Every day, I breathe a sigh of relief that our kids made it through 12 years of public education and, in one case, a university degree, without being brainwashed into climate’n’gender zealotry.

You can say that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I wouldn’t always blame the parents. At least one set of our friends have watched in despair as their daughter metamorphosed into a screeching, “trans-positive”, lurid-hair-and-trigger-glasses Third-Wave feminist. They’re as perplexed and despairing as any sensible parent would be.

Spare a thought, too, for poor Jim Budd, in Britain.

The father of a protester who poured human faeces over a Captain Tom memorial said he is ‘deeply ashamed’ over the way his daughter ‘desecrated’ the NHS hero’s memory.

Where did he go wrong, I’m sure he’s asking himself. He didn’t. Like losing a kid to the Moonies, his child was basically stolen by a cult.

Jim Budd, 62, said his daughter Maddie, 21, had ‘gone rogue’ after she paused her studies at medical school to become a full-time climate activist, and he ‘felt sick’ when he saw the stunt.

‘I’m ashamed of her and what she has done. There has been a big public reaction for obvious reasons. I don’t think she understands what the hell she was unleashing,’ Mr Budd told MailOnline […] ‘I felt sick with shock when I saw it.’

Captain Tom Moore, you may remember, was the WWII veteran who raised £30 million for charity on his 100th birthday.

The BFD. Face of the day.

All so that a university student could literally shit on his memory.

One of Maddie’s fellow protesters with campaign group, End UK Private Jets, said people don’t understand how hard it was for Maddie to pause her studies.

Yeah, sure. Tom Moore survived jungle warfare and a bout of dengue fever, fighting Japanese fascism, but some university bint has it, like, really, really hard because she decided she didn’t want to go to school.

Maddie has been arrested by Derbyshire Police and remains in custody, with the owner of the memorial looking to prosecute her on vandalism charges.

‘We are working with the police, we have got a crime reference number,’ Austin Cox, director of the company who made the memorial, said.

‘We are pursuing it and hoping they will prosecute. I can’t really say more than that at the moment’ […]

Footage of the event will be scrutinised by experts who will decide if the act passes a criminal damage threshold, although Kai is confident his friend and fellow activist can beat the case.

Metro

Which is probably the worst aspect of this whole, shameful episode. These activists don’t even have the bad excuse of acting on a spur-of-the-moment passion. Instead, their puerile insults disguised as “protests” are calculated to skate under the law. Activists are explicitly limiting the damage they do to just below the criminal threshold. At which point an activist judge simply tosses the whole case aside.

If Tom Moore was still alive, he’d be wondering why he bothered to fight for these pathetic brats.

Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade...