The ‘Extinction Rebellion’ Cult

It is not the imminent collapse of the earth that we should fear, but loony groups like Extinction Rebellion:

Communism never dies – it just mutates into different forms. The hatred of the West, the hatred of the free market, and ultimately, the hatred of people, is always with us in one form or another. And the old communist war on the West simply continues in new guises today.

The latest form it takes is radical environmentalism. West-hating lefties have not disappeared from the scene – they have simply morphed into today’s greens. But the same revolutionary zeal to destroy the West remains. One person who should know all about this is the cofounder of Greenpeace, Dr Patrick Moore. As he said in his 2010 book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout:

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.

While not all those concerned about the environment are radical Marxists, many are, and they tend to lead astray those who are without all the political baggage into radical leftist extremism. Consider the latest manifestation of hyper-left greenism: Extinction Rebellion (ER).

This far-left activist group was first formed in the UK in May, 2018, and now is found throughout the West, including here in Australia. It declared this month to be one of international action, and it favours major disruptions in city centres with mass arrests of protestors.

The group proudly states its hatred of capitalism and the West. As one tweet from the group puts it: “This movement is the best chance that we have of bringing down capitalism.” They seem oblivious to the fact that it has been free market nations, not socialist ones, that have done the most to help the environment and help the poor and needy.

As a result of all this reckless activism, mass protests and urban disruptions, critics of the movement have emerged – even from those within the green movement. Consider one recent example of this:

The head of one of Australia’s largest environment groups has warned Extinction Rebellion protesters they could be creating division on environmental issues at a time when “cool heads” are needed. Lyndon Schneiders, national campaigns director for the Wilderness Society and a veteran activist, told Guardian Australia he hoped the XR campaign would not hand more power to the fossil fuel lobby by causing further polarisation. This week, XR groups in Australia and around the globe have stepped up activities, with an “international rebellion” that, in Australia, has focused on disrupting city centres. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/extinction-rebellion-risks-polarising-public-on-climate-veteran-activist-says

But two scathing articles by Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill are especially worth noting and quoting from. Two days ago he wrote a piece based upon his encounter with them in London:

They demanded repentance. ‘Buy less, fly less, fry less’, said one placard. Catholics only demand the non-consumption of meat on Fridays, as an act of penance to mark the day of Christ’s death. This new religion demands an end to meat-consumption entirely, as penance for mankind’s sins of growth and progress. And like all death cultists, they handed out leaflets that contained within them ‘THE TRUTH’. The leaflets foretell floods and fire: ‘We are in trouble. Sea levels are rising… Africa and the Amazon are on fire.’ The only word that was missing was locusts. They can’t be far behind these other ghastly visitations to sinful mankind.

And if you question their TRUTH? Then, like those heretics who were hauled before The Inquisition 500 years ago, you will be denounced as a denier. A denier of their revelations, a denier of their visions. ‘Denial is not a policy’, their placards decreed. Spotting me filming their spooky, apocalyptic ceremony, one of the attendees waved that placard in my face. A warning from the cult to a corrupted outsider.

This was, of course, Extinction Rebellion. Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people. This is an upper-middle-class death cult. This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence.

As mentioned, groups like this are at heart anti-human. O’Neill continues:

Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of ‘progressive’ politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world.

Extinction Rebellion says mankind is doomed if we do not cut carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025. That’s six years’ time. Think about it: they want us to halt a vast array of human activity that produces carbon. All that Australian digging for coal; all those Chinese factories employing millions of people and producing billions of things used by people around the world; all those jobs in the UK in the fossil-fuel industries; all those coal-fired power stations; all that flying; all that driving… cut it all back, rein it in, stop it. And the people who rely on these things for their work and their food and their warmth? Screw them. They’re only humans. Horrible, destructive, stupid humans.

