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October 1, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield 37 Comments

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

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If the weather is too hot or too cold, if there is a natural disaster, if a plane crashes, if crime increases, if crime decreases, if the Ebola virus rampages across of Africa or stays home to read a good book instead, if the price of coffee goes up or if a war breaks out… it will eventually be connected to Global Warming

Even the rise of ISIS has been blamed not on the Koran, but on Global Warming.

Meanwhile a Muslim terrorist can blow himself up at Ground Zero on September 11 while screaming, “I am doing this because I am a Muslim and I hate you all” and those same experts will tell us that it had nothing to do with Islam, but it was caused by the impact of Global Warming on the molecules of his brain.

It’s all a matter of how you connect the dots.

Democrats think that Global Warming is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda. That’s the profitable notion that Al Gore has been selling for some time. When ISIS began making headlines, lefty publications scurried to explain how ISIS had been caused by Global Warming. If you can’t get rid of ISIS, you can always promise to make it go away with another few billion for Bay Area Green Tech liberal donors.

That’s why Homeland Security is focusing on Global Warming. Why bother with Islam when the root cause of Islamic terrorism turns out to be neither Islam nor terrorism, but your failure to buy recycled toilet paper and pay much higher prices for energy. Instead of droning ISIS, we will drone on about sustainable sustainability and how eagles would rather be killed by wind turbines than by oil spills.
Ideas are roads to conclusion and conclusions lead to policies. If you want to control the policy, you have to control where the roads go. The media narratives are roads. If you take them, you can never reach the right conclusions because they just don’t go there. The media’s map of America has highways going from climate change to marriage equality to death panels. The policies we end up with are based on that map and the policies determine where all the money and the power end up.
If Islamic terrorism is a major threat then the money will go to defense contractors and security consultants, to building more drones and bombs. That means guys named Earl and Amos who wear sunglasses and have a background in the Agency and the Mossad are suddenly in demand. Transguys named Meaghan and Tad who wear retro eyeglasses ironically and did their thesis on using non-linear histrionic narratives to educate inner city children about climate change suddenly have to get real jobs.

But if Global Warming is a major threat, then money goes to environmental consultancies and non-profits, to propaganda for education and the arts, to Green Tech companies and Wall Street. And the consultants, bureaucrats and regulators gain a vast suite of expanded domestic and international powers. Meaghan and Tad are back and running every aspect of your life through their gigs at some non-profit you never heard of funded by a family foundation with Ford or Rockefeller in its name.
The War on Terror expanded the powers of domestic law enforcement, but it’s nothing compared to what the War for the Environment has done to the power of every bureaucrat large and small to raise your heating bill, outlaw your washing machine, eliminate your water supply and root through your trash. If you thought the TSA was bad, the carbon regime puts a carbon footprint value on everything you do from driving to the grocery store to buying a beer to viewing this website.

And then it decides which of your behaviors have to be changed and how.

Global Warming and the War on Terror empower different parts of the government and the assorted consultants and contractors who plug into them. Those people not only have political differences, but also major cultural differences. It’s no wonder that the media, whose writers, producers and talent are culturally a lot closer to Meaghan and Tad than to Earl and Amos, favors their narrative.
The Warmist side of government is also the more liberal side. The side that bombs ISIS doesn’t even understand why anyone would stand on line for two hours to buy fair trade artisanal pancakes.
A shift to the terror side of the dial means restrictions on immigration, more strong male role models and more domestic oil drilling. Tilt to the Warmist side and the emphasis is on letting Meaghan and Tad decide what you can buy, where you can live and whether you can live.

However only one of these crises is real and it isn’t the one that involves the planet burning up, the polar bears riding surfboards to San Francisco and Al Gore revealing that he was sent as a messenger from a distant alien civilization to convince us to change our ways. But that has never mattered before.

The left has a long history of diverting attention from real problems by inventing urgent crises. Liberals rarely go two decades without declaring a major crisis in education. They were doing it throughout the twentieth century with invariably disastrous results. Common Core is only their latest effort at imposing a reviled educational reform plan funded by corporate giants and opposed by parents and teachers.

Liberals did their best to divert attention from the Cold War with a poverty crisis. The Cold War was won, while the War on Poverty made a lot of sociologists very rich and enabled the transformation of the country without actually ever being won. That war has morphed into the obesity crisis, the equality crisis and a dozen other smaller crises which all add up to power and wealth tilting to the left.

Then there was the crisis of the uninsured which couldn’t wait to be solved until someone in Congress actually read the bill meant to solve the problem or until anyone at HHS learned how to write code. It still isn’t solved, but ObamaCare has driven a lot of money and power to all the right parts of Maryland.

The Global Warming crisis is only the latest incarnation of a range of environmental alarmism about everything from a coming ice age to worldwide famines. Eventually another term and another threat will replace Climate Change, but schoolchildren will still be coloring in posters crying out, “Save the Planet.”

These crises divert attention from a real crisis that would weaken the power base of the left while inflating an imaginary crisis that will put cash and power in their pockets. The left accused the right of inventing foreign enemies to justify wars of profit. But Communism and Islam were and are real threats. It’s the left that invents phony threats and fights phony wars for money and power.
We aren’t being allowed to recognize the threat of Islamic terrorism because the left wouldn’t profit from it. At least not until someone finally proves that the Koran was caused by Global Warming.
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Don’t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield on The Glazov Gang discussing “ISIS Rising”:

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