ALL QUIET ON THE CLIMATE CHANGE FRONT:
AOC has spent her entire tenure as a congresswoman with this mindset in mind; January 6th 2020 was the equivalent of ‘Serving in War.’ As Kevin Wiliamson wrote in his 2019 article headlined “Sandy’s War:”
Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As [Jonah] Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.
In 2021, in order to get some fresh headlines from her stillborn Green Nude Eel of 2019, AOC played the Moral Equivalent Card yet again: Move over Marine Corps, AOC’s pushing for 1.5M-strong ‘Climate Corps.’
The moral equivalent of war has been the organizing principle of the left since the start of the 20th century, trapping them in the moral equivalent of a quagmire, with no sign of an exit strategy in sight. In 2019, Australia’s Tim Blair finally wargamed its conclusion: If radical environmentalism is refighting WWII, “Fair enough. Nuking Hiroshima it is, then.”
As Blair’s quip highlights, progress during the real WWII was of course much faster than the left’s imaginary “moral equivalent:” Marines stormed Iwo Jima in March of 1945, only a few months before finishing off Japan. Original “Progressive” philosopher William James coined the phrase “the moral equivalent of war” to justify lefty power grabs in 1910. Al Gore envisioned the planet’s woes as the equivalent of Kristalnacht in 1989; Time magazine’s imaginary eco-warriors raised a tree on Mount Suribachi in 2008, and as the Columbia University press release inadvertently highlights above, this quagmire of moral equivalency mindlessly rages on.
