Commissar Bill de Blasio of New York is suing oil companies, claiming they cause global warming, which in turn worsened the severity of Hurricane Sandy and damaged the city.  The attempt by a commissar of the left to shake down the engines of capitalism is hardly unprecedented.  What is unprecedented is the use of Orwellian doublethink to prosecute such an endeavor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio will sue the country's five biggest oil companies[,] alleging [that] climate change and global warming led to Hurricane Sandy and its catastrophic fallout and the companies should pay for the city's resiliency upgrades.

The de Blasio administration will announce Wednesday that the city will sue for reparations and force the companies to pay for the city's resiliency efforts, which have taken years to complete since 2012, when the storm devastated the city, killing 53 people across the state [and] costing more than $19 billion.

The mental gymnastics you have to go through to proceed with such a lawsuit are mind-boggling.

1. You have to believe that the Earth has been getting warmer – not merely warmer because of man-made activity, but warmer, period.  It's not.

2. You have to believe that the Earth has been getting warmer due to man-made activities.  Most people who fervently believe in global warming also have no idea what the theory of global warming is.  They have no idea that, assuming that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, most carbon dioxide comes about via natural environmental factors, and in any event, carbon dioxide is a tiny, tiny fraction of the air in the atmosphere.  In short, the only way to believe the theory of global warming is not to know any of the details of it.  That's Orwellian.

3. Even if you believe that the Earth has been getting warmer (it's not), even if you believe in the theory of man-made global warming (which makes no sense), you then have to believe that global warming, which causes changes to climate, can also affect individual weather events, like hurricanes.  When President Trump ridiculed the freezing cold the East Coast was experiencing, saying maybe we needed some global warming, he was ridiculed for attributing "climate change" to a specific weather event.  But when liberals need the facts to suit them, they easily do the same thing, attributing climate change to the specific event of Hurricane Sandy.  They simultaneously believe that Trump was wrong to attribute global warming to a specific weather event and that they were right to do the same for Hurricane Sandy – a classic example of doublethink.

4. Even if you believe everything above, you still have to create a causal connection between the carbon produced by the five specific energy companies being sued and Hurricane Sandy, which is impossible.  If man-made CO2 caused or worsened Hurricane Sandy, it would be impossible to trace the source.  You could no more prove that Shell or ExxonMobil was responsible than a series of coal factories in China.

What makes this so Orwellian is not simply the leaps of illogic one must take to pursue such a lawsuit, but the use of total fantasy to create an enemy.  Remember how in 1984 people would be conditioned to believe whatever was being said at that moment and to ignore whatever came before?  They could be told, "Eurasia is the enemy" or "There is global cooling," and people would believe it.  Then, a moment later, they could be told, "Eastasia is the enemy" or "There is global warming," and they would believe that, too, without reasoning out the true situation for themselves.

The idea of this lawsuit proceeding brings us one step closer to mass manipulation of the public in dangerous ways that can make any of us the enemy.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.