By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The Jolly Green Giant was born as a twentieth-century symbol for a brand of vegetables whose towering image later was rated one of that time period’s top 10 advertising icons. He had a booming laugh that invited you to enjoy the product. Little kids running through the family room with the television prattling in the 1960s likely remember hearing that “Ho, ho, ho.”
The Scowling Green Giant, from a different line of gargantua, started towering over our lives in the twenty-first century. He extended no friendly invitations to enjoy, but ugly threats of force and catastrophe if you didn’t swallow his nasty nostrums without question. You weren’t being enticed to savor but ordered to gag down mandates cooked up by globalist bureaucrats wearing Soros toques.
This bad giant was born in 1970 with the first Earth Day. Although capping belching smokestacks seemed reasonable to anyone, the scowling giant already had malign intent. His underpinnings were grim and false, including the 1968 book The Population Bomb, by radical alarmists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, whose predictions were spectacularly wrong.
Petrifying predictions aren’t subject to proof because they haven’t been fulfilled yet, and the left wing doesn’t punish its loony apostles when they err on the side of the movement’s copacetically pleasing extremism.
As with other aspects of leftism, environmentalism serves as a substitute for religion, although they’ll accept the help of clergy-persons adrift in their wake. Or woke.
The environmentalist crusade that began decades ago didn’t seem so moderate after all, but it wasn’t ordering everyone at that time to submit to the totalitarian tyranny becoming all too evident today.
A few years ago, radical leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez burst forth their Green New Deal notions that seemed too foolish to anyone — except to powerful left-wing Democrats who brook no opposition, and dominant-media members who admire them for doing so.
Before you knew it, supposed answers for weather catastrophes that only were projections of fantasies were being injected through politics oppressing us in the present and propaganda to shape the future.
Left-wing politicians and corporatists showed they actually didn’t believe a word of it but sought every avenue to make us live as if it’s real, including imposing financial suffering and diminished freedom.
They built mansions right by beaches like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their friends, with the knowledge that their tragically rising seas were hokum. They darkened the skies with the shadows of their flocks of roaring private jets carrying the likes of disaster-monger Klaus Schwab while ordering us out of our modest gas-fueled cars.
Within a few decades their phony weather warnings went from a New Ice Age to Global Warming to Climate Change. They knew less about upcoming weather than an Arctic resident who knows he’ll get snow or a desert-dweller who knows he’ll get heat.
The more they warn of higher temperatures, the more snow on their doorsteps.
An Earth Day website (www.earthday.org/history) recalls that Wisconsin’s U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson (a liberal Democrat and population controller) was inspired by the contemporary movement that opposed resistance to expanded Communist aggression in Vietnam in the 1960s.
With this inspiration, the website says, “Sen. Nelson wanted to infuse the energy of student anti-war protests with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution. Sen. Nelson announced the idea for a teach-in on college campuses to the national media, and persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican congressman, to serve as his co-chair.
“They recruited Denis Hayes, a young activist,” the website adds, “to organize the campus teach-ins and they choose [sic] April 22, a weekday falling between spring break and final exams, to maximize the greatest student participation.”
What occurred, in other words, wasn’t spontaneous but carefully planned. The website includes a dated video of the CBS network’s ideologically committed anchor of that time, Walter Cronkite, giving a reverentially correct presentation that the enviro message was “act or die.” Reliably apocalyptic even back then.
The Green Agenda publicly has become shameless, anticipating a totalitarianism to “save the planet” that means treating most humans — although not the elite — as third-rate serfs.
All those years that the welfare of California’s Central Valley farmers was treated as highly inferior to minnows and weeds were preparing the way for today.
Today the Green Agenda reveals its actual globalist plan under the cloak of sustainability to herd almost everyone into urban centers and to control how they earn, eat, drive, learn, hear, move about — just about how everyone around the globe suddenly was told to reorder their lives beginning in 2020.
That was due to a surprise virus sprung from a totalitarian Communist Chinese laboratory and excused in the U.S. by wealthy, lying globalist Anthony Fauci, MD. Tough words? Hard reality.
Today one of the voices of fact and moderation against the rising tide of fantasy and compulsion is Francis Menton, a retired attorney who lives in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan and thus sees abundant nonsense of left-wingers up close. He blogs as the Manhattan Contrarian (w ww.manhattancontrarian.com).
It’s a wonderful place to live, Menton says, except for “a stifling political and ideological orthodoxy. The central tenet of that orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending. The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and anyone who stands in the way of those solutions is immoral.”
He often blogs about bureaucracy and energy. On March 7, under the headline “Bureaucracies Utterly Incapable of Making Reasonable Tradeoffs,” Menton posted:
“Often I focus on bureaucratic regulation of energy because the ability to restrict use of energy is the ultimate societal control. Once they have obtained the ability to restrict use of energy, bureaucrats could, if they choose, take away most of our freedom to enjoy life and return us to the income levels of the Stone Age.
“Will they stop before going that far,” Menton asked, “making reasonable tradeoffs to enable the people to flourish economically? Or will they instead pursue environmental purity without concern for the well-being of the populace?. . .
“In the U.S., battle is currently joined on multiple fronts as to whether unaccountable bureaucracies get to declare the non-toxic beneficial gas CO2 a ‘danger’ to human health and welfare and thereby claim the ability to shut down the entire fossil-fuel-energy economy and force a multi-trillion-dollar (and probably impossible and impoverishing) energy transition on the people.”
A person contemplating the rigid thinking of the Biden administration and its international allies sees ample evidence of an intentional desire to harm the United States and its people.
