The perverse fantasies of XR’s founder

If we don’t cut carbon emissions, your mother will be raped. This is the deranged prediction of Roger Hallam, the weird-beard co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. Eco-doomsters used to say the ice caps would melt and polar bears would perish unless we all went green. Now they’re upping the ante. Now they’re prophesising gang rape, murder and war if you don’t shrink your eco-footprint. Better get recycling.

Hallam’s nutty foretelling of an epidemic of rape appears in a piece of writing titled ‘Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation’. He’s a cheery soul, isn’t he? Apparently he wrote it when he was in jail for four weeks last year on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage. The whole thing is nuts. The world is a ‘gas chamber’ and ‘the gas which will kill you has been sent down the pipes in vast quantities for 30 years now’, says Hallam. Which is pretty bloody offensive.