The only reason I write articles attacking the irrefutable science of “climate change” is that I am paid such vast sums to lie. Besides the stupendous salary I get from Breitbart News, I also receive generous retainers from the oil industry and the tobacco industry, which, for reasons of crass right-wing ideology or crude economic self-interest, require me to churn out propaganda stories, day in day out, insisting that global warming is a myth.

No, not really.

I doubt even many leftists or greens would be stupid enough to believe that this were so.

First, most of the money is on the other side of the argument, so why would I bother shilling for relative paupers when I could be coining it in from the $1.5 trillion-plus Climate Industrial Complex churning out lucrative global warming bilge for the Guardian, the BBC, or the New York Times and being flown out to endless environmental conferences to sit on panels bewailing the selfishness and greed of people who fly too much?

Second, like a lot of journalists, I’m quite lazy. Why would I put myself through the stress of faking scientific articles and torturing data and pretending to take people like Michael Mann seriously when it’s so much easier just to print the truth?

Third, okay, so where are my stables, my string of hunters, my sexy girl groom and under groom, my villa in Tuscany, etc?

Fourth, anyone who would make such an allegation clearly doesn’t understand journalism. We don’t go into it for the money. Otherwise, by now, we’d have made the transition to corporate PR. We do it – bizarrely – because we actually believe in this shit we do.

Fifth, I would have been rumbled by now. Conservative commentators are always held to much higher standards by our left-biased media culture. So if I were just printing anti-global warming stuff for monetary gain, the flaws in my feeble arguments would certainly have been cruelly exposed by doughty left-leaning investigators, and everybody would have long since ceased to take my commentary seriously.

But suppose if, despite all the above, I really were doing it just to please my nefarious funding sources; here’s the clincher: it wouldn’t matter a damn anyway.

Why wouldn’t it matter?

Because facts are facts, logic is logic, truth is truth, and everything else is for the birds.

The claims I make in my pieces are verifiable, well sourced, often illustrated with helpful graphs, linked to scientific studies, and abundant with quotations from experts in the field.

So whether I’m paid a billion dollars a day for writing this stuff or I’m doing it for free is entirely irrelevant. If you want to go ahead and refute my facts and my arguments, feel free to refute my facts and arguments. They’ll remain valid facts and valid arguments regardless of what you think of me personally or of my funding sources.

I mention all this by way of introduction to a fascinating debate I saw on Twitter recently, which I want to share with you because it goes to the heart of perhaps the biggest and most dangerous challenge to conservatives right now: our increasingly tough struggle to make our voices heard in a world which is trying to close us all down.

It started with a tweet by economist, philosophical thinker, and author, Jamie Whyte:

I am leaving the IEA as of 1 Jan 2019. I will miss it. But I won’t miss the endless “who funds you?” tweets. They reveal a profound misunderstanding of the kind of people who work at think tanks and what motivates them. And always irrelevant to the issue at hand. So stupid.

— Jamie Whyte (@_JamieWhyte) December 27, 2018

As listeners to my podcasts will know, the IEA, Institute of Economic Affairs, is one of my favorite London think tanks. From the fake news “gender pay gap” to the Nanny State’s war on sugar, salt, fat, fun, and freedom, the IEA is one of our greatest intellectual redoubts against the creeping menace of ever-bigger government.

That’s why it is constantly being plagued with the “Who funds you?” question from its leftist critics. They don’t like its arguments but find them too difficult to refute. So, instead, they opt for the smear tactic of making out that its arguments are somehow corrupted by its donors.

Whyte has written about this logical fallacy before. He calls it the “motive fallacy.”

As he puts it in his excellent book Bad Thoughts: “A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love her nevertheless.”

Whyte reiterates this point with his usual clarity here:

Many people on Twitter wonder how they can trust me, gven that they do not know who funds me. But I have never asked for people to take my opinions on trust. If my arguments are no good, tell me where they go wrong. My income and its sources are irrelevant.

— Jamie Whyte (@_JamieWhyte) December 28, 2018

Yes. So why is it that the people on the left – and it is almost always people on the left – cannot understand this?

And I’m not just talking about stupid or NPC-level people on the left, either.

Here is a left-leaning commentator and author I normally admire weighing into the fray. His name is Jeremy Duns, and one of the reasons I usually respect him is that he strives hard not to let his instinctive political impulses cloud his judgment. For example, he has proved an extremely trenchant critic of the Corbynista sock puppet, Owen Jones – an easy thing for those of us on the right to do but a much braver and more original line for someone on the left to take:

His claim to be asking to be judged on the strength of his arguments is nonsense. They publish research. Concealing funding is a masssive red flag, pretending conflicts of interest don’t exist even more so.

