“What is worth more, art or life?” asked the dumpy 21-year-old British climate activist Phoebe Plummer (they/she/he according to Plummer’s Instagram account), who gave a short, hysterical speech to horrified onlookers at London’s National Gallery last week before she and her fellow protestor Anna Holland, 20, hurled two cans of Heinz tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers and then glued their hands to the wall beneath it. The painting, which is estimated to be worth $85 million, is covered in protective glass and suffered no damage, though its frame had some minor discoloration. Security personnel promptly detained the two protestors, who were later charged with “criminal damage to the value of less than £5,000,” and rushed the painting off for examination. It was reportedly back on display by the end of the day. Plummer and Holland pleaded not guilty in a London court and were released on bail on condition that they stay away from galleries and museums and do not carry paint or adhesive substances in public places. They will be brought to trial on December 13th.
The activists come from a group called Just Stop Oil, which favors carbon-free energy. In only one of many ironies in their stunt, both of Britain’s major political parties have committed to a green energy program to make their country net carbon zero by 2035 at the latest. Plummer’s speech undermined her/his/their ostensible purpose further, for it had nothing to do with oil or energy as pollutants, but rather with rising energy costs, which increased 57%in the United Kingdom in April and are due for another sharp rise as pandemic-era government price controls lapse. The war in Ukraine and consequent sanctions on Russian energy producers will reduce supply further, as has the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which connects Russia to Europe via the Baltic Sea. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) also recently announced production cuts, which will do even more to prop up international oil prices.
Just Stop Oil is supported by something called the Climate Emergency Fund, a U.S. non-profit founded in 2019 to disburse money to activist groups that pledge to take provocative public actions to popularize climate issues. Thus far in 2022, according to its website, it has given grants totaling $4 million to 39 such organizations. Just Stop Oil is the single greatest recipient, having received $1.1 million, an amount that can definitely buy a lot of tomato soup. The Climate Emergency Fund has proclaimed this month an “October Uprising,” a phrase with unfortunate connotations of violence associated with the Russian Revolution of 1917, with actions supposedly planned in eleven countries. “Gradualism has failed,” its website boasts, “But activism works.”
Does it really? The Climate Emergency Fund’s leadership is certainly very proud of Plummer’s and Holland’s publicity, which made news reports in major outlets all over the world. “In terms of press coverage, the Van Gogh protest may be the most successful action I’ve seen in the last eight years in the climate movement,” Climate Emergency’s executive director Margaret Klein Salamon told the sympathetic Guardian without realizing how trivial she has made her industry sound. “It was a breakthrough, it succeeded in breaking through this really terrible media landscape where you have this mass delusion of normalcy. It’s time to wake up.” Salamon, who is 36, holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and is yet herself deluded enough to believe the world is full of people who think it is normal, imagines that her “work helps people to face the deeply frightening, painful truths of the climate emergency and transform their despair into effective action.”
There is no indication that anyone’s opinion of climate change is different now from what it was before the souping, even if Salamon comforts herself with the hope that her work is a kind of therapy for snowflakes troubled by existential angst, as the lumpy, gender dysphoric Plummer and her marginally less unappealing accomplice Holland seem to be. The loudest reactions instead reflect the view that the activist girls Salamon funds are silly and naïve, tools of a corporate international pressure group that appears to have used them to further a political agenda. In the same way, for years the larger climate movement has used the angry, awkward Swedish activist teenager Greta Thunberg as a public face whose age, gender, and apparently serious emotional and psychological problems protect her—and thus the larger movement—from polite public criticism. This is not the first time self-hating elements of the West have degenerated into a millenarian death cult led by a purported child saint, but what was tragedy in the Middle Ages is repeating itself as farce today. (Full disclosure: upon making a social media joke about Thunberg’s maudlin style and propensity to self-pity a few years ago, I found myself unfriended by two unrelated contacts who hold doctoral degrees).
“More protests are coming,” Salamon promises in the absence of any protest thus far other than a disputed spray painting of a New Scotland Yard sign, “this is a rapidly growing movement and the next two weeks will be, I hope, the most intense period of climate action to date, so buckle up.” We could say that we are waiting to see what her squad of emotionally damaged pseudo-activists will do next, but what seems to excite her the most is the millions of dollars guilty white liberals will continue to pour into her organization in the hope of assuaging their guilt and signaling their virtue. Aileen Getty, herself an oil heiress whose family became among the world’s richest thanks to the purportedly environmentally-unfriendly substance, has donated $1 million. Leftist Walt Disney heiress Abigail Disney has pledged $200,000. They and others like them hand over these sums like so many medieval penitents buying indulgences from the old school Roman Catholic Church so that they and their dead loved ones can proceed to Paradise with no stops. Today’s much cheaper reward-for-purchase is to live contented and unmolested in some outpost of Whitetopia, where the stability, security, and prosperity readily denied to the rest of the population can be enjoyed by the virtuous elect.
