Do you know anyone who denies that there’s such a thing as climate? Do you know anybody who hears the word “climate” and says, “Nuh-uh! You can’t fool me, that’s just made up!” I don’t. Yet whenever somebody questions any aspect of the prevailing global warming orthodoxy, he or she is labeled a “climate denier.” It’s a clever little bit of deceptive rhetoric, linking climate change skeptics with deniers of the Holocaust. A Holocaust denier is an awful thing to be, so a “climate denier” must be just as bad.

You don’t want to be one of those deniers, do you? You know how those people are.

That’s why my climatically skeptical ears perked up when I heard that somebody in Australia had written a stage play with the subtlest title ever: Kill Climate Deniers. Here’s a synopsis of the play, courtesy of killclimatedeniers.com:

As a classic rock band take the stage in Parliament House’s main hall, 96 armed eco-terrorists storm the building and take the entire government hostage, threatening to execute everyone unless Australia ends global warming. Tonight.

Now, the embattled Environment Minister has no choice but to pick up a gun and stand up for her ideals, pushing back against the threat which has engulfed her country – one terrorist at a time.

Sounds like a real crowd-pleaser. They even made a trailer of sorts for it:

Oh. Um… Ha ha?

Now, I tend to be a small-l libertarian about these sorts of things. I think you should be able to espouse any ridiculous conspiracy theory you want, even if it involves the belief that people are destroying the planet by leaving their phone chargers plugged in when not in use. That’s fine. You’re entitled to your religious views, no matter how stupid and insane they may be.

And I don’t think anybody will be inspired to actually kill climate skeptics just because they saw a play called Kill Climate Deniers. I don’t believe that movies or video games or novels or comic books or anything else will make anybody do anything. Let alone stage plays.

But just imagine the uproar if somebody produced a play called Kill Tree-Huggers. Or Kill Feminists, or Kill Militant LGBTQ Activists, or Kill [Fill in Some Other Protected Class Here]. Then it would be different. Then it would be time to hit the panic button. The 24/7 news cycle would be filled with solemn warnings about “hate speech” and “toxic rhetoric” and other euphemisms for “We don’t like what you’re saying and we want you to shut up.”

We saw this when Gabby Giffords was shot. Within hours of the shooting, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press had convinced themselves that gunman Jared Lee Loughner went on a rampage over a campaign map that was distributed by Sarah Palin’s political action committee. Never mind that Loughner wasn’t interested in politics, and there was never any evidence he’d even seen the map. Palin’s supposed complicity became the conventional wisdom. Years later, the New York Times was still lying about it.

Which was weird, because the guy who shot Steve Scalise last year was a loud-and-proud Bernie Bro. He was politically active, and the shooting was 100 percent politically motivated. The evidence was clear that he went to that baseball field to kill Republicans. Yet the name “James T. Hodgkinson” has already been scrubbed from history. That guy doesn’t fit the narrative, so you never hear about him anymore.

Anyway. I think these nutty Australians should be able to put on their little play, and title it whatever they want, and let the audience decide for themselves how entertaining and/or persuasive it is. But I refuse to be lectured on the propriety of such things by people who establish one set of rules for those they disagree with, and no rules whatsoever for everybody else.

We see you. And we don’t respond well to gaslighting.

(Hat tip: Valerie Richardson)