— Jeremy Duns (@JeremyDuns) December 28, 2018

Eh? The point is that declarations of conflict of interest are there for a reason – it’s not up to the reader to work them out or investigate them, as this works on trust. If you simply refuse to say who funds you, you are essentially boasting about a conflict of interest.

— Jeremy Duns (@JeremyDuns) December 28, 2018

What a tragically pettifogging point on which to stake your credibility as an impartial, thoughtful commentator.

Sure, part of what Duns is arguing here is trivially true: research can be corrupted by funding sources (as we see a lot in, for example, the global warming industry, where so much “peer-reviewed” lol research confirms what the alarmist paymasters wish to hear); if someone refuses to disclose their funding sources, then, yes, that would indeed prompt any neutral observer to be more wary about taking his “facts” at face value.

But so what?

In no wise does this refute Whyte’s fundamental point: arguments stand or fall on their own logic, not on the motives or funding or “bad faith” of the people who make them.

This might seem a fairly abstruse philosophical point on which to base a 1,500-word article at a time of year when most of us are still struggling to cope with our Christmas hangovers and our preparations for the onslaught of New Year.

Actually, though, I’d say it’s key to almost everything that matters – perhaps the most important struggle of our times: the battle to preserve plurality of speech.

If you’re on the left – as the IEA’s critics are – you’re never going to find yourself silenced because of your politics. Not in the politically correct West, at any rate. You’ll be welcomed in academe, in the media, in politics, in big business, in the law – all of which are now fully on board with the identity politics/social justice/communitarian agenda.

If you’re on the right, on the other hand, your every thought and deed is a microaggression potentially punishable by loss of income, loss of credit rating, loss of social acceptability, loss of freedom. Just one expression of an idea that contradicts the politically correct status quo can get you thrown off Twitter or demonetized by Patreon or kicked out of your job or denied promotion or refused work in the first place.

So crushingly victorious has the left been in the culture wars, indeed, that many intelligent, reasonable people out there – Jeremy Duns clearly being one of them – have come to accept its tyrannical hegemony as normality.

Apparently, it hasn’t even occurred to Duns that there might be very good, morally unimpeachable reasons why an organization like the IEA or the Global Warming Policy Foundation may wish to keep its donor list secret. And the reason it wouldn’t have occurred to him – and his ilk – is because, being on the left, he is never once in his life going to experience the kind of prejudice, discrimination, and persecution that is becoming routine for those of us on the right.

Try earning a living as a conservative journalist, Jeremy, in a climate where even once-conservative newspapers are now squeamish about publishing opinions that the shrill, resurgent left has successfully but unjustly branded “hard right.”

Try getting a novel published when – as you are, Jeremy – you are cursed with being white, educated, and middle class, only with the added killer handicap that your politics are deemed insufficiently woke by the social justice warriors who dominate the publishing industry.

Try – ditto – getting yourself heard on TV, except as the token right-wing loon to be doughnutted on a panel by a socialist, a green, and a feminist.

Try making a crust as a vidcaster or a podcaster or a blogger when, if you’re even remotely conservative, YouTube will demonetize your content and Patreon will deny donors the chance to support you.

Try being paid to articulate and promulgate free market ideas in a scholarly, published way unless you work within the security of a free market think tank.

Yes, I’m quite, quite sure that the people and organizations who fund free market think tanks have powerful reasons for doing so, sometimes ideological, sometimes financial. But the same goes for the people and organizations that fund left-wing think tanks. The only difference is that the latter are not held up to nearly the same degree of scrutiny.

We on the right may deplore the cynicism and hypocrisy and self-serving nature of the likes of George Soros or Tom Steyer in the leftist causes they choose to fund. But we’re not so ideologically blinkered as to imagine that “funded by Soros” or “funded by Steyer” or “funded by the Russians” (as so much anti-fracking industry propaganda is) constitutes an argument sufficiently strong to make our case. Sure, it’s a bit of helpful color, circumstantial evidence which may enhance the case for the prosecution – or at least prompt like-minded readers to raise their eyebrows in sympathy with our line of attack. But we’d never expect our audience to view it as the clincher because that just wouldn’t be intellectually tenable. It would be as fatuous as trying to insist that dogs are all hateful because Hitler was very fond of his.

For the left, on the other hand, “Who funds you?” is more than sufficient to act as judge, jury, and executioner.

