts have ruled that the word “Communist” refers to a member of that Party, which Welch did not believe was true of Eisenhower. His stated opinion was that Eisenhower was an agent of the Communists; a “dedicated, conscious agent.” In later years, as we shall see, Welch would use the term Insider to describe Eisenhower’s type, referring to the small group of wealthy, powerful Insiders at the very top who never would set foot inside a Communist Party meeting; but who control, direct, and finance the Communists at the bottom. When he wrote The Politician, however, Welch had not yet begun to use that term.
Many people did not see the distinction between a “dedicated, conscious agent,” and a Communist; and the media never bothered to explain it. The media also never explained why Welch thought as he did. Why had he taken time to write The Politician? What did the book actually say? The American people were told only that Welch had “called our former President a Communist,” and that since Eisenhower was semi-divine, Welch obviously was just the opposite. End of discussion.
Mr. Welch’s later use of the term “Insider” to describe “Eisenhower’s type” reflected the need to demolish widely accepted views about the forces promoting world revolution. At issue was the fundamental relationship between Communism and the dominant power structure among nations generally classified as “Western” or “democratic.” At the time that Welch was writing The Politician, most Americans labored under several delusions deliberately fostered by our leading colleges, news journals, and other institutions of influence. Among the delusions encouraged by the “Insiders” of the Establishment were the following:
• Communism is a political philosophy created by theoreticians such as Marx and Engels that derives most of its power base by exploiting class conflict.
• Because of Communism’s emphasis on the creation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the redistribution of wealth, it appeals almost exclusively to the “downtrodden” masses (and the occasional idealistic young revolutionary). Therefore, all propertied members of Western society automatically are above suspicion of collaborating with the goals of Soviet or other Communists.
• The “Establishment” of the United States, consisting of the upper echelon in the worlds of finance, manufacturing, and the military, are almost entirely — even if only out of self-interest — “conservative” Republicans.
The above assertions are all fallacious. In reality:
• Communism is neither an economic nor political theory, but only one of the more manifest branches of an elaborate criminal conspiracy that favors no party or class — but exists only for the consolidation of power for the benefit of its own participants.
• The various overtly Communist or covertly Communist-controlled organizations serve a very practical purpose for elite members of this conspiracy, by providing a force described as “pressure from below” in order to justify consolidation of political and economic power, conversely described as “pressure from above.”
• Members of America’s ruling “Establishment” are not, ipso facto, “conservatives” (I.e., strict constructionists of the Constitution, advocates of free enterprise, opponents of excessive government, and staunch defenders of national sovereignty.) Instead, they frequently support — through tax-exempt foundations created primarily for that purpose — unconstitutional, redistributionist federal programs; street-level organizations promoting social disorder in the name of “civil rights,” “the environment,” etc.; and internationalist organizations such as the United Nations and NATO (and more recently NAFTA and the FTAA) that subvert the independence of the United States.
Robert Welch understood the principles regarding the forces that influence contemporary American affairs before virtually all of his contemporaries. To fully appreciate today why his understanding was correct might still require the reading of several books. Once having completed The Politician, however, the reader will be far ahead of a large majority of the public.
What is the relationship between the elite conspiracy referenced above and Dwight David Eisenhower? The reviewer of The Politician in the U.S./France Report observed:
The main issue … is the final implication inherent in Mr. Welch’s thesis — that the former President willingly and knowingly lent himself to the conspiracy for their ultimate purposes. The strategy of the conspiracy, as far as their interest in Eisenhower was concerned, was to create in him — with his consent and cooperation — the irresistible image of a military hero and national leader in whom the American people would gladly place its full trust and blind faith. This man, capturing the American people with his famous smile and amiable manner, would lead the American people in any direction the conspiracy ordered him. This, incidentally, was the identical formula used by the conspiracy with regard to [French leader Charles] de Gaulle, whose god-like image, too, was created during World War II.
