Truth squads. Pushing “bitter pills” down other people’s throat. Democracy’s new enemies are green.
Richard ‘Rick’ Nunno is a member of the Executive Committee of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Sierra Club. He’s also the editor of the Capital Sierran newsletter.
Recently he has helped organize “Truth Squad” letter-writing campaigns. The Sierra Club, you see, doesn’t merely think it’s entitled to be heard. It believes there’s only one acceptable perspective.
Alternative points-of-view are therefore “false and misleading” and must be countered by Sierra Club members. Whether those who attend Sierra Club training sessions are coached to pose as ordinary citizens when they sign their letters-to-the-editor is unclear.
So what kind of world would we now inhabit if Nunno were in charge? One in which democracy was a distant memory.
In democracies, authority rests with ordinary people. We elect representatives to make decisions on our behalf. It is not the job of our elected representatives to boss us around. They’re there to do our bidding.
If we don’t approve of their performance, at the next election we fire them.
Nunno, however, thinks our leaders are supposed to coerce us. He thinks it’s their job to force us to collectively do things we wouldn’t otherwise.
Because he personally believes that “any action to reduce the U.S. carbon footprint will be on the right side of history,” he says President Obama should ignore the views of voters (as expressed via public opinion polls).
In a letter-to-the-editor Nunno himself recently had published in the Washington Post, he declares that the
time for pampering the public has long passed, and it is now necessary to push a bitter pill down the throat of Congress. [bold added, letter backed up here]
Anyone who has anything to do with a “truth squad” is scary. Anyone who equates doing the public’s bidding with “pampering the public” is dangerous.
Anyone who advocates pushing “a bitter pill” down someone else’s throat is precisely the sort of person who commits heinous crimes under totalitarian governments.
