'Climate Change': A New Form of Paganism

“The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything,” wrote Belgian author Emile Cammaerts in The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues & G.K. Chesterton. The line, in one form or another, is often attributed to Chesterton himself, but regardless of its provenance, it is especially apt in these times when so many of our fellow citizens have abandoned the Judeo-Christian tradition that for centuries underlay Western society. In its stead we witness the rise of a neo-paganism, the tenets of which are untethered from any reality as it was recognized only a few years ago.

Like any religion, this neo-paganism has its sacred texts, among which are the New York Times and its imitators, conveying to the faithful the latest version of accepted dogma. And as in many religions, adherents have divided themselves into sects, placing varying degrees of emphasis on any single tenet of dogma while taking care to stay faithful to all of them, lest they be branded as heretics and cast into the howling darkness.

“Climate change” is of course a key tenet of this new religion, as is the phantasmagorical notion that a man, through surgery, medication, or even by simply declaring it so, can become a woman or vice versa. My colleagues here at The Pipeline address these issues elsewhere in this series while I, from a vantage point afforded by more than 40 years as a police officer, address another, equally pernicious aspect of this modern cult: the deliberate destruction of civil society in the name of “social justice.”

Into the flames of global warning!

Consider: in 1990, more than 2,200 people were murdered in New York City, the high-water mark for homicide in the five boroughs. Owing to political will and innovative police work, the yearly totals declined almost every year thereafter, reaching 295 in 2018, a period in which the city’s population grew by 1.4 million.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, this decline in murders and the accompanying decline in other crimes can be attributed to an enlarged police force and a manifest determination to arrest lawbreakers. The NYPD grew by 35 percent in the 1990s while the New York state prison population grew by 24 percent, figures that were welcomed at the time but arouse today’s social-justice neo-pagans to apoplexy.

They are thus aroused because the demographics of those imprisoned do not mirror those of New York City as a whole, this owing to the fact that blacks commit a far greater share of crime – especially violent crime – than other racial groups. Any effort to drive down crime will therefore fall most heavily on those most responsible for it, which, in New York City and any other American city one can name, happens to be young black males.

This is anathema to the neo-pagans who, as indicated by their unquestioning devotion to “climate change” and “trans rights,” choose to ignore reality while adopting the altered version of it as presented in their sacred texts or simply adopted as tribal folklore. A 2021 poll found that 53.5 percent of respondents who describe themselves as “very liberal” believed that police in the United States killed 1,000 or more unarmed black men every year. According to the Washington Post, the actual figure was 18 in 2020, 11 in 2021, and 12 in 2022. As we near the halfway point in 2023, the number stands at 5. And bear in mind that even someone who is technically “unarmed” can in some circumstances still be subjected to a lawful use of deadly force, which was the case in nearly all of these incidents.

The neo-pagans, like many primitive cults of the past, occasionally demand sacrifices be made to appease their gods. For example, Europe's "climate change" sect has called for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cows in Ireland over the next several years, thereby eliminating their emissions and allowing that country to meet some bureaucratically invented "climate target."

So too does the social justice sect demand its sacrifices, the latest of whom is Daniel Penny, the former Marine now accused of manslaughter in the death of homeless drug addict and career criminal Jordan Neely. He joins Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by a police officer without legal cause during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and the four former Minneapolis police officers whose misfortune it was to arrest George Floyd, another drug-addicted career criminal, as he was in the midst of dying from a drug overdose.

St. George help us.

This neo-paganism has also infected corporate America, which in this holy month of June is consumed with celebrating all manner of sexual eccentrics under a diseased definition of “pride.” But worse than this is the expectation that corporate employees stand by idly while merchandise under their care is carted off by thieves. In merely the most recent example, two employees at a metro Atlanta Lululemon store were fired for having the temerity to challenge two masked shoplifters who were brazenly looting the business, then calling the police on them.

And how should the women have reacted to this affront, according to Lululemon management? Clear a path and let them take what they want, says one of the fired employees, an approach embraced by all too many businesses, some of which have chosen to shutter their stores rather than take action to deter thieves.

And so it goes. As long as thieves and other ne’er-do-wells are emboldened by our inaction, as long as those who resist them are punished for having done so, the neo-pagans will continue their ascent and Western society, as we once knew it, will continue its descent in the opposite direction.