The most noticeable thing about Extinction Rebellion is just how bourgeois the whole Krazy Klimate Kult really is. While the rest of Australia firmly rejected the left’s climate policies at the May election, the two wealthiest electorates in Australia voted for candidates running almost exclusively on climate change. The movers and shakers of Extinction Rebellion are Eton toffs living off Mummy and Daddy’s trust fund. The “schools climate strike” was notably swelled by the ranks of pampered private school elites.
“Climate emergency” really is the ultimate first world problem.
Ordinary folk have much more real problems than fretting about an absurdly improbable “climate catastrophe”. And they’re fast getting fed up with a bunch of rich layabouts getting in their way.
The people are rising up against the elites. No, I don’t mean Extinction Rebellion. I mean the Rebellion against Extinction Rebellion. Today’s clashes on the Tube between the commuting working classes and the time-rich, bourgeois fearmongers of the XR cult is a wonderful illustration of the elitist nature of eco-politics and of rising public fury with the eco-agenda.
For more than a week now the XR elitists have been disrupting everyday life. They’ve stopped flights from taking off, preventing people from going on well-earned holidays or visiting loved ones abroad. They’ve clogged up roads in city centres, irritating cab drivers and people on buses. And they’ve stormed Smithfield meat market and Billingsgate fish market – smug middle-class vegans lecturing hard-working traders about the correct way to think and live.
But today their sneering campaigning went too far.
It’s all very well to glue themselves to roads in Westminster, where road users can afford to pay congestion taxes for their beemers and mercs, but the Tube system is the vital daily commute for millions of working-class Londoners. Absurdly, it’s also run on electricity, which you’d think the Krazy Klimate Kult would welcome. But the Kult is really about screaming for attention – and this time, the Kultists really got some.
People got pissed off. Really pissed off.
Across the Tube system commuters confronted the XR irritants. In one videoed scene a commuter can be heard asking about people who have hospital appointments to keep. What about them? ‘The point is…’, replies a plummy XR protester, no doubt about to launch into a snooty green lecture for the little people, but she gets cut off by other angry commuters. One points out that the train she has glued herself to is electric. Why target this transport system? ‘Are you guys really THAT fucking stupid?’, he asks. ‘That’s why you ain’t got jobs…’
…In Canning Town an angry crowd of working people even dragged XR protesters off the top of a Tube train. The sight of one of the protesters kicking at the commuters to prevent them from reaching him really showed how nasty and contemptuous of the public these green extremists have become. This is the reactionary middle classes insulting and assaulting ordinary people.
That particular protester soon got more than he bargained for. Dragged off the roof of the train, the video seemed to show the crowd giving him an old-fashioned London kicking before police intervened.
Some leftists and greens have been shocked by today’s rebellion against Extinction Rebellion. They’re saying XR should change tactics. But the problem here isn’t tactics…[working] people reject this elitist movement. They reject its alarmism, its snobbery, its anti-humanism, and its demands for crippling austerity. We saw that today. Commuters’ message was ‘Fuck Extinction Rebellion’. And that’s a positive, progressive, forward-looking political demand we can organise around.
spiked-online.com/2019/10/17/finally-a-rebellion-against-extinction-rebellion/
It might be the better part of valour for the Extinction Rebellions snobs to slink back to their posh digs, pop some Bolly, and have a good long think about what they’re bringing down on themselves. Because, if they keep pissing off working people for much longer, there’s going to be a lot more kickings dealt out. Or worse.