Extinction Rebellion Climate Violence:
Funded by the World’s Richest People

by Dean Andromidas

[Print version of this article]

Sept. 13—One of the co-founders of the Extinction Rebellion organization we profile here, Roger Hallam, made a video in August 2019 for its web site, in which he advised the climate demonstrators why, in this “climate emergency,” they must accept money from “rich people who are capitalists.” These wealthy people are beset with climate anxiety, he told his supporters:

We’re dealing with people who cry at night, just as we do. We don’t want them to commit suicide. No! We want them to ring us up and give us that million quid [$1.3 million].

Very rich people, indeed, support the Extinction Rebellion, which calls itself XR for short.

The same billionaires who aim to make large profits with so-called “green finance” schemes for high-tax, high-cost “renewable energy” technologies, are financing XR. According to Extinction Rebellion documents acquired by Breitbart News, the mega-speculator and financier of so many No-Good Organizations (NGOs), George Soros, topped XR’s list of eco-anxious donors, although the amount he gave was blacked out in the relevant document. Other European funds have come from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which gave no less than £121,140 (about $155,000). This is the foundation of the notorious, mercenary London-based hedge fund, The Children’s Investment Fund Management, founded and run by Sir Chris Hohn. The CEO of this foundation, which has an endowment of over £2 billion, is Kate Hampton, who also serves as Vice Chair of the key European Climate Foundation and a board member of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

Another hedge fund donor is Alasdair Breach, founder of the London-based Gemsstock Limited hedge fund. He transferred £50,000 (about $65,000) through his investment company Furka Holdings AG in Andermatt, Switzerland.

The other funders from Europe include Greenpeace, which gave £10,000, and the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which gave £20,000. The latter’s Chairman, Stephen Brenninkmeijer, is a member of the billionaire Brenninkmeijer family that owns C&A Clothing stores, has billions of dollars in “green” and not-so-green investments. One of the most important funders of the environmentalist movement in Europe, the ECF is financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Growald Family Fund. The latter is the fund founded and led by Paul Growald, who started his career as public relations representative for the evil Paul R. Ehrlich. Ehrlich’s 1972 book, The Population Bomb, was a famous series of wildly false doomsday predictions he still claims will come true—someday.

From the Tides Foundation in the United States, which has been funding environmentalism for decades, came $10,000. Then the Climate Emergency Fund announced its establishment earlier this month, with a commitment of £500,000 to the Extinction Rebellion and other groups. This fund is led by Rory Kennedy, the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy; and Aileen Getty, the daughter of the late rabid anglophile, Sir John Paul Getty, Jr., who became a British citizen and was knighted by the Queen. A few weeks after this announcement, the younger Getty pledged an additional $600,000 to the Climate Emergency Fund, no doubt largely for the Extinction Rebellion. A third leader of this new fund is Trevor Neilson, who co-founded the investment company, “i(x) Investments.” On this investment company’s board are author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, and David Wallace Wells, who wrote the fashionably gloomy Uninhabitable Earth.

Neilson’s partner in i(x) Investments is Howard W. Buffett, the grandson of Warren Buffett, the third-richest man America. The Buffett family are long-time financiers of the environmental moment. Howard held high positions in the Obama Administration including in the Defense Department and White House. Neilson himself started out as a servant of Bill Gates, the second-richest American. He had worked for Bill and Melinda Gates in their family office and as a founding member of the team that created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he served as the Director of Public Affairs. He was also Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition (GBC), created with investments from Bill Gates, George Soros and Ted Turner. This organization was headed by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and President Obama’s former Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This is just a sampling of those very, very “rich people” Roger Hallam meant, who are lavishly funding an organization begun only in late 2018, and known mainly for blocking intersections and crazy-gluing its members to doors of government buildings in the UK.

XR’s Purpose: Turn ‘Climate Anxiety’
into Hysteria

Political leaders across Europe and in the U.S. Congress, and the vast majority of newspapers and think tanks in the trans-Atlantic region, are fully on board with the “Big Lie,” as Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels called it, that the climate is rapidly heating, primarily driven by the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by modern industrial civilization, and that this will literally destroy the Earth and mankind if it is not drastically stopped.

The media recount mass psychosis, unprecedented in modern history, gripping the western world. Adolescent, even pre-adolescent children are being mentally abused and placed in the limelight, exclaiming that carbon emissions must be stopped (i.e., industrial civilization must be destroyed) within the next twelve years or their elders will have destroyed civilization. Children are instructed to skip school to protest climate change, since there is no purpose to education if we are all going to die. Women are encouraged not to have children, since they will not have a livable world to live in.

