Andrew Bolt: Protests seek the extinction of our democracy
Global warming is its rallying cry but the Extinction Rebellion is really about bring down the parliaments of the ‘wicked’ West, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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This Extinction Rebellion should be taken more seriously. Its real aim is not to shut our streets, but our parliaments.
Listen to its leaders: this is a revolution against our democracy by a new breed of Bolsheviks. Of Bolshewokes.
Global warming is just its excuse to panic the young into joining its revolt.
Yet our politicians are too blind to see this, even though this British-based movement caused such chaos last week in its first big outing in Australia.
Day after day its fanatical supporters blocked key intersections in our cities by gluing themselves to roads or chaining themselves to cars, fences and even a boat.
Hundreds were arrested, and they’ll be back.
So our politicians must understand what Extinction Rebellion really is, if this bizarre year-old movement is to be stopped.
How about just reading what its chief ideologue says is the plan?
Roger Hallam, a former organic farmer now in jail, is one of Extinction Rebellion’s three British co-founders, along with Simon Bramwell and “economic justice campaigner” Gail Bradbrook, who says fighting global warming means ending “systemic racism, white supremacy and the wounds of the patriarchy”.
Yes, this really is a revolution against the wicked West, which Hallam stresses in his manifesto, Common Sense for the 21st Century.
“The representative parliamentary (system) has been shown to be irremediably corruptible in the context of the dominance of a global capitalist system,” he says.
To bring it down, protesters must “force the hands of the politicians to make the choice; agree to give up power or repress us”.
That’s why followers get themselves arrested. They count on authorities losing confidence in their moral right to arrest so many.
“The authorities are presented with an impossible dilemma,” Hallam gloats.
“On the one hand they can allow the daily occupation of city streets to continue. This will only encourage greater participation and undermine their authority.
“On the other hand, if they opt to repress the protesters, they risk a backfiring effect.”
But Extinction Rebellion must make followers think that being arrested is no big deal — a small sacrifice in a great crusade.
So Hallam hypes global warming as an evil “worse than the horror of Nazism”: “We are facing extinction … the slow and agonising suffering and death of billions of people.”
He gets away with this nonsense because our politicians don’t dare tell the truth: life expectancy is actually rising, world grain crops have set new records this decade, and the death rate from weather disasters has dropped 99 per cent in a century.
But Hallam does not care for science. He wants revolution.
“You can bring down a regime with 5000 people,” he tells followers.
“Communicate the ferocity of your rage that massive injustice is being committed.”
And here is Extinction Rebellion exposed. So 5000 people should bring down a government elected by millions?
But no wonder Hallam denounces democracy’s “injustice”, given his humiliation this year in Britain’s European election. Of the 2,241,681 votes in his London electorate, Hallam won just 942.
Or take Australia. The Morrison Government won what the Greens called the “climate election”, yet just five months later Extinction Rebellion demands climate policies even more extreme than those that voters rejected.
That’s the big thing about Extinction Rebellion: it’s anti-democratic.
It cannot win at the ballot box, so now its woke warriors try force.
And like the Bolsheviks, these Bolshewokes plan to replace our parliamentary democracy with a “better” one — a Citizens’ Assembly of people chosen randomly by ballot, under quotas
more “representative of the community.
Extinction Rebellion’s Australian leaders agree, demanding we “replace oppressive government structures with systems of self-management and true participatory democracy”.
These Assemblies would then enact “emergency measures” that Hallam says include closing all coal-fired power stations and most gas-fired ones in just 10 years, with electricity rationed.
Petrol cars would be banned, along with “fossil-fuelled” planes.
Meat eating would be restricted.
Hallam doesn’t explain why his Assemblies would agree to make people poorer, but says their members, unaccountable and representing no one but themselves, would be “exposed” by unnamed people to an “understanding” of what they must do.
We’ve seen before how such revolutionaries get their way — first with propaganda, then violence.
Extinction Rebellion is a movement of our times, when our elites have weakened faith in our culture and institutions, and encouraged a global warming hysteria.
Yet this revolution will ultimately fail, just as did those of the communists, the Shining Path and the Jacobins. But what damage will it do until then?