Dianne Feinstein caught a lot of flack over the weekend after an out-of-context video went viral. The clip shows Feinstein’s exchange with a bunch of kids from a radical environmentalist group called the Sunrise Movement. The kids demand that Feinstein support the Green New Deal while the senator does her level best to educate the youngsters on the finer points of the legislative process.
The outraged masses claim that Feinstein was “disrespectful” and “rude” to the children. The full video clearly shows that she was enormously patient, at one point offering an internship to one of the kids. Even the short clip is favorable to Feinstein. She isn’t the one who needs to apologize for her behavior. The impertinence was entirely on the part of the kids, who spent several minutes lecturing and scolding an adult. I’m old fashioned enough to still believe in respecting your elders. The parents of these children have clearly neglected to teach them that crucial lesson.
But the most disturbing thing about the footage, aside from the bratty behavior of those poorly-raised children, is the very real fear you can hear in their voices and see on their faces. They really believe that the world might soon end and the Green New Deal is the only thing that can pull us back from the brink. They believe such nonsense because that’s what the adults in their lives have told them. Environmentalism is a doomsday cult, and millions of kids are being indoctrinated into it.
The high priestess of the cult, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, warns us that the situation is so dire that we should probably stop having kids. That makes sense, I guess, because she also thinks the world is going to end in 12 years. The UN takes a slightly more optimistic view, prophesying mere catastrophe in 12 year’s time, though perhaps not the end of all things.
A climate alarmist with a huge social media following put the prophesy in more colorful terms:
Preventing the Earth from descending into a lifeless husk of a planet in a geological blink of an eye is technologically possible, experts say. But it will require confiscating unearned wealth from billionaires and ending the pointless wars we’ve been fighting for generations.
A lifeless husk? We couldn’t turn the Earth into a lifeless husk if we tried. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It has survived asteroids, super volcano eruptions, nuclear blasts, ice ages, and countless other cataclysms. The idea that a couple hundred years of industrialized society could, as they claim, “destroy the planet,” is absurd in the extreme. It’s incredibly arrogant, too. A cosmic scale event is required to destroy a planet. The collapse of a star, a planetary collision, a black hole — these are planet destroyers. Your SUV won’t cut it.
These people are moments away from strapping on sandwich board signs with “THE END IS NEAR” written across in black marker. From there it’s only another step to a bowl of cyanide Kool-Aid. Ocasio-Cortez is the organic Harold Camping, an End Times prophet shouting about Armageddon. Al Gore carried that mantle before her, and there were others before him. When I was a kid, I was told that we’d all soon suffocate because of oxygen depletion due to deforestation. Environmentalists have more failed apocalypse predictions than Jehovah’s Witnesses. And they’re only getting bolder, and louder, and more hysterical as time passes.
Despite all of this madness, it is actually possible to advocate for environmental responsibility, conservation, recycling, and other wholesome practices, without sounding like the Book of Revelation. We cannot and will not “destroy the planet” or turn it into a “lifeless husk” or bring about the end of all existence through cow farts and car exhaust, but we can make our planet a more or less pleasant place to live depending on our stewardship of it. That may not be a very dramatic or attention-grabbing message, but at least it has the benefit of truth and sanity. And it won’t traumatize our children.
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