Extinction Rebellion has quickly gotten into the forefront of mobilizing this hysteria, along with explicit children’s crusades called the Sunrise Movement, and FridaysforFuture, which aims to keep children out of school on Fridays, demonstrating. An open letter announcing XR’s formation, published in the Guardian on Oct. 26, 2018, was signed by 94 academics, politicians, and social activists, declaring that when governments are guilty of “failing to acknowledge that infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources is non-viable. . . . It is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself.”

This fundamental lie—that we live in a world of scarce resources—was refuted by Lyndon LaRouche in his 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth, demonstrating that useful resources are constantly expanded through scientific discoveries of new technologies, utilizing previously unused resources.

XR Not a ‘Sociological Phenomenon’

Extinction Rebellion is not a sociological phenomenon, but a creation of the same powerful financial and oligarchical interests who, under their environmentalist agenda, for more than a half century have pushed a Malthusian, anti-industrial, anti-technology, and fascist agenda. Not only are billionaires like Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, and the Rockefeller family fully mobilized in this effort; the institutions of the British Monarchy, starting with Prince Charles, self-appointed heir to the New Green Empire, are fully mobilized.

Their model for this XR committee of 94, is Lord Bertrand Russell’s 1960 creation of the supposedly pro-peace “Committee of 100” civil disobedience movement. The same Lord Russell had earlier called for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in the Oct. 1, 1946 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Vol. 2, Issue 7-8); now he would “ban the bomb.” Under the cover of this Ban the Bomb movement, Russell pushed the same anti-technology, Malthusian, one-world government agenda that the climate change movement is pushing now.

Referring to “mass psychology” as the most important tool for politics, Russell in his 1952 book, The Impact of Science on Society, wrote (pp. 29-30):

[Mass psychology’s] importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.

What is essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler’s with a speech of (say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. . . .

It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

The XR, an exercise in precisely such mass psychology—better called mass brainwashing—is now shutting down traffic and defacing monuments, but can be expected to proceed to terrorist attacks on CO₂-producing factories and power plants soon.

Brainwashed Brainwashers
Destroy a Generation

The professional backgrounds of the nearly 100 signers of the XR founding declaration give them the skills, influence, and especially access to funding, necessary to create a movement, particularly one premised on the psychological manipulation—yes, the brainwashing of young people. It should not be surprising that more than a quarter of them are psychiatrists, psychologists, or involved in the study of education, especially for students under 18 years.

These climate psychologists are brainwashed themselves. They fully accept the lies that climate change is man-made and with apocalyptic consequences. Since they view man as a species incapable of applying creative reason to the advancement of human knowledge, and of creating technologies to expand production and productivity, they declare that economic development itself is undermining the future and must be stopped.

An example is Dr. Susie Orbach, a signer of the XR declaration, who identifies herself as a consulting psychoanalyst at the Balint Consultancy. She is one of several authors of the Extinction Rebellion handbook, This is Not a Drill. This doomsday handbook targets young, impressionable adolescents. In her chapter on “Climate Sorrow,” Orbach wrote (pp. 66-67):

What is required of us psychologically to engage with, rather than cut off from, this knowledge? How can we envision what is happening when it isn’t right in front of us? It’s difficult to imagine one’s own death. How much more impossible to imagine that human activities might mean extinction?

If you are not depressed, she argues, you should be: “Acknowledging our feelings—to ourselves, to one another—makes us more robust. We need to mourn and organize. It should not be one or the other.”

Isn’t this the essence of aversive conditioning, throwing the victim into existential crisis, in this case impressionable young people? They are told to consider that their lives may be destroying civilization—everything would be better without them, and so they must attack their parents for giving them this life. The now well-defined “climate anxiety” syndrome is a kind of depression with no hope, no future except extinction—or unreasoning and even violent action.

Another signatory of the XR declaration is Paul Hoggett, Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, University of West England, Bristol. He is also on the Executive Committee of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), a crew of mad psychologists who, when they are not psychoanalyzing people they claim are suffering “climate change psychosis,” are lecturing others on how to cope with the doom they claim mankind faces because of climate change.

According to its website, CPA announces events at which they discuss such questions as: “What would it be like to be part of a culture which no longer believed in progress, one which was prepared to be prepared for the worst rather than always hoping for the best?” or “What forms might love and hope assume in an age of ecological austerity?”

Eco-psychotherapist Mary-Jayne Rust, a Climate Psychology Alliance board member, discussed everything from “climate anxiety” to “climate grief” in a recent lecture in which she bemoaned that:

[Climate change] is part of a much bigger story about our dysfunctional relationship with the rest of nature. . . . If we listen, we will hear stories of love and loss in our relationships with the land, animals, plants and more. We also continue to struggle with a very ambivalent relationship with ourselves as animals.

