We began our series on #Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3 by looking at an essay by Professor Angus Dalgleish, an oncologist who went through a professional awakening during Covid when he saw forces of narrative control shut down scientific debate (all while demanding we “follow the science”) in order to ram through a social agenda based not on science but political correctness. And once he had seen the pattern up close in his own field of medicine he realized it was also happening with climate change. And this week we conclude our series by turning to the chapter by Margaret Anna Alice, a psychological researcher, who also came to see the intellectual pattern connecting official/orthodox responses Covid, climate and many other issues. Which was difficult for her psychologically as well as intellectually as a lifelong, card-carrying progressive environmentalist. “Climate change was my inviolable belief,” she says. “I didn’t want the polar bears to drown and the planet to become uninhabitable within my lifetime.” Soon she would realize that her environmentalism, and the environmental movement as a whole “had been hijacked by the climate change agenda.” Her awakening, she says, was like losing her religion.
Her (now late) husband went first. It began when they watched footage of “shrieking, baseball bat-wielding social justice warriors” on Evergreen College campus having a meltdown upon learning a professor disagreed with them. Baffled at how those students at institutions of supposed higher learning had instead been indoctrinated into an infantile victim mindset that left them so unstable and enraged, her husband began looking into issues on which they had previously accepted the progressive narrative and one after another began crumbling.
In response Margaret grew uneasy at him not the state of progressivism, and began researching how to deprogram her husband from what she thought was right-wing propaganda. But ideas have consequences, and in the process it hit her that “right-wing” now meant “liberal” and those in her tribe had become “illiberal”.
At that point she too began re-examining her beliefs and assumptions and in the process “recovered from menticide”. One belief after another crumbled, except the mighty fortress and last refuge of climate change. But eventually it too gave way to honest questioning. She saw the social structure that had come to resemble strict religion at its worst, with high priests, sacred texts, mandatory tithes, endless guilt and costly penance, and a distinct lack of charity including in of course seeking and finding heretics and skeptics to burn at the stake.
At this point she began doing real, probing research, delving into IPCC reports, NASA webpages and other authoritative sources. But she also looked into Climategate and saw what the high priests had been doing when they thought no one was looking. Learning about the greening effect of CO2 was another important revelation for her. And when she looked at what the greenest politicians had in store for the public she saw the same lockdowns, deprivation and social control they tried to achieve using Covid. A lifelong green progressive realized she’d been had, and discovered liberalism and science only by re-thinking all her assumptions, painful though the process was.
But the truth shall set you free and we hope that readers of the #Canary volume will find in it much truth and intellectual freedom.
