By Andrea Widburg
Melissa Fleming has a bachelor’s in German studies and a master’s in broadcast journalism. These degrees equipped the former journalist to become the head of the United Nations Department of Global Communications. From that august bureaucratic propaganda position, she just announced to a World Economic Forum panel that the UN and Google “own the science.”
Old-fashioned people like myself understand that science is a process. You propose a theory, you carefully construct an experiment that will isolate the truth or falsity of that theory, and then you hold the result of your experiment out to the world for it to be replicated (then it’s probably good) or challenged (bad theory, very, very bad).
Scientists are not a process. They are humans who make mistakes, who have or lack morals, who let their egos get in the way, and who are limited by the technology and knowledge of the era in which they live.
Over the years, scientists have come out with some very bad theories that could not hold up to the scientific process. Here’s just a short list of horrible ideas that scientists have had over the centuries: Meat hatches flies, bleeding improves people’s health, bad air causes disease, non-White races and Jews are biologically inferior, ulcers are not caused by bacteria, the earth is the center of the universe, and people can magically change their sex.
The process consistently yields new results because it has new variables: Sometimes those variables are observable facts, sometimes they’re amazing individuals with new ideas, and sometimes they’re the result of an accretion of knowledge or technical ability. Nothing is stagnant, and no one has a lock on the science or, when it’s done correctly, the results.
But try telling that to the bureaucrats at the UN. Whether its climate change(which has seen every doom-and-gloom prediction proven wrong, scientists alter facts, and everyone ignoring natural climate cycles), COVID (here’s a short list of leftist errors), or gender (which ignores biology and offers only theory), the leftist bureaucrats who populate the Un have been wrong about everything.
However, the UN apparatchiks understand something that we, who believe in the scientific process, struggle to recognize: It’s not the process that matters; it’s access to information. And that, Melissa Fleming, with her German and journalism majors, completely understands. At a World Economic Forum panel on “disinformation,” Fleming stated explicitly that the process is irrelevant; it’s power that counts (emphasis mine):
Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the United Nations at WEF ‘Disinformation’ event: ”We partnered with Google,” said Fleming, adding, “for example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do.”
Truth? No. The scientific process? No. Facts? No. All that matters is raw power. What should terrify all of us is that the UN’s chief propagandist is no longer ashamed to admit it.