Thus, we begin with the great image build-up during World War II, so that Eisenhower, despite his inferiority to MacArthur, Patton, Clark and others as a military man, emerged head over heels as the hero of World War II. From there the image was nurtured and cultivated so that it would be ready for when it was most needed — in 1952.
For the next eight years — while McCarthy was being slowly ground into the dust — the American people were hypnotized by the Eisenhower smile, radiating warmth and security. “I like Ike” was the national slogan, and times were good. The image, the façade, shining down on America, was like the sun itself.
No Change in Policies
Dwight David Eisenhower turned over the reins of the presidency to a young John F. Kennedy in 1961 and died in 1969. But did this and subsequent changes in political leadership produce major changes in the direction of U.S. foreign and domestic policies? To answer that question, let us trace the history of a single, strategically important cabinet position: that of Secretary of State.
The two secretaries of state in the Eisenhower administration were John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter; Dean Rusk held the position under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Under presidents Nixon and Ford, we had William P. Rogers and Henry A. Kissinger; in the Carter administration, Cyrus R. Vance and Edmund S. Muskie; under Reagan, we had Alexander M. Haig, Jr. and George P. Schultz. George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State was James Baker; Bill Clinton’s was Warren Christopher, and George W. Bush’s man at state is Colin Powell.
Over the past 50 years, the post of Secretary of State has been held virtually without interruption by members of a New York-based organization called the Council on Foreign Relations. Dulles, Herter, Rusk, Rogers, Kissinger, Vance, Muskie, Haig, Shultz, Christopher, and Powell were all CFR members. In fact, with the exception of James A Baker III during the first Bush administration, every Secretary of State since 1949 has belonged to the CFR.
An honest examination of the history of the CFR demonstrates that it is far more than the impartial study group it claims to be. The men at the CFR’s inner core have extended offers of membership to aspiring leaders in the worlds of government, the media, academia, and finance in order to influence the direction of our nation. Members of the CFR have dominated not only our Department of State, but virtually all key posts — up to and including the presidency itself — in every presidential administration since the conclusion of World War II. More relevant to this discussion: Yes, Dwight David Eisenhower was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Several excellent books have been written about CFR influence in our government, including The Shadows of Power by James Perloff and The Insiders by John F. McManus. But Robert Welch was a pioneer in this area. He was among the first to identify the root of America’s national problems: treasonous conspiracy, not unfathomable stupidity. Although The Politician does not provide all we need to know about the Conspiracy at work today, the book is nevertheless a priceless primer for understanding the nature of the enemy that seeks to destroy our Republic.
Two Champions of Opposing Ideals
The Politician represents, in a fashion, a squaring off between two men born in the 19th century (Eisenhower in 1890 and Welch in 1899) who came to their prime in the middle of the 20th. The older of the two was propelled to fame and popularity by cooperating with powerful forces that already exerted great influence in our nation. The younger achieved a fair degree of fame, but very little popularity, except among the small group of patriots who followed him in the freedom fight. Such is usually the case for those who sacrifice fleeting public acclaim in order to defend timeless principles.
And the philosophical descendants of both of these men are still very much alive and active in today’s world. Members of the Council on Foreign Relations still dominate our presidential administration and largely call the shots concerning our nation’s policies. (And not only our foreign policy — as the Council’s name would imply — but our domestic policies, as well.)
Fortunately, Robert Welch’s descendants, members of The John Birch Society, are a growing positive force in our nation. The Politician is timeless because it provides insight and inspiration for all who would follow in the footsteps of Robert Welch in the defense of the likewise timeless principles he championed. The motto of these patriots is: “Less government, more responsibility, and — with God’s help — a better world.”
G. Vance Smith
October 2002
by Tom Gow, FFS VP
Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them by Steve Milloy (Regnery, 2009)
Perhaps you think the green movement is merely a fad perpetuated by overzealous conservationists with no deep consequences for you. Think again.
