In contrast to the social and news media entourages that used to follow them, the return of Extinction Rebellion (XR) to Westminster’s streets has received little attention. A few tweets, mostly from those affected by today’s occupation of Tufton Street, drew more notice than XR’s own. “The unemployed and weird take on 55 Tufton street,” said Anna Ridgway of Students for Liberty. “Soapdodgers at it again outside 55 Tufton Street,” said the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Ted Newson.
The group officially declared that its style of “public disruption as a primary tactic” had come to an end at the end of 2022. “What’s needed now most” in its place, they claimed “is to disrupt the abuse of power and imbalance, to bring about a transition to a fair society that works together to end the fossil fuel era”. But the truth is that there was no bunch of idiots more capable of drawing rage – not against the climate crisis and the cause of the climate crisis, but against themselves and their radical environmentalism. It had been founded as part of the broader ‘Climate Mobilisation’ movement, which aimed to radicalise the public by doubling down on climate alarmism. But instead it beclowned its own fold.
As I’ve pointed out: just look at them. Do they look to anybody else like the kind of people we might turn to for expertise on society’s functioning? They are not dressed to be taken seriously. And they do not argue like people asking to be taken seriously. Indeed, they style themselves as absurd creatures. There cannot be a more counterproductive strategy of public engagement. It is alienating, weird and irritating. And it was very soon shown to have been so at the so-called 2019 “battle of Canning Town”, where the rough-and-ready commuters showed XR activists exactly what they thought of being obstructed.
But as Oscar Wilde once observed, “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.” And so it has been a miserable three years for the eco-narcissists who had to get used to the indulgence of the sympathetic press. True, those who were desperate enough could have joined Just Stop Oil (JSO) or some other XR franchise. But JSO itself declared victory on the first week of the new Labour government, following the July 2024 General Election. Citing “the new governments’ commitment to end new oil and gas licensing”, JSO seemed to be explaining its winding down. Besides, many of its terminal narcissists were now behind bars.