There are a number of reasons why the left does this, one being that it has a completely different mindset than the right – one based on emotion and “the narrative,” rather than on facts and logic. For, say, Antifa or Momentum or your average leftist Twitter bloviator, rightists are so evil that there’s no need to refute their arguments; merely to point and shriek at how wicked they are is more than adequate.

But the main reason the left does it is simply because it can.

“Who funds you?” is not a valid criticism or a credible argument. It means little and proves nothing. Those who care about the future of our civilization, be they on the right or the left, need to recognize it for the ugly, dishonest, mean-spirited, low down, and dirty tactic it truly is: and cover their faces in shame, Jeremy, for ever having imagined otherwise.

I must admit I sneered at all of the “First they came for Alex Jones …” posts right after he was banned from every social media platform save Geocities.

True, I found it anomalous that every major tech company found him in violation of its terms of service with felicitous simultaneity for doing the same things that he’d been doing for nigh on a decade and a half, but even most conservatives would agree Jones was sui generis as a fringe voice. I disagreed with the decision but couldn’t summon any outrage; Jones was a singular figure and surely the banning was a singular occurrence — even as it was obvious to anyone paying attention that social media was cracking down on conservative voices in more covert ways.

Never since my prediction that Ryan Leaf would get the best of Peyton Manning (made back in high school, I must note) have I made a prognostication so horribly, frightfully wrong. Jones was clearly a test case. When the media didn’t mind and conservative outrage was mild at best, they moved onto figures still perhaps on the fringes but certainly not in the territory Jones occupied. And then the figures weren’t fringe.

And then they started going after religious figures.

The figure in question would be the Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. Franklin, as you probably know, is a well-known evangelist in his own right, although certainly not an uncontroversial one. If you don’t agree with his views on the Bible, that’s fine — but the justification for the interpretation is clearly in there and (at least to this observer) it’s being given out of conviction and not hate.

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That wasn’t Facebook’s verdict, however. Graham apparently found himself banned from the platform for 24 hours over something he wrote. Two years ago.

“Last week I was banned from posting on @Facebook for 24 hrs because of a 2016 post about NC’s House Bill 2 (bathroom bill). They said the post went against their ‘community standards on hate speech.’ Facebook is making & changing the rules,” Graham tweeted.

Last week I was banned from posting on @Facebook for 24 hrs because of a 2016 post about NC’s House Bill 2 (bathroom bill). They said the post went against their “community standards on hate speech.” Facebook is making & changing the rules. 1/2 https://t.co/HYIgErnp3J

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 29, 2018

“@Facebook is censoring free speech. They’re making & changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules & His Word is truth. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA,” he added.

.@Facebook is censoring free speech. They’re making & changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules & His Word is truth. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA. You can read the post that Facebook took down last week here: 2/2 https://t.co/SIbgivZjTo

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 29, 2018

North Carolina House Bill 2 was a 2016 piece of legislation that required individuals to use bathrooms that corresponded with their biological sex. Critics called it a piece of anti-LGBT legislation, while supporters of the bill contended it was passed in response to a poorly written anti-discrimination act in the city of Charlotte that would have essentially mandated unisex bathrooms. The bill was later repealed after numerous boycotts.

On April 9, 2016, Graham made the post that led to his temporary banning.

“Bruce Springsteen, a long-time gay rights activist, has cancelled his North Carolina concert. He says the NC law #HB2 to prevent men from being able to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms is going ‘backwards instead of forwards,’” Graham wrote.

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“Well, to be honest, we need to go back! Back to God. Back to respecting and honoring His commands. Back to common sense.

“Mr. Springsteen, a nation embracing sin and bowing at the feet of godless secularism and political correctness is not progress. I’m thankful North Carolina has a governor, Pat McCrory, and a lieutenant governor, Dan Forest, and legislators who put the safety of our women and children first! HB2 protects the safety and privacy of women and children and preserves the human rights of millions of faith-based citizens of this state.”

This may not be your opinion, and you’re welcome to be angry. Graham’s take is also entirely within the realm of civilized debate and defensible within a biblical framework. Is this what you believe Facebook ought to be banning?

I’d also like to point out that there were, no doubt, a wave of liberals who complained about the post when it was made in April 2016. If what Graham is saying is accurate, the only action taken against it was now — two years later, when the only people left scrutinizing the post could only be described as cranks who apparently see some worth in going through old social media entries of conservative figures they don’t like in the hope of finding something they thought was worth reporting.

And in 2018, they struck gold.

Graham linked a Fox News article about the vagaries of Facebook’s speech policies, which is worth reading but profoundly unsurprising. It’s a window into a corporate culture that bans someone for supporting separate bathrooms for each sex but — according to sources within Facebook — allows praise for the Taliban provided it has to do with the terrorist group’s agreement to a cease-fire.

