Back in 2019 an activist named Zion Lights was the spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, a British climate change group which had made a lot of news for blocking traffic and later for gluing themselves to famous paintings. As the group’s spokesperson, Lights appeared on Andrew Neil’s show where he took a very simple approach to questioning her. He asked her to back up the claims made by the group’s founder, Roger Hallam, that billions of people were going to die as a result of climate change unless something was done.

“What’s the scientific basis for these claims,” Neil asked. Lights immediately started backpedaling and admitted there was disagreement over those claims. But Neil just kept hammering away. “I’ve seen young girls on television, part of your demonstration…crying because they think they’re going to die in five or six years time, crying because they don’t think they’ll ever see adulthood,” Neil said. And over and over it was clear that Zion Lights couldn’t justify that hysteria.

To her credit, Zion Lights left Extinction Rebellion not long after that interview. In 2020 she wrote a piece for the Telegraph admitting she had given up defending the indefensible:

I couldn’t defend those numbers because they didn’t have a basis in science. So I was faced with an awful choice on live TV: either I could stand up for science or I could defend XR. I had to choose the former, because for me, sticking with the evidence is the most important thing of all.

This week the Free Press published a new piece by Zion Lights which confronts the problem of climate hysteria a little more directly. Lights says that Extinction Rebellion and other groups like it clearly have a cult problem.

I told myself activists can be odd birds and tried not to give it more thought. I mostly hung out with the dorkier types, like me. But over time, I realized there was something wrong, and that the guy in charge of XR, Roger Hallam, was the root of it…

When I first saw Roger in the XR office in London, I didn’t see his appeal. His wiry gray hair was unkempt, and he sat behind his desk every day eating pungent homemade hummus. I noticed he didn’t pay attention to people when they talked. That we were facing certain death was his justification (or rationalization) for being rude to everyone.

Members called him a hero, and fell for his constant self-comparisons to MLK and Gandhi. He referred to himself as a prophet, and “proved” he was a martyr through regular arrests and stints in jail…

For any cult to work it needs to offer salvation. Roger offers that, plus a sense of purpose and belonging to the young people who flock to him.

“I won’t live to be thirty,” youth members would tell me. I tried to convince them they would live, but they were already under Roger’s spell…

When a movement that bills itself as compassionate and democratic seems to rely so heavily on messianic figures trading in doom and gloom, you have to ask yourself: Is this really the most ethical way to change the world?

Lights goes on to say that after she left the group and started speaking in favor of nuclear energy she was attacked by former colleagues who accused her of being a sellout. She says she was determined to remain quiet about the cultic behavior she saw at Extinction Rebellion but changed her mind after seeing some of their latest stunts.

Roger Hallam was effectively kicked out of ER in 2020 after a series of bad decisions but is now running a new, even more desperate, group called Just Stop Oil which is engaged in the same stunts. Zion Lights concludes:

Just Stop Oil has nothing to do with saving the environment or waking people up to the climate emergency. It’s about one man, his ambitions for revolution and power, and the innocent children he has brainwashed to do his bidding.

I think most of us get that. Unfortunately, there aren’t many people willing to say it in print. Zion Lights has now started her own group called Emergency Reactor which is pro-nuclear energy.

Finally, here’s the interview with Andrew Neil which helped convince Zion Lights to leave Extinction Rebellion behind. The message of this clip is a good one for any other activists out there pitching the public on doom and gloom as humanity’s future.