The greatest threat to justice is the liberal class, as Martin Luther King so clearly said. 

"The white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

King was talking about freedom for African Americans, but his lesson for civil society – and humanity – comes to me now as I am more enraged than I have ever been, watching the moderate Richard Madeley discuss, with all apparent sincerity, how frightening the climate crisis is. Western Europe is on fire, and seemingly nobody knows why…!

The original version of article first appeared at Clare Farrell's newsletter. To read the 'unfiltered' commentary, visit her Substack.

Fault

According to Madeley now, “we were warned” and “knew this was going to happen”. Now the Apocalypse has arrived, what can we possibly do about it? Maybe nothing?!

Excuse me?!

The truth is, for the last few decades people like Richard Madeley – our liberal media class and commentariat – have spent their time on our TV channels moderately convincing the public to look away from the crisis.

To look away from power, to look away from the pain, to look away from the money, to look away from the politics, to look away from the industries, to look away from the public relations tricks. To just look away. 

They have done everything they could to convince people that the climate crisis might not be caused by human beings, or that it might be your personal fault, rather than the fault of the oil and gas executives who knew what they were doing.

Deflect

These liberals of the media class are the people who have, for example, helped the Atlas Network of think tanks and Policy Exchange to enact their strategy of dehumanizing activists in order not to have their profit margins hit by those activists, who are campaigning for truth and for life and for love and compassion.

So let me say it really clearly: people like Richard Madeley have contributed the most to creating the hellscape in Europe now in front of people’s eyes, live on TV.

King understood that the moderate, or liberal, will do everything they can to avoid the “positive tension” of justice. Because this tension involves having to share power, equality, wealth, land, rights, and even survival, with others - such as the black American, whom the white moderates of America considered of less value.

When it comes to the climate crisis and the media class, this aversion to “positive tension” is going to get all of us – including them, and their families – burned alive in wildfires or starved in food shocks.

The Madeleys and the Allister Heaths in The Telegraph, the Jordan Petersons and the Piers Morgans, try so hard to deny and deflect the truth of climate collapse because they are the self-appointed keepers of the moderate, liberal narrative of the status quo.

Chaos

They tell us growth is good, people are sovereign isolated individuals, people shouldn’t worry themselves with making decisions and leave it to the Oxbridge educated elite. 

Their refusal to endure the tension of positive justice and freedom for everyone, because they are so committed to defending the narrative of Western progress, is, I think, the main driver behind why they are so obstructive to what actually needs to happen to somehow respond to our collapsing climate.

Fires are now a significant feedback loop. There have been 393 wildfires across England and Wales this year, as reported this week. The fire risk remains elevated after more than 200 fires in just 12 days. 

This doesn’t even include Scotland. France… Spain… Italy… and on and on it will go, destroying carbon sinks, decimating ecosystems during a mass extinction event that’s underway anyway. We cannot recover from this, with an extreme heat experience similar or worse to this year, predicted for 2027.

It’s time to admit that the most willfully ignorant are also the loudest and richest in our society. The denial and avoidance of this liberal class has guaranteed they, as well as we, will live in eternal chaos.

Meaning-making

We will not, as the LSE and Oxford educated Allister Heath thinks, be able to simply pretend we now live in the Med and eat more olives. We will, in fact, begin to fight over food. As Professor Stefan Ramstorf, an actual climate scientist, says - we got a close up look at the Mediterranean lifestyle just last week. 

Unless we change who controls the narrative of who we are, we’re certainly utterly f****d. The government tried to suppress a report from its own secret service, but the reality is simple to see.

Fires produce carbon and kill nature which heats up the planet faster and causes more fire. I have no doubt I could teach this basic fact to a room full of 10-yr-olds.

So what exactly is Heath’s problem? Or Madeley’s, or Morgan’s, or any of them? I think extreme privilege makes you insensitive to the facts. As the right wingers like Charlie Kirk love to say, change my mind!

Because it is these same moderate white men who have done most to obstruct, deflect, and delay any serious meaning-making by ordinary people about the climate crisis in the public sphere.

Distrust

And no doubt, the next thing they’re going to do is draw a false equivalence between here and other places in the world. I’m waiting for the “fires are bigger in Australia” moment.

It was as easy for Madeley as it was for me, in the past, to go and do some research. It would have been the simplest thing for Madeley to consider the evidence, to become informed, and to look at what was blindingly obvious seven years ago.

We were then on course for civilizational collapse, irreversible breakdown, and the destruction of everything that we know and love, and a non-existent future for our younger generations.

Presumably, he was either too engaged in motivated reasoning or too arrogant to try to learn anything, despite having a literal team of researchers at his job to do just that!

So, rather than engage with the most important issue in all of human history, he decided to wage a campaign of distrust against people like me, like us.

Gall

Watch what Madeley says to Gail Bradbrook, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. “Sir David Attenborough is not a saint.” That was the most important thing for his viewers to think?! For them to question David Attenborough?!

Ordinary citizens who do not have enormous means, resources, privilege, or access to power, come on your show. And they say: “This is happening. It’s guaranteed to happen unless we take radical action. And I’m here, willing to go to jail, willing to sacrifice even possibly my life to try and make a difference.”

When an ordinary citizen comes on your programme and says the crisis is already killing an estimated 400,000 per year. That “in our lifetimes Europe will burn and Europe will have no food”.

You ridicule them to their faces. You destroy and denigrate our identities and our personhood in public. You deny it, attack the messenger, mislead the public.

How does that square with what you said this week, Richard? That you “knew this was going to happen”...? You have the gall to sit on your daytime television programme and act as if you knew this was going to happen.

Jail

If you already knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you help? If you already knew this was going to happen, why didn’t you lean into your conscience? I’m still here left wondering, why didn’t you help? 

All I can do is keep coming back to King’s quote: that people like you prefer 'order' to justice. 

You would rather keep things the same, live through collapse, and kill your own grandchildren than live with the tension of being wrong, of being powerless, to face the reality of what we were trying to present. All because it was too much of a threat to your existing order.

And now, public order laws have been changed to such an extreme degree that if I go and break a window or paint a building, I may be charged as a terrorist. 

This effectively means I have almost no rights in the legal system: no right to fair trial, no rights to a political life, no right to any privacy, and guaranteed jail time.

Vested

If you have not realised by now that nonviolent disruption is society’s best defence against injustice – its best warning system – you’re not paying attention. 

And you are going to be “shocked” no doubt at the outpouring of violence and disorder which will happen when the supermarket shelves are empty. 

Not to mention the abject fury I expect we will see when people come to realise that the wealth and abundance of our planet that used to reproduce naturally, has been willfully destroyed for profit and can never be brought back. What do you think people are going to do?

The newspapers will continue to campaign against climate action, at the same time as reporting live on the devastation that has been caused by the fossil fuel industry. 

Just the other day, the front cover of The Times featured holiday makers on a beach staring at a burning horizon. The headline was part of a concerted campaign against the net zero agenda. They are not objective news outlets. They are campaigning machines for vested interests.

Unforgivable

The media use the power they’ve built up to crush and destroy any young person, any woman, any poor person, any ordinary citizen, who fights them. The precise description is called “punching down”. It’s pathetic. They punch down and down and down on the small people. I would rather be faced with the real climate deniers.

At some point, this is all going to unravel. The Climate Genocide Act Now campaign have put together a dossier of evidence and lodged a complaint against The Telegraph. 

But until then, how should we exactly go and say, “We told you so”. Because it isn’t a nice thing to have to say. But, we told you so.

I can only conclude that the liberal media class are psychopaths. It's legacy on climate is unforgivable.

So this is what I think should happen now.

Wildfires

I would like young people to disown Richard Madeley, Nick Ferrari and Piers Morgan. For them to disown all the hubristic, macho, bullish, idiotic, liberal men in the media. 

The men who will now go round acting as if they were right all along, yet still despising anyone who has an opinion that might mean they have to look at their own privilege, their own complicity, their lack of morality, their own lack of humanity, their own lack of foresight. 

I think about all the members of the liberal media class who for years, or decades, have denigrated and destroyed the scientists, the conscientious quitters, the activists and protestors.

These people should ask their grandkids, or some young people in their lives, what they think a commensurate repentance would look like. 

And then spend the rest of their natural lives doing what those young people said they should do: in service to the floods, the wildfires, to nature, to the world.

Distorted

People in the climate movement have been floating ideas for a retroactive strategy. How do you keep the receipts so that later on you can get justice? 

There is the Climate Genocide Act Now campaign. There is the Media Sovereignty Act campaign. There is the Media Tell the Truth campaign. 

Activists in their droves have recognized that one of the deadliest parts of our Western culture and society is the mainstream media. The damage they are doing is unparalleled, because they’re literally preventing the meaning-making that needs to happen so that human beings can save each other and themselves.

As the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) body states: "When public understanding of risk is systematically distorted, the capacity to respond collectively is weakened. This becomes particularly visible in moments of crisis."

Just in the UK, GB News aired more than four anti-climate claims per day ahead of the 2024 general election, according to DeSmog.

Unchecked

They are the enemy of life. They are the enemy of the public, and they should be treated as such. Accountability isn’t violence. To ask those responsible for taking accountability for their actions is not violence. It is justice.

In the nonviolent tradition, we take responsibility for our actions. We live in an age of real consequences. And in an age of consequence, as the climate movement, we have asked people to shoulder the responsibility for being alive at this time.

That includes, especially perhaps, those with the power to shape our context – what we understand about what is happening – through narrative and communication. 

Those who own, produce, and front the dominant narratives and communication have great power and therefore great responsibility.

It’s unbelievable, unacceptable, to allow that power to go unchecked.

Permission-space

Looking at what has happened, and is still happening. Look at how Allister Heath and Jordan Peterson are still, as the world is on fire, argue for giving up, or for "adopting a Mediterranean lifestyle". The claim that climate action is a woke Left agenda. 

I know that the narrative power in this permission space of our media public sphere has to be taken away from these psychopaths.

They might pretend to not know what they are doing, but they do, and they should be held responsible.

Because, I ask you this: Look at the news and think about who in this society has got credibility now. Because I’m really sorry to have to say it, but we f*****g told you so.

This Author

Clare Farrell was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and is now building real democracy in service to life. The original version of article first appeared on Clare's newsletter. To read the 'unfiltered' commentary, visit her Substack now.