Rebels without applause

The message didn’t get through. Tourists mocked him. Few media outlets paid him attention. No lawmaker took up his cause. On Nov. 18, Tamacas was back on the Hill, this time with a whole cadre of fellow fasters from the climate activism group Extinction Rebellion who would really appreciate some attention.

Their plan was simple enough: corner House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her office; force her to explain the lack of Democrat-led legislation on climate change; refuse to eat until she does so; and, if somehow she managed to dodge the hunger strikers and their demands — it would take some art; these guys were here all week from Nov. 18 to Nov. 22 — then Pelosi would face the fury of their historical judgment. “We will know once and for all that the Democratic Party doesn’t care about the people of this planet,” Extinction Rebellion explained in a statement several days before the stunt.

Setting such high stakes for a hunger strike seems a bit nervy, but Extinction Rebellion is no stranger to alarmism. Ever since the group expanded from London to Washington in January, it has been staging baroque melodramas in the streets of the district. Group members often dress up in animal costumes and carry signs mourning mankind’s destruction of the Earth. Group leaders encourage their followers to be rowdy, break the law, and get arrested. It’s worth it to save the climate, they say. Anything to raise awareness.

But, as with so many British movements that hop the Atlantic, Extinction Rebellion’s schlocky methods face a tougher audience in the states. The group’s first major event was a poorly attended funeral march down Constitution Avenue. This was during the government shutdown, and D.C. was practically a ghost town. Despite making noise, blocking off an intersection, and lying down in the street, the protesters failed to attract the handcuffs of metro police.

“By God, this nation will pay attention to the climate crisis,” Extinction Rebellion organizer Russell Gray shouted through a megaphone to a small crowd of onlookers to no avail. As the protest ended, a man wearing a polar bear suit sighed, “No arrests. Polar Bear wanted to be arrested.” A “polar bear” speaking in third person about trying to get arrested seems the perfect distillation of Extinction Rebellion’s methods and results.

It took several false starts before Extinction Rebellion started manufacturing serious run-ins with the law. An “only slightly against the law” attempt in July to vandalize the Capitol with chalk was preempted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolling out a resolution seeking to declare a climate emergency. Thunder stolen. But the group scored big two weeks later when members glued themselves to the Capitol building’s basement doors. Several dozen protesters were arrested, much to their delight.

There was one serious drawback, however. Capitol Police prevented the group from catching any of it on camera, denying them their viral moment.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” spokeswoman Kaela Bamberger told me as the event ended.

Extinction Rebellion staged its most high-profile stunt to date in late September when, along with several other groups, it shut down several intersections in Northwest D.C. Members chanted, waved flags, and some of the more devoted believers chained themselves to a parked sailboat.

While the event disrupted traffic and inconvenienced commuters, Extinction Rebellion managed to step on its own feet with an act of inadvertent racism. While occupying the streets, some protesters handed out fliers apologizing to commuters for the inconvenience. The gesture was meant to inspire empathy for the climate cause, but it backfired when Black Lives Matter took this as an implicit apology for black existence. In their view, a message of “sorry we’re here” implicitly cast this protest tactic as an affront while quite literally apologizing for the black protesters in their way at that moment. About a week after the protest, Extinction Rebellion issued an apology for its previous apology.

“Many, if not most, of us did not understand the implications of apologizing for our acts of disruption within the context of broader legacies of cultural violence,” the group wrote. “We did not recognize how our apologies for the space we occupied reflected the regular and habitual marginalization of black and brown people at large; apologies for acts of civil disobedience, within that context, can only undermine the justified claims that people of color have to such spaces, and are themselves an act of harm reflective of those broader legacies of cultural violence and marginalization.”

That final sentence — word salad though it may seem — fits Extinction Rebellion into a larger ecosystem of intersectional activism. Committing to save the climate is a sort of umbrella issue that entails committing to stop racism, celebrating gay and transgender rights, dumping President Trump, stopping world hunger, and a host of other seemingly unrelated issues. All things are one when you’re out to save the world.

Even the Nov. 18 event, ostensibly a simple hunger strike, was about so much more than convincing the queen of the House to take up climate legislation. When Tamacas and his compatriots delivered their speeches in front of Pelosi’s office, they had a multitude of complaints. Tamacas wanted a one-hour meeting with Pelosi. But another young man wanted a music festival in Ellicott City, Maryland. A young woman wanted House Democrats to seriously consider former first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program, designed to get youth more active to combat childhood obesity. A dishwasher named Ben shouted, “Elect Bernie Sanders!” And so on.