What’s most important is the result of social media’s enforcement vagaries — namely, the banning of conservative figures on almost a weekly basis.

They at least gave excuses for Alex Jones and Gavin McInnes — Jones for TOS violations and attempts to circumvent bans, McInnes for his association with the Proud Boys. The excuse for James Woods’ lockout was so woeful — that a joke meme he posted could theoretically have influenced an election — I feel sympathy for whatever Twitter employee was tasked with writing it. When it came to pugnacious conservative pundit Jesse Kelly, they didn’t even bother giving an explanation when he was perma-banned, then they didn’t give much of an explanation when they restored his account, only denying it was a perma-ban. This isn’t even going into shadow-banning, a phenomenon for which an OED-sized work could plausibly be compiled.

Think Facebook is any better? Just ask Franklin Graham — who can get temporarily exiled for something that was just fine two years ago but is apparently morally noxious now.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Hollywood leftist and wannabe political cartoonist Jim Carrey released another disturbing picture in his series of crude drawings depicting women in the White House.

Just two days after Christmas, Carrey attacked Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, who he characterized as a murderer.

“Now we add a second child to your list of murders. Callin’ it your job don’t make it right, Fraulein Kirstjen,” Carrey wrote on Twitter alongside the drawing of Nielsen.

Now we add a second child to your list of murders. Callin’ it your job don’t make it right, Fraulein Kirstjen. pic.twitter.com/ZYGo6Ny18N

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) December 27, 2018

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Carrey’s drawing was inspired by the death of a sick migrant child who was detained at the border with his father. The left has tried to falsely place the blame of the child’s death on Border Security, when in fact he was repeatedly given medical attention.

Carrey has also unleashed vicious attacks on White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.

Last week, Carrey posted a crude cartoon of Sanders and compared her to “the Gorgon,” who will “turn your heart to stone.”

Beware the Gorgon.

She’ll turn your heart to stone. pic.twitter.com/mGwn7GClea

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) December 19, 2018

Carrey also attacked Sanders in March, calling her “wicked” and “monstrous.”

“This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous!” he wrote alongside the drawing.

This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous! pic.twitter.com/MeYLTy1pqb

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 17, 2018

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Carrey also attacked first lady Melania Trump during the hysteria about a jacket she wore while visiting migrant children.

Carrey claimed Melania didn’t give “two craps” about the migrant children that she went out of her way to visit.

Nothing comforts a federally-abducted refugee child like a photo op with a Slovenian model wearing a coat that says she doesn’t give two craps about your misery. pic.twitter.com/vqO5GyeRRL

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 22, 2018

Carrey’s fixation with women in the White House is misogynistic and obsessive.

It’s unfortunate Carrey went from a once beloved actor to just another unhinged Twitter troll and mindless cog in the leftist machine.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

It’s truly curious how Democrats will be the first to be up in arms anytime a close election doesn’t go their way.

When a Democrat loses, it must be “voter suppression” or some other nefarious plot to undermine them.

But if a Democrats win a tight race by, say, “ballot harvesting“? They’ll laud it as a hard-earned victory.

It’s a truly nauseating double-standard. Making matter worse, it’s a double-standard that Democrats have gotten away with for years.

You certainly won’t hear the establishment media criticizing Democrats, and many Republicans don’t want to come off as sore losers.

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But when an outgoing Republican governor, who has nothing left to really lose, has to sign off on a close and controversial congressional race in his state? That certainly sets up the potential for sparks to fly.

And, boy, did the sparks ever fly in Maine.

Outgoing Republican Gov. Paul LePage voiced his sincere contempt with the manner in which Democratic Rep.-elect Jared Golden “beat” incumbent two-term Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin in the November election.

I use “beat” in quotations because it must be noted that Poliquin initially finished with 2,000 more votes than Golden. Thanks to some questionable loopholes, Golden ultimately surged ahead and won.

LePage was obviously not happy with the way it happened, and he made sure to note it on the official election documents he had to sign off on.

I’ve signed off on the CD2 election result as it’s no longer in federal court. Ranked Choice Voting didn’t result in a true majority as promised-simply a plurality measured differently. It didn’t keep big money out of politics & didn’t result in a more civil election #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/0fEhD1dvAb

— Paul R. LePage (@Governor_LePage) December 28, 2018

Next to his signature, LePage very clearly wrote “Stolen Election.” That is as searing of a jab as any, and considering the legal importance of the document, it will be enshrined forever.

