Although there are enough fools who believe climate alarmists and other Leftist agitators, the latter resort to paying people to participate in demonstrations, and even purchase services of firms, specializing in “organizing civil disobedience.” From McKibben, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist (referring to events of 2011):

“Our advance team had been on the ground in Washington for three weeks. It turns out that in a market society there are people equipped to fill every need, including organizing civil disobedience. The crew we’d found, and who would soon become close colleagues, was headed by Matt Leonard.”

“Matt kept saying that we’d be fine with five or ten arrestees a day over our two-week protest; even as the number of people signing up kept mounting, he cautioned that many would melt away. The D.C. police must have felt the same way, because it was next to impossible to get their attention— our team was bounced from one sergeant to another, and none seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. I began to worry they’d just let us sit there, that we wouldn’t get arrested at all.”

If you learned about these arrests from putative news reports and these details were omitted – don’t worry. These were fake news from a fake news TV channel or website.

“Civil disobedience is hard work— training a hundred new people every night, getting them safely arrested in the morning, writing press releases, talking to reporters.”

The S.O.B. does not even know what real work is at all. I doubt he had ever had an honest job in his life. This is what he considers a job (refers to events of 2001): “Newly ensconced at Middlebury College in Vermont, I’d offered to teach a course on local food production. There were two problems. One, I can’t really grow anything— my heart is green, but not my thumb.” Yes, he applied to and got the position to teach kids of farmers how to produce food, having neither experience nor even theoretical knowledge on the subject! That would be a fraud in any other business, but education. This case is illustrative of the educational system degradation. It has been captured by the radical Left, who went to hire even more radical Left, and chased away not only Conservatives and moderates, but even professionals in the apolitical fields, the agriculture in this case. McKibben’s idea of a food production course was environmental reading, and his second problem was the perceived lack of suitable literature: “We could choose among the remarkable essays of Wendell Berry, the seductive novels of Wendell Berry, and the tough poems of Wendell Berry.” Thus the higher education complex have either exiled or diluted competence within its walls, and most of it fell into the abyss of obscurantism. But back to McKibben’s “hard work”:

“Once the final arrestees on the final day had been hauled away in handcuffs, our small circle of core organizers sat down at a Thai restaurant to eat and plan.”