Stephen Moore: The Left Is Using Science “Consensus” To Shut Down Free Speech in America

It was about eight to 10 years ago that the Left made a unilateral decision to shut down all opposition and any skepticism about climate change by pronouncing that the debate was over.

The “scientific consensus” had been reached, as if sent down on tablets from God, that mankind was causing the rapid warming of the planet. Period. End of argument. Doubters will be denounced as science deniers and stripped of their science credentials and muzzled by the speech police.

This idea of a scientific consensus is, of course, the diametric opposite of what scientific inquiry is all about. It is completely ahistorical. History’s greatest minds and inventors were people who challenged the conventional wisdom of the day. It’s an updated version of the Flat Earth Societies in the Middle Ages that would imprison those who dared question the scientific consensus of the time that the Earth was flat. The Spanish Inquisition tortured heretics who questioned papal orthodoxy.

The irony of the modern-day inquisitionists is that they are the very people who were the doomsayers of the 1970s who have been so consistently wrong about the future. These were the people who peddled the “population bomb,” which fizzled. They were the ones who said the Earth was cooling and that we were headed into another Ice Age. They were the ones who said we were running out of energy, food and farmland, and we were headed to a Malthusian nightmarish future. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

You’d think they would be humbled. But they are reiterating their certainty that they are the fountains of wisdom. And now they are getting dangerous with their heavy-handed tactics to squash dissent.

Consider what has happened in California — and soon coming to blue states near you. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a law that will revoke a physician’s medical license for conveying “misinformation” (defined as deviation from expert “consensus”) about COVID-19 and its treatments. Remember, by the way, this comes from the same people who said that the scientific consensus was to shut down schools and businesses to stop the spread of COVID-19 and that children as young as 5 had to be vaccinated — yet another set of the catastrophic and wrongheaded decision by “the experts.”

Since when does the government have the right to censor doctors? Whatever happened to doctor-patient confidentiality? Whatever happened to “my body, my choice”? Even Leana Wen, a former leader of Planned Parenthood and Baltimore’s health czar, warns this law “will have a chilling effect on medical practice.”

She worries that physicians could be suspended or have their licenses revoked “for offering nuanced guidance on a complex issue that is hardly settled by existing science.” Those accused of “misinformation” would be subject to discipline from the Medical Board of California, 13 of whose 15 members are appointed by none other than Newsom. We should call this the “inquisition panel.”

These are the political hacks who will decide what transgresses scientific consensus.

During COVID-19, both the Centers for Disease

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