The Democrat Party’s totalitarian impulses have been formalized. In the final draft of this year’s party platform, the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee unanimously adopted a provision “calling on the Department of Justice to investigate alleged corporate fraud on the part of fossil fuel companies who have reportedly misled shareholders and the public on the scientific reality of climate change.” In short, the attempt to criminalize dissent is now an official party plank.

The committee was led by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). “As Democrats, we believe that our country’s greatest strength is its people, and we’re committed to the values of inclusion and opportunity for all,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement.

Apparently Wasserman Schultz is oblivious to her own hypocrisy. There is nothing remotely inclusive about such a “my way or the prosecutorial highway” take on science that is far from settled, despite all the orchestrated hysteria by Democrats and their media enablers. Yet if Democrats wish to prosecute fraud, perhaps they should start at the top of the so-called food chain, as in government entities, not corporate ones, who have pushed an agenda in lieu of scientific fact.

Take the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, for example. German Professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert, a retired geologist and data computation expert, undertook a detailed study of NASA-GISS’s temperature data series, going all the way back to 1881 and involving 1,153 stations. He discovered NASA-GISS had tampered with raw temperature data to literally invent global warming. Between 2010 and 2012 NASA-GISS altered its own data sets to show a post-WWII warming that never existed. Moreover, apart from the continent of Australia, the planet has been on a cooling trend.

The agency is not an outlier. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also cooked the books on more than one occasion, including on ocean temperatures to make the nearly two decade warming “hiatus” disappear.

Earlier this year, at a “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA presented a graph ostensibly showing a 58-year long temperature record compiled by “radiosondes,” which are mini weather stations with radio transmitters attached to helium or hydrogen-filled balloons that lift them to altitudes exceeding 115,000 feet. Yet NOAA’s graph showed only the last 37 of those 58 years. The omitted data? It revealed as much pre-1979 global cooling as post-1979 warming.

It also revealed NOAA’s willingness to defraud the public in pursuit of the leftist agenda.

And that’s when leftists bother pursuing data at all. Speaking to the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee, climatologist Michael Mann de-emphasized the need for climate science because global warming has become too obvious to ignore. “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues,” he lamented, “is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle.”

That Mann would de-emphasize science is not surprising. That’s because his own contribution to environmental radicalism includes the now infamous temperature graph known as the “hockey stick.” First published in 1999, Mann’s effort was to reconstruct the average northern hemisphere temperature over the past 1,000 years. His graph showed relatively steady temperature until the last part of the 20th century, when they allegedly began to rise dramatically — creating what looked like a hockey stick. Unfortunately for Mann, Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick found a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program used to produce the hockey stick. In short, data that accrued to the hockey stick was emphasized and data that didn’t was suppressed.

Just like the Democrat Party would suppress — and now officially attempt to prosecute — those who disagree with them.

Unfortunately for Democrats, the sun itself is not cooperating. On June 23, for the second time in just this month, the sun went completely spotless. The blank sun is a sign the next solar minimum is on its way, leading to an increasing number of spotless days, then weeks, then months reaching a solar minimum phase around 2019 or 2020. The last time the sun entered a long phase with no sun spots was between 1645 and 1715. The so-called “Maunder Minimum” coincided with the Little Ice Age that produced a series of extraordinarily cold winters in Earth’s northern hemisphere. Some scientists believe we will experience a similar scenario in the next few years.

Are they correct? More to the point, what gives them any less credibility than fascist-minded Democrats and their government collaborators at NASA and the NOAA, or the odious coalition of 16 Democrat attorneys general who are threatening legal action and huge fines against those who refuse to abide their version of so-called Settled Science™?

In a rare show of backbone, Republicans are fighting back. “If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration,” Republican AGs wrote in a letter to their Democrat counterparts. “If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud.”

Yet such fraud pales in comparison to a Democrat Party willing to formally embrace the prosecution of Americans’ First Amendment protections. A Democrat Party that is clearly green on the outside, but red on the inside. “The draft platform we have produced in an open and transparent manner reflects our priorities as Democrats and demonstrates our vision for this nation,” states Platform Drafting Committee Chair Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). Those would be the priorities of suppression and/or prosecution, and the vision of an authoritarian state. Democrats? Fascists is more like it.