Hoist by Their Own Petard

I love exposing the Left in their prevarications, and in today’s post I’m going to use the Statue of Liberty to illustrate two of them.  Both may seem a bit silly or picayune, but I’m using use them to demonstrate how the Left will use almost any situation to force feed its ideology.

Lady Liberty has watched over New York Harbor since its dedication on October 28, 1886.  The monument was designed by the French sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi and is one of the most recognizable structures on earth.  The statue was a gift from the French people to the United States to honor the friendship between the two countries, celebrate the United States’ independence, and recognize America as a champion of liberty.  The statue was also meant to encourage people of France to embrace the same ideals.

During a visit to New York in 1871, Bartholdi, first saw Liberty Island, then known as Bedloe’s Island, and chose the site because all ships arriving in New York would have to sail past it.  Construction began in France nearly a decade before the 151-foot statue would land at its permanent home, and in 1885, it boarded the French steamer Isère and made its way to New York.

There have been many claims on the internet and elsewhere that the Statue of Liberty was originally intended to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States following the end of the Civil War, and that the model for the Statue was an African American woman.  But interestingly, there is nothing to support that position on either the Statue of Liberty’s website or in the Museum itself.

At the same time, we’re all familiar with the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – the opening stanza of the poem, The New Colossus, which is etched in bronze and mounted on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal.  But do you know the sonnet’s origins?

Because those words appear on a national monument, the Left use these words in every debate in order to have us believe they express the intent of the Founders and are an endorsement for open immigration.  But the New Colossus wasn’t authored by the Jefferson or Madison, it was penned by American socialist and Jewish activist Emma Lazarus, a writer whose essays and poetry spoke out against the persecution of Jews in Europe and growing anti-Semitism in the United States.  Also interesting, The New Colossus was written years after the statue’s dedication as part of a contest to raise money for the construction of the statue’s pedestal.

The second matter I want to illustrate is a fallacy about climate change again using the Statue of Liberty as an example.  While you’re at your computer, enter “Oldest photos of Liberty Island and the Statue and Liberty” and “Modern-day photos of Liberty Island and the Statue and Liberty,” into your search engine you’ll see photographs as New York harbor existed 150 years ago contrasted with how it appears today.  What should be obvious even to the casual observer is that the sea level in New York harbor hasn’t changed during the last 150 years, begging the question, where is all the water from the melting ice caps going?

It’s no secret the Left isn’t inclined to investigate policy issues unless they can create a 23-character-four-word bumper-sticker from it, and so too, most progressives have never examined or evaluated the evidence for climate change themselves.  Instead, they rely upon the opinions of others, i.e., the talking heads on CNN and other ideologues who tell them “…no competent individual could possibly disagree that climate change with its attendant rising sea levels is a threat to humanity, and therefore is not suitable for debate.”

But those of us old enough to remember, recall a similar hysteria that occurred a half century ago when Paul Erlich, a Stanford Professor, with no credentials in demographics published the book, The Population Bomb.  A book that became one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most controversial.

The first sentence of the book set the tone: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over and humanity had lost,” the promised that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and no matter what people do, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”  But the world population has doubled in the 55 years since while the world-wide rates of poverty, famine and hunger have declined.  A similar canard occurs today as more and more of the Left’s dire predictions about the changing climate go the way of Erlich’s “Population Bomb.”

With all that said, Erlich’s “Chicken Little” predictions did leave us with some useful information; they tell us is that claims about man-made catastrophes, i.e., famine, climate change or the next COVID virus tend to emanate from sources with absolutely no bona fides in the matters they pontificate about.

Quote of the day: “The annual March for Life is the only demonstration in Washington D.C. that doesn’t stand to benefit those who take part.” – P.J. O’Rourke