by J.B. Shurk
It’s been my experience that modern leftists have the disposition of Stalin, the demeanor of a middle school bully, and the temperament of a two-year-old. When they’re not outright trying to kill you, they’re either calling you names or crying about not getting their way. It’s deeply disappointing to realize how effective these bad behaviors have been in bringing the West to heel. It has to be my way!-red-diaper babies deserved a good spanking this last century; instead, they learned that when you whine and stomp your feet long enough, you can poke someone else in the eyes, steal their lunch money, and call yourself the victim.
They preached “tolerance.” We “tolerated” their bad ideas. Those bad ideas germinated into the evil we see today. And evil repaid our “tolerance” by setting to work slitting our throats. What’s the lesson? Evil will always use good people’s virtue against them, and truly good people must find the courage to slam the door on evil before it weasels inside and destroys everything.
Tolerating evil is how we have reached the point today that statues of Thomas Jefferson — a man whose words spread liberty around the world — are being removed from public display because his slanderers find him “oppressive” and “imperial.” He fought an empire, risked life and limb for others’ freedoms, yet correctly diagnosed that individual rights are key to preventing State-sanctioned evil. If people are seen as interchangeable cogs that may be controlled or discarded according to their usefulness to government power, then a hundred million people can be murdered in half a century in the name of Marx. If people, themselves, possess innate value and authority apart from and superior to the State, then murder can never be excused by tyrants hiding their slaughter behind “good intentions.” And for recognizing the inviolable moral worth of each human being and for refusing to empower the State above the people, Jefferson must be stricken from the record. Progress demands it!
It’s a tricky business, this thing the political left calls, “progress.” It only has room for a small number of ideas, is very worried about how many people should be allowed to live and have them, and elevates Earth over man. If modern comforts could be transported back in time to around 10,000 BC when only a million or so people were alive, “progress” would be within reach! (So long as those meager inhabitants understood, of course, that biological sex is merely a social construct and that an intellectual caste exists to rule over everyone else.) Even then, I suspect Bill Gates, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama would still be giving each other Nobel prizes for figuring out how best to do away with whoever’s left.
I believe in being a good custodian of the nature around me, but there has never been a point when I’m enjoying a clear stream or a magnificent mountain peak that I would have chosen the beauty before me over a human life. To value a rock or a pristine snow-capped ridge over a human being? Never! Yet I wouldn’t want to put my fate into the hands of the planet-worshippers who insist on deciding how many people should be sacrificed on Mother Nature’s behalf. The question isn’t whether little Greta Thunberg would choose to spare my life despite my insistence on exhaling carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — I’m fairly certain she would not! — but rather how many “breathers” she believes must be thrown into the volcano with me before the world is “saved.” Imagine Bill or Al or John or Barack or mad Greta, the Great staring out across some untouched meadow and coldly calculating just how many lives that meadow is worth. That’s the real Green New Deal! They just never tell the masses about the fine print at the bottom of the life insurance policies they’re writing for us from one U.N. Climate Change Conference to the next.
The whole “global warming” schtick is predicated on the idea that fractional temperature deviations (what climatologists and geologists understood as a natural condition of the planet before their expertise could be used for political and financial gain) are a threat to human life. Yet temperature fluctuations are poppycock compared to the loss of human life that will be precipitated by choking off the fuels necessary to generate electrical power. Where electricity is neither stable nor cheap, surviving the winter with scant heat is never guaranteed. Where refrigeration, water pumps, and lighting are scarce, so too are medicines, food, and personal security. Killing electricity means killing people, plain and simple. In a sane world, we would celebrate the hydrocarbons beneath our feet as gifts that have powered the innovations that allow humans not only to beat back death successfully but also to do so with increasing comfort and civilizational stability. We have flourished only as far as we have learned to master our natural resources.
Yet if you tilt your head back and listen carefully, it becomes obvious that it is not some future catastrophic weather event a century from now that animates the Davos oligarchs and their accomplices to usher in a Great Reset but rather the human flourishing going on today that they’ve decided is the real problem. There are just too many people, you see, with no end in population growth in sight unless all of the human innovations and conveniences of the last two centuries are curtailed permanently. When you pay attention to what the Green New Deal zealots are saying, they are not interested in saving life but rather in reducing it, one generation at a time. Greta and her pals have essentially reconvened the Jacobins’ Committee of Public Safety and plan to make quick work of the guillotines once again. It’s just that ordinary people don’t yet comprehend that it is their heads about to fall off into the baskets. Kind of makes you wonder if all the “woke” true believers and hipster ideologues would still applaud themselves for being on “the right side of history” if they understood that they weren’t “saving the planet” but perpetuating a kind of demographic holocaust that will naturally pick off the world’s most poor and vulnerable populations while sparing those income brackets that can afford to indulge their misanthropic frivolity as if it were all just a video game. How many people actively trying to build back better today are going to be surprised when they realize they haven’t been invited to enjoy whatever ends up being built?
It sure is perplexing why a group of world leaders so committed to controlling and reducing the human population for a Green New World Order would also concern itself with creating a life-saving “vaccine” to save the riffraff from a virus most likely created within one of its own labs. Evil always has a way of masking its true intentions, doesn’t it? Of course, choosing to tolerate evil once it arrives outside our doors, well, that’s entirely up to us.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.
