Cancel Culture Comes for the Sun
Liberals are trying to cancel the sunshine, our conservative columnist writes.
I am trying to become a Conservative columnist for the New York Times opinion section who makes $600,000 per year.
Every once in a while I will share an audition piece. Here is my latest.
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The censors on the Left have a new target: the sun.
All summer we have heard from furious Liberals that the sun is too hot.
Just as today’s Wesleyan students fear campus speakers they disagree with, so too they fear temperatures that are out of step with their Liberal preferences.
They are trying to do Cultural Marxism to the sun. Reasonable people on both sides would do well to resist this censorship — or should I say, “sun-sorship.”
The sun is our friend. He is often depicted smiling and wearing sunglasses. A friendly person possesses a “sunny” disposition. When my female interns come back from their beach vacation with a tantalizing tan, they are said to be “sun-kissed.”
The Left ignores this evidence of the sun’s benevolence. What ever happened to “Follow the Science”?
They list out rising temperatures like the enemies of Arya Stark: It is 130 degrees in Arizona; it is 105 degrees in Antarctica; it is 140 degrees in the Jacobin newsroom.
Enough.
Liberals would do well to accept these hotter temperatures and rising sea levels, just as Barnard would be sensible to welcome a lecture by the Proud Boys.
To be sure, there is some reason to be concerned about an uninhabitable planet.
But no matter your political affiliation, free speech is worth defending — whether it is a hateful tweet by Ilhan Omar or the sun’s rays killing a backpacker.
In a tolerant society, we do not shun those we disagree with. We should extend that courtesy to Texas billionaires forcing construction workers to work in 127 degree temperatures.
The climate panic is full of contradictions. They want us to accept that a human can transition their gender, but not that Florida’s coast can transition from solid to liquid.
This is no longer the party of rationalists like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John McCain.
CNN reported that July was the hottest month in 120,000 years. This feels like a milestone to be celebrated. America landed on the Moon and it has empowered the Sun. Take that, cavemen!
I often hear young women complain that the earth will soon be unlivable. Do you know what would make them happier? Motherhood.
The simple joys of child-rearing — watching your little ones bumble about in a sun-soaked backyard — are the antidote to the Left’s Climate Hysteria.
When I was an undergraduate at Yale in 1993, we did not cower from the sunshine. We would gather on the quadrangle and debate controversial ideas for hours. We did not fear the sun nor the N word. Those were halcyon days.
Today’s college students scream like banshees just because the temperature is in the triple digits for 80 days straight.
I have read the Communist Manifesto. I disagree strongly with its premise.
Yet I do not ban it from my office. On the contrary, I discuss it often with my editorial assistants as I attempt to give them foot massages.
I wish today’s Millennials would extend the same courtesy to the sun as I give to Karl Marx.
Hear its ideas for apocalyptic heat.
Consider its viewpoint that Asia Minor should be uninhabitable.
Let the sun bake the earth without drowning out its opinion with chants and jibes.
If you do not, then you — and not the Earth’s rapidly warming atmosphere — are the one who is full of Hot Air.
Jason O. Gilbert is the Harlan Crow Professor of Pluralistic Discourse at Mel Gibson University in Dallas, Texas. His column appears on Fridays.