"I once asked a long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wacko who he thought was threatening the owl."
Rush Limbaugh p 160
"One obvious way to try to weaken a cause is to discredit the person who champions it. So-the masters of invective and insinuation have been busy: I am a 'bird lover-a cat lover-a fish lover,' a priestess of nature, a devotee of a mystical cult having to do with laws of the universe which my critics consider themselves immune to."
Rachel Carson 1
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In an ad hominem argument, the person making the claim is criticized and the argument itself is ignored. Poisoning the well is presenting negative information (true or false) about someone in order to try to discredit what they may later claim. Other techniques, such as scapegoating, name calling and fear mongering are all commonly found in propaganda.
"First, how credible is a banker's estimate that 80 percent of Florida's bald eagles were sterile in the mid-1950s? Do you also believe that bird watchers can predict interest rates?" Steve Milloy in Our Swollen Future. But the banker, Charles Broley, was a bird watcher. He had been studying eagle nests since 1939, and had tracked 125 active nests and banded some 150 eaglets each year (Colborn et al., pages 2-3).
"Didn't Tom Cruise make a stock-car movie in which he destroyed thirty-five cars, burned thousands of gallons of gasoline, and wasted dozens of tires? If I were given the opportunity, I'd say to Tom Cruise, 'Tom, most people don't own thirty-five cars in their life, and you just trashed thirty-five cars for a movie.Now you're telling other people not to pollute the planet? Shut up, sir.'" Rush Limbaugh way page 158
"I used to think that environmentalists were a bunch of political liberals who were just using a different angle to advance their cause. . . . There are two groups of people that have made environmentalism their new home: socialists and enviro-religious fanatics. . . .With the collapse of Marxism, environmentalism has become the new refuge of socialist thinking. The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favors central planning and an intrusive government. . . .The second group that has latched on to the environmental movement are people who believe it is a religion: that God is the earth and that God is nothing more than the earth." Rush Limbaugh way p 166-167.
"Organization's coffers have been filled, personal fortunes have been made, individual fame has been achieved, a variety of agendas have been or are in the process of being fulfilled. and over $100 billion a year is being spent, all in the name of making the country a safer, better place in which to live, or, to use the more recent expression, of 'saving the earth.' Yet there is little evidence that the country is much, if at all, safer as a result of the environmental crusades of the past decade and a half." Michael Fumento, pp 367-368. This is from a chapter comparing environmentalism and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution
"When [the Antarctic ozone hole] was finally recognized, 'new' chemistry had to be invented to explain the phenomenon so that it would fit the CFC theory." Dixy Lee Ray p 37
"But their alleged love of nature is a smokescreen for their underlying fear (not to mention loathing) of the dynamics of capitalism. Their motive have been revealed as evidenced by their almost total lack of concern over Saddam Hussein's torching of Kuwait's oil fields. This action was the worst manmade environmental disaster in human history." Michael Gemmell p. 4.
"From Kant to Hegel to Haeckel [who coined the word 'ecology'] to Nazi Germany. One country's ideas and one country's actions. This can hardly be termed as a coincidence." Gemmell and Lehr p 10.
"I believe that to an important extent the hatred of man and distrust of reason displayed by the environmental movement is a psychological projection of many contemporary intellectual's self-hatred and distrust of their minds arising as the result of their responsible for the destruction wrought by socialism. . . . In my judgment, the "green movement of the environmentalists is merely the old "red" movement of the communists and socialists shorn of its veneer of science. . . . The greens, I think, may be cut below the reds, if that is possible." George Reisman p 836.
"The giant chemical corporations, which are slated to make hundreds of billions of dollars selling replacements for the now-banned CFCs, are working with environmental movement, which has already made millions of dollars in revenues from the ozone depletion scare. The U.S. environmental groups are able to finance the promotion of environmental hoaxes like ozone depletion through the more than $500 million they receive a year from the major philanthropic foundations run by this nation's financial elite-Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur, and other foundations. But money is not the only motive driving theo ozone hoax. Behind the action's to ban CFCs-and to cut back on refrigeration-is the Malthusian ideology that the world needs fewer people." Maduro and Schauerhammer, page 2.
References:
Colborn, T., D. Dumanoski and J. P. Myers, Our Stolen Future: Are we Threatening Our Fertility. Intelligence, and Survival?-A Scientific Detective Story, A Dutton Book, 1996.
Fumento, M., Science Under Siege: How the Environmental misinformation Campaign is Affecting Our Laws, Taxes, and Our Daily Life, William Morrow, 1993.
Gemmell, M. M., "Natures's Value"; pages 3 to 5 in Jay H. Lehr, Ed., Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.
Gemmell, M. M., and J. H. Lehr, "Ecology's Ancestry", pages 6 to 15 in Jay H. Lehr, Ed., Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.
Limbaugh, R., The Way Things Ought to Be, Pocket Books, 1992.
Maduro, R. A. and R.Schauerhammer, The Holes in the Ozone Scare: The Scientific Evidence That he Sky Isn't Falling, 21st Century Science Associates, 1992.
Ray, D and L. Guzzo, Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense?, HarperCollins, 1993.
Reisman, G. G., "The Toxicity of Environmentalism". pages 819 to 841 in Jay H. Lehr, Ed., Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.
Notes:
1. From a speech to the Women's National Press Club on December 5, 1962. Quoted on page 308 in Paul Brooks, Rachel Carson: The Writer at Work, Sierra Club Books, 1972-1989.
Written by Jim Norton
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