Let's burn the global-warming heretic

But, then again, there’s really no intellectual point to all of this, is there? It’s an attempt to make legitimate opinions off limits. Brandon Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, the man who helped invented JavaScript, lost his job a few years back because he agreed with the president about the role traditional marriage back in 2005. Michigan pizza shop owners made the mistake of offering hypothetical answers to a hypothetical questions about their faith, so they went into hiding. This is what the Left foresees for so-called denialists, as well.

You might recall a similar campaign to convince FiveThirtyEight to get rid of Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Like Cain, Pielke Jr., is not a climate change denier. His crime? Failing to accept all scary scenarios about anthropogenic climate change without posing some questions. One Slate writer claimed that engaging in this sort of intellectual exercise, the type of intellectual exercise smart thinkers have always engaged in, was an “embarrassment to Nate Silver’s new venture.” And then, of course, there is the smearing of Willie Soon.

Even if we defined “denial” using the expansive parameters offered by this Deadspin author—who probably understands as much about climate science as he does about Edmund Burke or “oil corporations”—Cain is still well within the mainstream of American public opinion.