By Dave Plumb

In 1958, a Hollywood producer brought some lemmings to a site on the edge of the Bow River near Calgary, Alberta. He took some close-up video of a small group of them running through snow on a big, spinning turntable. The film he produced claims that the lemmings are in mass migration in the Arctic.

People knowledgeable about lemmings noted that these lemmings were a non-migratory species.

The producer then took the lemmings to the edge of a high riverbank, which he called a cliff, overlooking the Bow River, which he called the Arctic Ocean. There, he released them with people behind the scenes stomping and banging about to so terrify the little lemmings that they fled over the riverbank and fell into the Bow River to escape the two-legged monsters they perceived as mortal danger.

Thus was created the pervasive societal belief in migrating lemmings periodically committing mass suicide, throwing themselves off cliffs to drown in the Arctic Ocean. It’s common knowledge. It just happens not to be true.

In Hollywood, creating façades good enough to convince people to believe what you want them to believe supersedes truth and facts. A few sticks prop up the façades from behind, but they’re essentially information vacuums. Hollywood prefers that we not look behind the façades.

In 1958, the film White Wilderness won an Academy Award for Walt Disney. If a producer today were to make a film using those methods, he would not win an Academy Award. He would win a substantial fine for animal cruelty and prison time to reflect upon his evil ways. We’ve progressed socially in the last several decades. We’re more enlightened now. We no longer treat lemmings or any other animals like that.

Now, we treat children like that.

Oh, we don’t force them to run around on snow-covered turntables and bail out over the banks of the Bow River. That would be too blatant. We’re much more subtle, sophisticated, and sneakier than that now.

We have replaced the lemmings with students.

We have replaced the turntable with classrooms.

We have replaced the human monsters terrifying the lemmings with climate change terrorists at the fronts of classrooms where once stood teachers.

We have replaced the physical “cliff” of the Bow River with a mental, emotional, and psychological cliff of climate change emergency, crisis, catastrophe, disaster, and other alarming descriptions.

We have replaced the “stomping and banging about” with a curriculum featuring tall tales of impending climate change doom that send children fleeing in terror over the mental, emotional, and psychological cliff of climate change Armageddon to drown in an ocean of ADHD (Anxiety, Depression, Hopelessness, and Despair).

I get such outlandish notions from the same source that almost everybody in our society gets information about climate change: the mainstream media.

Those are the facts. Make of them what you will.

Dave Plumb is the author of Inconveniently $crewed! and Climate Essentials. You can find him at inconvenientlyscrewed.com