If there is a chance that some consumer or some viewer may not like something, it gets jettisoned… fast. No hearing. No due process. Just a professional execution. That is the very definition of hysteria.
You know those disclaimers on home video, about opinions not necessarily expressing the views of management? Artists—whose job is to comment and interpret, after all—artists no longer have that right or courtesy. Just like under Hitler, though now serving the socialists. They toe the leftist line or they are history.
This is the year hysterical reaction trumped sound business sense in several notable instances. It is the year Starbucks lost sales from more than eight thousand stores during an afternoon coffee rush when it closed all its locations for sensitivity training after an incident in a single store, when a single barista overreacted to the presence of two black men who were loitering without buying anything.53 It is the year the Disney–ABC Television Group canceled its hit Roseanne reboot after a tweet from its star. Not an official tweet from the network or the show, not even a tweet about the show—just an unfortunate comment from an actress.54 It is the year the National Football League, one of the great American entertainment brands, tied itself in knots trying to come up with a solution to its employees publicly damaging that brand, rather than just firing the employees outright.
In these cases—and many more like them—a truth about our universities, which graduated the dummies who made these decisions, became apparent. For all the time they spent in classes learning about cultural overreaction, and the virtues of victimhood, they apparently skipped basic economics. Because these hysterical reactions, which they did voluntarily, had serious economic repercussions for the businesses. Starbucks lost an afternoon of sales… and still had to pay to keep the lights on and pay the wages of the employees who were being indoctrinated. As a by-product the coffee chain had to close hundreds of stores, permanently. At the Roseanne show, in which even Roseanne’s costars rose against her, hundreds of backstage techs, support staff, and other workers lost work (the show was revived sans Roseanne). The NFL’s compromise solution of having player-employees who wanted to protest not take the field—without penalty—during the national anthem satisfied no one, cheapened the product, and has and will cost the league revenue and brand equity.
This is very real damage. It’s damage in Hollywood, it’s damage throughout the country in places where the left loves to huddle for hours over its expensive Apple laptops, and it’s damage to a great Sunday pastime. But the left isn’t going to see that. The left got its pound of flesh in return for a transgression, and when a few more people join the unemployment lines, well… that’s a small price to pay. Especially for people who don’t have to pay it.
We will be in for more such actions, but I hope 2018 marks the high-water mark for them. I hope that someday, somewhere, someone who has a classic education, who has been trained in economics and classics and sanity, will stand firm against mass self-flagellation reactions that only hurt the people the left supposedly wants to help. I hope that someone with a degree that doesn’t end in the word “studies” will be able to make a sane case for measured responses—including the word “no.”
If there is hope, it is with the few universities that refuse to kowtow to the hysteria and those that are starting to challenge this nonsense. One university president recently informed students that his institution was a college, not a day care center. And the dean of students at the University of Chicago informed the incoming 2016 freshman class:
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.55
Because reason will always trump hysteria, this mania will die of its own oxygen deprivation. In the meantime, however, a generation of minds is being ruined.
The first victim of hysteria is fact. The modern era has seen several great hysterias fueled by nothing more than dubious science. Unproven science renewed its long and ugly reign when dietary experts held that food we have been eating for millennia has turned against us and continues, today, as alarmists try to convince us that the planet is baking itself to death.
14.
FROM CONSUMABLES TO CLIMATE CHANGE
The Nation Creates New Venues for Hysteria
POISONOUS IDEAS
I have always read and cherished the Bible, which is what inspired my previous book, God, Faith, and Reason. Whether or not you believe the stories as literal history, the morals are profound and the wisdom indisputable. I turn to the ultimate authority again for a few thoughts on our next topic.
Let’s go back to the beginning:
And to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)
Jumping ahead:
“This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.” (John 6:50–71)
And this:
“Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” (Matthew 7:9–11)
The answer to that last question is relevant. The food industry is trying to give you something indigestible. Despite millennia of tradition, despite having been a dietary staple of the human race for some thirty thousand years, society has suddenly done an about-face on bread. In particular, on wheat. And in specific, gluten.
As a trained nutritionist and botanist, I have always been aware of what gluten is. The word is from the Latin glūten, which unappetizingly means “glue,” and it’s a protein complex that accounts for most of the protein found in wheat used to make bread. In addition to nutrition, it helps dough to achieve added volume. It’s true that some people are sensitive or allergic to gluten. We are not a monolithic species, and environment, genetic mutations, and other triggers have caused us to diverge over the eons. For example, celiac disease is a disorder that impacts the small intestine and other sections of the gastrointestinal track. It can be caused by rye and barley as well as wheat. It also affects only about 1 in 133 Americans.1 So how did one syndrome, which at its most extreme can cause diarrhea and malabsorption, turn gluten into public food enemy number one? How did it go from being an unknown protein to a word everyone tosses around (even if they don’t really know what it is or does)?
