The Lunatic Fringe

or... How to Lose Friends and Alienate People*

This past weekend, a couple purported climate activists splashed two cans of tomato soup at a Van Gogh painting hanging in London's National Gallery. They also glued themselves to the gallery wall.

Last week, a bunch of similar activists blocked traffic in the DC area, backing up traffic for several miles.

I get their earnestness. If you believe that, barring immediate action, the planet (or, more accurately, the human race) is doomed due to anthropogenic climate change, the perceived slowness of climate action would make you crazy. Crazy enough to do things that will not win you converts or convince hesitants and skeptics of your dire truth.

Especially when what you demand is such a big ask.

And, especially when countless previous predictions of doom proved to be wrong.

Consider, first, the big ask. The remedy demanded is a rapid decarbonization of our lives. All energy to be derived from "renewables," i.e. wind and solar (with an allowance for existing hydropower and some other in-the-noise tech like geothermal). All cars to be battery powered. All appliances to be electric. Coal, oil, and natural gas harvesting and use to be ceased, ASAP.

If this could all be done with a minor disruption in lifestyle and a manageable out-of-pocket, it might sell to the public.

It cannot. Already, the disruptions are severe. Fuel and energy prices are up in no small part due to the Biden administration's policies stifling oil and gas exploration, recovery, and use. Germany is facing a dangerous, life-threatening energy shortage due to her aggressive domestic decarbonization. The citizens of several nations whose governments have gone down the "green" path are rising up in protest over the misery that path has inflicted on them.

On top of that is the Chicken Little problem. Every bit of bad weather is proof of "climate change," facts and history be damned. We were warned, back in the 1990s, of dire death and destruction by Y2K if we didn't act IMMEDIATELY, yet here we are, twenty-two years later, with no looming cliff edge, and a whole lot less warming than was predicted.

The activists and other vested parties have shown no remorse whatsoever in their over-prediction or the harm being done, today, to billions, by their chosen path of coercive decarbonization. Rather than dial it back, propose sensible remedies that don't involve immediate and substantial pain and privation, they scold. The nut bars in their ranks - people who in many cases have some backstop or support that reduces the pain of high energy costs - engage in disruptive behaviors, and the warmist community does nothing to disavow.

Who in their right mind thinks that clogging up the already-over-clogged DC metro area's streets would go over well with John Q. Public? Who thinks the risk of slowing an ambulance down, or blocking a car whose driver is trying to get to his in-labor wife, is the way to win hearts and minds?

Where is the denouncement of the lunatic fringe's excesses in climate activism? Where are the people who say "our first remedy isn't going to work, let's discuss other options?"

They've been excommunicated for failure to show sufficient faith in the religion that is warmism.

I'm hesitant to say that the lunatics are running the asylum when it comes to global warming, because I believe that many cold and calculating people in power are leveraging them and climate alarmism itself to expand their power, to turn economies away from capitalism, and to snooker the masses into accepting reduced living standards and less liberty.

Where the lunatics are running the asylum, however, is in transgender activism. The administration and the Left are so all-in that they support some truly mind-boggling notions. Among them, that children can choose their gender before adulthood, and sometimes before puberty, and should be 'affirmed' via chemicals and surgery; that people with penises should be allowed to use women's locker rooms, be incarcerated in women's prisons, and be admitted to women's rape shelters; and that male-to-female transitioning persons should be allowed to compete in women's sports. To question any of this is to be instantly declared a transphobic bigot.

These two areas of public interest and debate are dominated by demands that are not only counter-intuitive, but counter-factual. Those demands aren't presented via proof and sober analysis intended to convince, but rather by a combination of aggressive fear-mongering and ad hominem tactics intended to produce submission and cowering acceptance. The excesses that have produced resistance and push-back aren't acknowledged or abandoned, but instead are redoubled, with those pushing them relying only on their echo-chambers of affirmation to convince themselves they are correct.

The shame is that the backlash can stand in the way of the good. That the problems have been overstated (they have - the countless failed predictions are proof enough) doesn't mean that the problems don't exist. There is ample reason to believe that human carbon emissions are having some effect on our climate. There are reasons to pursue remedies that might mitigate that effect. Likewise, promoting acceptance of individuals with gender dysphoria is a good thing - every person should be afforded the respect each of us expects from our fellow humans.

Excess is, unfortunately, rewarded by the mechanisms of modern society. Because social media and other 'first-world' realities make it so much easier for us to sort into like-minded silos, and because we lives lives of incredible ease and comfort compared to every other time in human history, there is both the free time and the incentive to try and stand out from the crowd. To be the tall poppy in the field. To dial to eleven when most everyone else dials to six or seven.

Politicians should be moderating voices, given that we have invested them with power and responsibility. They should ignore the screams of the lunatic fringe.

Politicians, however, are cowards. And opportunists. They tolerate excesses when it suits them. They let cities burn if it furthers their goals. They don’t demand highway blockers be removed and prosecuted if the agenda matches their own. They allow chunks of downtown to be taken over by anarchists in some sort of “solidarity” with likely voters.

They bend the knee to the loudest, while quietly leverage that loudness for personal gain.

Private citizens are little different. Many cower in the face of aggression, fearing the name-calling (often justly, given cancel culture and the corporate world's submission to the fringe), and accepting the extreme demands. Some among them welcome the excess, because it advances their pet issues. Too many people don't mind lies that benefit their side, and excuse them with "we need to lie to the stupid to get them to agree with us."

Problem is - when lies and excess become such an integral part of the political sandbox, others fall prey to the same siren song. There's no proof, for example, that Trump won the 2020 election, but his Big Lie is embraced by far too many. In many cases this is the result of the broken trust, as in "the FBI, Justice, the Democrats, and the rest of the Deep State lied to us about so much else, they can certainly be lying about the election outcome." I have a family member who believes Trump won, but freely admits there's no proof or reason to do so. This is what happens when the lunatic fringe is given too much heed, and while we see the Left's loons having the greatest impact on policy today, it's not the exclusive province of either team.

I singled out three issues-of-the-day here: climate change, transgender rights, and stolen election claims. There are many others, and the lesson is always the same: you don't win people over with angry excess that's insufficiently supported by facts, logic, or evidence. People are manipulable, but they're not pure ovines. Go too far, and they see through the BS, they note the Emperor has no clothes, they figure out that the sky is not falling. Unfortunately, our natural reaction in rejecting the loons can lead us to ignore some less-dire but still legitimate concerns. We should talk about whether climate change is a problem, and what we can do to mitigate it (I have suggested remedies many times). We should start out with a baseline of respect for people struggling with gender identity. We should demand that our election process be as resistant to fraud and corruption as possible.

Above all, we should not submit to the demands of selfish assholes like the Van Gogh vandals or the highway blockers, not when their demands don't stand up to scrutiny.

It is libertarian to accept others’ right to protest. Protests to call attention to unaddressed problems or to highlight injustices are a fundamental part of a free society. However, it is not libertarian to support destruction of private property or the infringement of others’ right to movement, and it is certainly not libertarian to side with coercive infringements on our living standards and personal choices.

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* Some may recognize the sub-title of this essay as a book-turned-movie by Toby Young. It's also the title of a much older book by Irving Tressler. I confess to having read or seen none of them. Any similarity between them and this essay is purely coincidental.

The phrase is, obviously, a play on Dale Carnegie’s seminal How To Win Friends and Influence People. I haven’t read it, either. Though perhaps I should…

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Peter.