If there’s one thing that’s notable about the Climate Cult, it’s what an exclusive club it really is. Climate conferences burst with private jets and limousines. “School Climate Strikes” are awash with immaculate private school blazers and hyphenated surnames. Even Gaia-on-Earth, the Swedish Doom Goblin herself, is the scion of multi-millionaires.
And you’ll hear more Oxbridge accents at an Extinction Rebellion protest than at Free Whipping and Caviar Night at Madame Lash’s.
Here in Britain, noisy greens are often strikingly well-to-do. When Extinction Rebellion clogs the streets of London, you feel like you’ve crashed an aristocratic drinks party.
Everywhere you turn there’s someone yelling “Cut carbon emissions!” in a cutglass accent that would give Queen Camilla a run for her money.
And when they’re throwing paint and making wealthy dills of themselves, you can bet their supplies came from Marks and Spencer instead of Tesco.
As soon as I saw that ecowarrior leap on a table at the World Snooker Championship, I knew he’d be a posh kid from a nice part of town […] I was right. The Sun had the skinny. The man’s name is Edred Whittingham and he’s the “son of a mega-rich investor”, the paper reported. He’s a “posh yob” who grew up in one of the leafiest parts of Cambridge.
It’s not just in Britain. The Greens and Teals voters live in the wealthiest suburbs of inner Melbourne and harbourside Sydney.
Writer Harry Mount calls them “Econians”, a green spin on Etonians. They’re the “public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world”, he says.
Studies bear out the poshness of Extinction Rebellion. A survey of the 6000 XR supporters who brought London to a standstill in April 2019 found they were “overwhelmingly middle-class (and) highly educated”.
They’re less horny-handed sons of toil than velvet-handed sons of leisure.
It’s just the continuation of a decades-long trend. The bomb-throwing radicals of the 60s and 70s were, without exception, from well-off, middle-class families. Even the Manson Family paid the bills with the credit cards Charlie’s well-off runaways stole from their wealthy families.
So, this “rage of the entitled” is hardly the “new kind of activism” Brendan O’Neill thinks it is. They’ve just stopped putting on prolier-than-thou airs. Even the socialists of the Bloomsbury Circle were all wealthy toffs who openly sneered at the working-classes.
They lecture the plebs about our carbon footprint and insist we learn to live on less. It’s a patrician finger-wag disguised as radical agitation.
Green protesting seems to have one aim only: to inconvenience working-class people.
So young Edred ruined a day out for snooker’s largely working-class audience […]
Eco-toffs who block roads – everywhere from London to Sydney and Melbourne – knowingly make life harder for people who need to earn a wage.
Last year in London, I saw young lads in paint-spattered workwear pleading with XR road-blockers to let them get home after a long day’s work. The eco-toffs looked the other way. “Don’t these ruffians know we’re saving the planet?” they were probably thinking.
Ditto the climate road-blockers whose iPhone was so memorably yeeted by an angry young man in scrubs.
You can be sure, though, that when the workers rise up against these silver-tailed loons, it only cements the toffs’ sense of moral superiority.
Irritating the great unwashed is the aim.
Convinced that hoi polloi have been brainwashed by evil capitalism, the eco-toffs feel the need to teach us a lesson. The world is burning, you morons – that’s the undertone of their arrogant activism.
XR stunts are best understood as an expression of bourgeois loathing for modern society, and aristocratic disdain for its inhabitants.
And it isn’t just the eco-movement. The left more broadly has been captured by a new graduate elite.
“Has been”? “New”?
Hate to break it to you, Brendan, old mate: but it’s been ever thus. Even in the 1940s, Orwell pinged “the astute young social-literary climbers who… and all that dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”
Hilariously, some of these privileged protesters still use phrases such as class war.
Oh, there’s a class war, for sure. And you guys are on the wrong side of it.
The Australian
The best thing to do is give them enough rope to hang themselves. As Orwell reminds us, “Offer [the ordinary man] a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight”.
Bring it on.
