Mamaroneck, NY’s Tree Law Smacks of Theocracy: Climatism Has No Place in the Politics of a Free Society

In ‘My Property, My Trees’: New Tree-Cutting Law Divides N.Y. Town, the New York Time’s Hilary Howard reports on a law in Mamaroneck, New York, that regulates tree removal on private property. Requiring property owners, including homeowners, to get a permit to remove a tree is disturbing enough from a pro-liberty standpoint. But what really got my attention were the rationalizations at the forefront of the new law. Howard reports:

When Robert Herbst returned to his hometown about 30 miles north of New York City in 1992, he wanted his children to be immersed in the lush greenery of his childhood. But over the decades, he noticed more trees coming down to make way for bigger houses.

Mr. Herbst, a lawyer, and other like-minded residents of Mamaroneck, N.Y., view the vanishing trees as a serious threat in the era of climate change.

“We should be protecting trees for our own survival,” said Jacob Levitt, a dermatologist who lives in Mamaroneck. “It’s suicidal not to do it.”

But some residents say they should have the right to remove any and all trees on their properties to make way for more sunlight or a home expansion, or simply because they want them gone.

“People want to landscape the way they want to landscape,” said Eve Neuman, a realtor who lives in the area.

Herbst and Levitt are leaders in the war on tree removal. But, what right do these men and their cohorts have to use the coercive power of the state to impose their values on everyone else? None. Enter “climate change.” 

I wrote these comments, which were not published because the comment section of the article was closed before I could get to it. :

“[V]anishing trees [are] a serious threat in the era of climate change. ‘We should be protecting trees for our own survival. It’s suicidal not to do it.’”

How does one answer such Chicken Little hysteria? You can’t, any more than you can rebut “It’s God’s will.” Yet such quasi-religious rhetoric is used to justify trampling people’s sacred property rights, without any evidence that cutting down a tree would violate the rights and/or safety of anyone else.

If you can use climate change—or “the climate crisis”—as a God-like justification for trampling individual rights to cut a tree on one’s own property by law, then what dictatorial scheme can’t be justified by it? On that standard, none of our liberties are safe. Faith is impervious to reason and morality. But that’s the point, isn’t it? “Climate Change” is the newest calling card of totalitarianism. America beat back tyranny in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWs 1 & 2, and the Cold War—only to give up our freedom to the likes of  “tree advocates?”   

In the Constitution it is written that no law respecting the establishment of religion shall be made. The Founders well understood the threat of theocracy. Yet a new secular religion—Climatism—is exactly what is being established by this law. Totalitarian theocracy is the ultimate goal of anyone who raises climate change as a justification for rights-violating laws. It's a reincarnation of The Divine Right of Kings, and the Separation of Religion and State should apply here. End the madness.

The term “climatism” is not mine. The term was first coined by Robert Bryce, as far as I can tell. Bryce roots the term in economic terms: Environmentalism, Bryce observes, “has morphed into the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.” That’s true enough. But I see something deeper. I see the tentacles of religious dogma and authoritarianism wound through the entire movement. Climatism fits the bill very nicely, in my view. “Follow the money,” says Bryce in explaining Climatism’s grip on policy. But religion provides something far more consequential—and dangerous—moral firepower. Replace God with Climate Change, and you have a new superior power to submit to. And just as “God’s will” is determined by faith leaders who claim to speak for God, and thus must be unquestioningly obeyed, so we have “climate experts” who claim to speak for “the fight against climate change,” and unquestioningly obeyed. Neither authority requires evidence. Any dissident is heretical, which makes you a sinner—or a climate denier on the moral level of a neo-Nazi. . . a holocaust denier.

Of course, like all manifestations of statist assaults, the best moral and practical defense is individual rights.

Related Reading:

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Environmentalism In America Is Dead: It has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. by Robert Bryce

The Would-Be Climate Dictators’ Trial Balloon

From ‘Authoritarianism’ May Be Necessary to Fight Climate Change, Cambridge Study Argues, FEE’s John Miltimore reports:

A recent study published in American Political Science Review, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University, begins with a teasing question: “Is authoritarian power ever legitimate?”

