According to Euronews, it’s not fair to send people to prison for trying to destroy classic art to save the planet. Not because they didn’t know it was illegal, didn’t carefully plan in advance to do it and aren’t lunatics (other than when they announce “We do not consent to plans that will result in 3C of warming and mass death” or when they think there’s a connection between Vincent van Gogh’s classic Sunflowers and climate… although come to think of it sunflowers love CO2.) But because um uh laws are just for people we disagree with. After all, if some MAGA types were trying to deface art because it was lewd, guess what these people would say? But across the board, greens seem to be brushing aside the rule of law if it keeps them from forcing their views on the peasants without the tiresome bother of persuading them.

In that Euronews item on 16 Just Stop Oil protestors in the UK, supporters from Friends of the Earth said “Silencing those striving for a better world will not make these escalating crises disappear – doing so only serves to stifle our democracy.” Silencing. As in forbidding them to throw soup or beans at art, which doesn’t even really make noise. No one is taking away their right to speak, or that of an audience to hear them. Which means the end of democracy, apparently.

Oddly, Canada’s Green Party takes the same view of deporting a guy who’s been massively, systematically violating the terms of his Canadian “student visa” as “one of the central figures in a series of massively disruptive illegal road blockades targeting the Vancouver area.” Sure, he violated court injunctions and “his own release conditions”, not to mention not actually meeting academic requirements. But it was to fix the weather along with groups known systematically to plan to break the law. So he whimpers that his treatment, consisting of continually not being deported as the law and logic require, is “Kafkaesque” while Green Party perpetual leader Elizabeth May said “For God’s sake, Marc and David, stop this deportation.” Evidently she’s on a first-name basis with her partisan adversaries, whereas mere citizens can be unable to reach the airport or the hospital. Who cares about them? Mind you if they were inconvenienced by truckers fighting for liberty, it’d be cops on horseback and frozen bank accounts. But for my friends, everything.

The Guardian ran a host of items on the same question, and the same protestors Euronews is campaigning for, including a column by Caroline Lucas headlined “Five years in prison for nonviolent protest: it’s plain wrong, and Keir Starmer knows it”. Uh, would that be the same Keir Starmer who put the courts into overdrive to jail Britons for rude tweets about multiculturalism?

The degree of misrepresentation is stunning. Lucas, herself a former MP for the Green Party who has been arrested for protesting because “I felt I had exhausted all democratic options”, aka had not convinced enough people and didn’t care to wait for their grubby consent, whines that:

“These sentences have been condemned as draconian by Amnesty International, as ‘a grave erosion of … freedoms’ by Liberty, as ‘a profound injustice’ by Global Witness, and as ‘not acceptable in a democracy’ by a special rapporteur for the UN. They represent the terrifying decline of our nation, from a beacon of tolerance with a clear division between politics and policing, towards an oppressive state where that dividing line is becoming harder and harder to discern. Regardless of your politics and what you are standing for, the right of peaceful protest is a vital sign of a healthy democracy and an essential guardrail against authoritarian politicians and reckless companies.”

We won’t dwell on her failure to point to traditional British sources on liberty under law; evidently we are all post-nationalists on the left ashamed of our own heritage. But “the right of peaceful protest” means you can stand in a park with signs, get on a soapbox and deliver a diatribe, pray silently outside a… oh wait, you can’t do that one. It doesn’t mean you can forcibly obstruct your fellows as they go about their lawful business, and have them charged with assault if they try to remove you from the public roadway.

When such people call these actions “trying to draw attention to the government failure to confront the cause of the climate crisis” rather than “trying to hijack democracy because their ridiculous attitudes, rude words and unworkable proposals did not command sufficient assent to change government policy” you know they have no more regard for your intellect than for your rights. Which do tend to come as a package.