A person may wonder about the reasons — Biden’s Marxism-friendly theoreticians thinking that Beijing has a better way to govern? Biden’s sexually twisted pals being blinded by their serious sins? — but the damaging direction is undeniable.
The Wanderer asked two sources to comment on the damaging plans being made.
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer said on March 8: “Everybody ought to be a good conservationist. Today’s ‘environmental activists,’ though, act like a cult — a cult not just content with living in certain ways themselves, but in forcing their views, whether actually based on science or not, on everybody else.
“Worse, their left-wing authoritarianism can actually hurt the environment itself, punishing responsible entities for not being cult-like enough, while leaving others, including massively polluting foreign entities, to pick up the slack without any significant environmental controls or incentives,” Hillyer said.
“By destroying freedom and by completely ignoring human context, left-wing environmental activists contribute to human poverty while, counterintuitively, acting as true menaces to Planet Earth,” Hillyer said.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard said on March 8: “In the case of most major causes, the right and the left come at them very differently. Where the right tends to look for solutions to whatever the challenge is (the environment, improving health care, product safety, etc.), and tries to incentivize the private sector and individuals to not only find the solution but to be a major part of the solution, the left sees each challenge as an opportunity to acquire greater control.
“So their solution to environmental concerns is to micromanage how we live and consume products,” Querard said. “Their solution to health-care concerns is to nationalize it and over-regulate it. Their solution to product-safety issues is to add layers upon layers of hurdles to the introduction of new products and over-regulate it as well.
“So we can’t be surprised that the ‘trees before people’ crowd would love to take control over our lives and dictate where and how we can live,” he said.
It’s not that there’s an absence of warnings about the wretched future being planned for us. It’s that the planners don’t care about opposition to them, as long as they prevail somehow.
Joel Kotkin, a veteran writer on demographic, economic and social trends, posted on March 3 at the Sp!ked website under the headline “A neo-feudal war on the people — The elites are steadily impoverishing the working and middle classes.”
Kotkin wrote: “The pandemic and its aftermath also expanded an already evident class divide. With ever fewer middle-class neighborhoods, Americans have become increasingly economically segregated. But two classes have benefited.
“One was the government clerisy, a class of professional bureaucrats who gained and exercised a level of power unprecedented in peacetime,” Kotkin said. “This power will not willingly be surrendered, with many viewing lockdowns as a test run for addressing climate change.”
Power for the elite to do as they please can be ever-expanding, with shocking implications. On March 2 the left-wing Guardian news site, based in the UK, headlined, “UN urged to intervene over destruction of U.S. abortion rights.”
Not that the UN has a very good record on a number of fronts, but are we to contemplate its parachuted-in soldiers ordering rural Texans to get some suction machines pumping along? As for the piquant phrase “destruction of U.S. abortion rights,” that apparently is worse to pro-abortion journos than the destruction of actual U.S. babies.
Another facet is the emerging term “15-minute city,” where everything can be conveniently near to where you live. But there’s another way of looking at it, like the European ghettoization of Jews. The government gets to keep you in your neighborhood, where you’re easier to watch, control, and be recognized.
At one point when a new east-west freeway was being considered through a developed area of Phoenix, the dominant newspapers raised the roof in protest, resulting in the defeat of the proposal in a public referendum. However, this outcome denied commuters the speed of a freeway. What to do?
The City of Phoenix devised the concept of the “urban village” — do you hear “15-minute city”? — where office buildings would be brought right into neighborhoods and you could work nearby.
My neighborhood was presented with a plan to have a row of buildings about 20 stories high just north of us, putting our suburb in the heart of a mini-downtown and cutting off a mountain view. Once again, the big guys who think they know best were exposed as foolish.
Neighborhood protest cut the proposed heights about in half, but what I called a “Berlin Wall” still got built, although those buildings never supplied me with a job. For 14 years I drove about a 22-mile roundtrip to work. The city forgot to mandate where I was hired. As if I’d want it to have that power.
Kari Lake In The Spotlight
Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake noted some elitist goals as she delivered the keynote address to the Ronald Reagan Dinner at the national Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on March 3 near Washington, D.C.
I covered the speech for my “Sunrise Sunset” column posted March 4 at Substack.com. It included these two paragraphs:
“ ‘Today we face an evil that operates in our own government…an evil that seeks to strip us of our religious freedom’ and freedom of speech, [Lake] said, adding that it aims to eliminate the middle class and nuclear family.
“ ‘I don’t know about you guys but I’ll be damned if I bow down to George Soros,’ she said, going on to comment that she doesn’t want to see U.S. farmland being bought up by the Chinese Communist Party — as it has been doing.”
Later in the story I cited her: “She said she’s not willing to tell her children, it’s been a great life for me, but good luck with Communism and globalism for you.”
The story was headlined, “Kari Lake says no to U.S. young people fighting for Zelensky.”
The Phoenix area’s deceitful little men thought they could suppress Lake, but she was awarded this spotlight role far beyond the control of local politicians Bill Gates and Stephen Richer.
Lake won a straw vote as the CPAC 2024 vice-presidential selection, beating both Ron DeSantis and declared GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Lake has said she still is focused on being governor and has appealed the 2022 election for consideration by the Arizona Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, it would be refreshing if DeSantis ruled out any talk of his running for president in 2024. A few months ago, he won a smashing victory to serve a second four-year term as governor of Florida. Did he believe his own campaign words then, or was it just a ruse to give himself a platform for declaring his presidential candidacy within a few months?
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