Bestselling author Jack Cashill is back with his most timely book yet, "Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism Exposed."
And Cashill, a WND columnist, is pulling no punches over what he calls the unholy rise of progressive neo-puritanism.
As in old school puritanism, worshipers achieve a sense of moral worth simply by designating themselves among "the elect" – no good works required.
To validate that uncertain status, they heap abuse upon the sinner lest they be thought indifferent to the sin, he outlines.
Rather than simply cataloging the neo-puritan assaults on reason and liberty, "Scarlet Letters" illustrates how the progressive movement has come to mimic a religion in its structure but not at all in its spirit while profiling brave individuals like Clarence Thomas, Aayan Hirsi Ali, Camille Paglia and many lesser known truth tellers who have dared to take a stand against this inquisition.
Released by WND Books, Scarlet Letters shows in detail how an allegedly "liberal" movement has become what can only be described as bizarrely punitive and inquisitional.
Exclusively at WND.com, you can read here the third chapter of "Scarlet Letters":
"The Scarlet D: Denier"
By Jack Cashill
American history is rich with movements, religious and quasi-religious, grounded in the belief that the end is nigh. Perhaps the most influential was the one inspired by William Miller, a New York State farmer who persuaded as many as one hundred thousand people the world would end in 1843. Although the apocalypse did not arrive for his followers in 1843 – or 1844, after a hasty reset – it did for a gun-toting "branch" of his sect on the dusty plains of Waco almost exactly 150 years later.
The Branch Davidians were hardly unique in hastening the end times with, admittedly, more than a little help from the Clinton Justice Department. Charles Manson had his "Helter Skelter." Jim Jones had his "White Night." And Marshall Applewhite had a spaceship waiting for him and his Nike-wearing acolytes behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Joseph Bottum described the impulse as "the search for immediate application of the Book of Revelation." To deny a believer his apocalypse is to challenge his very identity. That gesture often comes at a price.
THE DENIER
On November 5, 2008, the very day Barack Obama was elected president, writer and producer Michael Crichton died at age sixty-five. The Harvard-trained MD had enjoyed a spectacular career. Several of his best-selling, science-rich novels had been turned into movies. These included hits such as the The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and Lost World. He had success as a screenwriter and a director and produced the megahit TV show ER, which he also conceived. Despite this résumé, or perhaps because of it, the progressive online journal ThinkProgress saw fit to headline his obituary, "Michael Crichton, world's most famous global warming denier, dies." The neo-puritans buried him with the scarlet D for "denier" ablaze on his chest. To the hard core, he had no other meaningful credential.
The ThinkProgress headline would not have surprised Crichton. Some years earlier, he had taken it upon himself to question the prevailing scientific orthodoxy and did so most flamboyantly at the famed Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The organizers of the September 2003 event had handed Crichton a weighty assignment, namely, to address the most important challenge facing mankind. The "challenge" he chose – "distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda" – surprised everyone. It seemed so lacking in gravitas. As Crichton explained, however, solving more tangible problems was futile if no one could discern which problems were real.
As an example of the challenge at hand, Crichton spoke about environmentalism, a bold move in a city that spawned the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and a herd of other like-minded groups. If anyone had the chops to challenge eco-activists in their home court, it was Crichton. At this stage of his career, he did not need anyone's approval, and, in San Francisco, he wasn't about to get it. After reassuring the audience that, like all rational people, he understood man had a responsibility for his environment, he warned that civic leaders often failed to make the right decisions and, worse, refused to learn from their failures.
As a student of anthropology – he had taught the subject at Oxford – Crichton knew why this was so. "The best people, the most enlightened people," he argued, were making decisions based not on fact but on faith. They thought they had transcended religion, but they had not. For the West, said Crichton, "one of the most powerful religions" was environmentalism. He called it, in fact, "a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths." This was the belief system that gave meaning to the life of the secular elite and shaped their sense of the world.
