The skies are dark and hazy across the Midwest after inducing eerie yellow billows across the North and East. Residents of Western states such as California and Montana are used to such evidence of wildfires, but not residents of Midwestern and Eastern U.S. states. So this haze blanket stretching south from Canada feels surreal, even apocalyptic.
Even more apocalyptic is the political context. We’re two months away from the Biden administration potentially letting the United Nations seize power over the entire United States indefinitely in the event of whatever it defines as a “global shock.” One of the potential emergencies warranting this global dictatorship, the U.N. says, is a “major climatic event.”
Such as wildfire smoke affecting multiple nations? The wildfire smoke is not just seeping beneath America’s hat. NASA says it’s also reaching Europe.
As we’re barely out of the unwarranted, U.N.-fomented mass suspension of civil rights in disastrous Covid lockdowns, these kinds of threats are not in the least theoretical. One must also consider the historical pattern by which tyrants govern via states of “emergency.”
States of Emergency Are Tools of Tyrants
The worst air quality from the more than 600 conflagrations is apparently in Ottawa, the seat of Canada’s government. It seems fitting, as that’s where Justin Trudeau is. He’s been perhaps the most tyrannical prime minister in Canadian history, demanding that banks confiscate the life savings of his political opponents and expressing sympathy for the arsonists burning down churches.
Seizing people’s life savings seems to be far afield from stopping a virus, but when people’s fear is activated, they are easy to mindlessly stampede. That seems to be exactly what’s going on in media coverage of these wildfires. As they do essentially every natural disaster now, media are baselessly labeling this usually natural phenomenon in the dry West a consequence of “climate change.”
It’s a really interesting thing, scapegoating the forest gods for what are typically the consequences of far less cosmic human actions. Usually, fires that get really out of hand result from bad forest management. It may be lightning or a cigarette butt that starts a fire, but a big factor in whether it gets horribly out of control is poor forestry.
That’s a catastrophe — a manmade one. Just not manmade like the climate alarmists want you to believe. Manmade in a way that could be addressed through due process in the courts. No emergency powers needed.
Environmentalist Crazies in the Wild
One must also take into consideration the recent growth in eco-terrorism, which also can be addressed by duly instituted courts of law. It is no longer a fringe-left phenomenon.
In just the last several years, top leftist publications have defended destroying natural resources in the name of protecting them, even when people are in the way. The New Yorker went so far as to platform an advocate of “intelligent sabotage” to property and infrastructure to alarm people so they’ll adopt leftist climate policies.
“If people go about this in a careful fashion, and if they time property disruption of this sort to moments when the impact of the climate crisis are being felt, there would be a decent chance to also gain popular support for these kind of actions,” said Andreas Malm, the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, in 2021.
Ezra Klein took seriously Malm’s call for violence to push climate policies in a New York Times column. In it, he notably refused to reject violence as a way “to force the political system to do enough, fast enough, to avert mass suffering.”
Today, Joe Biden’s pick to run the nation’s land management agency was part of an environmental group that endorsed arson at ski resorts, violence against Tesla factories, and attacks on logging equipment. U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning also threatened to nail huge spikes into trees that could kill or maim any loggers cutting them down.
So it seems entirely reasonable to call for investigations into the potential manmade causes of these unusually expansive wildfires. We deserve to know before the left sacrifices what’s left of our freedoms to the implacable climate gods.
Assigning Collective Guilt Is Unjust
While leftists want to blame — and punish — all of humankind, those responsible may be indeed far fewer and identifiable.
Every evil is not directly descended from a specific human action, of course, but some are. In cases like this, when we have record-breaking amounts of wildfires causing global repercussions, it seems not just reasonable but absolutely necessary to investigate all potential factors contributing to this evil situation.
These wildfires may be acts of God over which we have no control, but the governments responsible first for protecting their people’s lives ought to investigate to be certain. As such, simply blaming “climate change” is an extreme cop-out that no one should accept.
Government Will Never Be God
Historically, “acts of God” have been considered prompts for individual and corporate repentance. Yet, having abandoned God, many of today’s pagan “nones” fill the domains where He belongs with substitutes, chief among them government.
Since they have deified government, they cannot put government agencies or officials on their lineup of potential suspects, or even consider them as partly responsible for this worldwide tragedy. If government is fallible, that threatens their entire plan of enthroning government as the world’s ultimate savior.
The left’s refusal to admit government is just as error-prone as the rest of us omits key potential culprits from public consideration and transfers blame from individuals to the collective. Yet transferring guilt from the guilty to everyone is unjust. So is punishing everyone for natural disasters over which no human has any control.
The only justice possible in this situation is not cosmic, it is individual. That’s all any government can legitimately handle. The cosmic things are out of their hands, and failing to recognize that endangers us all.