In Green Hell, Steve Milloy demonstrates with exceptional clarity that our way of life — our health, mobility, comfort, prosperity, a first-world standard of living, and most especially our freedom — is at risk due to well organized and well funded revolutionaries.
We predict that Milloy’s timely exposure of the green agenda will make your blood boil — even if you are a veteran of the freedom fight.
As Milloy shows, America has a largely misunderstood enemy within our gates working to destroy our success and create an Orwellian nightmare. Because it is not clearly recognized for what it is, this subversive movement is much more dangerous than an obvious external enemy.
Green Hell is totally within the grasp of non-technical readers. Although Milloy is well versed in the science (he is the founder of junkscience.com), his book refrains from arguing the science. Instead, he lets the greens indict themselves with their outrageous record of incessant obstruction. After reading Green Hell, anyone with an ounce of commonsense should be outraged and concerned.
And that is the invaluable contribution of Green Hell. The research Milloy has assembled clearly reveals the underlying green agenda — government control of our lives and an enforced Spartan existence. Or as Milloy expresses it:
“Make no mistake: living green is really about someone else microregulating you — downsizing your dreams and plugging each one of us into a brand new social order for which we never bargained. It’s about … having the boundaries of your life drawn by others.
“The central concept of this book is that there is hardly any area of your life that the greens consider off limits to intrusion. There is almost no personal behavior of yours that they consider too trivial or sacrosanct to regulate.”
You may be thinking that Milloy is exaggerating the threat. But as Green Hell clearly shows, “this is how the greens themselves describe their intentions. Their words alone reveal their true intent: to curtail, to ration, to force, to deny, to compel, and to squeeze.”
Green Hell also reveals the credibility of the threat — the tremendous funding, high level support, and tactics that have been able to steamroll natural resistance and drive the green agenda forward.
Milloy’s warnings cannot be dismissed as the rantings of some radical author with a minimal following. Indeed, Milloy is a columnist for FoxNews and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Free Enterprise Institute. The book’s jacket describes Milloy as “An outspoken defender of the free market against the junk science and false claims disseminated by the Greens, [whose] columns and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times.”
The Movement’s Structure
Milloy examines only briefly the “vast and multilayered network of private organizations working to advance green policy.” Instead, he has opted to focus on the actions and public policy impact of a few of the most prominent organizations within the network rather than its makeup:
“The green workhorses are the Natural Resources Defense Council boasting $88 million in annual revenue and $167 million in assets, according to Forbes, and the Environmental Defense Fund, enjoying $83 million in annual revenue and $108 million in assets.”
Milloy does, however, provide examples to differentiate the various layers of this network:
“From the Earth Liberation Front, an FBI-labeled terrorist group, to ‘street theater’ groups like Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, to suit-and tie ‘mainstream’ activist organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund, to ‘old money’ private foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, the greens can muster an array of forces — protestors, lawyers, scientists, journalists, and others — to get things done.”
We include here a perhaps unnecessary disclaimer. We do not suggest, nor does Milloy, that the majority of those who identify with green causes have anything but genuine concern over the environment at heart. But the driving force behind the movement — follow the money — is subversive. What makes the green movement so dangerous is that “saving the planet” is really just a clever emotional pretext obscuring the movement’s driving agenda to empower government to regulate our downsized lives.
In Green Hell, Milloy also examines the successful strategies this network uses to implement its agenda and block economic progress. These include harnessing the courts, generating the appearance of mass support (allowing its allies in government to move forward), and pressuring politicians to conform by claiming the moral high ground:
“One of the most effective weapons in the greens’ arsenal has been their ingenious manipulation of language and, in turn, the framing of ideas. While green opponents have yet to even name their cause, the greens for a long time have shaped the debate through the use of loaded buzzwords and hard-to-argue modifiers….”