For many, the answer is clearly no, concedes the study’s author—Ross Mittiga, an assistant professor of political theory at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. But Mittiga, in the abstract to the study, suggests otherwise:

“While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach.

This was inevitable. I have long argued that the normally mundane science of climate change had become a means to a political end—some form of totalitarian statism. The tactics used by politicians for fighting the "climate crisis" are invariably dictatorial, but they would never openly admit it. Now, with so many people duped into being conditioned to accept government coercion to "fight climate change," the climate crisis mongers appear to be getting ready to take the next step—openly declare that freedom cannot handle the crisis and then demand the dictatorial powers their policies always implied. 

Note also that the over-reaching COVID 19 freedom restrictions are being cited as the precedent for the coming climate attack on our liberty, which I also predicted.

The piecemeal advance of statism is often preceded by trial balloons to gauge how ready the public is for another erosion of their freedom and rights. That’s how I see this study. We'll see how far this trial balloon goes.

Related Reading:

New U.N. 'Study' Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

As We Endure Through COVID-19 Lockdowns, Dems Gear Up for ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism

QUORA: ‘What three points do communists and fascists disagree on?’

 QUORA: ‘What three points do communists and fascists disagree on?’

I posted this answer:

1. Communism is international socialism: It seeks a worldwide homogenous system. Fascism is national socialism: It seeks to tailor its system to the customs and traditions of individual nations.

2. Communism allows no private property or private enterprise. Fascism allows a superficial veneer of both. But it is only a veneer of privatization, as all economic forces, as Mussolini put it, must be “coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.”

3. Communism is by definition strictly egalitarian—”from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Fascism is less so, or not at all so. 

These differences are superficial, though. What’s more important, because more fundamental, is what they have in common. There are 4 fundamental commonalities:

1. Statism (central control of all aspects of society)

2. Collectivism (the supremacy of some group, be it the race, the proletariat, society as a whole, et al, in whose name the state operates) 

3. Mysticism (the quasi-religious belief in a higher group or national consciousness in whose will the state is the embodiment.)

4. A common enemy — Enlightenment liberalism and its consequences; individualism, constitutionally limited individual rights-protecting government, and Capitalism.

So, in practice, communism and fascism have meaningful differences.

But fundamentally, on the philosophical level—which is the level that counts most—communism and fascism can be thought of as fraternal twins. Never mind that, in today’s scrambled jargon, communism is considered “far Left” and fascism “far Right.” In truth, the only social system that is the antipode of both is Capitalism.

Related answers:

Why do people find communism so terrifying as an idea?

Why do fascism and communism often go hand in hand when they are philosophically polar opposites?

Is it possible to be both a Communist and a Fascist?

Related Reading:

QUORA *: ‘Why do people find communism so terrifying as an idea?’

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

What is Capitalism?—Ayn Rand

Nazism, Communism, Atheism, and the Enlightenment

QUORA: ‘Is fascism a form of capitalism?’

We Need a Deeper Understanding of Socialism

A is A, and Socialism by any Other Name...

Biased Reporting, Hypocritical ‘Educators’

A 3/5/23 Washington Post news story, Florida bills would ban gender studies, limit trans pronouns, erode tenure, is a case study on biased reporting and hypocritical educators. The article by Hannah Natanson, Lori Rozsa and Susan Svrluga, opens with, 

Florida legislators have proposed a spate of new laws that would reshape K-12 and higher education in the state, from requiring teachers to use pronouns matching children’s sex as assigned at birth to establishing a universal school choice voucher program.