Progressive movements, as the name suggests, used to be about pursuing progress, pushing mankind forwards, creating a better, wealthier world for all. Extinction Rebellion wants the precise opposite. It wants to propel us backwards, to the Stone Age. It wants to reverse the most important moment in human history – the Industrial Revolution. It wants to undo that revolution’s liberation of mankind from the brutishness and ignorance of life on the land and recreate that old, unforgiving world in which we all ‘ate locally’, never travelled, danced around maypoles for fun, and died of cholera when we were 38. https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/07/the-madness-of-extinction-rebellion/

And yesterday he had another article on this group in which he continues his well-deserved assault on ER madness. In it he writes:

Let’s be frank: they’re nuts. These people are crazy. If society were to cave in to their demented demands, humankind would be propelled into the most devastating form of austerity imaginable. If they got their way, the poor would stay poor, the Third World would never develop, meat would be banned, flying would be unaffordable to all but the wealthiest people, and you would be shamed for having children. These people want to inflict misery and penury and barrenness on humankind and it’s about time more of us said so.

Extinction Rebellion protests increasingly resemble cult-like gatherings. I’ve seen these people forming circles and swaying back and forth as they warn of the hellfire that will shortly consume mankind. ‘What will you do when the world gets hot, what, what?’, they chant.

Like all end-of-world sects they warn of floods and fire and pestilence. ‘Sea levels are rising’, their leaflets pronounce. They also tell us that ‘Africa is on fire’, which of course isn’t true. I can’t be the only person who finds it pretty obnoxious that these mostly white, well-off, time-rich protesters reduce the complex continent of Africa to a mere symbol, to a tragic victim of ‘fire’, and then use it as a warning sign to the rest of us. Gross.

He concludes:

Extinction Rebellion is a menace to reason and progress. It is reliant on the politics of fear. It uses exaggeration and hyperbole and emotion to try to convince us that End Times are around the corner. It demonises as a ‘denier’ anyone who questions this depressing, anti-human script. And it campaigns, tirelessly, for less — less production, less consumption, less meat, less travel, less joy.

As George Monbiot honestly put it in his 2006 book Heat, the most important thing about environmentalism is that it is a campaign ‘not for abundance but for austerity’. Exactly. And Extinction Rebellion confirms this beyond all doubt. XR is a movement of privileged, comfortable people who lecture the plebs and foreigners about our allegedly destructive habits and who want to create a more austere and punishing society. Every sensible person will reject such misanthropy and continue supporting the genuinely progressive project of liberating all of mankind from poverty. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/extinction-rebellion-is-a-menace/

Oh, and if you want to know what a real ER fanatic sounds like, check out this interview with one, conducted by Neil Mitchell the Melbourne radio host – it is scary stuff indeed: https://www.3aw.com.au/the-debate-extinction-rebellion-in-the-studio-with-neil-mitchell/

[1557 words]

12 Replies to “The ‘Extinction Rebellion’ Cult”

  1. This is a cut and paste but a good read! Dedicated to all fathers of teenage daughters:

    Cotton Edwards Anderson
    After our daughter of fifteen years of age was moved to tears by the speech of Greta Thunberg at the UN the other day, she became angry with our generation “who had been doing nothing for thirty years”.
    So, we decided to help her prevent what the girl on TV announced of “massive eradication and the disappearance of entire ecosystems”.

    We are now committed to give our daughter a future again, by doing our part to help cool the planet four degrees.

    From now on she will go to school on a bicycle, because driving her by car costs fuel, and fuel puts emissions into the atmosphere. Of course it will be winter soon and then she will want to go by bus, but only as long as it is a diesel bus.

    Somehow, that does not seem to be conducive to ‘helping the Climate’.

    Of course, she is now asking for an electric bicycle, but we have shown her the devastation caused to the areas of the planet as a result of mining for the extraction of Lithium and other minerals used to make batteries for electric bicycles, so she will be pedaling, or walking. Which will not harm her, or the planet. We used to cycle and walk to school too.

    Since the girl on TV demanded “we need to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels” and our daughter agreed with her, we have disconnected the heat vent in her room. The temperature is now dropping to twelve degrees in the evening, and will drop below freezing in the winter, we have promised to buy her an extra sweater, hat, tights, gloves and a blanket.

