If you watch enough cable news, you start to realize there are a handful of bankable segments. These are segments that describe some outrageous behavior, which the media presents as shocking. They’ll all pretend to be very concerned by it. But in fact, this behavior happens all the time, and the media loves it when it happens, because it lets them fill air time on slow news days.
There’s maybe no more obvious example of this phenomenon than so-called “protests” by climate activists. Every time purple-haired climate nuts deface a historic work of art, or throw paint on the side of a building, it’s usually good for a quick 2-minute segment on cable news and a few viral posts on social media. “Why are those theater kids so upset with the Mona Lisa?”, befuddled panelists will ask themselves. “Why are the Oberlin sophomores at the Sunrise Movement surrounding that politician who’s just trying to get to his car? They sure are crazy!”
This kind of thing happens constantly. At this point, you can only roll your eyes when you see it.
And you’ve been seeing a lot of it lately. A few days ago, for example, climate activists smashed the glass protecting Velazquez’s Venus painting in London’s National Gallery. And before that, just a few weeks ago, protesters glued themselves to signs in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. There are many more examples, but the point is, these climate lunatics act out and deface property all the time. And then there’s some angry news segments about it and then everyone moves on.
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This is the familiar cycle. Radicals who are fixated on climate change, almost all of whom are severely mentally ill, are treated as nuisances. In fact, we often pity them, because they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about, nor do they remotely understand how to persuade others to join their cause, and they are in general hopelessly deluded.
But the truth — which no one wants to say out loud, for some reason — is that these climate activists are not simply nuisances. They are, instead, a mortal threat to sane people everywhere. They are enemies of civilization who endanger the lives of innocents. If you don’t believe that, or if that sounds too extreme, consider this story from 24-hours ago, which corporate media in the United States has not covered at all. As the Telegraph reported, the group “Just Stop Oil” gathered at London’s Waterloo bridge, where they blocked an ambulance carrying a patient with a “life-or-death” injury. Here’s what that looked like:
According to the Telegraph, in this episode, “An ambulance arrived with blue lights and sirens but was held up in traffic for ten minutes. The driver of the ambulance told The Telegraph: ‘I am responding to a life-and-death emergency — I am going to pick up a team from Guy’s hospital to save someone’s life at another hospital but can’t get through.'”
Apparently, this ambulance driver was on his way to another hospital on behalf of a patient whose lungs had stopped working, someone who needed urgent medical attention. So, as the Telegraph reported, the ambulance driver, “pleaded with police officers to let him through on multiple occasions as he became increasingly angry. Officers said they were working to let him through as quickly as they could as activists lay on the ground.”
In this case, as far as I can tell, the patient in the ambulance survived, thankfully. But ask yourself this question: Why haven’t you heard this story? How many reports have you heard about climate activists tossing paint in museums? Why is the media reporting about that, and not the people these climate activists nearly killed?
It’s worth answering that question, especially since, unfortunately, people have died during — and perhaps because of — these unhinged climate protests. Here’s one example, which also received zero attention from our media. A year ago this month, a cyclist in Berlin died after climate activists prevented her from getting to the hospital. As the BBC reported, the 44-year-old woman was hit by a concrete truck. And then, “The fire service says a specialist rescue vehicle was delayed by traffic because of a climate protest held by a group called ‘Last Generation’.” A senior Green Party figure condemned the climate protesters after the woman’s death, saying, “Anyone who risks the health and life of others loses all legitimacy and also harms the climate movement itself.”
What’s left unsaid here — and what really needs to be said — is that anyone who blocks traffic is “risking the health and life of others.” They are guilty of reckless endangerment at a minimum, and murder if someone dies as a result of their little blockade. It is little different, morally, from someone who goes outside and starts firing a gun into the air at random targets. Maybe they won’t hit anyone. Maybe they aren’t trying to hit anyone. But they are doing something incredibly reckless, with total disregard for the damage it may cause.
But that’s not how these people are being treated. Instead, with very few exceptions, police officers are allowing climate activists to blockade roads with total impunity. That’s been happening in Panama for the past three weeks. As The Daily Mail reports, “Road blocks set up by protesters have caused up to $80 million in daily losses to businesses, according to Panama’s association of company executives, with schools closed nationwide for over a week and more than 150,000 medical appointments missed.” These protesters are blocking a major thoroughfare — the Pan-American Highway, roughly 50 miles west of Panama City.
The point of this ‘protest,’ apparently, is that Panama’s government signed a deal with a Canadian company, giving them 20 years’ worth of mining rights. Whatever the motivation is, these blockades are clearly putting people’s lives in danger. When more than a hundred thousand medical appointments are being missed, and businesses are suffering $80 million in losses per day, then you are engaging in a violent protest. There is no other way to frame it. When people miss medical appointments, they tend to get sicker. And some of those people might die. On top of that, store owners who lose money every day are going to be forced to make up the revenue in some other way, which might expose them to personal risk that we can’t possibly account for. This is what happens when the rule of law breaks down. This is why the rule of law is so important.