Newspeak à la Orwell’s 1984 is not omitted either. Among XR’s active leaders is Arran Stibbe, “Professor of Ecological Linguistics,” University of Gloucestershire. Stibbe is a devotee of the famous (or infamous) British linguist, the late Michael Halliday, who in 1990 wrote that “applied linguistics” should be used as a weapon against the very idea of progress:

Changing language can change the existing order. When planning language, applied linguists are not forging an ideologically neutral instrument for carrying out policy; they are creating an active force in shaping people’s consciousness.

According to Stibbe:

The main example Halliday gave was that of “economic growth,” describing how “countless texts repeated daily all around the world contain a simple message: growth is good. Many is better than few, more is better than less, big is better than small, grow is better than shrink,” which leads to ecologically destructive consequences.

These are 21st-century climate-change Strangeloves who tell young people to “Stop worrying and love the extinction of mankind.”

Psychedelics for ‘Green’ Movements

In a manifesto titled, “How Psychedelics Helped to Shape the Extinction Rebellion,” released in the summer of 2019, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook “explains how her psychedelic experiences helped to shape the genesis of the movement.” She describes traveling to Costa Rica, where she “ingested a flood dose” of native psychedelics such as ayahuasca. “I was terrified,” she writes, “but the reason why I pushed my consciousness to such [an] extreme wasn’t just to do the inner work on myself—I wanted answers to how I could bring about social change.”

While admitting her ignorance about the science of climate, Bradbrook raves:

Entire species are going extinct. . . . There is widespread denial of the fact that we as humans are not at the top of a pyramid where we get to dictate the terms, we are part of a web of life.

Speaking at the 5th Breaking Convention conference on the use and legalization of psychedelic drugs, held on August 16, 2019 at the University of Greenwich in London, the British journal, Nature, reported that Bradbrook had declared:

I would support a mass civil disobedience where we take medicine to tell the state that they have absolutely no right to control our consciousness and to define our spiritual practice.

That conference was sponsored by the Beckley Foundation, whose founder and Director is Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March. It drew 1,500 researchers, shamans, “psychonauts” and journalists and had as its purpose the promotion and legalization of these psychedelic drugs. Climate change and the Extinction Rebellion were among the key topics at this year’s conference.

Bradbrook said psychedelics must be used in the “right way,” and that we can learn from indigenous cultures that routinely use substances like ayahuasca:

Whilst I’m all for psychedelic science—I think it’s fantastic—I don’t think we necessarily have time to wait for the science to tell us these medicines are useful. The indigenous cultures have already shown us the ways.

Bradbrook didn’t elaborate. It is a fact that many of the tribes who practice the “wisdom” of taking ayahuasca, such as the Yaguas of Colombia, have also practiced cannibalism.

All the Queen’s Men and Women

The mobilization of psychological shock troops preying on our youth and the promoters of drugs and the psychosis they create should be enough for governments to take legal actions against the XR for child abuse, promotion of drugs, and incitement. Nonetheless, there is the other side of this movement: that it is sponsored and promoted by the highest levels of the British establishment, including the British Monarchy and the institutions the royals patronize.

We don’t have to go very far to see this. Just look at the parallel lives of XR co-founder Bradbrook. There is the scatterbrained activist who can be seen on YouTube calling for massive civil disobedience; but there is another side of Bradbrook, with very serious connections. Prior to declaring herself a climate warrior, Bradbrook’s first full-time employment was with Business in the Community (BITC), The Prince’s Responsible Business Network. The “Prince” is Prince Charles, Prince of Wales. From 2001 to 2003, Bradbrook was a program director who “Supported businesses in the ICT [information and communications technology] sector to consider their role in bridging the digital divide and examining their corporate social responsibilities.” Here she developed her skills in digital inclusivity. Needless to say, the BITC has a heavy climate change agenda for businesses.

Prince Charles has been following in the footsteps of his father Prince Philip who, together with the card-carrying Nazi, Prince Bernhard of Holland, created the World Wildlife Fund after World War II. It was Philip who infamously declared in 1988 that he would hope to be reincarnated as a deadly virus “to contribute something to solving overpopulation.” In July Prince Charles said, “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.”

In 2003 Bradbrook met her future husband, John David Fisher, who, according to his own biography, served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force for four years in 1973-77. Despite his short service record he is currently the Vice Chairman of the Royal Air Force Club and received the Queen when she recently visited the club. Fisher founded and is currently Chief Executive of the digital inclusion charity, Citizens Online, registered at Fisher’s home address in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK, offering services to organizations and communities to access the Internet. Fisher served on former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Digital Inclusion Panel and as an adviser to cabinet ministers on the issue. Bradbrook was a director of Citizens Online from 2003 until 2018, after which she separated from Fisher and Citizens Online to create XR.