    For the same reason we have decided that from now on she only takes a cold shower. She will wash her clothes by hand, with a wooden washboard, because the washing machine is simply a power consumer and since the dryer uses natural gas, she will hang her clothes on the clothes line to dry.

    Speaking of clothes, the ones that she currently has are all synthetic, so made from petroleum. Therefore on Monday, we will bring all her designer clothing to the secondhand shop.

    We have found an eco store where the only clothing they sell is made from undyed and unbleached linen, wool and jute.

    It shouldn’t matter that it looks good on her, or that she is going to be laughed at, dressing in colorless, bland clothes and without a wireless bra, but that is the price she has to pay for the benefit of The Climate.

    Cotton is out of the question, as it comes from distant lands and pesticides are used for it. Very bad for the environment.

    We just saw on her Instagram that she’s pretty angry with us. This was not our intention.

    From now on, at 7 p.m. we will turn off the WiFi and we will only switch it on again the next day after dinner for two hours. In this way we will save on electricity, so she is not bothered by electro-stress and will be totally isolated from the outside world. This way, she can concentrate solely on her homework. At eleven o’clock in the evening we will pull the breaker to shut the power off to her room, so she knows that dark is really dark. That will save a lot of CO2.

    She will no longer be participating in winter sports to ski lodges and resorts, nor will she be going on anymore vacations with us, because our vacation destinations are practically inaccessible by bicycle.

    Since our daughter fully agrees with the girl on TV that the CO2 emissions and footprints of her great-grandparents are to blame for ‘killing our planet’, what all this simply means, is that she also has to live like her great-grandparents and they never had a holiday, a car or even a bicycle.

    We haven’t talked about the carbon footprint of food yet.

    Zero CO2 footprint means no meat, no fish and no poultry, but also no meat substitutes that are based on soy (after all, that grows in farmers fields, that use machinery to harvest the beans, trucks to transport to the processing plants, where more energy is used, then trucked to the packaging/canning plants, and trucked once again to the stores) and also no imported food, because that has a negative ecological effect. And absolutely no chocolate from Africa, no coffee from South America and no tea from Asia.

    Only homegrown potatoes, vegetables and fruit that have been grown in local cold soil, because greenhouses run on boilers, piped in CO2 and artificial light. Apparently, these things are also bad for The Climate. We will teach her how to grow her own food.

    Bread is still possible, but butter, milk, cheese and yogurt, cottage cheese and cream come from cows and they emit CO2. No more margarine and no oils will be used for the frying pan, because that fat is palm oil from plantations in Borneo where rain forests first grew.

    No ice cream in the summer. No soft drinks and no energy drinks, as the bubbles are CO2. She wanted to lose some pounds, well, this will help her achieve that goal too.

    We will also ban all plastic, because it comes from chemical factories. Everything made of steel and aluminum must also be removed. Have you ever seen the amount of energy a blast furnace consumes or an aluminum smelter? Uber bad for the climate!

    We will replace her 9600 coil, memory foam pillow top mattress, with a jute bag filled with straw,with a horse hair pillow.

    And finally, she will no longer be using makeup, soap, shampoo, cream, lotion, conditioner, toothpaste and medication. Her sanitary napkins will be replaced with pads made of linen, that she can wash by hand, with her wooden washboard, just like her female ancestors did before climate change made her angry at us for destroying her future.
    .
    In this way we will help her to do her part to prevent mass extinction, water levels rising and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

    If she truly believes she wants to walk the talk of the girl on TV, she will gladly accept and happily embrace her new way of life.

  2. Thanks Jo for the above contribution. It is hilarious.

    I have just received a request from a friend to sign a petition on the climate change emergency. I respect her work in mental health so I have written a few notes on why mental health professionals should not join this crazy movement.

    ‘Climate Change’ and mental health implications

    Cult-like – Cult like behaviours include – indoctrination rather than education, preaching the end of the world, obedience to global UN masters, UN Agenda 21/30/50 as scripture, veganism, separation from family, friends and colleagues who do not agree, a messianic message, hypnosis (chants, costumes, dances, paranoia) unable to engage in rational debate, those who dissent are labelled heretical, only one view allowed.