That happened in 2010, when doctors came up with a catch-all phrase to describe a condition that wasn’t celiac disease or a simple wheat allergy. They called it “nonceliac gluten sensitivity.” While the public became hysterical about the possible health impact of this terrible condition, the food industry went into overdrive creating a new market: gluten-free foods. This, not long after the same food industry came up with a market to service people who believed or feared they were “lactose intolerant,” unable to digest the sugar lactose found in food products. According to some estimates, roughly two-thirds of the world is lactose intolerant. Verifiable or not, that’s far more than the estimated 6 percent of the population who are gluten sensitive2—and given that a lot of the “studies” that are aimed at making us change the products we buy are written with a very liberal perspective, I suspect there’s a lot more “not” than “verifiable.”
Some scholars have suggested—and I share many of their views—that one of the worst things that ever happened to humankind was the invention of agriculture. Once we started producing crops and breeding animals that thrived in specific regions, people living in those areas ate just one kind of diet in abundance. Talking about the Bibl
e, the Jews freed by Moses were headed to a land flowing with milk and honey, which was supposed to be a good thing. Milk maybe not, at least not for adults, according to some dieticians, and while there are antioxidants in honey that strengthen our cells, it is also an ideal medium for botulism bacteria. I can just imagine the overly health–sensitive in the wandering tribes trying to point that out, along with discussing trichinosis in pork. They’d have left these people eating manna at the foot of Mount Sinai.
But agriculture inadvertently damaged us. Instead of enjoying a balanced variety by remaining hunter-gatherers who spear fish, pick berries and fruit, and spit-roast boar, as our taller and stronger prehistoric forebears did, we loaded up on foods that caused a variety of ailments, like heart disease and diabetes, that continue to this day. A phrase, popularized by nutritionist Victor Lindlahr in a 1923 Bridgeport Telegraph article said it best: “Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.”3
But the reverse is also true. We are what we do not eat, and for most people who have become hysterical and given up gluten, there is a dangerous precedent. Hysterical consumers assume, in what is commonly and tritely referred to as “an abundance of caution,” to simply avoid any undiagnosed risks by avoiding gluten. Or lactose. Or beef. Or chicken. Or beer. Or anything else that might not be optimal for our health (though the juries are still out on many of those). The first thing to be aware of if you are gluten sensitive is that turning to gluten-free products will likely cause you to gain weight. That’s because you will now absorb caloric bulk that your body was rejecting before.4
Furthermore, there is a misconception that if something is gluten-free, it is de facto healthy. That is also not true. The replacement ingredients for wheat typically contain more sugar and less protein and fiber. Neither of those options is healthy. There are also social pressures that can lead to stress, which can cause countless health issues. It used to be you could go to a restaurant or friend’s house and just eat what was served. Now people want vegan or gluten-free or lactose-free or organic-only. They want substitutes like “mock duck”—which, ironically, contains gluten. Social stress is not a good thing for anyone. And I’m sure you’ve seen it, people are not moderate about this. They will not touch anything with gluten. They will sit at the table and eat nothing but the salad—no croutons—if you’ve failed to accommodate them.
There is something else to consider, and that’s the fact that U.S. growers add folic acid to many grains. Folic acid has been proven to reduce birth defects and anemia, among other ills. Grains also contain necessary B vitamins, and of course there is the energy that comes from carbohydrates.
But hysteria doesn’t respond to reason and you aren’t about to get reason from the food industry. The gluten-free market is now a $4 billion business in the United States.
I would be the last person to suggest anyone behave foolishly or irresponsibly with food. Be informed, be sensible, but do not become hysterical. It isn’t necessary to go through your kitchen and throw out everything that is on someone else’s dietary watch list. Especially when you’re researching online, and it’s often impossible to tell real news (as much as that exists any more) from sponsored content.
While we’re on the subject of food hysteria, for years consumers have been told to fear foods made with GMOs, genetically modified organisms, also cynically called “Frankenfoods” after the famed monster. Here’s the hysteria the activists were peddling. First, a scientifically enhanced plant or animal would damage the environment because it would no longer be subject to natural selection. It would become the Superman of calves or potatoes or whatever it happened to be. Second, it would force farmers to buy costly seeds—a burden on developing nations. Third and most damning, they would corrupt human genes and cause autism, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and more—all of these claims made with hysterical fear and not a scrap of evidence.
So, what have we actually learned since 1994, when the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved product, the Flavr Savr tomato, hit the shelves? These startling facts: they have done no damage to consumers as far as medical science can tell and they have actually reduced the amount of toxic pesticides used by farmers, actually improving the health of consumers… and the environment.
