THE COLUMN: Actually, It Is 'Blah, Blah, Blah'

Michael Walsh03 Apr, 2023 7 Min Read
Save the planet: kill yourself.

One pernicious development of these parlous times has been the rise of various cults that ape the trappings of Christianity while being fundamentally and unalterably opposed to its moral tenets. Case in point, the Marxist Suicide Cult masquerading as heroic do-gooderism that goes by the name of "climate change," by which these solipsistic lunatics mean "man-made climate change."

The argument that the climate is changing is prima facie false, because there is no argument. The climate is always changing. An hour in any major art gallery immediately illustrates that. Start with the Dutch paintings from the Little Ice Age, such as Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow from 1565 if you doubt me. Note also that the old city of Alexandria, in Egypt, which was founded by the Macedonian Greek Alexander the Great c. 331 B.C., and once ruled over by Cleopatra, is now under water. Man had nothing to do with either.

All gone now.

In fact, to say that puny human beings can affect the climate is arrogance of the highest order when one considers the size of the Sun and the vastness of even our little solar system at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. "An ant in the afterbirth," as Mr. Dolarhyde famously put it.

In the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one period in which we have had a real taste of our climate’s potential for moodiness, beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.... This was also the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.

The effects of the Little Ice Age were global in scale. In China, then as now the most populous country in the world, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, undermined by, among other things, erratic harvests. In Europe, rivers and lakes and harbors froze, leading to phenomena such as the “frost fairs” on the River Thames—fairgrounds that spread across the river’s London tideway, which went from being a freakish rarity to a semi-regular event. (Virginia Woolf set a scene in “Orlando” at one.) Birds iced up and fell from the sky; men and women died of hypothermia; the King of France’s beard froze solid while he slept... in 1588, the Spanish Armada was destroyed by an unprecedented Arctic hurricane, and a factor in the Great Fire of London, in 1666, was the ultra-dry summer that succeeded the previous, bitter winter.

And then a warming trend began, continuing into our day: high culture flourished, science advanced along with the arts, and a longer growing season helped fuel a rise in population. This, of course, is not good enough for the ninnies, hysterics and bed-wetters who are convinced We're All Going to Die if we don't immediately reverse these civilizational advances (which, remarkably, seemed to have passed the entire southern hemisphere by), tear down our offending infrastructure, cease having babies (but import other people's babies), reduce our mobility, and ban everything that "pollutes" our precious air and water, even at the cost of a grotesque and unnecessary reduction in living standards: 1565, here we come again!

How times change.

Hence my use of the word "cult," which should not always be interpreted as a pejorative. In Roman times, the Latin word cultus went beyond simple reverence to include the ritual of the act itself. There were cults of every description, most of them benign. The emperor Severus, for example, was involved with a cult devoted to the Egyptian goddess Isis and the god Osiris, renamed Serapis. This in addition to the official pantheon of Roman gods, including the deified emperors, among whom would soon enough be Severus himself. To this day, Catholic Christians have the devotional cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which at its most extreme exhibits itself in various Marian apparitions, such as at Lourdes, Fatima, and most recently at Medjugorje in Bosnia. The earliest adherents of Jesus belonged to various Jewish sects or cults; the Ebionites, for example.

We may therefore define a "cult" as a group of adherents that regards a certain person or object (whether real or mythical) with intense devotion and is not interested in hearing any evidence to the contrary: you either believe in the Virgin Birth, or Isis, or you don't. Since modern Leftists have forsaken traditional religion, one cult they have invented and embraced is the Climate Cult, which in the U.S. began around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, established by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, Democrat (of course) from Wisconsin. Here's how its demon, immortal bureaucratic offspring, the EPA, tells its origin story:

It may be hard to imagine that before 1970, a factory could spew black clouds of toxic smoke into the air or dump tons of toxic waste into a nearby stream, and that was perfectly legal. They could not be taken to court to stop it. How was that possible? Because there was no EPA, no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act. There were no legal or regulatory mechanisms to protect our environment.

