The Green New Draft

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro takes note of the following exchange at a Democrat town hall. The subject? A $16 trillion "Green New Deal" proposed by socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders:

I'm not on the "Green" side in this "war." (Image by Stijn Swinnen, via Unsplash, license.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You seem adamant about climate change. So what ways would you take to practice what you preach? If you were to become president, I know it's stressful and you have to travel a lot. You have to use fossil fuels.

SANDERS: No, I'm not going to walk to California. All right. You know, look, you know I understand that, you know, we do the best we can as an example. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that we're not going to use fossil fuels. [format edits]

Shapiro comments:

Oh well, I thought we had no choice. There's no middle ground. I cannot give you any one, even one specific way in which I am reducing my carbon footprint. But it is a war and we must do something, right? This is the beautiful thing about being on the Left. It's a war against poverty. But I'm not going to spend my money on it ... It's a war against climate change. All right. I'm going to continue to fly my private jet to Iowa and out of Iowa.

Shapiro gets around to concluding that the candidates are in a competition to show whose intentions are best. He's right, as far as he goes.

But there's more, and we can get to it by dusting off some advice from the mouth of Ayn Rand's villain, Ellsworth Toohey: "Don't bother to examine a folly -- ask yourself only what it accomplishes."

Sure, Bernie Sanders and his ilk are hypocrites. That's part and parcel of the fact that altruism is impractical, as is this contest to show who can claim to have the "best" intentions. But do not forget that these people in the Democrat primary are after power. Note further how frequently the climatistas -- starting with Sandy Ocasio -- invoke the claim that taking their marching orders is the moral equivalent of a war.

Isn't it interesting that leftists -- who can be counted on to oppose any actual war that involves American self-defense -- are such big hawks now? War. What is it good for? When did they stop asking that question, which was once rhetorical coming from them?

As soon as they found something they could frame as a war and pitch it to people who still understand on some level that wars -- at least real ones -- are sometimes the only resort to solving a problem, as horrifying as they are.

Do not waste your time, mental energy, or psychological currency asking how they manage to evade their own hypocrisy on fossil fuel exhaust or on the invocation of war. Ask yourself what they are trying to accomplish.

Bernie Sanders, Sandy Ocasio, Liz Warren, and the rest want to tell you what to do. And they hope to get you to let them by convincing you that they are good -- that they should be trusted to draft you into an army. Why? Because they want you to regard the cause that they don't even take seriously themselves as a war.

"Climate change" isn't a war or its moral equivalent. But the Green New Deal is the political equivalent of a draft, and it should be fought tooth and nail for exactly the same reasons as a military draft.

And again, this isn't a real war. It is potentially worse, as Ayn Rand pointed out long ago, when she said, "Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate."

The first, she points out, is dictatorship. American culture has not declined to the point that the public will knowingly vote itself into such a suicide, but we are getting closer to that point. At least a few people seem to know this, as evidenced by their brazen hypocrisy and obvious contempt for our intelligence.

-- CAV