Quick take (probably not): Liz Cheney, the politics of purity and the politics of truth

 Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) is at it again, trying to make me love her, even though there is so much about which I disagree with her.  Top of the list, in terms of objective, mathematical, scientific importance would be climate change.  Cheney is a climate denier.  If you want a demonstration of Cheney's position, here is her position on Trump's withdrawal from the Paris accords.

In objective, scientific, mathematical terms, the most important issue is climate change.  Period.  If you don't understand this, you don't have an "agree to disagree" disagreement with me.  You just flunked a math test, or a principles test.  Which does Liz flunk?  Both.

These days, I'm a little more sympathetic to climate deniers, though.  I am a scientist, myself, and a statistician.  Ask me to explain atmospheric chemistry, and I can only give you the most cursory explanation.  Ask me to explain the numbers, and I'm in more comfortable territory.  Climate denialism is a conspiracy theory, though, and conspiracy theories tend to fall apart at the same point.  All it takes is one person to blab, and the whole thing falls apart.  And no, Q is not a real person blabbing.  (A real person, perhaps, but if so, a loony or a liar, and either way, enough of this shit.)

Anyway, though, I am more sympathetic to the climate deniers than I used to be.  Why?  The premise is a conspiracy within academia to silence scholarly apostates.  Is that happening in climate science?  No.  Are there attempts to silence scholars on other topics?  Fuck yes.  Openly.  At Princeton, the big dust-up recently was over the proposal to create a Star Chamber to review every bit of research by all faculty to ensure sufficient wokeness.  For real.  Even questioning the proposal created a backlash for Joshua Katz, which is nuts beyond the telling.  There are scholars driven out of academia for research that does not comport with current woke dogma, even when there is nothing that could reasonably be characterized as bigoted or hostile in their work.  And it would be unwise for me to tell you who I mean, or what research I mean, because then I attach myself to a specific heresy, and open myself up to a specific line of attack.  Instead, I will simply recommend that you go look.  These cases are not difficult to find.  Then read or listen to the academics for yourself.  Not merely the wokesters who have demanded their cancelations, but the scholars themselves.  Some are just douchebags.  For real.  Many are actual scientists with real insight which merely happens to conflict with the current religion.

So there are two ways to respond.  One is to note that the conspiracy has failed because enough of these academics speak out, even though I am being too cowardly to name the specific instances for fear of being next, and if you are wondering whether or not I have specific reasons, well... moving on...

Anyway, you're on the right track, if this is your general line of thinking.  I am being cowardly by not naming names, but they are easy to find, and the fact that they refuse to be silent demonstrates the failure of the conspiracy, which isn't a conspiracy because it happens openly.

Yet to a right-winger, the fact that the attempts to silence academics happen means that you can't trust climate science!

A few problems.  First, climate science and the clarity of the data predate the academic pogroms driven by our current woke moment.  Yeah, as scientists, we must always be open to new data and corrections, but that leads to the second point.  Who are the silenced scholars, purged in the climate change pogroms?  It does not take much to find the scholars in various other disciplines purged in the wokeness pogroms, but who got fired for challenging climate science?  What are their stories?  Yeah, not the same, is it?

When right-wingers like Liz Cheney look at the academic purges and the silencing of heterodox scholars, and conclude that climate science is to be distrusted, they are making inferential errors.  Yet from the perspective of a scholar aware of these purges, I am now more sympathetic to the view.  Moreover, there is a rising power in academia:  postmodernism and its ideological descendants, which view science itself as a tool of oppression.  You don't get to call science a tool of oppression, and then demand adherence to it, and when such absurdity emanates from academia, I find myself a little more sympathetic to the incorrect inferences being made by the deniers.

They are wrong.  They are dangerously wrong, on the most important issue of our time.

Yet when I look at Liz Cheney today, I see someone willing to stand up to a pogrom.  You notice what I'm kind of not doing?  By not even mentioning the scholars who have been purged for their research, I'm kind of like one of those weaselly Republicans who says, "I don't like Trump's tweets," but never fucking does anything out of fear of those tweets being turned on him.  Translation:  Liz Cheney is way more badass than I am.

She's wrong.  About climate change, and a lot of other important stuff.  Yet she has the courage to go on Chris Wallace's show on Fox and tell the audience that they've been duped.  Everything has been a lie.  She stood up to Trump, she stood up to the House GOP crazy caucus, and she's standing up to the worst of the worst.

For truth.  For fact.  In a caucus and party built on lies.

The Republican Party went crazy years before Trump came along.  The party really started going off the deep end when it started imposing purity tests as a substitute for substantive policy debate.  Right now, the test is "personal loyalty to Donald Trump," thereby demonstrating how empty the party has been for a long time.  A principled party never could have been duped into making that its test.

Until recently, the Democrats had avoided the kind of extremism in which the GOP had indulged, and the purity tests, those two observations being causally linked.  Right now, the Democrats are going the way of purity tests and extremism.  And... among some quarters, hostility to science, along with disdain for facts that may be inconvenient to the current dogma.

Right now, if this where the high school lunch room, I'd go sit with Liz Cheney.  Certainly not Ilhan Omar.  Never with Ilhan Omar.  Liz Cheney?  Hell, yeah.  I can disagree with her, but we can agree on the existence of things called, "facts," and the importance of democracy, along with standing up to liars, and standing up against bullshit purity tests.

What matters to you?  What really matters?

At the end of the day, what matters is what matters at the beginning of the day, as a precondition for your end goal.  Fact.  Liz Cheney is standing up to liars.  And she has more courage than I do.