A Lesson in Hypocrisy

[Valin]

US News & World Report:

Those who attack Koch funding at universities are waging the real assault on academic freedom.

Peter Roff

March 11 2015

 

Tomorrow’s new recruits to Occupy Wall Street and other social movements are today’s juniors and seniors on America’s college campuses. They’re busy waging a kind of war against the free market system, the very thing that makes their attendance at college or university and hopes for a prosperous future possible. They’re loading themselves up with debt they won’t be able to repay, if they succeed at biting off the hand that feeds them.

 

It’s alarming that their arguments have become couched in the language of preserving “academic freedom.” It’s their rallying cry when they attack professors and institutions they regard as suspect, leading them to compromise the very ideals of academic freedom they claim they’re trying to protect. If they miss the irony, it’s probably because English 101 was held at the same time as "Hollywood & Washington: Influencing the Political Process through Mass Culture" so they missed the lecture on rhetorical devices.

 

In what Inside Higher Ed described as “[a] tug of war ... brewing at the University of Kansas,” Art Hall – a popular lecturer who heads the Center for Applied Economics there – is being assailed by a student group that alleges his relationship to philanthropists Charles and David Koch is worthy of inquiry, if not a full-blown investigation.

[Valin]

But Wait! There's more.

 

Liberals Don’t Understand the First Amendment–or the Climate, Either

John Hinderaker

March 15, 2015

 

We have written a number of times about the Left’s effort to smear scientists who don’t toe the alarmist line on global warming. Apart from generally suggesting that “deniers” be jailed, liberals are trying to discredit realist scientists by claiming that they are funded by the fossil fuel industry or other supposedly nefarious interests.

 

This is hugely ironic. The American environmental movement is paid for in part by oil interests–Russian oil interests, which don’t want American petroleum developed via fracking. Beyond that, alarmist scientists are massively funded, to the tune of billions of dollars every year, by the worst special interest of them all: government. Governments have more at stake in the global warming controversy than anyone: they largely invented it, and use it as a pretext for a grab for power over their respective economies. Which is to say, over their citizens’ lives.

 

One aspect of the Left’s campaign is a series of 100 letters that Democratic Senators Whitehouse, Markey and Boxer have sent to conservative think tanks and fossil fuel-related companies, demanding to know about any “payments made in support of scientific research and scientists, as well as support for other efforts related to climate change….” Koch Industries was one of the 100 entities that received the Democrats’ letter, and we wrote here about the apt response from Koch’s general counsel, Mark Holden, to the three senators. Holden wrote, in part:

 

(Snip)

 

Now, in true McCarthyite fashion, Democrats have taken the position that companies and institutions that stand up for their constitutional rights must have something to hide. Ed Markey’s spokesman, Eben Burnham-Snyder, told the National Journal, “Companies that are supporting legitimate, scientific inquiry should have no concerns about responding.” That’s straight out of the HUAC playbook: “If you aren’t a Communist, you should be glad to answer our questions!” Or, “If you have nothing to hide, why do you object to the government reading your emails?” No citizen should be asked to account to the government for exercising his constitutional rights.

 

(Snip)

[SrWoodchuck]

 

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