End of story. Except that hysterics on the left will now move to some other topic—like the climate.
CLIMATE HYSTERICS
I’m going to list, in order of importance, the events that cause climate change.
First: orbital cycles. Earth revolves around the sun in a nonconsistent way, and has for at least the last two millennia. This has resulted in a general cooling of 0.02 degrees Celsius per century, and is expected to continue into the predictable future.5
Second: solar activity. Sunspots—cool areas on the sun—decrease the temperature on our world and were apparently responsible, in part, for the Little Ice Age that afflicted Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.6
Third: volcanic activity. Increased eruptions send ash high into the atmosphere, circling the globe, cutting off sunlight, and cooling the planet. In 1883, the eruption of Krakatoa caused summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere to drop roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius.7
Fourth: ocean circulation. Fresh water entering the oceans can cause a shift in the air currents, such as the Gulf Stream, which can heat the polar regions and cause climate shifts.8
Fifth on the list, and way down at that: human activity. If we, as a species, tried to affect any one of the first four, we could not. That is how little our impact matters. How much do you think your campfire or your car or even all the world’s private jets affect the climate? Less than Krakatoa. And the effects of that, the biggest explosion in human history only, endured for a year.
So why all the uproar about global warming, which was phrase-changed to “climate change” and is now “extreme weather”—because the first two, like the third, is riddled by bad-science holes?
The answer, of course, like the hysteria over gluten, is money.
People don’t want to accept that. They call my show, post on my Facebook page, insist that I know nothing and that this is “settled science”—spoken with only the confidence that a drugged hippie or Millennial who still lives at home can muster. Sure, there is settled science on many subjects, like smoking cigarettes is bad for you and unprotected sex with a stranger can give you any number of diseases. But there is also science that is absurd on the surface. I just read an article about why people are afraid of clowns, as if the hype about the subject somehow makes it true. They even gave it a name: coulrophobia. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus would not have stayed in business for 146 years if people were inherently afraid of clowns! A few people may be, but it has nothing to do—as the article said—with the nuances of pattern recognition or the distortion of the human face. It has to do with the fact that clowns are frequently the antagonists in horror movies.
The “settled science” of climate change is like that. It’s being forced on us by the Al Gores of the world and their Oscar-winning “documentaries” like An Inconvenient Truth. People have gotten rich from spreading hysteria on the topic. An example of how shallow their arguments are can be seen in the fact that no one went to see The Inconvenient Sequel last year. I guess there was not enough of a hysterical tailwind. Remember, I said these hysterias burn out of their own accord. Perhaps Gore and Obama and their associates even managed to convince themselves there’s truth to what they’re selling. Certainly their screaming minions—people who are not climatologists—think so. But it’s all just wind, and not even gale force at that.
Nevertheless, the money keeps flowing. A recent study reported by the Daily Caller found liberal foundations spent nearly $567 million on global warming–related funding between 2011 and 2015. Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection got $20 million before merging with the Climate Reality Project, also founded by Gore.9
And what doe
s an Al Gore do when that revenue stream burns out? He whips up another cause with such transparent, shameless contrivance that only chronic hysterics could embrace it. He and others have decided that a massive conglomeration of floating garbage in the Pacific Ocean should be its own country, called Trash Isles, of which Gore is already the First Citizen. If you can’t become president of the United States, I suppose this is the next-best thing. Gore has somehow convinced one hundred thousand other people who have too much time on their hands to sign on as citizens of this mass of detritus they say is the size of France. They’ve even petitioned the United Nations to recognize it as the world’s 196th country. Achieving that, they hope to get the UN to clean it up under its Environmental Charter. They are also planning to mint Trash Isles currency, called “debris,” which would feature images of afflicted sea animals.
No one is saying that garbage in our oceans is a good thing. But it is sad that, as these people claim to be trying to salvage civilization, they are destroying it by turning pollution into Lord of the Flies for environmentalists—a barbaric power scramble in which dissenters are eliminated.
What these radicals fail to understand is that no one alive has seen more than a century of weather, and the record written in our planet’s surface tells a very different story. Russia’s Vostok Station, in Antarctica, is the coldest place on the globe. Ice cores taken from this site tell us about the climate of the region going back some 420,000 years. The findings? The rise and fall of global temperatures is a natural cycle on our world. Today’s temperatures are the same as they were at peaks throughout history. Despite the carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere, people have added very little to the process and are not the cause of global warming. I have to add, though, that I was disappointed to see NASA join the fray when they tweeted, “This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum extent is the 8th lowest on record, according to new data.”10
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