Note my highlighted portion. Sex is an observed biological fact. It is not “assigned” by anyone. Calling it “assigned” is Woke unreason, not objective reporting. An objective reporter would fact-check the idea that sex is assigned by anyone, and immediately conclude the falsity of the idea, based on the evidence. Of course, unpleasant facts are, well, unpleasant. That’s why there is a move in the journalism field to abandon objectivity altogether, on grounds that it is “a distortion of reality” and even racist—if you can believe it. Rather than accept the truth, even if uncomfortable, why not abandon objective truth and create your own truth to fit your narrative? This is a manifestation of what Ayn Rand identified as the primacy of consciousness, which is the opposite of what objective journalism is based on, the primacy of existence.

Teachers peddling this line—that sex is assigned, rather than observed, at birth—are guilty of gross educational malpractice. The observational biological facts are plain, and it is these facts, not choice or whim, that determines gender. Telling children that gender is a mere arbitrary designation, or “assignment”—at birth or at any time—is to undermine the ability of children to distinguish between what’s real and what’s only in her mind. This is the path to destroying the child’s rational faculty before it is even fully developed. It is a crime. It is monstrous.

Getting back to the Florida legislation, Rozsa and Svrluga write:

Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, warned that the legislation — especially the bill that would prevent students from majoring in certain topics — threatens to undermine academic freedom.

“The state telling you what you can and cannot learn, that is inconsistent with democracy,” Mulvey said. “It silences debate, stifles ideas and limits the autonomy of educational institutions which … made American higher education the envy of the world.”

On this issue, I posted this comment, edited for clarity:

Mulvey whines that “the legislation . . . threatens to undermine academic freedom.”  Is he joking? Aren’t these the same schools that happily soak in torrents of government money? Well, he who pays the piper, calls the tune. Mulvey apparently wants to have his government money, and eat it, too. If the Professors want a free reign, then don’t take government money. Otherwise, accept that you are accountable to the legislature, the taxpayers’ representatives.

“The state telling you what you can and cannot learn, that is inconsistent with democracy” is an even bigger joke. In fact, that is precisely what democracy is—electoral majority rule, with the emphasis on RULE. Apparently, Mulvey wants to have his democracy, and eat it, too. Well, it doesn’t work that way. In a democracy, your freedom is subject to majority rule—or, as Biden put it, “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” Indeed. If the elected legislature, the voters’ representatives, tells you how and what to teach, that’s it. You do it. Is the right to vote the right from which academic freedom flows—or not? The right to vote is primary, according to democracy. Like it or not, that’s democracy. Contrary to Mulvey, The state telling you what you can and cannot learn is perfectly consistent with democracy. Why should only educators decide what to teach? Majority rules, right?

People need to realize that government funding is tyranny. Fundamentally, it’s as simple as that. When funding is obtained voluntarily from willing consumers, educators can decide, and consumers can accept or go elsewhere. The state has no role, except to police the market for force and fraud. True academic freedom is the separation of education and state, under a constitutional republic with a democratic process of limited powers. In other words, the original American system, a free society based on unalienable individual rights, from which everything else, including the right to vote, flows. 

Related Reading:

Washington Budget Debacle Highlights Extent of Our Dependence on Government

Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis

The Dangerous Totalitarian Premise Underpinning the Justice Department’s Suit Against Georgia’s New Election Law

How About: Hands Off Our Money and Our Choice?

Bad Schools and What to Do about Them, with Andrew Bernstein, author of Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math: And What We Can Do About It by Jon Hersey for The Objective Standard

What the Nazis Borrowed from Marx by Ludwig von Mises in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War

DeSantis Reminds Public Universities of Uncomfortable Truth About ‘He Who Pays the Piper’: Public universities are complaining about Ron DeSantis's latest move. But do they have any right to object? By Lawrence W. Reed

QUORA: ‘Should I throw my father's Mein Kampf book in the trash can without telling him? I just can't stand that he has this book.’

 QUORA: ‘Should I throw my father's Mein Kampf book in the trash can without telling him? I just can't stand that he has this book.’

I posted this answer:

Ideas are the prime movers of history. They’re not the only movers. But they are the prime movers, for good or evil, better or worse. 

