In his satirical piece below, Simon Reader shares his views on Just Stop Oil supporters’ protests aimed at getting government to halt new oil and gas licences and consents, which have included throwing orange paint over the headquarters of a climate sceptic think tank in central London, gluing themselves to roads and spraying paint over a Rolex store in Knightsbridge. He says there is nothing remotely radical about these and associated amateur terrorist acts, funded as they are by a wealthy heiress whose grandfather was an oil and gas baron. You couldn’t make it up. – Sandra Laurence
Nothing remotely radical about today’s “protestors”
By Simon Lincoln Reader*
I’ve been thinking about ways to stem the tide of the hyper-privileged, narcissistic protestors contaminating London’s museums, shopping markets, streets and government institutions every single day this month. I’ve heard there’s a lively frog endemic to western Amazonia that, when aroused, secretes from its anus an odour – a combination of a decomposing corpse and an unwashed wet towel – that stays in the nostrils of anyone with the misfortune to encounter it for years. One 19th century Portuguese explorer was so tortured by it that he drank two bottles of rum; when the smell was still there, he blew his brains out.
Admittedly procuring such a creature would be challenging. You’d have to go to Peru, sneak up on it in the prayer it wasn’t randy, capture it, smuggle it back past the UK border before positioning it in the air-conditioning mains of a gallery or department store unfortunate enough to find itself in the crosshairs of these insufferable bastards. Then you have to start exciting the thing – tickling it with a feather or something.
“Just Stop Oil”, “Just Stop Dairy” or any other associated amateur terrorist act is the subject of the worst kept secret in Britain today: there is nothing remotely radical about these people – unless you consider shrieking men in women’s dresses, or hirsute young women, “radical”. Now on their 28th day of “peaceful disobedience”, their funding (a wealthy heiress whose grandfather was an oil and gas baron) is not radical. Their supporters (the media and its obedient little armies of chronic masturbator fact-checkers, the Archbishop of Canterbury, ex-sportsmen, etc) are not radical. Their objectives for our future are identical to those of the 3-letter, unelected institutions who appear to be the world’s real power centres.
Which explains why witnessing the police “arresting” these protestors is farcical: all have been released without the prospect of further charges. So basically these idiots lie down in a road, or vomit on a Bugatti dealership, the police rock up, and take them to the cop shop, where they are made tea before they get to scream at the desk sergeant on how he should be repenting for his whiteness. Then they march off singing about how disgusted they are with their parents that they weren’t born in Cuba four decades ago before the station commander sheepishly calls the biohazard unit because, obviously, the “protestors” haven’t showered in weeks.
And that’s an awkward point but a valid one: when Brigitte Bardot went naked for baboons or whatever, or Jane Fonda decided that the Khmer Rouge was the most awesome political movement ever, there was style to their “resistance”, however tenuous their grasp of the subject (which is the only thing they share with the contemporary iteration). It’s an observation that is increasingly popular: these people dress extremely badly, wearing clothes (again, when the men aren’t wearing stockings and g-strings) that you would ordinarily associate with toddlers.
There is also the theory that their structures have been infiltrated by extremely nasty actors, and no, not the likes of Seth Rogan or Mark Ruffalo, but bad, bad dudes, like the FSB, or the Saudi’s General Intelligence Presidency. This theory is largely jeered at, because if these guys are ultimately working with European governments they claim are enemies – then it would be like the Americans doing mental research on bat Coronaviruses in a hostile country with substandard biolab security protocols. And that just wouldn’t happen now, would it?
There doesn’t appear to be a bottom to this. It’s almost as if we are watching someone being shot in the face at 10,000 frames per second, which sounds fun, until we realise that we’re the ones doing the shooting – and it’s actually our face. By then it’s too late; the bullet is entering our top lip.
- Simon Lincoln Reader works and lives in London. You can follow him on Substack.
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