In spring 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force this issue onto the national agenda. Twenty million Americans demonstrated in different U.S. cities, and it worked! In December 1970, Congress authorized the creation of a new federal agency to tackle environmental issues, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Love that exclamation point! Here's how Nelson, who died in 2005, describes his great accomplishment, which began as a Children's Crusade and morphed into a straitjacket of punitive legislation:

My primary objective in planning Earth Day was to show the political leadership of the Nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement. While I was confident that a nationwide peaceful demonstration of concern would be impressive, I was not quite prepared for the overwhelming response that occurred on that day. Two thousand colleges and universities, ten thousand high schools and grade schools, and several thousand communities in all, more than twenty million Americans participated in one of the most exciting and significant grassroots efforts in the history of this country.

Earth Day 1970 made it clear that we could summon the public support, the energy, and commitment to save our environment. And while the struggle is far from over, we have made substantial progress. In the ten years since 1970 much of the basic legislation needed to protect the environment has been enacted into law:

  • the Clean Air Act,
  • the Water Quality Improvement Act,
  • the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments,
  • the Resource Recovery Act,
  • the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act,
  • the Toxic Substances Control Act,
  • the Occupational Safety and Health Act,
  • the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act,
  • the Endangered Species Act,
  • the Safe Drinking Water Act,
  • the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and
  • the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

And, the most important piece of environmental legislation in our history, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law on January 1, 1970. NEPA came about in response to the same public pressure which later produced Earth Day.

The false premise here is that some of us wanted to destroy the planet; it never seems to occur to the Left that there might have been, and still be, better ways to improve everybody's quality of life besides using the full force of government (which is to say, gunpoint) to mandate it. And so here we are, prisoners of our own device, our jailers in the thrall of childish fears that, despite the accomplishments of the late Sen. Nelson, the world is still coming to an end and, worse, it's all our fault. They have driven themselves so mad that the sight of a puff of smoke coming from a chimney or the sight of a cow's ass throws them into paroxysms of panic. And to accommodate their madness, we have to stop driving, stop heating our homes, stop cooking our food, stop traveling, stop. We've even got our military believing that "fighting 'climate change'" is its top priority instead of killing our enemies.

Praise Gaia! Praise him/her/it!

Which is why they are, at root, a Suicide Cult. Again, hardly unusual. Cults often kills themselves en masse. In 1997, the lunatics of the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves en masse in order to leave their bodies and be transported to an alien space ship hiding behind the Hall-Bopp comet. Most spectacularly, the 900 apocalyptic nutbags of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown willingly drank the deathly Kool-Aid at the behest of their guru, Jim Jones, in Guyana in 1978. David Koresh's Branch Davidians were spared the time and expense courtesy of the FBI, which slaughtered 76 of them in Waco in 1993, for no good reason. Desperate times demand desperate measures.

Today's Climate Cultists, led by a foolish, troubled child who's but a plaything in the hands of another cult, resemble the loner in the New Yorker cartoons wearing a sign that proclaims the End is Near. Which is something they're looking forward to, with the profound joy of an early Christian martyr heading into the arena. These people are carbon-based life forms who, after all, believe that the carbon dioxide they exhale as part of the necessary breathing process—and the very thing that gives life to the trees they're always hugging so protectively—is a poison that threatens all forms of life on Earth. They've taken the tiniest slice of planetary history that they could (their own short, pampered, transient lifetimes) and extrapolated doom. They call for "climate resilience" based on one hot summer in a place where hot summers are rare. They regard human beings as an excrescence. They could not possibly hate themselves more.

We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible. We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people.

Thus spake professional hooky player and "climate activist" Greta Thunberg at the Youth4Climate summit in 2021. Accordingly, their mission here on earth is to make life as difficult and uncomfortable for the rest of us as they can. To that end, disguised as "Green" political parties, they have declared war on the human race; no amount of their own suffering, it seems, can rob them of the joy of seeing the rest of us suffer, too. The early Christian martyrs gave up their own lives joyously in order to show the pagan world the righteousness of their cause. The "environmentalists" want you to give up yours for the same reason—and because they can.

Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was for 16 years the music critic and a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine. His works include the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints, and the bestselling “Devlin” series of NSA thrillers; as well as the nonfiction bestseller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and its sequel, The Fiery Angel. Last Stands, a study of military history from the Greeks to the present, was published by St. Martin's Press in December 2019. He is also the editor of Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, published on Oct. 18, 2022. Follow him on Twitter: @theAmanuensis

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5 comments on “THE COLUMN: Actually, It Is 'Blah, Blah, Blah'”

  1. Biden just continue to be the puppet for China and Greenpeace doing their will and imposing it on us

  2. Over the years, the public image of Jim Jones has been skillfully manipulated through constant reference to him as REVEREND Jim Jones, as if religion was at the root of the mass suicide that killed over 900 people on Nov 18, 1978 in Guyana. The truth is he had utterly denounced religion and the bible (to the point where most of his early African-American followers eventually abandoned him) and preached, vigorously, the gospel of Socialism: “If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.”

    Jones established himself as a power player in progressive San Francisco politics in 1975 when his Peoples Temple (sic) followers brought out the vote and handed the Mayor’s Office to George Moscone. After that, a Who’s Who of Democrat party bigs lined up to the pulpit: CA Gov. Jerry Brown, SF Mayor Willie Brown, Vice President Walter Mondale and even First Lady Rosalynn Carter became Jones’ confidants and correspondents.

    Many followers who made the decision to leave the Peoples Temple turned up dead. One mysteriously fell asleep on the local train tracks and was crushed. Even after endless published accusations of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, his political supporters refused to abandon him, much as his die-hard cult supporters stuck with him to the grape-flavored end.

    Jones fled to his Jonestown compound in the rainforest of Guyana but could not escape the growing scrutiny. Congressman Leo Ryan, a California Democrat, traveled to Jonestown to see if, as was reported, Peoples Temple members were being held against their will in semi-starvation and forced to perform grueling labor in the steamy jungle.

    Ryan, after much difficulty, was able to access the compound and interview many people, all under the watchful eyes of Jones and his hired goons (known as the “Red Brigade”) many of whom were career felons and no strangers to violence. The 15 people who mustered enough courage to leave joined Ryan and headed out to Port Kaituma, a tiny local airstrip. Jones’ men ambushed them, killing Congressman Ryan and four others at the airfield. The others escaped into the jungle.

    Knowing well that Guyana wasn’t immune to pressure from the United States government, Jones had for years attempted to gain refuge for the Peoples Temple in the Soviet Union. That escape plan having been foreclosed, and certain that the US Military would most likely be at their door in a day or two, Jones put his suicide contingency into action.

    On at least two previous occasions Jones had called for mass suicide. His followers dutifully drank the grape FlavorAid and awaited death, only to discover that Jones was merely testing their loyalty. This time, it was no test.

    Jones liked to record his endless, paranoid sermons, and on this night he urged his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide,” a phrase Jones had borrowed from Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton. If you stood up to The Man and he shot you dead, that was "revolutionary suicide.”

    One by one, the cult members lined up to drink the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. The many who refused were held down and forced to drink. Others were simply shot.

    Just before shooting himself, Jones proclaimed “We didn't commit suicide; we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world."

    If you are interested in reading deep into this story, I highly recommend Jeff Guinn’s gripping “The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.”

  3. John Kerry says “the inflation reduction act” gets us 40% of the way there and Biden executive irders will do the rest with heavy changes for all motor vehicles

    The mad men have really taken charge

  4. Some years ago the collectivist Left realized they could use the apocalyptic Climate Delusion to justify taking over the means of production (energy, industry) of the West by claiming they were 'Saving the Planet', by turning it all upside down. They've managed to get themselves in positions of power, and are using the public treasuries to enrich themselves and their camp followers by pouring money into crazy faux-energy schemes.

    It is not clear to me that they realize their delusional path will completely destroy the national economies of the West and they just don't give a damn, or whether they are so deluded and vainglorious in their zeal that they really believe that destruction is the road to nirvana.

    I keep thinking of the Xhosa of South Africa, who followed a teenage prophetess into destroying all their wealth (their cattle), in the belief they would be rewarded with victory over the Europeans and eternal riches:
    https://www.frontlinemissionsa.org/history/the-national-suicide-of-the-xhosa

    National suicide. Is this our future?

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