Evil doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It has deep philosophical roots. Serious ideas underpin and give life to political evils. I want to learn about the ideas that lead to, support, and sustain Nazism and other evils. I own and/or have read Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto and other Marx writings, Benito Mussilini’s The Doctrine of Fascism, and Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of Free Society, Confederate intellectual George Fitzhugh’s famous, widely read defense of slavery as a positive good.

Ideas never die. They go underground. They hibernate. They metastasize. They are camouflaged. They are always a risk to freedom and civilization. Books like Mein Kampf and other like writings are not just interesting historically. They are important because they serve to alert you to the re-emergence of these ideas in the current culture early on, so you can call them out before they metastasize and become so embedded that they once again become a real political threat. For example, Historian C. Bradley Thompson, was able to detect a resurgence of the pro-slavery ideas of Fitzhugh and other Confederate intellectuals in the 20th Century Progressive movement, a hotbed of socialist statism.

The urge to toss Mein Kampf in the trash exposes your anti-intellectuality. Simply evading these ideas is the greatest gift you can give to those who would resurrect the likes of National Socialism. Kudos to your father and others who have the interest and the guts to read such monstrous publications.Take it from me: Mein Kampf is torture to get through it. But it’s those who want to educate themselves, not those who want to close off their minds, who are the guardians of civilized society. 

Of course, there’s also the issue of ownership. It’s your father’s property, not yours. Of course, if he’s living in your home, you have the right to demand he remove it from your home. But you have no right to throw it in the trash without his permission. 

Related Reading:

Nazism, Communism, Atheism, and the Enlightenment

Brad Thompson on “the unidentified, unacknowledged union of proslavery and progressive thought.”

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

QUORA: ‘Is fascism a form of capitalism?’

Why Marxism—Evil Laid Bare--C. Bradley Thompson for The Objective Standard

Billionaires' Likening of Today's Campaign Against the Rich to Nazi Germany is Frighteningly Close to the Mark

The Left’s Double Standard on the Hitler Germany Analogy

Why Can’t Tom Moran Acknowledge the Common Collectivist Base of Affirmative Action and 20th Century Atrocities?

The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’

Obama’s Fascist “Partnership” With Big Busines

Tom Moran Warns of the Long Term Danger of a Presidential ‘Climate Emergency’ Declaration

In 2020, as America grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, I worried that President Donald Trump’s invoking of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to cope with the the Health Emergency would be a dangerous precedent that could clear the way for a Democratic President to declare a “Climate Emergency,” giving the federal government totalitarian executive powers. 

Alas, President Joe Biden is getting pressure from Congressional Democrats to do just that — declare a Climate Emergency in order to impose draconian Leftist climate change policies that he can’t get through Congress.  

Fortunately, Biden is resisting the idea, so far. And pushback is developing, including from some on the Left. Tom Moran, editorial page editor for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, strongly condemned the idea in no uncertain terms. In No, don’t declare a climate emergency, Moran warned about a power that “could quickly spin out of control.” “The threat of authoritarian rule by unchecked presidents,” Moran presciently observes, “is easy to see.”

To be sure, Moran includes the obligatory Leftist Chicken Little panic mongering hyperbole about climate change. “the climate crisis is spinning out of control as Congress fiddles.” “The climate crisis is causing chaos and suffering across the globe and promises to get much worse.” And the like.

But, paradoxically, the fact that Moran is a card-carrying climate catastrophist gives his warning all the more credibility. He rightly sees the threat of American authoritarianism to be a much greater danger than anything climate change can throw at us. 

And as I viewed Trump’s DPA declaration as the crucial precedent, Moran reaches back further:

Three years ago, President Trump declared a state of emergency so he could use money from the defense budget to start building his wall along the Mexican border.

The reason was simple: He lost the political fight in Congress, so he used these powers as an end-run around our democracy. Another norm broken.

