NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the two recent science-flavored marches (Science and Climate), the frustration of the brethren over same, and how the New York Times rode to their rescue with a Bret Stephens column.

UPDATE. At National Review, Oren Cass offers what looks like the traditional X is The Real Y argument ("Climate-Change Activists Are the Real Science Deniers") but adds a few wrinkles. For one, he admits climate change skeptics were once "irresponsible or dishonest" about warming, but have since adopted "more reasoned arguments" admitting some warming but concerned that we may be wasting resources trying to combat it. Conveniently, this change in approach coincides with the installation of a government seemingly hell-bent on reversing all federal progress on climate change. No need to act hysterical when Trump's doing all your work for you!

Cass doesn't admit that, though -- instead he asserts that the new line of attack is "a disaster for climate activists, exposing the flabbiness at the core of their position." In other words, to you it may look like a political reversal, but to Cass it's an intellectual triumph -- conservatives are winning because they're right, and only coincidentally because a grifter in the White House is paying off polluter-donors.

Cass also employs the hot new conservative tactic of implying that when you oppose their policies you're actually abridging their free speech rights:

At least one might assume that reasonable minds could be allowed to differ on the ultimate question of how well society is likely to cope with the effects of climate change...

At stake are the boundaries of debate in our democratic society, on an issue that the self-appointed enforcers insist is the most important one facing us. The ad hominem “denier” criticism places arguments and their purveyors beyond the pale, unworthy of response. Appealing to a purported “97 percent consensus” asserts that the question has been scientifically answered and policymakers have no business debating it.

They just got a major rightwing climate-change essay planted in the fucking New York Times yet still bellyache they're not "allowed to differ"  because people say mean things about them when they do. Maybe global warming is a fraud because these snowflakes should have melted long since.