Climate change denial headline echoes Third Reich propaganda

Yesterday I came across this tweet by science journalist Kelsey Kennedy:

This is an actual headline on Breitbart. Apparently peer-reviewed science is so threatening, you should arm yourself. pic.twitter.com/1nwAYy6iqR — Kelsey Kennedy (@kelseyrkennedy) December 12, 2016

The article is by Breitbart’s resident climate change denying clown, James Delingpole, one of those British conservatives American right wing knuckle-draggers love because their accent makes them sound so smart!

While Delingpole’s headline itself is outrageous enough, I had a disquieting feeling I’d seen this phrase somewhere before. So I did a quick Google search — and sure enough, it turns out to be a paraphrase of a slogan used by Nazi leaders, including the infamous Hermann Göring:

I’d always heard it as, “when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” But as the Wikipedia article cited above points out, the original phrase actually referred to a Browning — the same as Delingpole’s headline. It seems unlikely (to say the least) that this is mere coincidence.

Delingpole specializes in this kind of incitement against climate scientists; for example, he once authored a piece for Breitbart calling for the execution of climate scientists.

The article itself is the usual misleading tripe that’s standard fare for Breitbart “News,” a rant about the so-called uselessness of peer review (the evaluation of scientific work by other scientists in the same field).

Delingpole quotes another infamous climate change “skeptic,” Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise, who actually has an ironically apt dedicated page at SkepticalScience, the website that debunks climate change denial arguments: Global warming skeptic: Donna Laframboise.

There are no peer-reviewed climate papers by Donna Laframboise that meet this definition.

So Breitbart’s James Delingpole is quoting a writer who bashes peer review, but has never actually written a peer-reviewed paper herself. Par for the Breitbart course.

And now…

TFW #climate scientists start getting pictures of guns in their Twitter feed. pic.twitter.com/lAwOGLCvOB — Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) December 13, 2016

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