But, for whatever reason, authorities in Panama never did clear this blockade, at any point in the past three weeks. They allowed these protesters to prevent people from accessing medical care, from getting to their jobs, and from getting anywhere else they wanted to go. What happened next?
Well, on Tuesday, a 77-year-old man named Kenneth Darlington — who’s apparently an American lawyer with dual citizenship — decided he had enough. He got out of his car, approached the blockade, and then shot two of the climate protesters dead. Here’s a clip of the moment leading up to the shooting:
This is Kenneth Darlington. He had enough. pic.twitter.com/lmgdRkTtPO
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 9, 2023
There are a bunch of news reports describing Kenneth Darlington’s actions as “horrific” and “shocking.” The New York Post, for example, had this headline about the incident: “American lawyer, 77, busted in Panama after gunning down two eco-protesters blocking highway in shocking video.” But that’s not really true. Yes, he did gun down two eco-protesters, but there’s nothing shocking about it, if you’ve been paying attention. What he did is obviously wrong, it’s murder plain and simple, and cannot be condoned. But shocking?
No, in fact, the only thing really surprising about Kenneth Darlington’s reaction is that he’s the first person to react this way, in the face of a completely unreasonable, sustained blockade of a road that thousands of people depend on for their livelihoods. We’ve seen suggestions that people have had enough of this kind of thing, to be sure. A few weeks ago, for example, a tribal cop in Nevada plowed through one of these climate blockades, and made some arrests. For a very long time, Left-wing protesters have been harassing, accosting, intentionally inconveniencing and interfering with normal people trying to go about their day. They have obstructed ambulances and other emergency vehicles. They have vandalized and destroyed. They have intentionally added stress, hostility, and ugliness to the world.
To be clear, nothing I’m saying is intended to endorse Darlington’s actions. The point here is not to encourage anyone else to respond the way he did. I wish this hadn’t happened. I wish those people were never in the road to begin with. I wish that when Darlington pulled the gun, they had responded like sane people, and realized that they had pushed this man too far, and simply gotten out of the road, where they had no right to be in the first place. I wish it had played out differently, but it didn’t.
Instead, what I’m saying is that it was always inevitable that something like this would happen eventually. The Ruling Class can only suspend law enforcement for so long, and so arbitrarily, until a Kenneth Darlington appears and takes matters into his own hands. And now that this precise scenario has happened, I’m betting it won’t be the last time. People are increasingly fed up and exhausted. Even the response to this incident on social media shows that. These leftist protesters are intentionally pushing people to the brink. Regardless of your politics, you can hopefully agree: That’s not a smart thing to do. It’s especially a dumb thing to do on a highway.
Road rage incidents are pretty common all over the world. People get stressed out in traffic — unreasonably so — and often they lash out and do drastic things. This is why it’s a really bad idea to flip somebody off in traffic because you’re mad they cut you off or whatever. You don’t know who is in that car. You don’t know what kind of day they’re having. You don’t know what kind of life they’re having. You don’t know how on edge, how fed up, how completely and totally done with your bull**** they might possibly be. That’s not to say you deserve to have them pull up beside you and open fire, you don’t deserve to be killed for waving your middle finger around, but if that’s the response you get, it can’t be denied that you could have easily avoided it by making better choices in the moment.
Now imagine blocking an entire road full of traffic, and effectively giving the middle finger to hundreds of stress out commuters all at once, who are just trying to get home from work, or get to wherever else they’re going. You’re asking for trouble.
There is an image of Kenneth Darlington making the rounds on social media. It became an instantly famous picture.
An old man just shot 2 climate activists who were blocking a highway in Panama pic.twitter.com/F0iDRyALfb
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 9, 2023
You can see Darlington, standing there point the gun, right after he fired it. It’s a fascinating picture in many ways. A picture worth a thousand words, as they say. The most interesting thing about it is Darlington’s expression. He’s not screaming. He doesn’t look enraged. He doesn’t have the expression of a man who has gone totally insane. Instead he looks exhausted. He looks tired. He looks like a man simply fed up. There are a lot of people like that in the world today. People who just want to live their lives, and yet they find, every step of the way, forces intentionally trying to make their lives worse and more difficult. People who have watched the total breakdown of law and order, and who have been pushed to the brink, and over it, because of it. That’s not an endorsement of Darlington’s actions. It’s just an observation about the state of the world.
And it’s a state that has been engineered by the people in charge. Whether in Panama or the U.K. or this country, the authorities take a pretty lackadaisical, overly tolerant approach to Left-wing protesters engaged in these kinds of disruptions, or doing things even worse than blocking traffic. If they wanted to protect human life, preserve order, and prevent outcomes like this, you’d think they’d crack down on the people blockading highways, vandalizing artwork, et cetera. You’d think they’d make sure the Pan-American Highway wasn’t shut down for the better part of a month. But the authorities are not doing any of that — which can only lead you to the conclusion that they don’t want to preserve order at all.