Ricochet’s St. Augustine has asked the interesting question as to whether there is a limit to listening to scientists as the Democrats urge us to do. The problem with the question is that Democrats have an entirely different definition of “scientist.” Their science is a special office within the Narrative with the job of (a) protecting the fiction that progressivism is an outgrowth of pure reason and not merely a tired and rather conspicuously deficient ideology and (B) hijacking the prestige that has traditionally attached to academic credentials.

“Scientists” tell us, for example, that there is no male or female or that any and all politically wrong economic activity is killing the planet. One can no longer have a job as a scientist if one does not agree that polar bears are nearing extinction, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, that sex is just a cultural artifact, or that adaptation should be considered in lieu of mitigation of climate change.

Recall how Dick Morris disappeared from the airways when his guarantee of a Romney victory proved to have no value? Can anyone identify a servant of The Narrative losing work for being wrong? Journalists still defer to Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) whose predictions were not merely spectacularly wrong but drip with a vile anti-human philosophy —for 50 years(?!) with no retractions or apologies.

More recently, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College gave us the wildly wrong prediction of COVID’s lethality just as he had overpredicted the dangers of bird flu, swine flu, and Mad Cow disease. And not content with that embarrassing track record, he and his crack team of fiction writers offered a model in May (already falsified by actual data) which predicted mass deaths if the lockdowns were lessened in any way. How does this clown have a job? How can any journalist with even high school research skills reach out to such a proven incompetent for quotes?

Think of the array of credentialed buffoons who assured viewers on CNN and MSNBC that Team Mueller would bring down Trump any day now. Think of the thousands of articles over the last 30 years about climate disasters that never happened. The volume of authoritative prediction failure is rising fast but the Narrative does not care. We are at Orwellian DEFCON 2

When the left says to “listen” to “scientists” they are also declaring that the Narrative has claimed and reconfigured that which was once the realm of free exchange, empiricism, and disciplined induction. The new form of science will ratify the Narrative, deny human nature but hint at its perfectibility, declare crises that require the desired solution of the moment and continue to erase dissent by assertions of authority.

To disagree with this “science” does not generate a demand for proof or reasoned argument. Instead, there are accusations of ignorance, malice, or being in service to regions superstition or corporate greed. It is a response you would expect if the charge were heresy or treason. That is what “scientists” do. “Listen” means shut up and obey.