There are many opinionated people on each side of the political spectrum, including me, but I haven’t heard of any conservatives trying to muzzle leftists. Liberals on the other hand? Ha.

Man-made global warming liberals ridicule skeptics as corrupt or brain-dead deniers, and their advocate in chief, President Obama, habitually derides conservatives for rejecting his hysterical narrative on climate change.

Don’t assume they do this solely for political advantage. It can be far more serious than that.

A claque of 20 climate scientists, in an open letter, urged Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch to use the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to criminally investigate “corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.”

Knowingly deceived? That’s rich, coming from a barely disguised political movement tainted by well-documented fraud and corruption.

I’m no scientist, but it is remarkable to me that the scientists and politicians most adamantly demanding cloture on global warming debate violate the very essence of science in their premature certitude. Doesn’t science involve open-mindedness and liberal inquiry, even into questions that may seem to be settled?

But in the case of climate change, the matter is hardly settled, and it’s ironic that proponents point to skeptics’ alleged corruption as their motivation for denying the science. There is sick money, not to mention enormous peer pressure, behind the climate change agenda (you’d better believe it’s an agenda) and chilling any dissent. To wit: One of the principals behind the open letter is Jagadish Shukla, a George Mason University professor who reportedly receives an annual salary exceeding $250,000, in addition to multiples of that amount from government climate grants paid to his nonprofit entity.

The case for catastrophic man-made global warming is tenuous at best; there are many scientists (though perhaps not so credentialed in the field as Dr. Albert Einstein Gore) who reject the apocalyptic claims. Even if the case were compelling, none of the alarmists has ever explained how their draconian proposals would make a significant difference in stemming the tide. But there is no such uncertainty about the economic devastation their rash of “solutions” would cause.

If history has taught us anything, it is that science is not a matter of consensus and that so-called consensus has been wrong so often that it’s amazing these charlatans have the audacity to keep puffing their chests. Every other day, we see a new story debunking some long-held scientific “truth.”

Let’s face it. Far too many leftists are not just totalitarian in their ideology; they would also impose their ideas through totalitarian means, giving rise to the obvious inference that totalitarian ideology leads to totalitarianism in practice — and history bears this out, as well.

It’s inconceivable that well-respected universities have such dangerous crackpots on their payroll — and that they are not even considered crackpots, much less dangerous, by their brethren. It just doesn’t get much scarier and more anti-American than trying to criminalize dissent.

This Stalinist academic mindset far transcends just climate change, as you surely know. For all their cheap talk of diversity, academic leftists are just not that into academic diversity. Remember when universities encouraged open-mindedness and freedom of inquiry into a broad range of ideas?

The Cornell University newspaper disclosed that a stunning 96 percent of the political money donated by faculty members in the past four years went to Democrats. What possible excuse could an institution of higher learning have for such oppressive uniformity of thought?

Simple. “Placing more emphasis on diversity of political beliefs when hiring,” says Cornell government professor Andrew Little, would “almost certainly require sacrificing on general quality or other dimensions of diversity.” In other words, conservatives are anti-intellectual rubes.

Perhaps by “general quality,” Little means such things as professors who would reject the latest campus craze over “microaggressions,” which deems innocuous questions such as asking where someone is from and harmless statements such as calling America “the land of opportunity” prohibitively offensive on campus.

English professor Kenneth McClane sheds further light on Cornell’s conceit: “It is not surprising that faculty at Cornell find the anti-scientific rhetoric of many in the Republican Party to be troublesome. Many of us here are scientists. We believe in global warming, since we believe what the research tells us.”

But the winning quote is from professor Richard Bensel, who said, “Cornell does not have to be a banquet that offers every viewpoint.”

Perhaps not “every,” but how about a fair, even a small, representation of other viewpoints — in science, history, economics, social sciences, political science, journalism and the rest? No, I suppose not. That would result in greater diversity of thought in the universities, which in turn might retard the steady march of the leftist agenda in our culture. The collective ministers of truth will never let that happen.

It’s not just the close-mindedness of the left, its lack of intellectual curiosity and its fascist inclinations to smother and outlaw dissent that are disturbing. It’s also its staggering lack of self-reflection and self-awareness. These people are exactly the opposite of what they hold themselves out to be.

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