It was the first time the emergency laws were abused like that, historians say. The laws were intended to help a president cope with true emergencies that could not wait for Congress, like hurricanes, pandemics and invasions. Using it to defy the will of Congress was new.

Moran consults Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice:

“What Trump did with the emergency powers is exactly what Congress said he couldn’t do,” said Goitein.

Now, progressives want to break the same norm, and are pressing President Biden to declare an emergency over climate change, having lost the fight in Congress. It’s another end-run.

“I understand the temptation,” Moran says,

But Goitein, at Brennan, warns that this could quickly spin out of control, that if Biden declares an emergency over climate, a Republican president could declare an emergency over, say, abortion, and impose a nationwide ban.

“When Trump did this, you could argue it was an aberration, because he was an anomaly in every way imaginable,” she says. “But if Biden now uses it this way, to get around Congress, that would really shatter the norm.”

Philosophically, this is the kind of good political thinking that we rarely see any more. On this issue, Moran is channeling the same reverence for the importance of principles as the Founding Fathers.

The Founder' reverence for principle is demonstrated in these excerpts from James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments". In his dramatic defense of religious liberty in opposition to Virginia's proposed tax to support the Christian Church, he said:

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. (Emphasis added.)

The principle James Madison was referring to was the one underlying a Virginia law, known as “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion”. He understood that once any governmental “department of power overleap[s] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people, . . . there is no way to contain that power, because . . . the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience . . . is held by the same tenure with all our other rights.” (Emphasis added.) Madison elaborates on this crucial point:

Either we must say, that they may control the freedom of the press, may abolish the Trial by Jury, may swallow up the Executive and Judiciary Powers of the State; nay that they may despoil us of our very right of suffrage, and erect themselves into an independent and hereditary Assembly or, we must say, that they have no authority to enact into the law the Bill under consideration.

Notice the broad sweep of the rights that Madison saw threatened by a single religion-funding bill in a single state. The same can be said about a single climate change emergency declaration, whether at the federal or state level. The principle behind a climate emergency declaration threatens all of our rights.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Tom Moran is no equal to the Founding Fathers. That said, keep Madison's wisdom in mind as you read this editorial, and you can appreciate the power of Moran’s warning.

Moran offers more examples of the consequences of the abuses of presidential emergency declarations, including George W. Bush’s broad violation of Muslim-Americans’ rights under a national security declaration following 9/11: 

But if this norm is broken, presidents of both parties could claim emergency powers that are more far-reaching, Goitein warns, especially when a president declares a national security emergency.

“The real scary ones give a president the power to shut down communications facilities in an emergency, and to freeze assets and block financial transactions,” she says.

Which, if Goitein is correct, was exactly what was done to Muslim Americans. 

If I read Goitein’s premise correctly, she is basically saying there are effectively no limits on what the executive branch can impose under emergency declarations. What can political authorities not do as justified under the alleged need to “fight climate change?” Sounds like totalitarian powers to me—or at least as close to totalitarian as a president can get away with. And if the recent COVID pandemic is any indication, politicians can get away with quite a lot of usurpations of our liberties. 

Perhaps that’s why, as Moran points out, “Congress is considering reforms, like imposing tight time limits on emergency powers unless Congress votes to extend them.” 

That’s encouraging. “In the end,” Moran concludes, 

the emergency declaration seems like a political stunt, a way for Democrats like Booker to signal their concern and militancy, to answer the frustration in the party.

But it wouldn’t help much in the climate fight, and it would weaken our democracy. That’s a bad deal.

It sure is a bad deal—and, I will add, for our republic.

Kudos to Moran for clarifying the immense dangers inherent in any climate emergency declaration. I hope Biden will heed it.

Related:

‘Climate Emergency’: A Nonsensical, and Dangerous, Misuse of Words

As We Endure Through COVID-19, Dems Gear Up for ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism

Did Trump’s Defense Production Act Invocation Clear the Way for the Democrats’ ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism?

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

Rand Paul, Title 2, and the Importance of Principles