The greens realize that politicians find it enormously difficult to oppose “smart growth,” “optimum population,” or “sustainability,” terms which sound so responsible. Yet “smart growth” means isolated, crowded, self-contained communities, “optimum population” refers to government-enforced population control, and “sustainability” masks determined opposition to all economic activity and development.
The Green War on Energy
A primary green objective is to create scarcities, which then provide the pretext for government regulation and rationing. And what better place to bring a modern industrial nation to its knees than to starve it of energy?
In the late sixties and early seventies, the anti-nuclear movement, in cooperation with revolutionaries in government, largely killed the use of this American technology on American soil.
The current tactic to achieve energy scarcity, promoted by the Obama administration, is to emphasize the development of “renewable” energy, while attaching burdensome strings to the construction of power plants and the development of resources that can realistically supply our immediate energy needs, such as oil from shale. Colorado, as Milloy points out, is the Saudia Arabia of shale oil. Yet this resource has for years been off limits to development.
Green Hell provides a much-needed dose of reality regarding promises that a modern society can be run anytime soon on the alternative sources being touted, and Milloy points out the enormous expense in trying.
Moreover, when push comes to shove, as Milloy shows, green leaders will oppose even their “renewable” sources where these sources look like they might offer serious help, since the real but not advertised objective is no energy. The renewable energy campaign is really just a campaign to create shortages (at immense expense) that government can ration.
Milloy hits the nail on the head: “When combined with the supposed crisis of global warming, energy shortages provide the greens with an urgent rationale for unprecedented government action.”
In fact, the greens support a massive assault on virtually every alternative to satisfying human wants (even targeting the water supply, as we shall see). The only solution acceptable to the greens is mandatory regulation of human existence to a primitive level. The greens seek to bring this regulation about by inducing crises and shortages that justify Big Brother stepping in to save the day.
In support, Milloy quotes columnist George Will:
“For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag…. Rather, for them, changing society’s politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.” [Many sixties-era, anti-Vietnam War protestors have simply found a new focus for socialist activism.]“One of the collectivists’ tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern — the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual economy…. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.”
Milloy concludes: “But if the government were to use an energy crisis as a pretext to tighten its grip on the energy supply, it would vastly expand the state’s ability to dictate the everyday parameters of how we live our lives….. [E]nergy — the very thing that has enabled the American way of life — can also be used to quash it.”
The Green War on the Private Automobile
Americans owe much to the development and mass production of the automobile. For the better part of a century, the automobile has supported unparalleled mobility, prosperity, and freedom.
Yet the greens (in alliance with socialists in general) are conducting all out war on the private automobile. Milloy devotes an entire chapter to this war. For example, Milloy cites the Natural Resources Defense Council’s “Drive Less and Drive Smarter” pitch to San Francisco Bay residents: “It’s time to rethink our relationship with the automobile.”
Green suggestions for rethinking our relationship include the obvious leftist promotion of public transportation but also include “choose a compact neighborhood,” where you don’t need a car. And this highlights another green enemy “suburban sprawl” — in favor of high density living, which the greens cleverly refer to as “smart growth.”
As Milloy points out, the war on the private automobile involves more than just cutting oil consumption. Even the new federal standards for more fuel efficient cars do not satisfy the greens. (As Milloy points out, the new standards, in the absence of non-existent miracle technology, will simply force auto manufacturers to build lighter, less safe cars. And the Obama administration is pushing all kinds of unproductive, cost-prohibitive non-solutions, such as electric cars.)
In order to reduce driving, the “greens are working toward a more radical solution: ditching the gas tax in favor of a per-mile driving fee” — or as Milloy wisely observes, green politicians would likely saddle us with both.
A related green proposal is for “universal tolling.” The greens have been very successful in obstructing the building of new highways, notably in California. “As it turns out,” Milloy explains, “the greens only support converting existing roads into toll roads…. In practice, they oppose building new toll roads, because they see them as just another place for you to use your car.”
