From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

To say tempers are running hot over climate policy related bullying and abuse of rural landowners would be an understatement.

I attended an action meeting on the 28th September in Gympie.

Katy McCallum (Kilkivan Action Group – she has featured before in WUWT) along with Jim Willmott presented disturbing footage of wholesale destruction of wilderness areas to make way for the industrial scale wind farm and solar development – vast swathes of trees cut down, corridors 10s of miles long through formerly pristine wilderness.

Wade Northausen of Billboard Battalion along with Michael Griffith of Cafe Locked Out discussed the issues they were facing in rural Victoria.

One of the most disturbing issues raised was about crowd control weapons used against EPIC freedom protestors in 2022.

The Aussie government has admitted to using LRADS, sonic weapons, to disperse the anti-vaccine mandate protest, though they claim the LRADs were not configured as weapons.

But the people I spoke to claim they were burned – burns which took weeks to heal. Sonic LRAD weapons don’t cause burns, they hurt your ears.

Perhaps something other than an LRAD was deployed. The US military developed a microwave radiation crowd dispersal weapon a decade ago, dubbed the “pain ray” in some popular press articles. The microwave weapon looks a lot like the LRAD weapon, the antenna superficially has a similar shape. The microwaves projected by the ADS weapon are not the same as your microwave oven, they are designed to be far less penetrating, to minimise the risk of injury – but they can still reportedly cause second degree burns.

I don’t know for sure what happened that day, I wasn’t there – but I was horrified at first hand accounts I listened to from protestors who claim they suffered inexplicable burns.

The meeting speakers also mentioned the need to avoid excessive organisational centralisation. I contributed a little to the discussion on this issue, I said “the one thing they can’t cope with is a brush fire”. I also pointed out the tendency of European populist leaders of centralised activist groups to have unfortunate automobile accidents, which got a round of applause from the audience. The leaders I was thinking of were Austrian politician Jörg Haider, who died in an automobile accident in 2008, after his party unexpectedly won almost a third of the vote in national elections, and Britain’s Nigel Farage, who also suffered a suspicious automobile accident while campaigning for Brexit, though thankfully Farage’s accident was not fatal.

The speakers were (thanks to Marie):

Allona Lahn – No Jab No Play

Marleen Owen – Feed the homeless

Michael Griffith – Cafe Locked Out

Wade Northausen – Billboard Battalion (Victoria)

Katy McCallum & Jim Willmott – Kilkivan Action Group

Craig McManus – My Place Gympie

All the speakers were very careful to insist that everyone should remain within the law.

My overall impression – these are ordinary people, law abiding rural folk, who are being bullied and disrespected by government backed big green, mixed in with some vaccine freedom protestors. Some fiery things were said, but nobody, not a single person I saw speaking or spoke to afterwards, advocated any form of law breaking – other than the lockdown freedom marches they participated in. Most of the speakers very explicitly advised people not to break the law or make people feel threatened, and there were also explicit warnings from speakers to respect the privacy and families of politicians and other protest targets, and not to approach the private homes of politicians, only their official offices, if people wanted to conduct any form of protest.

Leave law breaking and violence to the greens.

There was some merchandise available. I bought a hat with 8:32 written on it, full marks if you know what it means.

4.8

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