Vandalism as a worthy cause

The above 1821 painting is called The Hay Wain, by John Constable, a British artist. I have deliberately kept the reproduction above small to preserve some of the integrity, but of course computer screens do not begin to be faithful to originals, much less iPads or, God forbid, iPhones. I would love to be able to stand in front of it. It is kept at the National Gallery in London.

In July of 2022 this painting was vandalized, a triptych overlaid placing modern civilization atop, and the vandals gluing themselves to the painting. The vandalism was done by a group called Just Stop Oil, the subject of this post, but first more about the article I am citing from, a work by Fred Bauer. It is called Vandals of Civilization, and is in the March, 2025 edition of National Review. Unless you buy the magazine from a newsstand, or subscribe, you’ll not have access. I am a longtime subscriber to NR, since my youth with an extended interruption … I read it in my early 20s and forward, and now read it with a far more skeptical eye. So much of it is good, so much less so in my view, but the people there always adhering to the principles of its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., a man I deeply admired.

I’ll cite one Buckley witticism among thousands, and move on. The magazine is for literary people, so correspondence to it gets read, and Buckley received a long treatise excoriating him for perceived failures, closing with the classic storm out phrase “Cancel my subscription!” Buckley’s response?

“Cancel your own goddamned subscription!”

The Bauer piece goes on to chronicle attacks on van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Botticelli’s Primavera. There have been more. The writer, in true NR tradition, tries to sum up the efforts of Just Stop Oil and the Climate Emergency Fund by finding the right words to undermine their passion and put it in perspective. In certain ideologies passions can overwhelm intellect, and people can become so certain they are right that any action to advance their cause is justified.

Thus, at least in cinema, murder and mayhem are justified to save the world from archvillains, as in every James Bond movie, and are easily forgiven due to presence of a nobler cause, as with the Reacher series currently in its third season (and every series and movie put forth by Taylor Sheridan). It’s easy, in fiction, to create a villain, but harder in real life. Hannibal Lecter never existed, after all. He was an invention of author Thomas Harris and became larger than life due to the capable acting skills of Anthony Hopkins.

So I look at the photo above of Just Stop Oil, and I imagine that none in that group has read or understands anything about climate. It’s a very complex subject, and requires not only math skills, including trigonometry, but some understanding of atmospheric and oceanic physics. The IPCC eschews all of this for simple anecdotes, like CO2 being a “control knob” an the world “boiling” (United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres). Such pedagoguery is designed for simple listeners and makes for great news clips. But it is nothing more than the product of PR firms, whose stock in trade is professional lying. Other groups, the Climate Emergency Fund and Extinction Rebellion, engage in similar activity as JSO, and so deliberately sets out to disrupt traffic in busy cities in addition to vandalism.

Fred Bauer, in his very well-written article, stops short of what I would do (which would preclude NR looking at my work even once, much less twice): I think that JSO and CEF and ER are comprised of two sets of people: A small group of funded organizers, and a large group of extremely ignorant followers. Except for the funding behind the organizers, they need not be taken seriously.

Bauer briefly mentions Aileen Getty, “a scion of the family behind Getty Oil”, who “provided what her foundation calls the ‘foundational grant to establish Climate Emergency Fund'”.  Another prominent source of funds for these groups, not mentioned by Bauer, is the Kennedy Family, fronted by RFK’s youngest child, Rory.

We are led to believe that each of these wayward kids is a deluded spoiled brat, like Patty Hearst or Greta Thunberg. Thus is a barrier created between the climate alarmism/vandalism crowd, and the real funders of the Climate Emergency conflict and the IPCC: Them families, again. (This includes the Buckley’s and Trump’s.)

I take heart that Getty’s and Kennedy’s are behind Just Stop Oil and the Climate Emergency Fund and Extinction Rebellion. It means the movements are fake, the followers unimportant, and the real goals of the movement hidden behind the usual suspects, the oligarchy. Just as they gave us all of the major fake events of our lives, so too are they behind these fake populist movements.

Because these families are wealthy and powerful, they must be taken seriously as threats to our well being, on one hand. On the other, they are intellectual lightweights, and so can be easily upended and defeated by real science and scientists. Such people exist. They are not well known, their work is ignored in all the right places. But the work is being done, and in the end will prevail. I believe that. JSO and CEF and EB are trifling problems that will fade away with lack of news exposure. They lack substance. The “science” behind the IPCC, already largely discredited, cannot survive light of day. The problem: The same families that are pushing this Chicken Little Armageddon also own the news media and entertainment.

That’s a real problem. I have no solution.