Regulating Human Existence
The greens work incessantly to create shortages, while propagandizing everyone that abundance is not sustainable. Indeed, a year prior to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Canadian multimillionaire Maurice Strong, the secretary-general for the Rio conference, wrote:
“It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle-class … involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and ‘convenience’ foods, ownership of motor vehicles, numerous electric household appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning … expansive suburban housing … are not sustainable.” — August 1991 UNCED report.
By creating shortages, the greens expect to “force through dramatic, mandatory conservation laws.” Water, as Milloy points out, is by far the most abundant substance on the planet. But if the greens have their way, water “will soon be in desperately short supply.”
As an example of the anti-water agenda, Milloy points to the Sierra Club which “has a laundry list of action times to achieve this, including a nationwide moratorium on withdrawals from, and diversions of, rivers that could affect fish and wildlife or scenic values; groundwater use restrictions; a ban on transfers between watersheds; and redirecting federal efforts away from designing new water development projects and toward maintenance of existing projects.”
Milloy informs us that the greens have also developed arguments to oppose importing water from Canada, which holds about 20 percent of the world’s fresh water supply, and to prohibit diversions of Great Lakes water by pipeline or ship. They even seek to block exporting bottled water from the Great Lakes.
Enormous resources and organization are required to develop the “research,” legal briefs, and arguments to sustain the green assault. We are reminded of the warnings of Admiral Chester Ward, who as a long-time invited member of the Establishment’s Council on Foreign Relations resigned in disgust and described in an exposé how the CFR developed pressure on Congress and overcame public opposition:
“Once the ruling members of CFR have decided that the U.S. government should adopt a particular policy, the very substantial research facilities of CFR are put to work to develop arguments, intellectual and emotional, to support the new policy, and to confound and discredit, intellectually and politically, any opposition.”
Although bottled water is a massive industry, Milloy notes that green opposition is beginning to show some traction: “By September 2008, St. Louis and Seattle had passed their own bans on city purchases of bottled water, while Chicago now taxes the product.” Milloy summarizes: “Although it’s indisputable that we need water from somewhere, the greens are agitating to ensure that there is water nowhere. These efforts reflect the greens’ negative view of humankind’s very presence on earth.”
What Else Can They Regulate?
After regulating water, what else? “Food,” says Milloy:
“According to the greens, the food you choose to eat has dramatic ramifications for the environment — and therefore your diet is the rightful focus of public policy…. The NRDC advises you to ‘encourage businesses and government bodies to adopt procurement policies favoring locally grown, organic, and sustainably harvested foods that are minimally processed’ (emphasis added).”
But Milloy points out that the green worldwide campaign against pesticides flies in the face of the green harping on conservation. He quotes the Economist:
“So producing the world’s current agricultural crop organically [without chemical fertilizer] would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn’t be much room left for the rainforest.”
In Green Hell, Milloy has assembled many more examples of the hypocrisy of the advertised agenda of the green movement. He also includes a chapter devoted to demonstrating that key leaders within the movement — Al Gore, even Barack Obama — don’t walk the walk. Indeed greens are noted for holding international conferences in plush, air-conditioned hotels where they develop plans to curtail the air conditioning for the rest of us. It is refreshing to find that Milloy recognizes the true character of the movement — a Marxist power grab — and that, among its top leaders, pretended concern for the environment merely serves as an effective rallying cry.
Ideological Child Abuse
Perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of the green campaign is the effort to indoctrinate kids and turn them into “green shock troups.” Milloy offers several examples, including the movie Arctic Tale, co-written by one of Al Gore’s daughters. As the New York Post described the 2007 live-animal action drama, “At the end, a parade of multiracial cherubs marches in to try to turn your kids into roboscolds who will accuse you of killing polar bears if you buy frozen food, use bright light bulbs, stay in the shower too long or fail to buy a Prius.”
