Watch: Delingpole Savaged by a Tofu-Muncher at the Extinction Rebellion Protest

James Delingpole

At the Extinction Rebellion protests in London this week, a bedwetting greenie grabbed my shoulder, pushed me and told me he hoped I’d never have ****ing kids and that if I ever did they’d ****ing hate me forever.

Obviously I loved this, a) because being physically assaulted by a pasty-faced soy boy is always comedy gold. And b) because it confirmed what I’ve long suspected: there’s really nothing peaceful or ‘nice’ about these posturing, deluded, ‘planet-saving’ pests.

I’ve put the ‘planet-saving’ in inverted commas because the only place these soap-shunning losers are saving the planet is in their warped imaginations.

Some of them are even honest enough to admit it. Here is one of the founding members of Extinction Rebellion (XR), telling it like it is on Medium:

So Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about ‘climate justice’**, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.

This article is calling to all of those who are involved in XR who sometimes slip into saying it’s a climate movement. It’s a call to the American rebels who made a banner saying “CLIMATE extinction rebellion”. It’s a call to the XR Media & Messaging teams to never get sloppy with the messaging and ‘reduce’ it to climate issues. It’s a call to the XR community to never say we’re a climate movement. Because we’re not.

Yes, I think the piece’s author Stuart Basden, has made it pretty clear that Extinction Rebellion is not about the climate.

So what, then, is it about?

Basden himself doesn’t appear to have much of a clue.

At one point, he writes:

We’re facing imminent societal collapse (whatever that means), both around the world and in the UK.

That parenthesis speaks volumes. ‘Imminent societal collapse’ is just another empty phrase to be brandished alongside all the other emotive catchphrases like ‘future generations’ and ‘time is running out.’

But what else would you expect from a movement whose spiritual leader is a 16-year old autistic school drop out who thinks she can see ‘carbon’ in the skies and who apparently gets her science facts from Ice Age 2?

Elsewhere in his article, Basden has a good old rant about some of his other obsessions:

  • The delusion of white-supremacy centres whiteness and the experience of white people, constructing and perpetuating the myth that white people and their lives are somehow inherently better and more valuable than people of colour.
  • The delusion of patriarchy centres the male experience, and excludes/hinders female assigned people from public life (reducing them to a possession or object for ownership or consumption). Patriarchy teaches dominating and competitive behaviours, and emphasises the idea that the world is a place of scarcity, separation and powerlessness.
  • The delusions of Eurocentrism include the notion that Europeans know what is best for the world.
  • The delusions of hetero-sexism/heteronormativity propagate the idea that heterosexuality is ‘normal’ and that other expressions of sexuality are deviant.
  • The delusions of class hierarchy uphold the theory that the rich elite are better/smarter/nobler than the rest of us, and make therefore better decisions.

In other words, Extinction Rebellion is imbued with the kind of pseudo-academic, post-modernist, neo-Marxist intersectional guff that they teach at universities these days – and which bears a great deal of responsibility for the widespread madness afflicting our age and poisoning relationships between the young and old, between races and religions, between the two [nb] sexes, between social classes and so on.

What also struck me as I wandered among the Extinction Rebellion crowds, feeling the loathing oozing from the ones that recognised me (I’m quite the hate figure in greenie circles, for some odd reason) was just how blinkered, prejudiced and ill-informed these people are.

Did they but know it — and I did try to explain this to some of them — I care at least as passionately about the environment as any of them do.

Indeed, I’d just come from a meeting with Mike Shellenberger, a green activist once named a ‘Hero of the Environment’ by Time magazine.

Shellenberger is a Democrat from the Peoples’ Republic of California, founder and president of a think tank called Environmental Progress, and was an early campaigner for the renewables program later adopted by President Obama. Despite all this we got on like a house on fire because, though we disagree on some minor issues – he thinks ‘climate change’ is a problem; I don’t – we agree on the fundamentals: the stuff being done to save the planet is actually killing it – and as nature lovers this drives both of us insane.

Watch: Mike Shellenberger and James Delingpole talk Extinction Rebellion and why they’re so wrong

We both agreed strongly that Extinction Rebellion’s war on economic growth — among all the other things it would love to ban: air travel, cars, etc — is the very last thing either the planet or future generations need.

It’s prosperity that enables us to have the money we need to care for our environment. Poverty just makes things worse. It’s no coincidence that the world’s worst environmental disasters of the last 100 years happened mostly either in the developing world or behind the Iron Curtain.

But when you try explaining this stuff to the Extinction Rebellion crowd they just don’t want to know. They are so convinced of the rightness of their cause they don’t want any pesky facts to get in the way of their belief system.

I suppose they think just the same about people like me. Indeed, I know they do: the ones who confronted me, such as the chap you see on camera having a go at me, assume that everything I say about the environment I say in bad faith.

That is, they all think I’m a wicked ‘denier’ who only says sceptical things about climate change and the environment because I am paid lavishly to do so either by Big Oil or by the rabid right-wing media.

I can’t say I blame them for thinking this way: it’s all they’ve been taught in schools; all they ever hear at college and university; all they ever read in the mainstream media or see on TV.

They have been brainwashed and propagandised into green groupthink.

So it’s all very well mocking freaks like the guy dressed in the clown suit, and the weeping dad blubbing next to a photo of his children, and the idiots doing dances and yoga classes and saying: “Enough is enough! This time we need to get serious about these idiots blocking our streets.” We — by which I mean our culture, rather than you or me personally — have created this problem by allowing all this junk-science, greenie nonsense these loons are spouting to go largely uncriticised by anyone, anywhere.

Dissenting voices to the green fake news narrative are so rarely heard — on the BBC, they are more or less banned — that it’s no wonder that kids are frightened the world is going to end in twelve years and that XR feel morally justified in causing such disruption and economic damage and human misery.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has dismissed the XR crowd as ‘nose-ringed crusties in hemp smelling bivouacs‘. And he has a point.

But isn’t this the same Boris Johnson whose government is committed to making the UK economy Net Zero of CO2 emissions by 2040 – an aim which is not only impossible without causing tremendous disruption, damage and expense to British industry and consumer freedom, but which also has no sound scientific justification whatsoever?

I’ll leave the last word on this to Matt Ridley, the Oxford-educated zoologist, now a member of the House of Lords, who is one of passing few politicians to talk sense on this issue.

Interviewed by Julia Hartley-Brewer, he said:

“What worries me is that the Establishment – in terms of journalists, politicians and scientists too – have kind of talked a whole generation into this extreme apocalyptic rhetoric which is just not supported by the facts”.

Precisely. It’s the Establishment which created the Extinction Rebellion monster. It’s the Establishment which continues to feed the Extinction Rebellion monster. And until the Establishment faces up to its responsibility for helping stoke up this green hysteria, the Extinction Rebellion monster will be rampaging amongst us for many years hence.

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