Why Do Governments Hate the Sun?

A solar eclipse in a file photo.

Commentary

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the endless barrage of government propaganda these days, all faithfully amplified by regime media. Daily and hourly, we’re being warned to stay away from the sun, which is said to be unusually angry at us this year.

What did we do wrong? We’ve been driving around too much, using gas stoves, taking too many commercial flights, and generally living it up after lockdowns. That’s not part of what governments have planned for our lives.

As a result, European governments are issuing stay-at-home recommendations, while U.S. cities are toying with blackout policies to cut energy use. The inevitable New York Times is running big tutorials on the question of when it’s safe to go outside. The reasons to stay in are abundant: heat, rain, wind, smog, you name it.

They say that all of this is happening because of “climate change,” which is the strangest noncrisis imaginable because the climate has always changed. This time, however, they say that this change is causing extreme weather, which is defined as anything that looks regrettable on the nightly news.

The media is acting like Rapunzel’s enchantress pretending to be her mother, forever warning of how dangerous it is out there and that she’s really only safe inside her tower.

During lockdowns, people stayed in, avoided the sun and its gift of Vitamin D, stopped exposure to normal pathogens, and, as a result, became very sick. Then their sickness was chalked up to COVID-19 because of PCR tests that can find the bug in a banana. That was added to the case totals, was reported all over the media, and generated new levels of panic and sickness.

It’s all happening again, as if right on cue. Just as people stopped dressing like astronauts to stay away from a virus with a 99.8 percent survival rate, the fear propaganda is suddenly everywhere.

Climate change is the new COVID-19. We barely get over one propaganda-fueled frenzy when another begins. The science behind the claims that our energy use is angering Mother Nature is sketchy at best, but you had better accept it or risk ruining your career.

Last week, the 2022 physics Nobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser spoke out to decry the fake “climate emergency” (he said there is none) and oppose policies based on “dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.” He further denounced media narratives that have “metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.” Finally, he called the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the “worst source of dangerous misinformation.”

As a result, his talk at the International Monetary Fund this week was abruptly canceled. His Wikipedia page is already littered with attacks. Keep in mind that this is happening to a man who only last year was granted the Nobel Prize in physics! Not even the most celebrated and published scientists of our time are safe from a sudden attack, complete with insinuations that he has clearly lost his mind between last year and this one.

This is what we’ve come to. The best epidemiologists on the planet were silenced during COVID-19, and now with climate change rearing up as the biggest excuse to attack liberty and prosperity, great scientists are already being shut down.

This attack on the sun is particularly weird. It reminds me of the parable by 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat. His essay is called “Petition of the Candle Makers.” It seems that candle makers were falling on hard times because the days were lengthening, and they needed to be propped up by government decree. So they wrote a petition:

“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion. ...

“We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds—in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.”

The petition goes on to explain all the incredible economic benefits that will come in the form of jobs and investments from such an action. Just block out the sun, and we’ll all get rich!

Of course, it’s supposed to be satire. But satires from the past have become instructions to governments in our time. They’re literally attempting to block the sun in order to achieve some kind of centrally planned climate. It’s more bizarre than anything I could have predicted.

It’s true that this gibberish has been around for 30 years, but I never imagined that they would act on it. Now with governments of the world plotting more lockdowns, 15-minute cities, the banning of so-called fossil fuels, and otherwise monitoring our spending habits to restrict consumption, fake science has become a true threat to the well-being and lives of billions of people.

And this is happening despite what one of the most respected scientists in the world had said as plainly as possible: “I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”

This one sentence refutes thousands of nonsense articles appearing in media the world over!

When I was a kid, governments were telling us to stop using aerosol deodorants because that was blasting a hole in the ozone layer. That made a real impression on me, mainly because it’s such a wildly implausible claim. I intuitively knew it wasn’t true. The whole campaign had the feeling of being nothing more than political propaganda. Today the orthodoxy is that the banning of CFCs closed the hole even though there’s every reason to doubt that claim. It’s far from proven: There are many other factors at work and no scientific way to demonstrate this supposed cause and effect.

Now, you might say, “Hey, you are not a scientist, and therefore you must defer to what the science says.” But what if not all scientists agree? And what if the heretics among them are being closed down and canceled, even people with the highest possible credentials? In that case, it strikes me that we should defer to the idea of freedom over all forms of imposition and despotism. After all, it was the “science” that was cited to lock us in our homes, slap masks on our faces, and shoot us up with meds that were never even necessary, much less safe or effective.

Let’s learn from the COVID-19 experience and never allow ourselves to be intimidated by pseudoscience again. Get out in the sun. Get some Vitamin D. Get healthy. And in so doing, turn off the bobbleheads on TV who are there only to propagandize for taking away your rights and liberties. Their ravings are particularly objectionable when they tell you to avoid at all cost that which gives life to living things—namely, the sun itself.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.