” Ordinary people are taking matters into their own hands today to do what our criminal governments have failed to do. We are putting our bodies on the wheels of the machine of the global fossil economy and saying oil kills; we refuse to die for fossil fuels and we refuse to stand by while hundreds of millions of innocent people are murdered. We are in resistance against our murderous governments and the criminal elites who are threatening the survival of humanity.
“The climate crisis will not end until every single country has phased out fossil fuels, but those who bear the greatest responsibility and have the greatest capacity must do the most. As citizens of wealthy countries based in the global north, we demand that our governments stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030 and that they support and finance other countries to make a fast, fair and just transition. They must sign a Fossil Fuel Treaty to end the war on humanity before we lose everything. “
- you if they had blocked the ports
Look, I can do conservative handwringing too!
Why, the point is that you need the public on your side.
They won’t be anyways. The entire conservative movement is against clinate protests regardless of how few people are inconvenienced. So why bother about what they think?
So what you are saying us they need all the public support they can get?
What I am saying is that there won’t be any significant difference in public support, regardless of how few people are inconvenienced. The people who complain now are the same who complained when the same group targeted luxury private jets.
No you don’t lol
Empirically, the public loves radicals who engage in violence and disruption. It both moves the overton window in those people’s direction and gets support from people frustrated with society but no place to vent it.
Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, the Gilets Jaunes, violent farmer protests in the Netherlands, Black Panthers, Suffragette terrorists, labor riots and lynchings of factory owners, the assassination of Shinzo Abe, hell, even Al Qaeda and Hamas. The pattern is always the same: radical and often violent disruptors get a massive amount of sympathy, attention and support while centrists wring their hands about how inappropriate it all is.
If you want to win public support, set something on fire. But if you’re offended and scared off by something being set on fire, you’re not the target audience yet. They’ll get around to winning you over when the movement has grown. Eventually, bringing up that it was bad that things were set on fire will make your friends and family uncomfortable, if they don’t outright confront you by saying that it was necessary to overthrow the old ideas. At which point you can re-examine it or retract that part of your politics from the world, forming a seed of conservative confusion and dismay that lies dormant outside the Overton window waiting until someone starts a fire in its name.