The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Climate Change’ Is a Dangerous Cult

Posted on | October 9, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Climate Change’ Is a Dangerous Cult

Say hello to Madeleine “Maddie” Budd, a 21-year-old English woman who dropped out of medical school to become a radical environmental activist. She has been arrested several times for her “activism.” Last September, she was arrested in London while engaging in a protest with the Extinction Rebellion group. In March, she was arrested for running onto the field during a Premier League soccer game between Arsenal and Liverpool, where she intended to glue her hands to the goalposts. In April, she was arrested on three separate occasions for taking part in “direct action” protests by a group called Just Stop Oil.

Maddie Budd’s turn to criminal activity — which is what “direct action” protests are — has dismayed her family, especially after her latest crime.

The eco-zealot seen in video pouring human excrement over a memorial to pandemic hero Captain Sir Tom Moore has been jailed ahead of her sentencing after pleading guilty to causing criminal damage in the ‘abhorrent act’.
Maddie Budd, 21, was arrested in London on Sunday over the attack at the memorial in Hatton, Derbyshire.
District Judge Louisa Cieciora said the starting point for sentencing following her guilty plea could be 18 months’ imprisonment.
She also today declined an application for bail ahead of the sentencing hearing, telling the court she has ‘substantial grounds’ to believe Budd would commit another offence.
Budd was remanded in custody while a pre-sentence report is carried out ahead of her sentencing on October 25.
Footage of the stunt, carried out for the pressure group End UK Private Jets, showed her drenching the monument — which honours the 100-year-old World War Two vet who raised £33million for the NHS during lockdown — in urine and faeces.
Prosecutor Jordan Pratt told Westminster Magistrates Court: ‘On September 30 the defendant attended a location in Hatton where there is a statue of Sir Captain Tom Moore.
‘The statue is situated in a public area next to a road. She approached the statue and poured a bucket of human faeces all over this statue.
‘She was wearing a white t-shirt which said “End UK Private Jets”. This act was filmed. It has already been seen by a number of people. This is an abhorrent act.
‘I need not remind the court of the impact that Tom Moore had. He was a figurehead who people rallied round to raise tens of millions of pounds walking round his garden at the height of the pandemic.’
Budd, of no fixed address, will attend her next hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court on October 25, she was remanded in custody in the meantime.
Ms Budd’s father told MailOnline on Sunday he was ‘ashamed of her’ and ‘sick with shock’ when he saw what she had done. . . .
The activist’s father, Jim Budd, 62, told MailOnline his daughter had ‘gone rogue’ after dropping out of medical school to become a full-time eco-warrior, giving up her career.
Father-of-six Mr Budd, an award-winning glazier, said he had felt sick when he saw the video of her defiling Captain Tom’s image. Mr Budd said he and his charity worker wife Harriet, 63, had messaged Budd after they realised what she had done but received no reply.
Speaking from their home near Kington on the England-Wales border, he told MailOnline close to tears: ‘The shock of this is hurting people and upsetting them.
‘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.
‘She’s done something horrible without thinking of the consequences.’
He added: ‘I felt sick with shock when I saw it — I have sent her a text message but she has not replied.
‘It goes against all the things you install in your children — it is not normal behaviour. I’m extremely sad. The fact is she has sort of gone rogue.’
Until recently Maddie had been at medical school in Manchester ahead of an expected career with the NHS.
But she dropped out to devote all her time to protesting over climate change after developing an initial interest at a young age.
Her father added it was ‘understandable’ for the police to investigate what he called ‘an act of desecration’.
He said: ‘I can’t really apologise on her behalf. Sir Tom was clearly a national hero and the country resonated with his fantastic and amazing actions.
‘However shocking the future of climate change predictions are, I don’t think it was her duty to desecrate his memory in the way she has.
‘Her motivations are very real but misplaced. The fact is she has gone rogue, so to speak.
‘When people are young and vulnerable they can go down roads they would not do later in life. It is a horrible thing to have happened and people are obviously upset.
‘It is very hard to understand how young people can feel so threatened by climate change that they can carry out such extreme actions.
‘But I’m not making excuses for her. She has made a terrible mistake. We were horrified, it’s an ongoing worry.’

The man whose statue Maddie desecrated was an elderly veteran who became a national hero in England by raising money for the health service during the COVID-19 pandemic. Captain Tom Moore was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in July 2020. He died last year.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

“Climate change” is a political propaganda operation, not a genuine crisis. As an activist movement, it dates to the 1990s, when the Left found itself in need of some new “cause” to replace the “No Nukes” movement.

How many of y’all are old enough to remember “No Nukes”? In 1979, a bunch of rock music celebrities staged a concert that became an album and a documentary film intended to promote unilateral disarmament by the West in its Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. The nuclear disarmament movement was always pro-Soviet and anti-American, and if it was not indeed a Communist Party front, certainly its goals were in line with Soviet policy. A friend of mine, Chris Cassone, knew several of the musicians involved in the “No Nukes” protests and speaks with emphatic disdain of the various rock celebrities who got themselves arrested in 1981 protesting the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California.

Once the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s, it took with it one of the Left’s big rallying points — opposition to the U.S. military, and especially the fear of nuclear war — and thus created a need for some new “cause” to unite the forces of anti-Americanism. Eventually, this gave rise to the movement to destroy American industry, especially oil and gas production, in the name of stopping “global warming.”

One of the telltale indicators that this was about politics, and not science, was when they made the switch from talking about “global warming” to talking about “climate change.” Do you know why that happened? First, because over the past 20 years or so, worldwide temperatures have stopped increasing; the infamous “hockey stick” projection — first published by Michael Mann in 1998 — simply hasn’t happened. Insofar as “experts” made date-certain predictions of near-term future catastrophes (this or that disastrous consequence would happen by 2010 or 2015 or 2020) all their prophecies turned out to be false. But the second reason that the phrase “global warming” was replaced with “climate change” was because there was an uncanny tendency for blizzards to strike whenever major conferences and speeches about the alleged crisis were scheduled in the winter. After several such incidents, the organizers of the “global warming” industry (which is what it had become by the early 21st century, an industry employing thousands of people) realized their public-relations problem. They couldn’t schedule any events about “global warming” between October and April without risking another laughable example of what became known as “The Gore Effect”:

The so-called Gore Effect happens when a global warming-related event, or appearance by the former vice president and climate change crusader, Al Gore, is marked by exceedingly cold weather or unseasonably winter weather.
For instance, in March, 2007, a Capitol Hill media briefing on the Senate’s new climate bill was cancelled due to a snowstorm.
On Oct. 22 [2008], Gore’s global warming speech at Harvard University coincided with near 125-year record-breaking low temperatures. And less than a week later, on Oct. 28, the British House of Commons held a marathon debate on global warming during London’s first October snowfall since 1922.

Because of this public-relations problem, the term “climate change” was substituted for “global warming” and, believe it or not, activists began arguing that excessively cold weather, including record-breaking snowfall, was also proof of “climate change.” Basically, any kind of weather could be claimed as evidence in support of their theory, which is so elastic that it is impossible to disprove it. And a theory which cannot be disproved is not science. It’s a quasi-religious cult.

One of the tactics of cults is to isolate their members, especially turning them against their own families. The estrangement between Maddie Budd and her family — she doesn’t even reply to her father’s text messages — is just further confirmation of what we already knew about the climate-change movement. The indoctrination and “echo chamber” tendency (where all dissent is silenced, and critics are demonized as enemies) are self-evident to any intelligent observer.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: Global Warming

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