What is 'Just Stop Oil' (and other XR franchises)?

Extinction Rebellion spin-off, Just Stop Oil has been indulged by endless media attention, which sheds little light on this bizarre cult. Instead, they serve its purpose.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) formed in Autumn 2018, and were characterised by their development of direct action that had characterised earlier green organisations such as Greenpeace. Rather than directing their stunts against large polluting companies, XR took direct action against the public, blocking bridges and roads in the capital. Since then, XR seems to have somewhat faded away, perhaps because of controversies caused by its co-founders’ ridiculous statements. But it has either re-branded or spawned a clutch of franchises, one of which is Just Stop Oil (JSO), that has for the last fortnight caught news media attention for vandalising art galleries and stopping traffic. But who and what are they?

The confusion that greets every news report of XR franchisees’ stunts is the failure of the Police to simply pick these people up off the road and cart them off to the Magistrates court — or the criminal court for repeat offenders.

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Just Stop Oil activists have struck again this morning, infuriating motorists by blocking the A4 into London. The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge joining Essex to Kent remains closed after activists climbed it yesterday. @JustStop_Oil | @InsulateLove

The Police seem to be standing around and only there to protect the “protesters” from angry members of the travelling public, who just want to go to work, to schools, hospitals, and so on. Others have observed the new fact of two-tier (or more) policing policy in the UK: whereas XR seem to be treated with immense caution by cops, politically incorrect protests saw the full force of the law being applied. In one notable case recently, a police officer is seen warning a journalist engaging in a conversation with a campaigner that if he used the word ‘insidious’ again, he would be arrested.

Perhaps at root of the confusion is the fact that XR franchises like JSO are not what they seem. JSO are not doing this because the government is refusing to do what they demand. The government, nearly all MPs and Lords in Parliament, civil society organisations, and most of the news media want the same thing as these green ideological zombies. JSO are taking direct action because the public don't want the policy agenda that the political establishment desires.

The cops are no less confused about who they are supposed to be serving.

When XR turned up in late 2018, they demanded Net Zero, that a "climate emergency" must be declared, and that a Climate Assembly must be convened.

They soon got what they wanted. The following year, Parliament declared a "climate emergency", passed Net Zero (increasing the Climate Change Act’s emissions-reduction target from 80% to 100%), and announced that a Climate Assembly would be convened.

This was a catastrophic indulgence. The mentality that is characterised by XR morons is generated by society’s continued failure to tackle a dark, malevolent, anti-human ideology.

The era of environmentalism’s ascendency is characterised by the decline of democratic politics and the collapse of seemingly liberal, enlightenment principles. People with dissenting views are excluded from public life, ridding universities, media and politics of debate and criticism, and leaving green ideology to fester. XR and its franchises epitomise reason’s exit from the body politic. It has been flushed out by harassment, censure, orthodoxies and endless streams of cash from degenerate billionaires and their descendents.

It is no surprise then, that we now have an army of ideological zombies who believe their behaviour is permitted — the dysfunctional offspring of the political class. Just as a child who never hears the word 'no' grows up to be a toxic individual, these narcissists have never been confronted by society. They are only ever indulged.

Rather than being confronted, at every stage of its encroachment into public institutions, environmentalism has been welcomed. At every level of government, from local to global, no questions have been asked. No questions, no debate, no votes required. To even ask a question, never mind to criticise green ideology or the climate agenda is to mark oneself as a denier.

Thus, with no resistance in front of it, and billionaires’ cash pushing it on, green ideology became the state religion of the political class. And that is how this faction of fuckwit quasi-functionaries was spawned.

Throughout its history, direct action has been the preferred MO of radical green movements that lacked the public support necessary to generate conventional democratic political power. In 2009, for example, Greenpeace activists scaled the Palace of Westminster to fly flags and drape banners that demanded “change the politics, save the climate”.

