We like to think people championing social movements and agendas have good intentions, and some of them actually do. The most dangerous kind of activist, after all, is the one who is a True Believer — one who honestly thinks that we, the ordinary people, need to be forced into a certain line of action, against our will if necessary, to achieve a certain goal or set of goals.
They may indeed have good intentions. But we all know which road is paved with those.
There are others, of course, who have no such good intentions. Their trip is power, gaining it and holding it, and they will use anything as a pretext. Like, say, the climate. A Friday editorial from Issues & Insights neatly describes a couple of these people.
What do the climate activists really want? Do they have nothing more in mind than a noble crusade to prevent the burning sky from falling on us? Or is the global warming scare just another piece of the revolution? It’s of course the latter. We know this because they’re constantly telling us it is.
The most recent admission comes from Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia, whose exhausting essay under the headline “To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism” was posted on Wednesday – yes, Sept. 11.
Xia dwells a great deal on “climate anxiety” caused by environmental events that have afflicted the planet since its creation but are now blamed on human progress through the combustion of fossil fuels. She worries “we’ll never go back to normal” without defining sufficiently “normal” – maybe because, in a world that has never stopped changing, there is no normal. She is angry, frustrated, helpless, and exhausted. Earth is so doomed that she questions “whether I could ever justify bringing my own children into this world.”
Let's hope she doesn't bring any children into the world. She seems awfully bitter and angry, not to mention a raging collectivist. This would leave us wondering what she means when she says we "...first have to fix individualism," except that I'm pretty sure we already know — this is code for "...we first have to eliminate individualism."
And she is citing allies. Allies who, like her, are claiming that the key to the whole problem is in the rest of us giving up our liberty, our economic choices, and our modern technological lifestyle. No thanks.
Xia approvingly quotes Sarah Jaquette Ray, whom she identifies as a “an environmental humanist who chairs the environmental studies program at Cal Poly Humboldt,” which tells us a lot about the state of academia.
“One huge reason why climate anxiety feels so awful is this feeling of not being able to do anything about it,” says Ray. “But if you actually saw yourself as part of a collective, as interconnected with all these other movements doing meaningful things, you wouldn’t be feeling this despair and loneliness.”
You heard it here first (well, no, you've probably heard it before.) It's not about the climate, it's not about Earth, it's not about weather, Gaia, warming, cooling, or anything else. It's about power. That's what trips these people's triggers, and it's telling how willing some of them — like Rosanna Xia and Sarah Jaquette Ray — are to strip off the mask and let loose their inner totalitarian.
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Issues & Insights has warned us of this in the past.
Look, there's a reason these people are angling around their claims of climate change to justify control. It can't be about the climate to anyone with any sense of perspective; the Earth’s climate is a huge, chaotic system. Nobody, but nobody, can accurately predict weather (or climate) more than a few months ahead at best, and local weather forecasters routinely fail at predicting local weather more than a few days in advance.
So, “Put not thy trust in princes,” or in politicians, nor activists pushing a political agenda, and especially not in autistic Swedish teenagers. They’re pushing an agenda, and it will not work out in your favor. Meanwhile, regardless of what people do, the Earth will keep ticking along, following the old feedback loops and patterns it has followed for four and a half billion years now, regardless of what we tiny little humans do.
So, to Rosanna Xia and Sarah Jaquette Ray, I will say only this: Get stuffed, slavers. We'll maintain our liberty, our freedom of choice, our modern technological lifestyles — our freedom. Surrender your individualism if you like, and your free will along with it. But you try to take ours at your peril.
