This is where the Right’s Authoritarianism combines with its Epistemic Closure to leave Righties unprepared for an uncooperative reality.

Because they’re authoritarians, their approach to scientific dissent is to attack leading scientists personally in the belief that this will discredit the science. For example, the story of Darwin’s deathbed recantation, as if this would undo 160+ years of scientific work by tens of thousands of scientists, forming the basis of modern Biology.

Here, they attack Mann as the ‘Father of the Hockeystick’, as if discrediting him would undo all the threads of data from numerous sources all pointing to AGW, simply because the ‘hockeystick’ is the most widely known graphic representation.

Having embarked on this fallacious crusade, and knowing that Somebody Once Told Them that Mann’s hockeystick was debunked, and that Mann is dishonest, they assume it must be true, and easily proven. But he really has been investigated repeatedly, and he really has been proven correct, and the ‘hockeystick’ really has been found repeatedly with proxies completely unrelated to any Mann uses in 1999.