THE COLUMN: 'Welcome Back to the Fight'

You all know the movie, Casablanca. So you probably remember this scene: it comes at the start of the last sequence in the film, during which Victor Laszlo and Rick Blaine put aside their differences over Ilsa Lund and join forces to frustrate the Vichy French and their Nazi overlords, personified by the wily Captain Renault and the sinister Major Strasser. What happens next -- and what came before the movie started -- is the subject of my 1998 novel, As Time Goes By, the authorized prequel/sequel to the Warner Bros. picture since translated into more than 20 languages.

My story, however, ends in 1942, with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Our fight today goes on, and is being conducted all over the world. Like the National Socialists, our opponents today are Socialists as well -- global socialists united with plutocrats of hitherto undreamt-of wealth, creating a new form of totalitarian Fascism centered in Davos, Switzerland, but with tentacles reaching into every country in the West, the European Union, and its culturally aligned allies.

One of their principal weapons has been the ongoing war on energy, commonly known as "fossil fuels." For decades, operating under the false flag of "environmental concern," they've tried every available scare tactic to dissuade people from powering their homes and their cars in a cheap and efficient manner, and have so thoroughly conditioned the public to the idea of "pollution" that a mere puff of smoke from a chimney now triggers in the feeble-minded paroxysms of hysteria. Well-meaning attempts to ameliorate smog in Los Angeles and bring fish back into the Hudson River have metastasized into "global warming" and "climate change" and latterly into the "climate crisis" and "climate emergency." They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

Four years ago, therefore, we began this site. Our opening mission statements are worth repeating. First, from founding editor John O'Sullivan, regarding the economic consequences of this madness:

People all over the world live healthier, longer, and more prosperous lives with access to a range of physical, cultural, and environmental satisfactions unimaginable to our grandparents. These two aims go together in a more fundamental sense. Both improving people’s lives and reversing environmental damage depend upon technical and scientific progress and in particular upon the availability of cheap and reliable energy that powers it. It would be environmentally regressive to return to a recent world of smokestack pollution, acid rain, and wasteful energy usage; but it would be socially regressive to return to an older world of untreatable epidemics, rural backwardness, widespread malnutrition and regular famines.

Two important things have occurred in recent years to make that possible. First, environmentalism has mutated from a rational movement for prudent regulation that reconciles growth with ecology into an almost religious cult that believes all development is damaging to the environment. There are more moderate and sensible environmentalists still around, of course. Increasingly, however, extremist Greens call the shots to which politicians, governments, and activists respond.

Second, my thoughts on the social consequences of what I called the New Luddism:

Today, we have the New Luddites, political "progressives" except that instead of being against the future, they are against the past, and seek to return what used to be called the First World to Third World standards of technological backwardness. Fittingly, the public face of this Green movement is that of an angry Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, who has turned playing hooky from school into a career. Issuing dire warnings of geological calamity with the certainty that comes from invincible ignorance married to an unwonted sense of entitlement blended with an inherited self-loathing of her culture, she seems everywhere at once, a grim prophetess of incipient doom that would put Cassandra to shame.  The doomed Trojan princess, however, was hated not because she foretold calamity, but because she was always right. Thunberg is celebrated precisely because she espies calamity, and yet is always wrong.

What has to go? Well, pretty much everything.  Automobiles and airplanes, to start; they burn "fossil fuels" and therefore are contributing to the chimerical phenomenon of, alternately, global warming, global cooling, or the catch-all term, "climate change." Private cars, even those powered by electricity once the sale of petrol and diesel automobiles is banned; eventually they will have to go, too, and citizens forced into public transportation for the good of Gaia.  The entire system of light and heavy manufacturing, henceforth to be powered electrically by windmills and solar panels. Homes will no longer be heated by fuel oil, but by other means -- including, presumably, heavy jackets indoors during the dead of winter, since in order to "save the planet" we will not long be burning wood, coal, or even turf. Diets will undergo drastic change, as the cattle and dairy industries come under attack. Indeed, even childbirth will be restricted,

In short, what the "environmentalists" wish to bring into being is a suicide cult, in which citizens, appalled by the very breaths they exhale -- which contain carbon in the form of CO2! -- will dutifully kill themselves to save Mother Earth. Of course, it's not Gaia who stands to benefit from such an extinction event and nor will the meek then inherit the earth. Instead, it's the "elite" Fascists, men of property and wealth, who will remain to reign over a diminished population of serfs. What might have seem too fantastic to believe four years ago has now become established truth, and in their own words and deeds as they proclaim the Great Reset.

Despite the media-driven odds against us, we've made remarkable progress in the past four years: the idea of "peak oil" has been debunked, the Covid hoax has been thoroughly exposed, and the Chicken Little Church of Climate Catastrophe is on the run as people are finally seeing it for the money-extracting elitist fraud that it is. So if you're new to our site, welcome aboard as we enter our fifth year. And if you've been with us from the beginning, welcome back to the fight, which resumes anew this week.

Tomorrow our newest writer, Buck Throckmorton, joins us for his debut piece on the abject failure of the government-mandated electric-vehicle revolution. Don't miss it.