Hillary Clinton is working alongside billionaire Tom Steyer to sow a garden of climate change paranoia. Clinton is scaring young voters into supporting her campaign by leading them to believe that a Republican president will unleash a climate apocalypse.
Calling millennial voters the 2016 presidential election’s “biggest cohort,” Steyer announced his plan last Monday to inject $25 million into targeting young voters. Specifically, Steyer will allocate millions toward an aggressive ground campaign based on climate alarmism. The goal? Getting the youth vote out for Clinton.
Science does not support the outlandish claims peddled by Steyer’s political advocacy group, NextGen Climate.
Money men like Steyer don’t view me and my peers as individuals. In Steyer's own words, we are little more than “swing” voters who “can make a difference” in a general election in the battleground states of Illinois, New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Young people deserve better than to be handled like guinea pigs.
Raking in Millions
Like a gardener sprinkling fertilizer over a vegetable bed, Clinton sprinkles Steyer’s cash over her presidential campaign when she needs a boost. In 2015, for example, Steyer and his wife Kat hosted an exclusive fundraiser for Clinton in their home.
Today, Steyer denies favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders. But Steyer’s money talks louder than his words. And Sanders recently admitted that his own path to the White House is “narrow”—and that was before Clinton swept four of the five crucial Acela primary states last week (Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania). Let’s face it: Tom Steyer is Hillary Clinton’s moneyman.
On Twitter, Steyer has been busy as a bee, tweeting out 30-second ads that intermingle shots of horrific natural disasters—ranging from forest fires to hurricanes—interposed with sound bites of Ted Cruz saying “Climate change is not science” and Donald Trump saying “Global warming… it’s a hoax! It’s a hoax.”
Facts are conspicuously absent from Steyer’s new ads. But Steyer has never been a man who let facts get in the way of a good story.
In 2014, TIME Magazine concluded: “Steyer’s TV and online ads warn that [the] Keystone [XL pipeline] would be used to ship oil abroad to China and that American consumers would get nothing more than higher gas prices. It’s not an argument anchored in reality–the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column gave a recent NextGen ad on the subject four Pinocchios.”
When pushed to address this discrepancy, Steyer responded: “Sometimes you need to take the fight that’s there.” Translation: I don’t care about presenting reality. I care about selling my agenda.
Silence on the other side
At the same time that Steyer is targeting his mega-misinformation campaign at Millennials, the billionaires best suited to countering him and properly educating young people are cowering in a corner.
Within 48 hours of Steyer’s $25 million advertising campaign announcement—brothers Charles G. and David Koch reiterated their plan to sit by the sidelines. The Koch brothers have spent their adult life working to promote free market values. Yet, at a time when their money could make the most difference, they are apparently assuming the role of bystander.
“So is it possible that another Clinton could be better than another Republican this time around?" ABC Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Charles G. Koch in late April.
Koch answered: “It’s possible.”
Poisonous Plants
“Young voters care deeply about climate change,” Steyer told journalists last week, citing anecdotal evidence from his travels “around the country in the 2014 election cycle.”
In truth, the latest data—from 2016, not 2014—shows that environmental concerns are a blip on the radar for young voters. Just over ten percent of Millennials feel the way Steyer portrays them.
Ipsos Public Research asked Millennials to rank the “most important issues for the President of the United States to prioritize” in 2016. Among their top ten issues, “environmental issues/climate change” ranked last—in tenth place.
Even so, Millennials could easily fall prey to the notion that anyone who is skeptical of climate change is anti-science. This is why education is paramount.
Owned by a Climate Change Skeptic
On YouTube, a video shows Cruz educate—or own—a very confused Millennial, named Tyler, who tried to “punk” Cruz on the topic of climate change. Their exchange is worth a listen as Cruz does a great job of articulating how one can believe in climate change—without accepting the conclusions and agendas of moneymen like Steyer.
Tyler the Millennial: “Do you deny climate change? … Your voting record basically shows that you don’t care about [the ocean].”
Cruz: “Let's step back for a second and look at this with some historical perspective. Thirty-to-forty years ago there were a group of political liberal and scientists who said we were facing ‘global cooling.’ They said we were headed toward a global ice age and the solution to global cooling was massive government control of the economy, the energy sector, and every aspect of our lives.”
Tyler: “OK. I’m not into that [despotism] personally. But go ahead.”
Cruz: “Then, the data disproved it. It was not, in fact, correct that we were seeing global cooling. So that was kind of a problem. …Many of these same scientists then latched on to a new theory—it's called ‘global warming.’ …interestingly enough, the solution was the exact same [increase government control].
Cruz continued: “The theory magically transformed into ‘climate change.’ And climate change—from the perspective of a political liberal who wants government power—is the perfect pseudo-scientific theory. Why is that? Because it can never be disproven. …And when you start to see politicians who propose the exact same solution to every problem regardless of the facts or the data, you start to think these are politicians who just want power over our lives.”
The interview ends with applause from the audience and with Tyler the Millennial having little to say except to speculate that “community-based solutions” may be superior to radical federal energy restrictions. On his own, he seems to realize that local and state governments are better suited to solving environmental issues.
Even if you’re not a millennial, you surely know some millennials. Do your part and let them in on the truth. Like a poisonous plant, Steyer’s slick marketing packages and confident sales techniques grip quickly and quietly. Don’t let Tom and Hillary succeed in leading our youths astray in their secret garden of climate change paranoia.