Leadership Quote by Michael Steele

Steele’s line is a master class in political jujitsu: it doesn’t argue the data so much as it reframes the entire playing field, turning “warming” from an observed condition into a staged illusion. The staccato repetition (“We are cooling. We are not warming.”) functions like a chant, designed for television and talk radio more than for a hearing room. It’s not evidence; it’s cadence. By the time he gets to “supposed warming,” the audience has already been invited to treat scientific description as partisan branding.

The finger “quotation marks” are the real payload. Air quotes signal membership in a skeptical in-group: you’re not just disagreeing, you’re savvy enough to see the con. It’s a visual wink that translates complexity into suspicion. Steele’s move is to concede the surface phenomenon (“the warming you see out there”) while evacuating its meaning, recasting it as a mere phase inside a grander, opposite trend. That’s a rhetorical escape hatch: any temperature record can be folded into the claim, because the claim is unfalsifiable on the timescales voters experience.

Contextually, this sits in the late-2000s/early-2010s Republican incentive structure, when climate policy was increasingly coded as cultural allegiance: regulation versus freedom, elites versus “common sense.” The intent isn’t to settle climate science; it’s to reduce the political cost of doing nothing. The subtext is clear: trust your eyes only when they confirm the tribe, and treat expertise as theater.