In 2008, a British energy company created a game to turn kids into energy police in order to “cut down on the climate crimes that are taking place in your home.” Forms kids could use to cite their parents for infractions were available online.
The passion to manipulate kids to support a revolutionary agenda and undermine respect for parental authority and traditional values is often found in the socialist school system. When encouraged by government power, history provides disturbing examples of where this can lead. During the Stalin era, for example, 14-year-old Pavlik Morozov was made into a “Hero of the Soviet Union” for betraying his parents. And Hitler had his Hitler Youth.
National Sovereignty and Security Also at Risk
Although Milloy devotes little space to the international green network, he does recognize that there is a broader agenda that threatens our national sovereignty and military readiness.
In fact, Milloy titles one section “National Sovereignty: It Was Nice While It Lasted” and notes: “[T]he greens aim to use the specter of a global warming catastrophe to subjugate America to global governance.” And he explains the dangers of global governance to our system of government and the constitutional protections for our rights.
With regard to the green danger to U.S. military readiness, Milloy reports on defense policies that could make army vehicles such as tanks more fuel efficient (and thereby lighter and more vulnerable in battle). He even chronicles a temporarily successful green action through the courts to restrict the use of sonar by U.S. submarines trying to defend our coast, all because of an alleged adverse impact on whales.
The Obama Administration
An important selling point for Green Hell is its timeliness. It was published well after the recent presidential election, so Milloy was able to include an entire chapter on what he calls America’s “First Green President.” Although we would dispute that President Obama is the nation’s “First Green President,” he is undoubtedly the nation’s most fervently green president.
Amazingly, many Americans know little about the man they elected as the federal government’s chief executive. Green Hell reveals that “the greens made an early investment in Obama’s political career,” which Obama later acknowledged was pivotal in helping him win the Illinois Senate seat in 2004.
Milloy specifically targets the appointments President Obama selected to implement his green agenda: “Perhaps the most notable — and worrisome is the naming of Carol Browner as White House coordinator of energy and climate policy.” Milloy describes her association with Al Gore and her work as head of the EPA in the Clinton administration. Highlighting a less well known part of her radical resume, Milloy points to her “recent membership in the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, a group that aims to ‘establish a genuinely new international economic order.’”
Thankfully, Milloy seems to appreciate that partisan politics are not the answer and that Republicans also carry the green banner, if not always so blatantly: “There was virtually no daylight between Obama and John McCain on environmental and energy issues….” Nevertheless, the Obama administration is committed to pushing the pedal to the metal with the green agenda.
An Inadequate Solution
Milloy’s final chapter “Fighting Back” proposes to deliver on the promise in the subtitle “and What You Can Do to Stop Them.” Not surprisingly, however, a book that deals so capably with an analysis of the problem falls way short of offering an adequate solution.
In general, we have little quarrel with Milloy’s advice. Much of it is good, such as how to keep the “greens” from holding the moral high ground and how to win the war of words. And Milloy does demonstrate that “green” initiatives can be derailed. His examples of clever grassroots tactics that embarrassed the greens, some as personal undertakings, will undoubtedly encourage readers.
Our objection to Milloy’s “solution” is to what’s missing. We see the book as providing grossly inadequate leadership for a solution based on two shortcomings:
First, Milloy openly admits: “There’s no question that the greens have us out-funded and out-organized on every front.” But then he fails do draw the appropriate conclusion: that adequate opposition to the greens requires good organization, sound leadership, and a good plan.
Instead, Milloy recommends individual grassroots activity: “If You Can’t Out-gun Them, Out-smart Them.” He suggests ways readers can act individually, as they are inspired, suggesting that there are opportunities all around you — you can figuratively shoot in any direction. For example, at City Council meetings, Milloy suggests asking the embarrassing questions the greens don’t want asked: “Get your facts straight and make a nuisance of yourself.”