It was bad dogma then, and it is bad dogma now. Nor is it any more convincing. The Catholic Church’s militant response to anything that smacked of heresy caused it to lose half of Europe to Protestant reformers who wanted nothing to do with it. Woke environmentalism, among other features of the trendy secular humanist faith, has weighed so heavily on contemporary Europe that Hungary, Austria, Poland, Italy, and Sweden—in addition to the United Kingdom itself—have recently elected governments dominated by the nationalist conservative right, while the UK has quit the democratically deficient European project altogether. Many American candidates for public office in the imminent 2022 midterm elections castigate their opponents for pushing high-price energy policies and pledge action to reduce prices and restore energy self-sufficiently immediately upon entering office. This is probably not the reaction Salamon wants in her heart, but it will persuade those guilty liberals to keep paying up so that she can buy more soup and use what’s left over to pay herself what is probably an above-average salary for a sort of young clinical psychology Ph.D.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all came in the actual souping, or better pseudo-souping. Heinz, the American food company that produced the tomato soup in question, belonged to the family of the late Republican Senator John Heinz, who died in a plane crash in 1991. Heinz’s widow Teresa soon after became the wife of the current U.S. climate czar, former Democratic Senator and Secretary of State, and past failed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry relied upon the Heinz fortune to support his political career, including his ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign. Today he uses it to fly by private jet, which sometimes takes him to—of all things—climate change conferences, where to embarrassingly little effect he represents the Biden administration. Called out on the incongruous hypocrisy of his fancy ride, which has reportedly emitted 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide since January 20, 2021, Kerry sheepishly commented “Well, you have to get there somehow.” Maybe he can give Plummer and Holland a ride to their next job, unless Salamon wants the private jet seat for her own executive posterior and sends them on Ryanair, where they can commune with the true horrors of the world.
Soup Nazis: Climate Activist Tools Take on Vincent van Gogh
“What is worth more, art or life?” asked the dumpy 21-year-old British climate activist Phoebe Plummer (they/she/he according to Plummer’s Instagram account), who gave a short, hysterical speech to horrified onlookers at London’s National Gallery last week before she and her fellow protestor Anna Holland, 20, hurled two cans of Heinz tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers and then glued their hands to the wall beneath it. The painting, which is estimated to be worth $85 million, is covered in protective glass and suffered no damage, though its frame had some minor discoloration. Security personnel promptly detained the two protestors, who were later charged with “criminal damage to the value of less than £5,000,” and rushed the painting off for examination. It was reportedly back on display by the end of the day. Plummer and Holland pleaded not guilty in a London court and were released on bail on condition that they stay away from galleries and museums and do not carry paint or adhesive substances in public places. They will be brought to trial on December 13th.
The activists come from a group called Just Stop Oil, which favors carbon-free energy. In only one of many ironies in their stunt, both of Britain’s major political parties have committed to a green energy program to make their country net carbon zero by 2035 at the latest. Plummer’s speech undermined her/his/their ostensible purpose further, for it had nothing to do with oil or energy as pollutants, but rather with rising energy costs, which increased 57%in the United Kingdom in April and are due for another sharp rise as pandemic-era government price controls lapse. The war in Ukraine and consequent sanctions on Russian energy producers will reduce supply further, as has the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which connects Russia to Europe via the Baltic Sea. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) also recently announced production cuts, which will do even more to prop up international oil prices.
Just Stop Oil is supported by something called the Climate Emergency Fund, a U.S. non-profit founded in 2019 to disburse money to activist groups that pledge to take provocative public actions to popularize climate issues. Thus far in 2022, according to its website, it has given grants totaling $4 million to 39 such organizations. Just Stop Oil is the single greatest recipient, having received $1.1 million, an amount that can definitely buy a lot of tomato soup. The Climate Emergency Fund has proclaimed this month an “October Uprising,” a phrase with unfortunate connotations of violence associated with the Russian Revolution of 1917, with actions supposedly planned in eleven countries. “Gradualism has failed,” its website boasts, “But activism works.”