But as savage as that burn was, the manner in which Golden won his House seat is certainly no trivial matter.

The controversy in Maine centers on its “ranked-choice” electoral system, per Fox News. In that system, if a candidate does not win the outright majority of votes, another tally of votes is triggered. Unlike the original tally, the “ranked-choice” tally would consider voters’ second and sometimes even third choices on a ballot, then add those votes to the tally.

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That initial 2,000-vote lead that Poliquin had was wiped out when Golden overtook the lead after secondary votes for independent candidates were reallocated in his favor.

It’s as dubious as it sounds and an unsurprising impetus for Poliquin to pursue legal action. He felt the “ranked-choice” initiative was unconstitutional and asked courts for another election or for him to be outright declared the winner. Neither happened.

Could you imagine the leftist outcry had a Democrat lost an election in this manner? Based on recent history, it wouldn’t be outlandish to suggest that there would be rioting in the streets.

As it stands, don’t expect to hear a peep from the Democrats. By hook or crook, they just got another House seat.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Will the Supreme Court issue a ruling on Robert Mueller’s magical mystery subpoena before the ball drops in Times Square on Monday night? Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports that the government got its response submitted to the court three full days ahead of an expedited deadline, although it might not have come directly from Mueller. The seal on the case is so encompassing that it’s tough to tell the players without a scorecard … and a decoder ring:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office appears to have responded to a foreign company’s bid to get the Supreme Court to step into a fight over a grand jury subpoena served on the firm. …

The docket entry doesn’t indicate Mueller’s office is involved in the legal fight. Indeed, there’s not even a mention in the Supreme Court’s public records that the U.S. Government or the Justice Department is involved in the case.

Friday’s filing was likely submitted by Solicitor General Noel Francisco’s office, which handles nearly all Supreme Court briefs for the U.S. government.

That creates an amusing, if not entirely interesting, picture. At one point, Francisco was an option for supervising Mueller’s operation if Rod Rosenstein quit or got dismissed; the firing of Jeff Sessions and the appointment of William Barr almost entirely mooted that necessity. Francisco has been seen as more sympathetic to Donald Trump than Rosenstein might be, although that’s mostly just speculative. Having Francisco shepherd Mueller’s defense of his subpoena in what looks like some kind of foreign-influence angle in the investigation certainly seems a little remarkable.

Unfortunately, whoever submitted the response to the challenge requested that the case remain under seal. That means we won’t get a chance to find out the identity of the subpoena target nor the reason for Mueller’s interest at least until the Supreme Court decides the matter. We won’t even know if this part of the case features any nude selfies, although that may be for the best depending on who got targeted for that picture.

So who might be Mueller’s target? Could it be a person or financial institution connected to Victor Boyarkin, a former Russian intel officer and major fixer for a Putin crony? Time Magazine’s Simon Schuster reports today on Paul Manafort’s connections to Boyarkin and the money he owed to Oleg Deripaska:

In his only interview with the media about those connections, Boyarkin told TIME this fall that he was in touch with Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in the heat of the presidential race on behalf of the Russian oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”

The former Russian intelligence officer says he has been approached by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Boyarkin’s response to those investigators? “I told them to go dig a ditch,” he says. Peter Carr, the spokesman for the Special Counsel’s Office, declined to comment. Through his spokesman, Manafort likewise declined to comment on his alleged connections with Boyarkin.

But those connections could be potentially important to the Special Counsel’s inquiry. They would mark some of the clearest evidence of the leverage that powerful Russians had over Trump’s campaign chairman. And they may shed light on why Manafort discussed going right back to work for pro-Russian interests in Eastern Europe after he crashed out of the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to numerous sources in the TIME investigation.

This picks up on a thread reported quite some time ago — fifteen months ago, in fact. As then, the thread never quite connects to Trump himself in this article, nor any other contacts with Russian intelligence. The Shuster story paints Manafort as a man willing to sell anything and everything in order to further his own monetary interests, but it never gets further than that. The closest it gets is a suggestion that Trump’s opposition to Montenegro’s admission to NATO paralleled that of Russia’s, but (a) that came up long after Manafort’s departure and Trump’s win in 2016, and (b) it also can be easily explained as part of Trump’s skepticism of NATO expansion in general (or NATO itself, arguably).

Perhaps Mueller has found more evidence, or evidence of evidence, involving money, communications, or both in the Deripaska connection. If not, though, the Boyarkin thread looks like a cul-de-sac, as does Manafort himself. Of course, Mueller’s interest and subpoena may be on another lead involving other people entirely. We’ll just have to wait for the nude selfie to see.