Those Dirty Negationists of the Tea Party

The caricature of the tea party just got a new adjective: in addition to being ugly, racist, ignorant, extremist and fascist, they don’t even believe in global warming — therefore, they are infidels to be sent to the stake. This is yet another stigma stuck on the skin of tea-partiers by a front-page story in The New York Times, which, in the past few weeks, has been reacting to the American teapot in the same way that the bull does in front of a red cloth. So we just have to read a few surreal interviews with the militants during an event (global warming “is a flat out lie,” says the electrician Norman Dennison, and a certain Kelly Khuri says it “is simply ridiculous,”) to come to an easy conclusion. From there on, the step is more obvious than short.

What the American newspaper doesn’t say is that behind the folklore — which in the tea party is not stronger than elsewhere, just more politically incorrect — hides a very realistic reading of the problem. The Americans for Prosperity don’t talk of the climate change but of Barack Obama’s “climate bill” as “the largest excise tax in history,” which is probably not far from the truth (or maybe it’s an underestimation). Freedom Works, a victim of a hacker attack yesterday, calls it a “power grab” and says: “Any effort to make electricity and fuel more expensive, or to cap or regulate CO2 will only exacerbate an already critical situation and cause tremendous economic damage.” Of course, all this can be explained only with “money from the oil industry,” according to The New York Times, which is then wrong twice. Because if the Marxist theory is true — with the interests that drive the story — then it is true for everyone. And, just like the tea party reflects the interests of the oil industries, then the proponents of climate policies also represent other interests — not necessarily more virtuous (the extraordinary movie by Jason Reitman, “Thank You for Smoking,” explains a lot in this regard). But The New York Times is wrong especially because rejecting beforehand the claims of the supposed enemy is a demonstration of enormous intellectual weakness, which can only lead to disappointing political consequences.

Among other things, the criticism to the “kyotist” logic contrasts with the image that the same New York Times (and its supporters) gave of the tea party: “right-wing populism.” Il Foglio has already explained why this is a distorted reading. But today we have confirmation. There isn’t, at this time, a sloppier and easier populism than the climate one: “everyone knows that” the climate is changing, changing at the fault of Western multinationals, so corporations have to pay. Questioning what “everybody knows” is equivalent to taking a critical, suffered and non-conformist position. If this can lead to over-simplistic reading or opposite populism, it’s another matter, surely valid, but certainly marginal.

Because what we are facing is an attempt to impose a sectarian adherence to the religion of climate — where the doctrine is more deeply rooted, the point is neither the increased temperatures nor, at a closer look, human responsibility. The mystical body of the green church is the optimistic expectation that bureaucracy, statism and the venerable international institutions will save us from our sins, providing us the ark to save us from the universal flood. Whoever doesn’t believe this is a sinner. But he’s a sinner that, in the midterm elections, will put a cross on Obama’s attempt of Europeanizing America. So, after all, he is a sinner who, despite the excommunication by the New York Times, is laughing in his sleeve.