But the actions of a few of the book’s inspired readers cannot possibly stand up in volume or duration to the well organized and funded green onslaught. Part of the answer, therefore, has to be to build the counter organization to “Out-gun Them.” That is what Freedom First Society is working to accomplish.
And it is possible to “Out-gun Them” for, as Milloy himself points out, the greens lack “anything near the popular mandate they claim.” But Milloy fails even to advocate sharing his book with others to increase the number involved in the resistance. A “Suggested Reading and Viewing” appendix, however, does promote several works that we have recommended and would recommend.
Our second objection is based on the important principle, summarized by Napoleon Bonaparte, that “the purely defensive is doomed to defeat.” Incredibly, Green Hell is very much on target in taking the offensive to expose the real green game plan, behind its veil of pretended concern for the environment. In fact, Green Hell very capably exposes that game plan, in a more compelling way, than anything we have seen. Yet in the chapter on solutions, the action recommendations are limited to defending against green initiatives.
However, the lack of an adequate solution does not greatly diminish the book’s value as a wake-up tool if it is used as part of a larger program to offer the required leadership. Our criticism merely means that promoting the book alone is not a sufficient solution.
Although our review has highlighted several points from the book, concerned Americans need to read Green Hell in its entirety and then use the book, which is particularly convincing and supported by extensive documentation, to wake-up other Americans and especially bring it to the attention of local policy makers. And most importantly follow up to suggest a real solution, namely to build that counter-organization.
For follow-up reading, we highly recommend our own book, Organize for Victory!, which explains our solution for countering the forces working to impose total government on America.
by Tom Gow, Freedom First Society VP
While the freshman class of the 112th Congress undoubtedly offers good opportunities to build a Congress that adheres to the Constitution, don’t expect the current GOP House leaders to blaze that trail.
In previous FFS Action Reports, we examined the track record of Speaker of the House John Boehner, in particular his alliance with ultra-leftist George Miller (D-Calif.) to help fasten the “No Child Left Behind Act” on America. But voters need to be aware of another force with influence over this year’s freshmen: the GOP’s Young Guns Program, which helped a number of freshmen in this and the prior Congress get elected.
The three founders of the Young Guns Program are GOP “rising stars” Eric Cantor (R-Va.), now House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the new Majority Whip, and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), now chairman of the House Budget Committee.
The Young Guns website (www.gopyoungguns.com) describes the program’s origins: “Founded in the 2007-2008 election cycle … the Young Guns Program began as a Member driven organization of House Republicans dedicated to identifying, recruiting, and mobilizing a new generation of conservative leaders.” With the early success of the program, it was adopted by the NRCC “as the candidate recruitment and training program for House Republicans….”
Last year, Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy published Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders promoting their leadership and commitment to principle and arguing why their program provides the best opportunity for moving America in the right direction.
Young Guns admits that the GOP had strayed from its principles: “We’ve seen Republicans who claim to believe in limited government spend the taxpayers’ money like teenagers with the parents’ credit card….” Partly because of such “admissions,” many uninformed readers will undoubtedly regard the three authors as sincere reformers.
However, the plan outlined in Young Guns for restoring America to its founding principles (and “changing the face of the Republican Party”) has two serious flaws:
First, in their message to America, Ryan, Cantor, and McCarthy totally mislead their readers as to the depth of the problem America faces.
Indeed, Young Guns would have the reader believe that the source of America’s problem is no bigger than a difference in viewpoints and commitment between the two major parties and a failure of past GOP leadership to stay true to traditional GOP principles. So it is no surprise that the thrust of the book is that the solution to America’s ills is partisan political.
Again, no surprise, the three young GOP leaders say nothing about the Conspiracy’s domination of the major opinion-forming institutions, which mischaracterize problems, political solutions, and leaders for busy Americans. Yet it is extremely naive to imagine that internationalism and Big Brother government can be rolled back, while the enemy controls the media of communication.
