It seems the comedian Ricky Gervais, who hosted the Golden Globes last night, is a new cultural hero of the right. He gets favorable reviews from Power Line's Scott Johnson, here, and from National Review's Kyle Smith, here. Both highlight, for special commendation . . . I don't know whether to call it a joke, or what. Gervais is addressing the Hollywood celebs in attendance:
You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
Thunberg, of course, is the teen-aged Swedish climate change activist and Time magazine's person of the year for 2019.
I guess this is funny, if it's funny, because Thunberg isn't old enough to have spent a lot of time in school, especially considering her busy media schedule, while (according to the joke's logic) the assembled Hollywood stars are even less educated and therefore have even less authority to speak. It seems funny, in the sense of weird, since on the subject of climate change the people who have gone to school speak with one voice—and what they say is pretty much what Greta Thunberg and Golden Globe nominees are saying. Ricky and Scott and Kyle resent hearing about it from "know-nothing cultural elites," but they also don't want to hear about it from the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the Geological Society of America, the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Public Health Association, the American Association of State Climatologists, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Botanical Society of America, NASA, any international scientific organization, any scientist affiliated with a university, especially if it's an elite university—Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, etc.—unless they can find somewhere one holdout, and, in that case, if he's at Harvard, so much the better! All the others are either dupes or active participants in the global warming hoax.
Seems doubtful. Who're you going to believe, an English comic or a million scientists and the news from Australia?
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