This form of political activism preferred spectacle rather than debate to advance its claims. Of course it did — its adherents’ understanding of the world is emotional, symbolic, and highly moralistic, and as such they were incapable of debate. You cannot argue with stupid, and you cannot reason with emotional injunctions. It is a tantrum.

But the state had a use for its ill-disciplined idiot children. The one-time radical anarchist anti-road protesters of the early '90s, for example, faced so little resistance that they soon ended up as civil servants on 6-figure salaries. Protest and disruption became official career paths into well-rewarded positions servicing the green agenda in the state directly, or in civil society organisations, or for the genuinely useless: in academia.

For years, nothing seemed to be capable of stopping the green agenda rolling on. A cross-party consensus was achieved. All parties and MPs were aligned. The politics really had changed. The Climate Change Act was passed with practically zero opposition. Windfarms sprang up across the countryside like mushrooms in autumn. Coal-fired power stations came down. But by the late 2010s, there remained only one obstacle: the public.

Despite the Westminster consensus, the public had its own ideas about what political priorities should determine policies. And who. It had just voted for Brexit. And in the US, voters had appointed Donald Trump. This was a political earthquake, signalling to global and supranational political institutions that the reassertion of democratic power threatened to overturn the agenda.

This shock brought home to the blob that it was not a 'movement' in any conventional sense. It completely lacked a popular base and policies, to which the establishment was completely aligned with, had no democratic mandate.

This is a problem for climate warriors that I had pointed out some time earlier. Ed Miliband, who had been the Labour Party’s climate champion, had epitomised the political establishment’s divorce from the public when he had mourned the absence of a popular movement to support the climate policy agenda. Said Miliband,

When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilization. Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.

But his remarks came after the policy (the Climate Change Act) had been created. Miliband had politics upside down: in general, popular movements form before policy agendas, to demand them; they aren’t created after the fact to support them. Miliband, a stranger to democratic politics, was only just beginning to understand that this inversion left the green agenda with an increasingly unwieldy top-heavy, target-based policy agenda, which, as I and plenty of others have observed, had no clear route to implementation, and which demanded massive sacrifices by the public, which they had not given their assent to.

The blob’s response was an attempt to mobilise a popular movement through its favoured mode of engagement — fearmongering — and to synthesise, rather than achieve a mandate.

You can see it very clearly in XR founders’ own words. They believed that if you could convince the public that climate change was a threat to them equivalent to "ten Hitlers", then they would produce overwhelming support for the agenda.

Here is Gail Bradbrook giving evidence to a Parliamentary committee in 2019. She makes constant reference to World War II in the belief that the public, like the political establishment, can be aligned to the climate agenda if it can be made sufficiently fearful of the threat of climate change.

And you can see it in the established organisational apparatus of the green blob: the question how to make the public believe that the public had demanded a draconian green policy agenda. That is how the idea of the climate assembly was formed.

This 2018 report by the UK’s oldest green think tank, The Green Alliance, which is embedded in Parliament, is a fascinating and frank acknowledgement by the green blob, that it has no democratic legitimacy. It cites many MPs complaining that the public just isn’t interested in the climate agenda, and doesn’t share the green ideological perspective. Nonetheless, it attempts to justify falsifying a democratic mandate, just as Miliband’s inversion of democratic politics had a decade earlier.

We offer recommendations for developing a renewed political mandate for climate action in the UK. We suggest that there needs to be more clarity about where responsibility lies for meeting the targets enshrined in the Climate Change Act and that this should be shared between government departments and local areas.

Greater use of deliberative processes, such as citizens’ assemblies, could allow politicians, the public and experts to meet on equal terms, assess evidence and agree how targets could be met in ways that improve social and economic outcomes.

Bradbrook from the seemingly most radical limb of the green blob, and the Green Alliance from the most establishment, were aligned in the view that the public could be mobilised by fear, and that people would overcome their growing scepticism of the political establishment, if they could be persuaded to see other "ordinary people" — not politicians — making decisions in the “climate assembly”.

This was of course, no coincidence. Neither were working independently. They were drawing from the ideas (such as they were) developed by the Climate Mobilization project, and adapted them for the UK.

The project was formed around the idea that "We need a whole-society mobilization to prevent climate catastrophe", and was influential throughout the green blob. It promised a strategy of amping up the fearmongering to drive a more committed and much larger "movement" of activists, to help to overcome the impasse and inertia that had frustrated the green blob's funders. They began pumping money into projects that offered to clone the Climate Mobilization's template.

It was based on the hypothesis of Margaret Klein Salamon, an obscure psychologist, who believed her insight could be used, not to help people overcome their anxieties, but to provoke anxiety, to make them obedient to a political agenda. As I have pointed out previously here, Academic psychology is a nasty joke.

Klein-Salamon’s thesis Leading the Public Into Emergency Mode: Introducing the Climate Emergency Movement is credited with being the blueprint from which ‘Extinction Rebellion, School Strikers, Sunrise Movement, and more’ were formed.

But the more likely truth of the matter is that Klein Salamon’s insights are prosaic, and thin justifications for fearmongering; the real drive of these movements was the cash provided to them, and their proximity to power. And we can see the influence directly:

"Imagine your house is on fire". Do those words sound familiar?

Yes. Thunberg too, the apparent instigator of the school strikes movement was herself the creation of the Climate Mobilization. She wanted you to panic.

The "climate emergency movement" even has its own fund -- The Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) to provide seed funding for XR-style projects, and introduce to larger "philanthropic" foundations once established. As Owen Evens reports,

Just Stop Oil, a spin-off from Extinction Rebellion, is funded by the Climate Emergency Fund, which itself is funded by the oil heirs from the Getty and Rockefeller families Aileen Getty, Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert, and Peter Gill Case.

Back in the late 2010s, the nascent XR was funded by the the also newly formed CEF, and by UK billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, in a personal donation, and through his investment firm’s fake philanthropy outfit the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation — as the Telegraph reported. The European Climate Foundation (ECF — not to be confused with CEF!), to which Hohn is the biggest donor, and de facto controller, also funded XR.

Why is this significant?

It explains how XR, the seemingly scruffy, radical, anti-capitalist green zealots were funded by the same parties — billionaire hedge fund managers — behind the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) — a group of Tory MPs formed to support the Net Zero agenda. As the CEN state, “We are funded by philanthropic foundations and donors, including the European Climate Foundation”. In 2020, Hohn’s CIFF gace ECF $52 million. In 2021, it gave $42 million. Since 2013, Hohn has given ECF over $128 million.

At face value, this is coincidental. ECF and Hohn fund nearly all UK civil society organisations that make interventions on climate. In 2021, CIFF donated over $200 million to climate organisations. In 2020, ECF gave €125 million to green organisations, €34 million of which came from Hohn himself, and€36 million of which came from anonymous sources (so much for the ‘transparency’ that green civil society organisations claim). But this funding comes with strings. Neither CIFF nor the ECF make a secret of the fact that they found and fund civil society organisations strategically, rather than merely support organisations that align with their purpose.

CEN was founded by Ben Goldsmith, who chairs the organisation. Goldsmith, brother of failed-MP, failed London Mayoral candidate, but made a Lord by Boris Johnson so that he could remain in government, Zac, is a trustee of Hohn’s CIFF. And in 2018, Ben Goldsmith was a non-executive board member of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

So XR and JSO may seem very different in appearance to their suited and booted cousins in cash over at CEN. But they driven by the same ideology. And funded by the exact same sources.

In May 2019, Michael Gove appeared in a video with XR protesters.

How odd.

A scruffy group of weirdos, with a seemingly hostile attitude to the government, from an organisation boasting its radical objectives, but which number only a few hundreds — low thousands at the most — and which has only been in existence for some nine months, gets an hour-long sit-down with a Cabinet Minister?

"Hi. We smash things up. Please can we meet with the Secretary of State?", said no one ever. Except XR.

"Anything you want?" Asks Gove.

Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from June 2017 to July 2019.

That is to say he worked with Ben Goldsmith. They were both on the DEFRA board.

Strategic funding of seemingly distinct organisations enables strategic coordination, which enables a meeting that no such organisation of just a few hundred manifestly criminal activists has never achieved before: a ministerial briefing after less than a year of existing.

Gove wanted what XR wanted, too. And so he acted as if XR really were the spontaneous expression of popular will. But in reality, it was through XRs and CEN's funders’ strategic coordination that the performance was designed.

Now the government had convinced itself that Net Zero had popular support and a programme sufficient to overcome the public’s apathy. It put the Net Zero target to Parliament.

And Parliament in turn convened the Climate Assembly, just as the XR had demanded, just as they were established to demand, to overcome the impasse.

And as I pointed out last year, in this report for the (then) Global Warming Policy Forum (now Net Zero Watch)…

The total budget for the Assembly was £520,000. Of this, the House of Commons contributed £120,000, while the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF) and the European Climate Foundation (ECF) contributed £200,000 each. Although both organisations claim to be ‘philanthropic’, there is significant overlap between their philanthropy on the one hand, and lobbying and political campaigning activity on the other.

And,

The Assembly claims that the ECF and EFF did not have a say over how its design or the way it was run, but their statement cannot be taken at face value. The ECF, for example, is the major funder of several organisations that campaigned and lobbied for the Assembly to be created, provided the research it used, provided its expert and advocate participants, and drafted the policy ideas that it considered. One of these is the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), which provided ‘communication outreach’. ECF provided the ECIU’s seed funding, and was its largest backer in 2019, providing a total of £360,000, the majority of its funding.

And,

The two foundations are also the Green Alliance’s [GA] biggest donors. Its 2017–18 annual report shows donations of up to £200,000 from the ECF, a further £120,000 from the EFF, and up to £450,000 from a major ECF donor, The Children’s Investment Fund. The GA describes itself as ‘a trailblazer for climate citizen juries’, and says its campaigning has been ‘vital to the set-up of a forthcoming national citizen assembly’. In 2019, it launched a report24 on its work in this area at a summer reception featuring speeches from then Environment Secretary, Michael Gove and Mary Creagh MP. The GA also has strong links to many of those who led 7 activities at the Assembly and to those who gave presentations to it, as described later in this report.

And,

Steve Melia, was introduced to CA members as being affiliated to the University of the West of England, but in fact he has long used his academic profile to campaign against cars, is a member of Extinction Rebellion, and is involved in direct action, for which he was arrested in April 2019.

XR franchises are a sick joke at the public’s expense.

Flattered and indulged by the government, politicians and the media, neither the Police nor courts take any interest in stopping them.

The few critical parts of the news media, meanwhile seem unable to explain their true nature: an ersatz political movement, that exists only by virtue of billionaires’ cash and influence. If it were not for the likes of Christopher Hohn, Ben Goldsmith, and Michael Gove, XR would never have been summoned into existence. If they had ever formed under their own power, they would have been truncheoned back into their holes with barely a news article to show for the bruises.

Worse, seemingly critical news commentators seem bent on giving these ideological zombies airtime, believing that more attention will hold them to account. “Why are you pouring soup over the world’s most important art?”, asks the interviewer. And there comes a machine-gunned litany of factoids about the world’s imminent collapse, none of which stand any scrutiny alone, but which together, with more behind them are an impenetrable fortress of unreason. You cannot argue with stupid.

Instead of holding zombies to account for their appetite for brains, the news media should be holding those who have created this army of idiots to account for their actions. Get Gove on the line. Ask Goldsmith what his role was. Ask Hohn, the Gettys and Bloombergs why they mobilised the ugly mob of dysfunctional, entitled idiots. They should explain the history of this dire political campaign — the absolute dregs of the green ‘movement’. And they should hold the government and opposition to account for depending on such a crew of feeble-minded zealots for their flagship policy agendas.