“Too many of their opponents are intellectual thugs.”
Steve Hayward writes in the Weekly Standard:
… The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.
“Too many of their opponents are intellectual thugs.”
Was misread as:
Too many of their opponents are intellectual slugs.
I’ve long since given up that the climatites could offer any kind of reasoned argument. When anyone resorts to screaming insults and calling it science, one would have to be a moron to believe in it.
But more than a few environmental blogs and mainstream news outlets ran with the story of how this “leak” exposed the nefarious “antiscience” Neanderthals of Heartland and their fossil fuel paymasters.
Unfortunately, that’s where the bias stream media left it. I saw the reported “leak” on several mainstream outlets. But never saw a retraction or [lol] a mea culpa for misreporting. Like they often do, the MSM left the initial accusations hanging out there, intentionally letting people believe it is true, while pretending that they haven’t got around to exposing it as a hoax, or that it wasn’t newsworthy enough to bump Whitney’s continued eulogy.
As far as I can tell, if you aren’t reading alternative news sources, the deniers are still involved in a covert misinformation operation. I’m waiting for one of my global warming faithful friends to bring it up as an attack point, not knowing it’s already been exposed as a fraud. Or they will just add it to their canon of convenient lies, hoping that whoever they are arguing with didn’t get the full story.