RedState had a post earlier this morning which beat us to the punch a little, but it’s worth amplifying – because John Kennedy tore apart a climate-change hysteric professor with a history of radicalism on social media at a Senate hearing yesterday, and the performance was one for the ages.

He starts off interrogating Ariel Cohen, the well-known political scientist who isn’t known as a particular leftist hack, and asks him about inflation in energy prices. Cohen largely demurs. But then Kennedy lays into Geoffrey Supran, an environmental science professor at the University of Miami, whose “research focuses on the history of climate disinformation and propaganda by fossil fuel interests.”

Supran is one of these checkbook crazies – supposed academics who don’t do scholarship but rather spout alarmist propaganda about how climate change will destroy the world. And one of the key features of these guys, who are a dime a dozen at universities here in America and elsewhere, is that they accuse skeptics about their climate-change narratives of being propagandists for the fossil fuel industry.

Which you’ll note that Supran does when Kennedy lays into him.

Here’s what Kennedy is talking about with respect to all the profanity…

BREAKING: we just called Joe Manchin a sick fuck. We humiliated him in front of a herd of Harvard elites. He squared up. We held firm. Barbaric murderer, hideous fiend, he torches humanity and laughs. pic.twitter.com/1ajrQsKnbJ

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) March 1, 2024

And…

We do not do online petitions. We do not do NGO coalition letters. We do not do fucking bus stop ads.

We CHASE fossil fuel CEOs and the politicians who do their bidding. And we do not apologize.

— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) December 14, 2023

These aren’t exactly the same people who throw tomato paste on Van Goghs or glue themselves to the pavement on highways to stop traffic, but they’re absolutely of a like mind and their tactics are no less idiotic. What they really amount to is a rabble of malcontents who, having drunk deeply from the well of prosperity and ease that Western civilization has afforded them, spend their time denouncing that civilization and attempting to turn it down.

The iPhones these idiots use to tweet out their hateful diatribes against oil companies are comprised of parts which come from refined petroleum in huge part, but that makes no difference whatsoever to any of them.

And Kennedy was perfectly in the right to call out Supran for his affiliation with these people. He’s one of them.

Supran’s defense was ridiculous. “Those aren’t my tweets” doesn’t wash in the least. When you repost or retweet something, you are endorsing it. You’re essentially making it yours. You can quote something on Twitter and add your own commentary divorcing yourself either partially or completely from the message, of course, and here’s an example of that…

Oh, shut up, you yammering monkey.

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) May 2, 2024

…but that’s not what Supran did. He retweeted those ridiculous, hateful messages and that means he’s accountable for having made them his own.

Good for Kennedy that he called Supran out on it.

Nothing much will come of this, of course. But Kennedy is doing good work in making sure what people remember is not that Geoffrey Supran testified in front of the Senate and declared the world is burning down because you’re eating a ribeye and driving a Chevy truck, but instead that Supran is in league with obnoxious lunatics who get in Joe Manchin’s face and call him a “sick f**k” or who attack Lisa Murkowski as a “murderer” for voting to aid Alaska’s number one industry.

The consequences to these people for such actions – and perhaps more to the point to the people who fund them – are virtually nonexistent now. But consequences always fall somewhere, and the result of allowing the Climate Defiance nuts and their allies like Supran to go around as though they were mainstream actors in politics and science is that this sort of behavior will become universal.

It would be nice if somebody would take Kennedy’s ball and run with it. Perhaps the House could launch an investigation into the Climate Defiance gang and find out whether they’re taking funds from China, Russia or some of the other international villains out there.