Activist Group Vandalizes Ancient Monument

Here’s a little ancient history that’s suddenly become relevant again. 39 years ago this month, just ahead of the summer solstice, the Battle of the Beanfield took place in Wiltshire, England. This wasn’t a “battle” in the traditional military sense. It was a violent confrontation between a convoy of around 600 New Age hippies, and roughly a thousand police officers.

The police officers were there to enforce an injunction preventing the hippies from holding a festival at Stonehenge. That injunction was necessary because, just one year earlier, around 100,000 hippies had — as hippies tend to do — caused tens of thousands of dollars in property damage to trees, fences and several archeological artifacts in the area, including Stonehenge itself.

So, in 1985, the authorities understandably wanted to prevent any more hippie carnage from being inflicted on Stonehenge. They set up a roadblock several miles away to turn the “New Age travelers” away. That’s when, according to the BBC, “Police said they came under attack, being pelted with lumps of wood, stones and even petrol bombs.”

Of course, to this day, the hippies maintain the police were the aggressors. That’s probably not true, but it certainly appears that the police officers used significant force once mayhem broke out. At one point, the police reportedly threw fire extinguishers and stones at the hippies to keep them from fleeing. In any event, ultimately, two dozen people were hospitalized, and more than 500 hippies were arrested. By most accounts, the Battle of the Beanfield marked the single largest mass arrest in the history of England, at least since World War II.

I mention the Battle of the Beanfield because it illustrates a couple of things. First of all, it demonstrates an obvious point, which is that the use of force by police officers does indeed deter lawlessness. You don’t have to endorse all of the tactics the police used that day in order to see that. In the years after the Battle of the Beanfield, there were still some hippies who tried to throw a festival at Stonehenge for the summer solstice, but it was nothing like what happened in 1985. For the most part, the hippies got the message loud and clear.

The other important takeaway is that, for whatever reason, Stonehenge has long been an object of fixation for antisocial, anti-civilization, anti-human weirdos. Most likely, the interest stems from the mystique of the whole construction. Stonehenge was constructed more than 5,000 years ago without the benefit of the wheel, and it’s still unclear to archaeologists exactly how the builders pulled that off — or even who exactly the builders were. It’s one of the most impressive monuments ever built in human history, so it kind of makes sense that listless, uninteresting people would latch onto Stonehenge in a desperate attempt to imbue their own lives with more meaning.

That brings us to the events that took place at Stonehenge yesterday.

A couple of vandals associated with the group “Just Stop Oil” — one aged 73 and the other aged 21 — charged towards Stonehenge and began blanketing it with some kind of orange powder paint. Watch:

As you can see, it fell to a tourist to stop these two people from defacing Stonehenge. There were no police officers nearby to immediately detain them, so a random guy on vacation had to step up to preserve one of the most famous structures in the entire world. We’ve seen this again and again. When vandals dumped pink powder on the case containing the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives Rotunda in February, no security guards lifted a finger to stop them. Late last year, activists with Just Stop Oil were able to throw soup on a Van Gogh painting, then glue themselves to the wall, all without anyone intervening. And of course, on too many occasions to count, these kinds of activists have obstructed traffic with impunity. They get away with it so consistently because, at some level, they have the tacit endorsement of the state.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

I’ve covered these brats extensively before, but even with all those other incidents in mind, this latest attack on Stonehenge is especially egregious to me. Defacing a monument as ancient as Stonehenge is really an attack on humanity. The fact that Stonehenge is still standing is a testament to human ingenuity and resourcefulness that’s hard to comprehend even to this day, thousands of years later. The only people who would want to deface or destroy Stonehenge and erase the evidence of humanity’s accomplishments are people who despise humanity itself. It’s the same reason why climate activists want everyone to stop having children. It’s the same reason they want to “end fossil fuels” and crash the global economy. They’re not really concerned about global temperatures rising by a degree or two. They want humanity to go extinct.

In comments to the media, Just Stop Oil has denied all of this. They’ve claimed that this orange cornflour paint is going to wash away in the rain, so it’s not really vandalism. Of course, Just Stop Oil has made that same claim before when they vandalized several other monuments, and it’s turned out to be false.

