Yesterday I used the term “watermelon” to refer to left wingers who dress themselves up as environmentalists. I can’t take credit for the term; I heard it for the first time while listening to conservative talk radio years ago. It refers to a person who is “green” on the outside but red on the inside.
I was referring to the organizers of Earth Day, who chose Vladimir Lenin’s birthday for their “environmentalist” holiday, and chose Lenin’s hundredth birthday (April 22 of 1970) as the first Earth Day.
It is amazing to me that in 2012, twenty years after the failure of Soviet Communism, leftist leaders in this country still waste their time thinking about it; and yet it’s evident that they do. Anti-Anti-Communism, a hostility to anything and anyone in history who ever fought against Communism in any way, still animates history faculties on our universities. And history professors like Eric Foner still defend Communism with a passion that seems ill-placed, to say the least.
Communist or not, those who advocate bigger and more intrusive government frequently use claims of concern for the ecology to justify increases in government power.
Sometimes the “environmentalism” claimed by advocates of bigger government is a pretty thin disguise. Solar power, for example, does far more harm than good to the environment. Solar panels and the battery banks that come with them are not just absurdly expensive in proportion to the tiny amounts of power they produce; they are also chock-full of toxic chemicals. Anyone who truly cared about environmental protection would opposed the idea, yet liberals are always demanding that the government poor borrowed money into the companies that make them.
The good thing about companies like Solyndra, from that point of view, is that they can launder taxpayers’ money for the campaign coffers of liberal politicians like President Obama. The fact that Solyndra quickly went bankrupt doesn’t bother liberals, nor does it bother liberals that Solyndra left toxic waste by the ton in a warehouse they’d been renting.
As for Earth Day, it was named after the man who created the Soviet Union, hence starting a program of Soviet environmental poisoning that continued at a horrific rate until America won the Cold War and put a stop to the damage.
So what is really important to the founders of Earth Day; protecting the environment, or promoting large and socialistic government?