On April 15th 2019 the new far left extremist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) will begin the next phase in its Civil Disobedience program aiming to paralyze London. The group’s call to action specific to the 15th asks participants to gather in Parliament Square in London with tents and food and the goal of “blocking road access to the center of the city” in the hope of shutting down the city center.
An offshoot of the failed Occupy movement, XR would necessitate no special coverage were it not for promotion by Russia Today, Putin’s main propaganda organ in the West, and that violence appears to be its thinly veiled approach to achieving its goals. The extremist group’s so-called “Guide for Participants” claims XR is “peaceful, alcohol and drugfree” though you need not look far to debunk these claims.
For starters, a directly correlated Preparation for Rebellion event on April 13th is hosted by the Psychedelic Society and XR cofounder Gail Bradbook whose affairs with shamanism and psychedelic inspired hysteria can be easily found. By her own admission, Bradbook was so lost after the failure of the Occupy movement she saw no choice but to fly to Costa Rica and take part in an Ayahuasca ritual. Similarly, the research required to debunk the “peaceful” myth is as easy as attending the XR’s official Frequently Asked Questions page. Mere sentences after claiming to be “strictly and avowedly nonviolent” the website goes on to state “Polite lobbying, marching, voting, consumer and shareholder activism, have all failed. We are now on the brink. If asking the establishment nicely doesn’t get them to act, then the only option left is civil disobedience, to disrupt the ordinary working of things, so that decision makers HAVE to take notice.” Though wise to the effect a direct call for violence on their FAQ’s page would have, prevaricating is the modus operandi of this movement’s every word.
The evidence to suggest they have little else but violence in mind is readily available if one cares to dig. Cofounder Roger Hallam (a career radical ‘social organizer’) routinely makes it clear violence is an inevitability. In a lecture with Real Media he speaks longingly of the backfire effect, giving the example of a very small group of “peasants” agitating landowners into violence, thus providing optics that galvanize the rest of the public into rebelling.
An important note to take away from this is the indifference of the original rebellion toward the public’s understanding of the actual movement or message for which they revolt. Instead, the aim is to take advantage of the population based on a strategically concocted emotional response. Hallam goes on in the same lecture to avow the strategy of ‘creating shit now’ [sic] so that “people will mobilize because London has ground to a halt. Now, the fact that London has ground to a halt because you’re blocking the streets is neither here nor there. Because people aren’t rational, they don’t think ‘that’s not actually about climate change so I’m not going to get upset.’ They get upset, then they start thinking about climate change because they’re upset because there’s shit happening on the street.” In other words, first you must agitate the public, then provide them with a scapegoat of a justification for their irrationality to weaponize their behavior and stoke the public discord. Does this sound strictly and avowedly like a movement with interests in nonviolence?
The fraudulence pervasive in Extinction Rebellion and its partially defunct founding organization Rising Up take only a cursory amount of research to appreciate. However, a refined look at the organization raises some serious questions. For one, why does this seem so familiar? A global map provided by the XR website to help participants find local chapters to get involved leaves a few big players on the world’s stage entirely blank, chiefly Russia and China. Putin knows as well as all 184 countries that signed the Paris Accord that energy is key to commerce and thus the country with the most dominant oil and gas market is firmly positioned at the top of the global food chain. The Kremlin’s constant protests that Russian gas, and especially gas produced by the government-owned Gazprom, will always be cheaper than American Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) holds a feeble grip with reality, as American LNG glutted the market in March of 2019 and is expected to be nearly a third cheaper than the Russian alternative in the European market. The Extinction Rebellion movement has taken a harder line against fracking then any other “eco holocaust” fear mongering organization, as is its demand that the West “reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025,” a clear impossibility that would require all fracking and fossil fuels to be stopped immediately. It’s a shame that such an eco-conscious organization never quite made it to China, the biggest polluter in the world, or anywhere near Russia for that matter.
Coincidence becomes a difficult narrative to swallow given that in January of 2017 an assessment by the Director of the Office of National Intelligence revealed that RT America TV, a Kremlin financed channel operated from within the United States “… runs antifracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.” There is an abundance of examples of Russian support for social movement warfare, including Occupy Wall Street’s own cofounder Micah White acknowledging “although it is rarely discussed, the Occupy movement received substantial support from Russia.” Additionally, another Occupy cofounder, Lee Camp ,who now hosts a TV show on RT America TV called “Redacted Tonight” makes his bias in favor of the movement a joke. Were he not conducting his show on the Kremlin’s dime we could all sit back and not laugh at this self professed comedian’s attempt at jokes. The examples are endless. On the heels of the Mueller report, which debunked the collusion and obstruction of justice narratives, let alone the rumored Trump/Putin love affair, it seems important to at least acknowledge the dots if not connect them.
As April 15th approaches yet another band of rabid leftists are clearly willing to engage in violence for political ends. They may or may not be able to paralyze London, but we should not forget those that egg them on.
By Eric Alexiev