Additionally, there are apparently 80 species of lichen on Stonehenge that might be dead now, including rare species that scientists wanted to preserve. They’re still trying to figure out the precise extent of the damage. And even if it does all wash away, they still have no right to use an ancient monument as a platform for their delusional political statement. So even if the paint ultimately does come off, the point remains the same: these activists are fundamentally anti-human — and they’re becoming increasingly emboldened. In a video message, the 21-year-old Stonehenge attacker — who apparently identifies as nonbinary — explained why they/them/zim/zir decided to deface the monument. Watch:

A few things to note here. First of all, there’s something physicians refer to as the “gestalt.” That includes a person’s general appearance, tone of voice, and the like. And the gestalt is a little concerning here. For starters, this person is whispering for some reason, which comes off as a little unsettling. On top of that, this nonbinary activist is also wearing a Patagonia shirt, even though Patagonia admits on its website that its vast array of suppliers — by necessity — relies on fossil fuels to conduct operations. They emit something like 200,000 metric tons of CO2 every year. So I guess we’re meant to conclude that ending fossil fuels is important, except when nonbinary University of Oxford students need a nice sweater vest or t-shirt. Then fossil fuels are okay.

Of course, every accusation is really an admission with these people. When these activists warn of death and destruction and devastation on an “immeasurable scale,” they’re actually revealing precisely what groups like Just Stop Oil want to happen. It’s what they know will happen if Western nations stop producing fossil fuels, which supply an overwhelming majority of the world’s energy. We’ll be taken over by China in about a week. Civilization as we know it will come to an end.

For some reason, that appears to be what a significant number of young people now want to see happen. They’ve been indoctrinated into a nihilistic death cult. And on social media, many of these young people are now celebrating what just happened at Stonehenge. On Twitter, Oli London posted an image of a blue-haired British archeologist with “she/they” pronouns who wrote that the attack was “well done.” More than 10,000 people liked that particular tweet, which gives you some indication of how popular the sentiment is.

It’s not hard to see why this is becoming a trend. For one thing, there’s a lot of money in it.

As Fox News reported late last year, the Beverly Hills, California-based, Climate Emergency Fund, or CEF, sent roughly $4 million in grants overseas in 2022 alone: “The most sizable slice [of these grants was] wired to U.K. climate activists. The largest beneficiary of CEF’s funds appeared to be Just Stop Oil, a British activist group that has repeatedly made headlines for stopping traffic and disrupting public places across the UK.” And this is just one dark money group based in the United States.

So that amateur quality, creepy video you just saw from the nonbinary activist may have been amateurish on purpose. In reality, Just Stop Oil is an extremely well-funded operation. They could’ve sprung for better production quality if they wanted to. So-called “environmental activism” is now a very big business, and a lot of people are making a lot of money on it from sources we can’t identify.

That could be one reason the whole movement is attractive to young people, many of whom are now looking for jobs. On top of that, of course, government officials all over the world have become propagandists who indoctrinate young people as a matter of course.

Here for example is New York governor Kathy Hochul warning of an impending heat emergency in the city:

The central claim that Kathy Hochul is making — that New York has never before seen temperatures that feel like 100° — is completely false. It’s so obviously false that you can disprove it with about five seconds of Googling. According to the National Weather Service, the highest temperature ever recorded in New York City’s Central Park was 106° Fahrenheit, all the way back in July of 1936. And that’s the actual temperature, not the heat index.

Before that, there was a heat wave in 1896 that killed more than 1,000 people, as temperatures exceeded 90°. The National Weather Service reports that the warmest month on record in New York was all the way back in July of 1999. And in several years since, New York has hit 100° on several occasions.

So what Kathy Hochul is saying is wrong for about a million reasons. But she said it anyway because she knows it’s effective. People hear what she’s saying — especially young people — and they believe it. They become activists and loyal voters for the Democrats. And unless they’re met with force, as they were at the Battle of the Beanfield, some of those activists will continue to deface priceless historical artifacts to attract attention to their nihilistic death cult. They will continue to block roadways, preventing people from going to work and ambulances from transporting patients. Appeasing these cultists simply does not work. That much is now very clear. If we want to have any monuments or any history left at all, we need to take the threat as seriously as the British did in 1985, and shut them down.

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