    Anxiety – Young children and young people are unable to sleep or concentrate on school work, socialising or developing skills due to fear that the world will end.

    Depression – Increasing numbers of children are being treated for ‘eco-anxiety’ and depression.

    Black and white thinking – There is only one way of thinking. We are told ‘all scientists agree’.

    Feelings before facts – We now have keyboard Social Justice Warriors who abuse all those online who differ with their emotion based opinions.

    No debate – Public schools are indoctrinating children rather than teaching them to research and reason.

    Labelling -Those that have a different opinion are ‘climate deniers’ and are heretical.

    Greater suffering of women and children – Women are coerced into not having children or aborting in order to save the planet. Many babies are not allowed to be born at all or living in fear that the world will end.

    Bullying – Labelling, physical, verbal and emotional abuse, trespassing on farms, taking over city centres and disrupting transport.

    Chaos – disruption of education, division between child and parents, interruption of work and transport, repeated, sometimes violent demonstrations.

    The above aspects would have until recently been labelled by mental health professionals as hysteria, paranoia, bullying, cultish behaviour, anxiety, depression, terrorism, messianic complex, alienation, anhedonia, post-traumatic stress disorder, child abuse and misogyny. The whole field of cognitive behaviour therapy was developed and is used to counter these irrational behaviours. That the current representative, Greta Thunberg is an immature young person who suffers Asperger’s Syndrome, OCD and mutism, not to mention starving herself for days on end and bullying her parents into completely changing their lifestyles, should alert all of us but especially those who work in the field of mental health of the dangers of this movement.

  3. The “rebel priest”, Jules Gomes made the point that, in the old days, the people who walked around with placards announcing, “The end of the world is nigh” were religious nutters. Now …

  4. progress used to mean you were progressing toward a goal trying to achieve something now progress IS the goal. if you push a boulder forward you are making progress. if you are pushing it up the mountain you are making progress but when you are pushing it forward BUT going down the mountain you are NOT PROgressing you are REgressing. a neutral observer can see you are regressing but you still think you are progressing because to you you are going forward and forward, to you, is progress. when progress becomes the goal you can never achieve anything you must always keep moving so when things start going good you keep going and that makes things go bad. but to the left that is progress. no wonder after the millennial kingdom, 1000 years of peace, man will rebel saying I can do better than this.

  5. thing is Malcolm these people still think we are nuts. yet changing NIGH to 12 YEARS is sane. and adding “to plants” on to REPENT is acceptable.

    Funny how they think humans are a cancer that needs to be eradicated yet they don’t want to go first. Me thinks after they kill the rest of us they would ‘discover’ a purpose to humans after all and find they could spare their own lives.

  6. Thanks to Gail Foster for her excellent diagnosis of the signs and symptoms of the Climate Catastrophe Cult.

  7. It seems, from the climate conversations I get to hear from the faithful believing mob at the ABC is loaded with hyperbolic, chicken little rhetoric. I think these wondering Willburies spouting their well-practiced verbatim speel are doing more to influence and indoctrinate those folk who would hold up the ABC cohorts as fonts of truth.
    No. the truth comes from a sincere heart and an open mind. I think scientists from both sides need to come together in an open and honest debate so instead of being bombarded with scary rhetoric can make their considered discissions about the consequences of climate change.
    We need to take the argument back to the scientists. They started the whole divisive controversy, let them now get upfront and take responsibility for this mess.

  8. Michael question is how do you debate a side that repeatedly says “the debate is over”??

  9. If you want to know just how hypocritical the climate change activists are, then I came cross a map during the week at: https://i.redd.it/a7hzrhln8jq31.png which shows fossil fuel / CO2 emissions per capita for 2017.
    Note that the countries that rate the highest are some of the Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries – and yet of course you will never see the climate change activists protesting there.

    Feel free to pass the link for the map on to others.

    Regards,
    John

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

%d bloggers like this: