Never mind Islamic
terrorism, illegals flooding our border, the rise of MS-13, and the opioid
crisis – all the Democrat presidential candidates agree that “climate change”
is the most imminent, terrifying threat facing America and the world. As their Party’s
rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it recently, the world will end
in twelve years if we don't address it.
Well, Evan Sayet has
addressed it in a new book and his conclusion is that the Chicken
Littles of the left
have been whipping up one environmental hysteria after another for over 50
years (none of the dire predictions of which has ever come to pass) and they're
at it again. The openly-conservative comedian and philosopher Sayet is perhaps
best-known as the author of the enlightening and entertaining must-read titled The KinderGarden of Eden: How the Modern
Liberal Thinks, expanded from a must-watch 2007 Heritage Foundation speech that has garnered
over 770,000 views on YouTube as of this writing.
Sayet’s newest
work is Apocali Now!, a faux
children’s book illustrated by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist A.F.
Branco. The book humorously skewers the left’s perpetual fear-mongering about environmental apocalypses,
but also manages to touch on their science denial, hypocrisy, totalitarianism –
even the mainstream media’s “fake news.”
I asked my friend Evan
some questions about the book and more.
Mark Tapson:
Let’s begin with your choice of medium. Why did you decide to take on the
left’s “sky is falling” frenzies in a cartoon format?
Evan Sayet: It was quite by
accident. I was writing my next book, tentatively titled Countering Culture:
The Left’s War Against All That Is Human, and I began to address all
of the fake environmental disasters the Leftist media and others have employed
through the years that not only failed to be the catastrophe that they, with
their “authority,” swore they would be, but, in fact, barely materialized at
all, and suddenly I found it all so ludicrous I was singing it to myself.
MT: How
did you hook up with A.F. Branco as your illustrator?
ES:
Well “hook up” has a whole different meaning these days so I want to make it
clear that I have never hooked up with Tony. But, obviously, if this was going
to look like a children’s book, I needed an illustrator and, if one needs an
illustrator, one of the very first phone calls one makes is to A.F. Branco.
The fact that he
instantly signed on meant two things to me. One, that I’d have someone who
would make all of my pointed jokes only that much stronger and, two, given how
in-demand he is, the fact that he committed to this project without hesitation
made it undeniable to me that I wasn’t alone in seeing how important a project Apocali
Now! is.
ES: Rahm
Emanuel famously stated that there’s “opportunity found in crisis.” Those
looking for opportunity, then – the opportunity to get rich, the opportunity to
get famous, the opportunity to get powerful – have a vested interested in
manufacturing crises. In “honor” of Earth Day, for example, CBS News
reran a clip of their reportage from the first Earth Day 49 years ago, and in
the severest of voices, the “most trusted man in America” summed up the story
as, “Act now or DIE!!!”
This
"act or die" meme that the well-known Leftist Walter Cronkite was
selling all those years ago remains – and has been all along – the angle the
Democrats play. People who are about to die become hysterical and hysteria
blinds people to what is rational. Since the Left is always selling something
that is not merely irrational but impossible – a government-created utopia –
they need the same kind of "Act now!" Hurry! Time's running out!"
sales pitch that used car salesmen employ to pressure people into making bad
decisions and buying their product.
The
only way the Left could possibly get people to forfeit somewhere between
seventy and ninety percent of their income and turn their freedom over to a 29-year-old
bartender from the Bronx pitching high speed rail to Europe – or to beat down
the doors of the Supreme Court, or march down the street dressed up as giant
vaginas – is if they have taken leave of their senses. Hysteria -- like
the Left -- is the opposite of reason.
MT: Tell
us about your own political history. Have you always been a conservative, or
was there a Saul-of-Tarsus conversion in your past?
ES:
Like a good many of us who now self-identify as “conservatives,” I thought
myself a Liberal and thus a Democrat when I was a child. In those days, life in
America was so halcyon that one didn’t have to think very deeply. And when one doesn’t think very deeply, one
believes themselves to be a Democrat.
The truth is, I
always was – and remain – a liberal. The problem is that the Liberal movement
(upper case “L”) is not liberal in the slightest. It is the antithesis of
liberalism. In fact, true liberalism resides in the Republican party and the
conservative movement. After all, what we conservatives seek to “conserve” is
this liberal democracy. My “come to Jesus” moment wasn’t that I didn’t believe
what I believed; it was when I recognized that what I believed was not found on
the Left.
MT: The
left has long realized that comedy is a potent political weapon, but this is a
lesson the right is slow to learn. There seem to be precious few
openly-conservative comedians, even though you’ve proven the left is ripe for
skewering. What can our side do to get our act together on this front?
ES:
Our problem is neither a lack of humor nor a lack of conservative comedic
talent. Our problem is two-fold. First, because they are the keepers of the
gates – they are the ones who say whether you have a show on HBO or you don’t;
they’re the ones who say you get a late night television show (or even an
appearance on one) or you don’t – none of the mainstream opportunities
available to a Leftist of even moderate talent or wit is available to those who
refuse to toe the line.
There is an answer
to this, however, which is to start our own media outlets and yet, though some
like my friend Tom Julian [Founder
of The JUL-TV Television Network and The Praise & Freedom Network] try, we still
don’t have the great benefactors – either the studios or the George Soroses
(please don’t put a “sic” there, who the hell knows the correct plural of
Soros?”) – who will step up and give us both the creative freedom and the wide
distribution that the others receive.
I suspect this is
because our side tends to be objectively driven (and there is no less
objective a profession than show business) and because “culture” (writ large)
is not how people who care first about home and family, community and church,
neighbors and friends tend to think.
MT: What’s
next for you? And where can people see you perform next?
ES:
Dinner. Oh, wait, you meant beyond that. I’m not sure. One of the things in my
life that is a double-edged sword is that I work in so many different types of
media – I write serious books, apparently, I write kids’ books, I write
speeches for presidential candidates and have written speeches for this
president. I give serious lectures and comedic talks and still write
screenplays and documentaries. So, right now, I’m promoting Apocali Now!
because I believe in it. Believe me, this is NOT a “prestige project.” But I do
believe it’s an important one.
We can have as
many think tanks as we want. We can produce the most brilliant and truthful
policy papers ever written and we do. But when the “new face” of the Democratic
party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, states point-blank that “it’s more important
to be morally right than it is to be factually right” we’ve got to recognize
that we need to come at them from a different angle. I think Apocali Now! does
just that.
One more thing,
please. I have heard from a number of people that what they’re doing is buying
SEVERAL copies of the book. They keep one on their coffee table for when
friends come to visit, and they’re quietly leaving the others behind at doctors’
offices, in the seatbacks of airliners, at coffee shops and other places where
it might be found and read by someone who might then be moved by the
never-ending litany of ecological disasters that simply never came to be.
MT: Great
recommendations for disseminating the message. Thanks for putting it out there,
Evan – just in time too, since humanity has only twelve years left.
From FrontPage Mag, 4/25/19
