Fear of the truth

Leftism thrives on ignorance. The least well-informed members of society -- minorities and the poor -- are their voter base. But the Leftist elite are not stupid. They know that the policies they preach sound good but will in the end be destructive to society. Hatred of the status quo is their motivation and their policies regularly deliver destructive and impoverishing results, mostly in the form of high taxes and a myriad of rules and regulations that stop people and businesses from doing perfectly reasonable things that they want to do. "By their fruit ye shall know them".

But there is one place where maintaining the ignorance that is needed to get Democrat votes is hard: Universities and colleges. The kids there tend to have open minds and are well able to assimilate the full facts about what Leftist policies will result in. So what the kids are told has to be heavily censored -- and heavily censored it is. The faculty give very incomplete facts in what they teach and the small cadre of far-Left students also do their best to demonize conservatives. Between the Leftist students and the faculty it is almost impossible to get a conservative speaker onto campus. Even very occasional readers of Tongue Tied should recall many instances where far-Left students have violently prevented conservative speakers from giving talks on various campuses (e.g. here).

If students got to know even the simplest of historical facts their Leftist indoctrination could be seriously disrupted. What if students got to know that the full name of Adolf Hitler's political party was: "The National Socialist German Workers' Party"? That would be very dangerous knowledge indeed. Who has ever heard of a socialist workers' party that was anything but Leftist? Many students might rightly begin to doubt one of the central elements of their indoctrination: That Hitler was "Right-wing". Even the fact that Hitler led a political party would be news to many, I think. So you can see that the Left have much to fear from people gaining a knowledge of the whole truth.

The strategy of censorship is contemptible enough in the universities but it even extends to Congress itself. With the Democrats in charge there now, great efforts are made to see that speeches against Global Warmism are not made or not heard. Warmism is a huge opportunity to shackle the country with a myriad of new and impoverishing rules and regulations so the Democrat leadership just love Warmism and don't want people to know the full facts about climate.

And they showed that vividly very recently. Last Friday there was a Congressional hearing on global warming scheduled for the House Energy and Commerce committee. The Democrats had invited a "special guest" to appear so the GOP did the same. The Donk guest was Al Gore and the GOP invited Britain's Lord Monckton, an extremely knowledgeable man about climate, right down to the tiniest scientific details. He would of course have wiped the floor with Big Al. He would be able to follow up each and every one of Gore's misrepresentations with the actual scientific facts. So what did the Donks do? They refused to let Monckton appear. They were afraid of the facts that he would put before them. The truth is poison to them.

Fuller details of the censorship here. I have also put up a remedial lesson in 1930s German political history here.