Does it really? The Climate Emergency Fund’s leadership is certainly very proud of Plummer’s and Holland’s publicity, which made news reports in major outlets all over the world. “In terms of press coverage, the Van Gogh protest may be the most successful action I’ve seen in the last eight years in the climate movement,” Climate Emergency’s executive director Margaret Klein Salamon told the sympathetic Guardian without realizing how trivial she has made her industry sound. “It was a breakthrough, it succeeded in breaking through this really terrible media landscape where you have this mass delusion of normalcy. It’s time to wake up.” Salamon, who is 36, holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and is yet herself deluded enough to believe the world is full of people who think it is normal, imagines that her “work helps people to face the deeply frightening, painful truths of the climate emergency and transform their despair into effective action.”
There is no indication that anyone’s opinion of climate change is different now from what it was before the souping, even if Salamon comforts herself with the hope that her work is a kind of therapy for snowflakes troubled by existential angst, as the lumpy, gender dysphoric Plummer and her marginally less unappealing accomplice Holland seem to be. The loudest reactions instead reflect the view that the activist girls Salamon funds are silly and naïve, tools of a corporate international pressure group that appears to have used them to further a political agenda. In the same way, for years the larger climate movement has used the angry, awkward Swedish activist teenager Greta Thunberg as a public face whose age, gender, and apparently serious emotional and psychological problems protect her—and thus the larger movement—from polite public criticism. This is not the first time self-hating elements of the West have degenerated into a millenarian death cult led by a purported child saint, but what was tragedy in the Middle Ages is repeating itself as farce today. (Full disclosure: upon making a social media joke about Thunberg’s maudlin style and propensity to self-pity a few years ago, I found myself unfriended by two unrelated contacts who hold doctoral degrees).
“More protests are coming,” Salamon promises in the absence of any protest thus far other than a disputed spray painting of a New Scotland Yard sign, “this is a rapidly growing movement and the next two weeks will be, I hope, the most intense period of climate action to date, so buckle up.” We could say that we are waiting to see what her squad of emotionally damaged pseudo-activists will do next, but what seems to excite her the most is the millions of dollars guilty white liberals will continue to pour into her organization in the hope of assuaging their guilt and signaling their virtue. Aileen Getty, herself an oil heiress whose family became among the world’s richest thanks to the purportedly environmentally-unfriendly substance, has donated $1 million. Leftist Walt Disney heiress Abigail Disney has pledged $200,000. They and others like them hand over these sums like so many medieval penitents buying indulgences from the old school Roman Catholic Church so that they and their dead loved ones can proceed to Paradise with no stops. Today’s much cheaper reward-for-purchase is to live contented and unmolested in some outpost of Whitetopia, where the stability, security, and prosperity readily denied to the rest of the population can be enjoyed by the virtuous elect.
It was bad dogma then, and it is bad dogma now. Nor is it any more convincing. The Catholic Church’s militant response to anything that smacked of heresy caused it to lose half of Europe to Protestant reformers who wanted nothing to do with it. Woke environmentalism, among other features of the trendy secular humanist faith, has weighed so heavily on contemporary Europe that Hungary, Austria, Poland, Italy, and Sweden—in addition to the United Kingdom itself—have recently elected governments dominated by the nationalist conservative right, while the UK has quit the democratically deficient European project altogether. Many American candidates for public office in the imminent 2022 midterm elections castigate their opponents for pushing high-price energy policies and pledge action to reduce prices and restore energy self-sufficiently immediately upon entering office. This is probably not the reaction Salamon wants in her heart, but it will persuade those guilty liberals to keep paying up so that she can buy more soup and use what’s left over to pay herself what is probably an above-average salary for a sort of young clinical psychology Ph.D.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all came in the actual souping, or better pseudo-souping. Heinz, the American food company that produced the tomato soup in question, belonged to the family of the late Republican Senator John Heinz, who died in a plane crash in 1991. Heinz’s widow Teresa soon after became the wife of the current U.S. climate czar, former Democratic Senator and Secretary of State, and past failed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry relied upon the Heinz fortune to support his political career, including his ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign. Today he uses it to fly by private jet, which sometimes takes him to—of all things—climate change conferences, where to embarrassingly little effect he represents the Biden administration. Called out on the incongruous hypocrisy of his fancy ride, which has reportedly emitted 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide since January 20, 2021, Kerry sheepishly commented “Well, you have to get there somehow.” Maybe he can give Plummer and Holland a ride to their next job, unless Salamon wants the private jet seat for her own executive posterior and sends them on Ryanair, where they can commune with the true horrors of the world.
READ NEXT
The Enterprise State
Play the Ball, not the Man: Cancel Culture’s Attempt To Capture Hungarian Academia
Starmer’s War on Farmers: a New Low for Client Politics