Another director of Citizens Online who has gone to Extinction Rebellion is Dr. Gerald Power, with whom Bradbrook co-authored a study on digital inclusion. Power is a management consultant who began his career at the UK’s Ministry of Defense “on its science and technology fast track management training program,” according to his own biography. He has enjoyed a career “across all of the major Central Government departments.”

Lord-in-Waiting and Bank Chairman

Another of XR’s founding directors, and currently its patron, is Anthony St John, 22nd Baron St John of Bletso, one of 92 hereditary members of the House of Lords, and Extra Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen. Currently Chairman of the Board of merchant bank Strand Hanson, The Lord St John of Bletso also sits as non-executive director of a long list of mining, communications, IT, renewable energy, and financial services companies in South Africa and Europe. In the House of Lords he is an Executive Committee Member of the All-Party Parliamentary Africa Group and Vice Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary South Africa Group.

St John’s green credentials include supporting for two decades an organization called Television for the Environment (TVE), which works with filmmakers and partners worldwide to produce and distribute films that put the environment and sustainability on the global agenda. A former president of Friends of TVE, he is now emeritus trustee. TVE was founded by the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Wildlife Fund-UK, and ITV Central (UK) in 1984.

He is also on the advisory board of Successful GREEN, an “international network for environment, innovation and information,” alongside Peter E. Merian, former Director of the Basel Stock Exchange, CEO of Bank Sarasin, and founding member of the Global Environmental Society; and Dr. Marcelo Cavalho de Andrade, President of the Earth Council Alliance created by billionaire Maurice Strong. Cavalho de Andrade is also Partner and Principal of Earth Capital Partners LLP, which is positioned to profit big from the push for green finance.

The Extra Lord-in-Waiting was also a signatory—along with U.S Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and U.S. Representative Alan Grayson, and rock singer-environmentalists such as Sting, Graham Nash, and Jason Mraz—of an open letter to world leaders at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris. They called for a sentence to be added to the treaty requiring companies and corporations to fully and transparently account for the costs of developing, producing, transporting, selling and consuming those products generating greenhouse gases.

Chatham House for Climate Action

Not so long ago, among the XR activists who super-glued themselves to the doors of the corporate headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell, could be found Farhana Yamin. This XR leader happens to be Associate Fellow of the Energy, Environment and Resources Department at Her Majesty’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House.

On July 4, Chatham House sponsored a debate titled, “Climate Action: A Role for Civil Disobedience?” Describing the purpose of the event, the Institute declared:

In spite of this ever-growing public awareness of the urgency of climate action, environmental scientists and activists have struggled to motivate the wider public, policymakers and corporations to push through the disruptive and ambitious policies needed. In recent months however, a new sense of urgency has been injected into the environmental debate by movements including the Extinction Rebellion in London and the Youth For Climate strikes internationally.

Speaking at that event, Sam Geall, another Royal Institute of International Affairs researcher, called for the security services to repress the oil companies, and not XR rebels. “We need to understand . . . who’s not being punished” for causing climate damage, he said.

‘Ditch Development, Save the Amazon’

Near the top of the list of signers of the XR founding declaration can be found the former head of the Church of England—that is, under its Supreme Governor, the Queen—the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowen Williams. He is among the most active in supporting the XR and appears at conferences and meetings encouraging youth to take part in the International Rebellion in London and beyond. Williams recently authored a commentary appearing in the Guardian making the outlandish claim that one-fifth of the world’s oxygen comes from the Brazilian rainforest, declaring that the fires are consequences of our “drive for development that serves only a lust for consumption and convenience . . .”

The Amazon forest must be left for the indigenous to live in primitive backwardness, he argues:

Their rights have been overridden in the face of the greed of various powerful economic interests, and theirs is a story that speaks of the stark economic inequality blighting and corrupting so much of our world, including countries like Brazil. . . .

In the Amazon, mining and oil extraction are pushing the communities out of the forest in which they have lived for centuries.

We are all to blame, said the good pastor, for the crimes of progress and eating meat:

This is not just Brazil’s problem. . . . All of us are implicated. The global patterns of economic growth, including the unprecedented levels of demand for meat in the developed world, account for much of the pressure on land use in the region. . . .

The wildfires raging in the Amazon are a visible metaphor for the effect of our unrestrained passion for limitless economic growth.

In an outrageous intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, Williams called for denying the huge Amazon region to the development of Brazil’s 211 million citizens.