Nor do Cantor, Ryan, and McCarthy express any concern over the literally thousands of left-wing, socialist organizations that draw sustenance from the federal trough and seek influence over policy, while mainstream America must try to be heard in Congress in its spare time and with after-tax dollars.
Certainly, Young Guns offers no hint that the American people need to be better informed before they will reliably support right-acting politicians and prudent programs. Nor could we find any suggestion that the people may have been intentionally dumbed down. And of course, there is no mention of a Conspiracy that has a grip on both major parties and the presidency, including serious presidential contenders.
As an example of understating the problem, consider this argument by Eric Cantor (p. 34):
“In 2009, a J.P. Morgan research report examined the private sector business experience of Washington presidential cabinet officials since 1900 and found the current administration to have the least private sector experience of all the presidential administrations studied…. This administration just doesn’t understand small businesspeople [sic, midgets?]. And Congress isn’t any better.”
Or this statement by Kevin McCarthy: “Under Republican leadership in the early 2000s, spending and government got out of control.” No, Mr. McCarthy, government and spending have been out of control since at least the administrations of FDR. And there is a reason why both parties have cooperated over the years in building a federal monster, while ignoring constitutional limits. It’s called Conspiracy.
The second major flaw in the Young Guns’ message is its acceptance of the socialist usurpations of previous administrations (from FDR to Lyndon Johnson), referring to them as America’s social safety net.
In his foreword to Young Guns, Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard (and former senior editor and White House correspondent for The New Republic) characterizes Paul Ryan as “the most influential Republican thinker in Congress.” (Indeed, Ryan was selected to deliver the GOP rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address in January of this year.)
Accordingly, let’s look to Paul Ryan’s section of the book to see what principles the three believe the GOP should champion:
On page 133, we are heartened to find this affirmation: “[Eric, Kevin, and I] have a deep attachment and enduring faith in our Constitution and the principles of freedom that were given to us by our Founders.” Earlier, however, Ryan misstates those principles:
“[M]y plan [The Patients’ Choice Act] unapologetically seeks to apply our nation’s timeless principles — our Founders’ commitment to individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise — to today’s challenges. It does so in a way that honors our historic commitment to strengthening the social safety net for those who need it most…. It fixes what is broken in our health-care system without breaking what is working.” [Emphasis ours.]
On page 93, Ryan describes his “Roadmap for America’s Future of 2008” (H.R. 6110) as “a detailed blueprint for how we can bring spending under control, secure the future of Social Security and Medicare, and reclaim the American idea.”
Or consider Ryan’s analysis of the options facing America:
“Choice number two [our choice] is a very different future. Imagine your family working, paying its bills, and enjoying a government that respects your work by allowing you to keep more of what you earn. If you’re out of work, dynamic, results-based job training is available…. If you lose your income because times get tough, a safety net is there to provide health care for you and your family.” [Emphasis ours.]
America’s Founders never envisioned any such role for the Federal government! The Constitution they created was based on the principle of federalism — with only a very narrow, limited, albeit important, role assigned to the Federal government. Indeed, the principles enshrined in America’s Founding documents did help immensely to launch America on its path to greatness.
However, these three politicians, who now sit atop the House GOP’s leadership, seem to recognize that few Americans today will hold them to account for misrepresenting America’s founding principles. Even though most Americans hold our Constitution in high esteem, few, unfortunately, really understand the principles contained therein or how far government has departed from those principles. Helping to re-establish that understanding is a good part of the reason why Freedom First Society was formed.
For more information on Freedom First Society, please see Organize for Victory!. For more information on the problems facing America, please see The Marxist Attack on the Middle Class.
The last in a series of four, this video examines how the Insiders operate, some of the traps they lay, and our plan to defeat them.
Part 3 of Freedom’s Foundations series. Learn about the Insiders that guide our country behind the scenes.
Understand the various political and economic systems, so that we can see clearly how to put America back on track for freedom and prosperity.
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