Few octogenarians can profess to being as badass as Noam Chomsky. For decades, the guy has been of the most important linguists and intellectuals on the planet, holding a professor emeritus position at MIT, during which he’s published well over a hundred books on everything from philosophy to politics. Needless to say, when he talks, people listen.
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Noam Chomsky Just Called Out the US Republican Party as 'a Danger to Human Survival.' Here's Why He's Right.
And what he has to say now is this: the US Republican Party is literally a danger to the survival of the human race.
“Today, the Republican Party has drifted off the rails,” Chomsky, radical libertarian socialist who frequently criticizes all sides of government, said in an interview Monday with The Huffington Post. “It’s become what the respected conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call ‘a radical insurgency’ that has pretty much abandoned parliamentary politics.”
Chomsky levies this accusation due to the Republican Party’s frequent and abject denial of anthropogenic climate change, a scientific theory agreed upon as accurate by 99% of the world’s scientists, themselves holding extensive degrees in everything from anthropology to meteorology to chemistry. The theory is supported by everything from Antarctic core samples to complex computer modeling.
Meanwhile, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is led by James Inhofe, who earlier this year threw a snowball in the Senate chambers as evidence against the phenomenon. Inhofe received his BA at the age of 40, and before becoming a politician, worked in both real estate and insurance. More than half of the Republicans in Congress deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, and nearly all Republican candidates for President hand-wave the issue as nonsensical.
Republicans were furious in November when Barack Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline, a project six years in the making that would have extended the United States’ dependence on oil while decimating the environment.
It’s this ignorance that Chomsky claims will “doom our grandchildren.”
There have been plenty of doom-and-gloom headlines lately about the consequences of unbridled industry. Just the other day, a study revealed that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. In general, the only major critics of clean, renewable energy and regulated industry that can rein in these bubbling catastrophes are the old men on the Republican side of Congress.
However, as Chomsky points out, this may not be the case for long.
Chomsky went on to outline how he wants the coming election to swing: regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, Chomsky told Al Jazeera he’d cast his general election vote “against the Republican candidate.” Thirty-four Senate seats, along with every single House seat, are up for reelection.
h/t: Huffington Post.