A 17-year-old woman named Sophia Kianni delivered a passionate speech about why she skipped school for this. She was representing Fridays for Future, child activist Greta Thunberg’s organization, and her voice quavered with a tone of Thunbergian reproach as she scolded Pelosi. “It is deeply saddening and shameful that we must resort to a hunger strike in order to get our nation’s leaders to listen,” she said. “They would rather watch climate activists starve than to give us the time of day.”

Her voice rose and her mascara began to run as she concluded her speech: “Nancy Pelosi, now is not the time to employ cowardly politics. Instead of worrying about alienating big businesses, every single member of Congress must herald the Green New Deal as a pragmatic and essential policy. It is easy for you to brush off our concerns now, but let me assure you, in 50 years, we will be in much different times.”

The rest of the hunger strikers looked on bravely and tears filled their eyes. One more young man, Nick Brana, stepped forward to address the small crowd. “Why do young people have to forgo eating, a basic necessity, in order to get the attention of our government?” he asked in a voice cracking with passion.

“I’ll be honest. I’m scared about what is going to happen,” he continued. “I’m scared about what I’m about to do. You know, I have a lot of life ahead of me. This is serious. Hunger striking is serious: People could get hurt. People are going to get hurt. My nieces and nephews are going to get hurt if I don’t do this, along with millions of other people.”

When he finished speaking, there wasn’t a dry eye among the hunger strikers. Brana, it seems, had captured the gravity of the moment.

Tamacas bowed his head and stepped forward for one speech. He dedicated his hunger to his extended family, his brothers and sisters, and the “hundreds of people hunger striking around the world.” He then read a poem about drowning with his loved ones: “Baby, hold me closer. Hold me tightly. We don’t have much time left. When I drown, I want to be in your arms,” it concludes.

And then it was unto the breach.

As the hunger strikers entered the office, Tamacas began a litany: “This is for our loved ones. This is for the people we love. This is what the climate crisis is really about. And I hope to God that people listen. Because we’re f—ed. It’s over, if we don’t do anything right now.”

The rest was a wash. Once inside the office, the strikers didn’t have much else to do. Pelosi wasn’t in, and the press were eager to get out of there and file. So, it was back to the speeches.

“Nancy Pelosi is now standing in the way of declaring a climate emergency,” Brana said. “She’s standing in the way of the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal doesn’t go far enough, according to what scientists say. She can’t even allow a nonbinding symbolic resolution to pass. The Democrats just shut down a climate debate, a debate on an existential crisis.”

Someone in the back castigated Pelosi for caring more about impeachment than climate change. Two Pelosi staffers sat quietly at their desks, ignoring the fracas. They knew what the hunger strikers also knew: House offices close at 7 p.m., and everyone would have to go home. Sure, they would be back tomorrow — and on scout’s honor, they would not eat in the intervening period — but there would be no meeting that day with Pelosi.

It’s almost unbelievable that Extinction Rebellion, a well-publicized and wildly successful organization in Britain that garners press coverage for every major event, gets so little traction in the United States. Climate activism is en vogue over here, too. Thunberg got to speak at the United Nations, and the city of San Francisco is dedicating a mural to her. There should be a market for Extinction Rebellion’s stateside antics.

Maybe Extinction Rebellion has an attitude problem. Every event the group organizes is aimed at convincing the U.S. that there is no way to stop a climate disaster. There is no hope, and even if there was, our leaders would still screw us over. Even in the fliers explaining the hunger strike, Extinction Rebellion still sends a message of despair: This protest, like all the ones before it, is doomed to failure.

“The major assumption is that if you suffer, the opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart,” the group writes of hunger strikes. “But in order for this to work, the opponent must have a conscience. The governments, corporations and power holders in the world do not have a conscience.”

It’s Kafkaesque, in the traditional sense of the word. More than anything else, the Bohemian writer was a master of walking the line between hope and the deepest despair. In his 1922 short story A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka makes light of the man who receives no attention for his impressive 40-day fasts. Left to rot in a circus, his single joy is the sight of a faraway crowd, which he knows is not coming his way, but in that brief instant, he can hope it will.

So it is with these climatistas. Pelosi may not be coming, but her office provided the strikers with print-outs of a written statement to give a momentary sense of comfort in their failure.

“We need Climate Action now!” Pelosi’s office writes — and that last adverb twists like a knife in the heart of the believer.

Nic Rowan is a media analyst at the Washington Free Beacon.