Dear liberals: are you wondering right now that the walls are closing in? First, it was Trump: bought and paid for by the Russians. Then it was the open and fair election of 2020 that armed insurrectionists, inspired by the defeated President Trump, dared to challenge. Then it was anti-vaxxers insulting the scientists and experts at the FDA and the CDC and the NIAID. Now, just up the road, we have uncouth anti-vaxxer Canadian truckers surrounding Parliament Hill in Ottawa in another attempted insurrection. Eh?

And that is saying nothing about riots and mayhem in the streets of our European allies.

What is going on? Why don’t the science deniers accept the science and the life-saving vax mandates devotedly worked out by our educated experts?

Oh dear, liberal friends. Where shall I begin? Yet I’m sure you know all this, being educated experts and all.

Back in the day, Moses came down from the mountain with the Tablets and the first thing he did was rout all the misinformers and disinformers that were worshiping a golden calf.

Then there was England in the time of Milton, Anthony Esolen writes, when the government licensed books to make sure that untrained minds were not corrupted by bad books. Don’t forget the notorious Index of the Catholic Church and the suppression of Galileo’s heliocentric science. No misinformation allowed!

In the French Revolution, they renamed and repurposed the Cathedral of Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason, presumably to cure religious believers of their superstitious disinformation.

But that was in the old days, before the rise of the modern educated class and its wise dispensation of knowledge and expertise from the academy, the university, and the media.

Now, whenever the educated class has power, it ruthlessly curbs disinformation it judges to be counterrevolutionary, privileged, or racist-sexist-homophobic.

The curious thing is that, starting no later than Kant, the most advanced thinkers have doubted our ability to have the absolute knowledge that would license rulers and their intellectual experts to control the trajectory of knowledge.

So why do our rulers work so hard to control speech in the public square?

There is one occasion where speech control makes sense, and that’s when there’s a war on. Or, to put it another way, if you want to control speech then you can’t do better than start a war.

If the Germans are outflanking the left-wing of the French army in Flanders, you can’t do better than accuse the Germans of Belgian atrocities. If the middle class is getting restless, what with a generation of aligning U.S. manufacturing wages with the developing world, then it stands to reason it is a bunch of racists and xenophobes.

But at some point, the war excuse wears out its welcome. That’s because of science. See, the latest thing in science is not reason and logic, it’s not that everything is relative, or that the answer to all your questions is evolution. Nor is it “experts agree.”

The latest wizard wheeze is “emergence.” Somewhere, somehow, somebody does something different. IBM comes calling on some tech kid for a microcomputer operating system, and the tech head buys one on the street for $50,000 and starts Microsoft. A butterfly flaps its wings and starts a hurricane. And it could be a thing: a rock falls off a cliff and dams a river.

Notice that in emergence we do not necessarily know why the tech head, animal, or thing has changed the world. Thus, emergence replaces the issue of “free will” and conscious action versus instinct or unconscious action and the concept of “agency.” Even a bacteria seems to act with “agency.”

Gosh, why aren’t our liberal friends all demanding an emergence revolution to replace the current rigid rule of the experts?

We know why. It’s the science. Way back in 1962, when Thomas H. Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he asserted that science only changes when the old generation of scientists dies off. He forgot to add: ruling classes.

The only way that politics changes is when the old generation of rulers becomes totally decrepit and is good for nothing more than going out for ice cream. And then dies off.

Our liberal friends are dying off. Their God is dead. But our liberal friends are still in the decadence phase of the Nietzschean descent into hell, still licking the ice cream cone and not realizing that it is the lick of death. And nihilism is yet to come, and the terror of the eternal recurrence.

Will our liberal friends ever experience the revaluation of all values, like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, and buy life insurance, and help old ladies, and catch kids falling out of trees, and take piano lessons, and finally win the love of the lovely Rita Hanson?

I don’t know. Hey, “it’s coooold out there.”

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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