There is something deeply troubling about Kevin Rudd’s extraordinary attack in his Lowy lecture on people who dare to be skeptical about the climate change hysteria that is presently overwhelming Australian politics.
Certainly its breathtaking arrogance and conviction of absolute certitude, its “naming and shaming” attack on political opponents and commentators, and its relentless dot-point repetition and stylistic vapidity, are worrying enough. However, its depiction of a giant global conspiracy of climate change deniers and skeptics reveals something more, a disturbed mental state first identified in 1965 by the great American historian Richard Hofstadter in his essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Read more.
Certainly its breathtaking arrogance and conviction of absolute certitude, its “naming and shaming” attack on political opponents and commentators, and its relentless dot-point repetition and stylistic vapidity, are worrying enough. However, its depiction of a giant global conspiracy of climate change deniers and skeptics reveals something more, a disturbed mental state first identified in 1965 by the great American historian Richard Hofstadter in his essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Read more.