National Review Is Still Filled With Partisan Hacks

According to Victor Davis Hanson, environmentalists want to cause mass starvation and human suffering: "Surely, the world right now is sort of what the radical Gorists wanted to see, since the current cutback in gasoline usage, and general economic slowdown are radically restricting the burning of fossil fuels."

The obvious response to this is a simple "No." Environmentalists are not thrilled to see our current wave of financial suffering any more than the average person. Nor has it ever been their goal to see the world as it is now, with rising unemployment and general human suffering. What the environmentalists really just want is to cut back on fossil fuel use without devastating people's lives (not "at all costs," like Victor Davis Hanson thinks). In fact, they have been explicitly arguing for a while now that switching off of fossil fuels will save us from future oil price-shocks, leave us more energy independent in general, and create millions of jobs. This is why they're always using the phrase "Green Collar Economy," and writing books like this one.

What Victor Davis Hanson is doing here is setting up a straw-man argument. It's no different from when former National Review contributor Ann Coulter covered the same topic and said (more explicitly) that "Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation."

UPDATE: In its earlier days, the National Review wrote columns like this one (pdf), titled "Why the South Must Prevail." In it, the National Review asked "'whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically?" After citing to the "cultural superiority of white over Negro," the National Review concluded that "Yes—the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."