Crichton went on to explain how environmentalism mimicked Christianity. It started with the "initial Eden, a Paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature." Man then overreached. He plucked the technological fruit from the tree of knowledge, and this led to pollution. "There is a judgment day coming for us all," said Crichton. "We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability." Not above a little humor, Crichton described communion in the church of Mother Earth as pesticide-free, organic food consumed by the elect, "the right people with the right beliefs." Bottum had come to the same conclusion. Environmentalism, he affirmed, "comes to us as Christianity without Christ."
Crichton had no argument with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Its adherents acknowledged many of their beliefs to be issues of faith. They did not pretend otherwise. Environmentalists had no such humility. They clung to their core beliefs as gospel even when confronted with new evidence. "Facts aren't necessary," Crichton taunted his audience. "It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."
Crichton disabused the San Francisco audience of one core belief after another. There was no Eden. Life before the emergence of modern technology was rife with disease, appalling child mortality, and early death all around. The indigenous peoples no sooner crossed into America than they began wiping out hundreds of species of large animals. Well before Columbus, they lived in a state of constant warfare with each other. Human sacrifice and infanticide were common. Those tribes that could not compete simply vanished or hunkered down in hillside abodes. Similar conditions and worse prevailed throughout the world among indigenous peoples. "The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true," said Crichton. That anyone still believed in the concept, he said, was a testament to "the tenacity of religious myths."
Having dispensed with the notion of a godless Eden and fall from grace, Crichton then questioned the rest of this ersatz theology, including the various apocalyptic scenarios. One that had not panned out, he observed, was the fear of rampant overpopulation. Although Crichton did not mention Paul Ehrlich by name, he did not have to. Ehrlich, the twentieth century's best-known neo-Malthusian, was foremost among the "preachers of environmentalism" to whom Crichton alluded. Indeed, he made the Millerites look like optimists. "The battle to feed all of humanity is already lost," Ehrlich lamented in the opening of his breakthrough 1968 best seller Population Bomb. The most "cheerful" scenario Ehrlich could envision for "the next decade or so" was one in which Americans assumed an unexpected "maturity of outlook," a new pope gave "his blessing to abortion," and only half a billion people died of famine.
"Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake," said Crichton with a wee bit of irony. Not only did fertility rates fall everywhere and food surpluses grow, but also, he noted, twenty-first-century demographers were worrying about a shrinking, aging population throughout the Western world. The fact that Ehrlich got everything not just wrong but spectacularly wrong scarcely dimmed his star. He capped a lifetime of prestigious environmental awards in 1990 – long after most of his predictions had proven absurd – with both a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation grant and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel equivalent for environmentalists. This kind of acclaim made sense, said Crichton, if one thought of environmentalism as a religion, and a crackpot religion at that. "Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects," said Crichton. "He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets."
Another article of faith that Crichton attacked that fateful night in San Francisco was the dogma that the miracle chemical DDT caused cancer and, worse, killed birds. One very determined woman, Rachel Carson by name, introduced this idea in her influential 1962 best seller, Silent Spring. A Manichaean at heart, Carson envisioned a constant struggle between an evil, material world of darkness and the bearers of light like her. She pulled much of her literary power from this ominous vision. Her chapters have titles such as "Elixirs of Death," "Rivers of Death," and "Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias." The Borgias, it seems, were mere dabblers in the art of poison. America introduced the "age of poisons." Carson used words such as "toxins," "contaminants,"" "hazards," "death-dealing materials," and the inevitable "poison" where others might use "chemical" or "insecticide." And she never let up.
As it happened, Carson proved to be the Elmer Gantry of environmental preachers. The esteemed entomologist Gordon Edwards, a Carson fan at the time, combed through the book page by page, noting literally scores of "deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations." At the end of the day, beyond all reasonable doubt, Edwards revealed Carson's claim that DDT is "deadly" to be "completely false." Still, her careless, media-fanned hysteria contaminated the culture and politics of the day. In 1972 the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency issued an order ending the general use of DDT in the United States after nearly three successful decades of application. Worldwide bans would follow, and so would millions of needless deaths from diseases, most notably, malaria. "Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America," said Crichton. Eco-activists had no use for facts; he noted ruefully, "The tenets of environmentalism are all about belief."