I can’t lie; there’s something inherently funny about leftists disrupting other leftists’ events because the other side’s participants aren’t extreme enough. Such was the case Sunday when the radical environmental group “Just Stop Oil” crashed a London Pride parade and lay down in the streets to stop its progress.
Their complaint? Many of the sponsors of the event are “high-polluting.” Just Stop Oil spokesman James Skeet explained in a statement:
Pride was born from protest. It speaks to how far we’ve come as a community, that high polluting industries and the banks that fund them, now see Pride as a useful vehicle for sanitising their reputations, waving rainbow flags in one hand whilst accelerating social collapse with the other.
How to fix the problem? Lie down in the middle of the street, of course:
Skeet rambled on in the statement, going so far as to suggest that we’re experiencing a “social breakdown.” I think he actually might be right about that–it’s just that I think such a breakdown is being caused for entirely different reasons than he does.
It is queer people, and particularly queer people of colour in the global south, who are suffering first in this accelerating social breakdown. What would those who instigated the gay liberation movement, during the Stonewall riots in 1969, make of the corporatised spectacle Pride has now become?
These partnerships embarrass the LGBTQ+ community, at a time when much of the cultural world is rejecting ties to these toxic industries.
He’s not all wrong in claiming that Pride month has become 30 days of corporatist woke messaging–just ask Target and Bud Light. Note that the vehicle the protesters sit in front of is a rainbow-bedecked Coca-Cola bus.
But Just Stop Oil is no stranger to destructive protests in the name of the environment; they even stooped to throwing soup at a priceless Vincent Van Gogh painting in 2022. And as my colleague Sister Toldjah reported, in that same year, activists blocked commuter roadways in London and demanded the “halt [of] all future licensing for the exploration, development and production of oil and gas.” I’m not sure how the modern world would continue to function in such a scenario, but I doubt these folks have thought that far ahead.
They were promptly dragged off the road by annoyed citizens, but here they were at it again in June, spraying paint all over the windows of U.K. TotalEnergies building. Not sure how that’s going to be good for the environment:
Police showed up in force at the parade, and the protesters were picked up and hauled away. Seven were arrested. London Mayor Sadiq Khan seemed to encourage more actions like this one, saying Sunday morning:
I am somebody who feels quite passionately that we have to tackle the climate emergency. And I feel quite passionately about encouraging people to join the movement to tackle the climate emergency. In my view, protest should be peaceful, lawful, and safe.
The whole episode reminds me of when climate extremist Greta Thunberg went to Norway to protest wind turbines in the Nordic country. Wait, I thought she liked wind turbines?
It doesn’t look like these kinds of protests are going to stop any time soon, though, if people like Thunberg get their way. She opined at a 2022 London book festival:
Asked to comment on recent protest actions by Just Stop Oil activists which saw them throw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ at London’s National Gallery, Thunberg said, “People are trying to find new methods because we realize that what we have been doing up until now has not done the trick.
“It’s only reasonable to expect these kinds of different actions.”
No, it’s not reasonable in the slightest. Throwing soup at priceless paintings will do exactly nothing to help anything. I often feel that many of these lost souls are more addicted to the act of protesting than they are about caring about the causes they espouse.
Nevertheless, it’s still fun to watch leftists protest other leftists. Maybe next, we’ll get the leftists protesting leftists who are protesting other leftists. That should be fun.