Hot summers? Global warming. Cold winters? That was global warming, too. Christian churches mysteriously burning to the ground? Ooh...obviously global warming. Endless hordes of foreigners breaking into the country? Global warming disproportionately affects third-world s-holes and causes military-aged men to run North, dontcha know. The spread of COVID? Oh, that definitely didn't come from a Chinese bio-lab receiving money from the esteemed pharmaceutical salesman Dr. Fauci; that virus was totally the fault of global warming!

According to the "experts," global warming caused every policy failure, government screwup, international brouhaha, and economic downturn of the last few decades (at least when card-carrying globalists, "progressives," new-world-order types, or other assorted leftists were in power). "Science" said so. And if you didn't believe the "experts," well, then, you were just an ignorant science-denier!

Since 2016, a new scapegoat - I mean, fact-based and expertly diagnosed cause - for all the world's problems has been hogging global warming's spotlight: Russia, Russia, Russia.

Read something that you don't like? That's gotta be Russian disinformation. The "wrong" candidate wins an election? Never would have happened without Russian social media bots! Energy prices are too low? That's because of cheap Russian oil and gas. Energy prices are too high? That's because Russia - and definitely not Ukraine! - blew up its own Nord Stream pipelines delivering inexpensive energy to Europe. Military-aged Muslims are raping and stabbing Europeans across the continent? Ooh, trick question - that's a global-warming-Russia tag-team! Everybody with a PhD in political science knows that Europe's inability to secure its own borders is totally Vladimir Putin's fault!

Didn't the Norwegian Nobel Committee award the Peace Prize to climate doomsayer Al Gore (who predicted that we'd all be under water by now) and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for figuring out that all of the problems in the world can be traced to hydrocarbons and free markets? Surely the prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature will eventually go to well-credentialed "experts" who determine that Russia is actually to blame for everything.

This Nobel Prize-worthy epiphany has been rattling in my head because I noticed that the United Kingdom's recently installed prime minister, Andy Burnham, is considering whether to reverse Brexit and rejoin the European Union since - you guessed it! - Russia somehow manipulated the 2016 referendum in favor of decoupling! Burnham - who won a small special election to gain his seat in Parliament only last summer and lacks anything remotely approaching a general mandate from the whole kingdom - says Russia's Brexit "interference" was "clear." His pronouncement seems to contradict multiple parliamentary investigations - including those from the anti-Brexit Electoral Commission - which have all concluded that there was "no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum."