The Vegan Antichrist: Questioning Extinction Rebellion.

some of you may be expecting me to point the finger at the extent to which roger hellum is leading or misleading people into terrorism by constantly hinting at more extreme more violent solutions risks on a larger scale risks that will put you in prison and his insistence that going to prison is the only way forward for social progress it's a very different sort of deception and self-deception that instead in this video i would like to point the finger at you know i'm one of the most intellectual people in this country i wake up thinking i go to sleep thinking i've been thinking ever since i was 14 and everything my intellect says is that the intellect is now useless [Music] i have to know how my brain works in order to catch it from doing bad things i've got a scholarship to london school of economics i'm super bright right the intellect in the present moment is basically our ego it's our desire to maintain control to bargain with reality and i think the essence of doing god's will at the present moment is to let go of that intellect and all those rationalizations and all that resentment and denial and confusion [Music] and i think what the christian church is guilty of and what religious people are guilty of is is having the air of piety but not the reality of it and i've seen this all through my life and i have a sense that what god is does is plays a game with us but we have to in giving ourselves to god we have to consider that we're following the devil rather than god and we have to take that risk because if you follow the path of god then you'll be attacked as really following the devil by society so you'll never really be able to work it out and the most difficult thing is to is to accept you'll never know and hand it over to god the climate movement in its present state is a far greater block to sorting out the climate crisis than the denial and the extreme right and the reason for that is because the white liberals of course have all the words and the books and the right arguments and the sophistication but they're missing the only thing that counts which is the willingness to enter into material resistance against radical evil we celebrate this eucharist friends in solidarity with all of creation [Music] this is where the church should be at this time in history in the history of humanity what is the point of the church if we're not on the streets standing up for god's creation we offer one another a sign of peace [Music] we do need to be here because it is an absolute emergency that we've got ourselves into the bread of life is broken the cup of salvation is poured out an essential and terrifying element of that blockage is the insistence on academic uh and intellectual sophistication in other words their sophistication is what creates the block radical political change is produced by entering into dogma for all my life i've been against dogma for all the reasons we know but the only thing i see now that will save us is entering into a dogma that is rooted in knowing what god means boris johnson the prime minister in the uk everyone's going to be looking at him so he's going to be going around you know shaking hands of kids at school planting a few trees making these announcements all this [ __ ] that's when you want to go and expose his gross obscene hypocrisy right because he's weak in 2022 he's not going to care about the climate christ he's moved on right so that's the moment to strike okay and like on that diagram i showed then there's the 9 11. then is the 9 11. then there's the 9 11. then there's these massive crises you have to act fast you know if hundreds of people have died in germany because of the floods you need that small group to go right we're going to have this big demonstration now in 24 hours you're going to make that fast decision that's why you need a small group is to react to these spontaneous moments when the opposition is weak or to design something when you are going to maximize the probability in other words strategic intelligence we're not going next year we're going now right in the next three to four years it's absolutely essential to use your brains on this right this is not a [ __ ] campaign it's the end of the world it means you have to like give up all your preconceptions of what doing a little trendy university campaign is about that's not the deal okay there's millions of people dying as i speak life just hasn't got to this country yet but it will we're going when they're weak on our we're we're determining the moment of resistance number three is high level disruptive action okay so again this is like totally foundational you're not going to be in the ballpark of catching that ball going down the road down the hill unless you engage in high level disruptive action that's an absolute no-brainer at this point in history we've got three years to turn around the crisis in the six month plan we have to go in there with something massively transgressive massively disruptive massively outrageous if you're not doing that you're not in the ballpark because you've got to capture mass attention to change history to change how the society is going to work this is the complete opposite of performative protest right it's about material disruption it's about material disruption the test for me following god at a time of radical evil [Music] and the test throughout history has not been the words from the sophistication in the sunday morning discussions the the essence of following god and being in the light of god at a time of radical evil is whether or not you are in a situation of material resistance against the regime there's something very concrete here about what i'm saying just as there's something very concrete about putting co2 into the atmosphere what i'm trying to say in this talk isn't at all abstract what what i'm saying is the only position place for a christian at the present moment is in prison if you go out and disrupt the government that is facilitating radical evil then the result of that will be you go to prison toughen up because you're going to have to toughen up i know it's not politically correct but i'm not critically correct right i'm a sociologist i'm 55 years old i've seen some [ __ ] you've got to toughen up it's going to be tough so what have you got to do what do people do over and over in history what they do is whatever is necessary to change the situation then they said you can't get people arrested you know people don't like getting arrested it's unpleasant and then they said if you get people arrested it's going to upset people you know that one right daily mail is going to get upset so it shouldn't do it and we said we cannot afford not to take the risk it became the most powerful climate movement in 2019 globally according to some posh thing right how do we do that by taking risks right you've got to take risks imagine the worst risk and times it by 10. and what that means is something concrete just as it means in the past and this is skated over over and over again when people talk in abstract ways about resistance when you enter into resistance you will lose your material security you will very likely lose your relationship you will lose your job your status your friends and that's really what it means some of you may be expecting me to point the finger at the extent to which roger hellum is leading or misleading people into terrorism by constantly hinting at more extreme more violent solutions risks on a larger scale risks that will put you in prison and his insistence that going to prison is the only way forward for social progress it's a very different sort of deception and self-deception that instead in this video i would like to point the finger at i once as a child read in a batman comic book batman saying to robin don't do as i do do as i say no one had ever said that to me i think still to this day in real life no teacher no adult no parent has ever used that phrase that anything with me so i partly just puzzled at it for some time and figuring out what it meant a lot of people it's not so much that they look up to the political leaders of our times they look up to icons on on social media they look at them and they're responding to and imitating what they do much more than what it is they say to do roger hallam is telling you to live a life of self-sacrifice suffering and sorrow in anonymity in jail he has collected millions of dollars in donations he has wealth fame power and respect on a scale very few of you can imagine very few of you will ever experience in your lives during the last five years who has been more powerful or more influential roger hallam with his few millions of dollars i'm not claiming it's many millions of dollars i've been completely unable to find any formal financial accounting of how many millions of dollars and that's probably a strategic choice on their part but if you look around you can find there was one fundraiser here for 850 000 pound sterling there was another donation there that ran up to 300 000 pounds you can find little breadcrumbs and information here and there and if you add those together we're already well over 1 million pound sterling it's reasonable to say this is going to be over 2 million dollars but again with his with his few millions of dollars in the last five years who has been more powerful and more influential in politics roger hallam or the mayor of the town where you live roger hallam or the governor of your state the premier of your province how about the president of laos how about some of the smaller countries in the caribbean in africa in southeast asia he has actually been more powerful and influential than a great many elected leaders and i'm sure there are elected leaders who've looked at him on the news in the newspapers and have wondered why their own voice matters so little and why his voice matters so much the students who are in the audience when he is addressing teenagers when he is addressing university students when he is trying to recruit and radicalize people i don't think they respond to what he's saying so much as they respond to what he's doing and they see a very clear path towards money fame power respect and of course sex and not necessarily in that order i do not trivialize the importance of roger hallam an extinction rebellion the history of ecology history of politics in our time generally for a period of about two years they have been tremendously powerful important and influential and it seems that that period of two years is now coming to an end i could be wrong it's possible they'll turn things around and they'll become tremendously powerful and influential again with the next fight it's possible it seems like they're a spent match it seems like they're you know a candle that's going to go out in the wind remember uh wayne syong wayne siong managed to get a budget of millions of dollars per annum and he became a tremendously powerful tremendously influential person for how many years what was it two years was it was it five how about paul bashir leader of anonymous for the voiceless millions of dollars not that many years maybe for about two years oh oh yeah and on a much greater scale one of the most influential the most powerful the most important movements of our time black lives matter i don't know if you want to count that as two years five years 10 or 15 but for just a few years they had a great many millions of dollars you can google around and you can tell me what they did with that money good luck pinning it down good luck figuring it out and now already as i say their star seems to have been snuffed out of the sky maybe i'm wrong maybe in the next five years black lives matter will become tremendously powerful and important what's going to be more influential than ever was but it seems reasonable to say now in january of 2022 that that's another example of a short-lived movement that has come and gone but the money and the fame will last a lifetime people are looking at roger allen people are looking at the leaders of extinction rebellion the leaders of black lives matter the leaders of anonymous for the voiceless direct action everywhere they're not listening to what they're saying they're looking at what they're doing and they're thinking me too they're not thinking they want to spend their life in jail they're not buying into roger hallam's uh profoundly christian model of the long-suffering self-sacrificing saint no no no no and i don't even think they're being radicalized into terrorism i think the most profoundly corrupting most long-lasting influence of these movements that have come and gone is that it's going to shape the next generation of activists to be neither more nor less than fame [ __ ] i've been doing this for about the same length of time as wayne seong i've been doing this for about the same length of time as as paul beshear you know can look at the timeline of my youtube channel and when it was exactly paul beshear was in chiang mai with durianrider and i remember i remember the first few youtube videos on wayne stone's channel you know direct action everywhere and obviously i've been doing this longer than extinction rebellion i've been involved in ecology and so on and trying to in my way lead a movement or create a new movement right for for more years than roger hallam has been doing and you can look at what i've done and you can say that it's a failure i remember getting a voice call from a vegan activist in uh in new york city and he was saying to me so simply and so humbly and so straightforwardly that he and a whole group of vegan activists had lost faith in the leadership of publisher really i want to say they lost patience with it they knew paul was bad they knew it was a bad organization but there's money involved there's one man at the top of each of these organizations who controls the bank account who controls the purse strings who decides who gets paid and who doesn't and that buys you a whole lot of silence it buys you a whole lot of complicity buys you a whole lot of conformity buys you a whole lot of people who don't question or cross-examine what you say even when it's obviously flagrantly wrong it can be strategically wrong it can be counterproductive it can be stupid and it can also just be downright crazy like roger hallum lecturing you about his interpretation of biblical scripture and talking about god and satan and self-sacrifice and blind faith and doubt money buys you a whole lot of complicity in madness but you know each of these movements whether you're talking about paul bashir wayne style roger hallam or even black lives matter you know what they couldn't buy was anyone's real intellectual respect so when the money's gone and when the opportunity for self-promotion for fame whoring for getting your name in the next newspaper when that's gone and it goes quick like maybe for two years each each one of these act each one of these movements is hot for about two years there's an opportunity for people to get in there and engage in self-promotion freely enduring rider was it about two years it's about two years and think about how many moths were drawn to the flame even if they couldn't directly make money out of it right that just that platform just that potential for self-promotion leading to money fame power respect political leaders like this they get followers but in our day and age those followers are themselves hoping to become not quite leaders but social media influencers they're hoping to have at least the kind of money and fame that roger hallum demonstrates even when he's talking about poverty sorrow suffering and and going to jail well you know what the money's gone and the opportunity for self-promotion is gone nobody gives a [ __ ] about what paul beshear has to say nobody has any respect for the philosophy of wayne syong and yeah in the last eight years although you may say that i've failed strategically or i've failed politically you could say that i've failed in this way or following this template to build a movement but the people who listened to me and cared about what i had to say eight years ago the people who listened and cared five years ago three years ago and sometimes three months ago those people still write into me and let me know how much i've influenced their lives for the better intellectually ethically and emotionally i have a relationship to my audience that roger hallum can't buy