Extinction Rebellion Canberra Rally Led by Marxist Extremist
On Friday, between 100 and 200 protesters marched through the centre of Canberra before staging one of their now familiar “Die Ins” at a busy intersection. At their head was rally organiser Kim Stern.
Stern, like many Extinction Rebellion protest organisers across Australia, is an activist with the Revolutionary Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative. Socialist Alternative want to overthrow the government and implement a totalitarian socialist state in the image of the early Soviet Union. It is a fanatical, often cult-like group that believes that if Trotsky rather than Stalin had won the power struggle after the death of Lenin, Communism would have turned out just fine.
Stern has been a member of this Marxist group since at least 2014. Along with his comrades Nicholas Carlton and Wren Somerville, Stern has been a part of the wider infiltration and subversion of the “Extinction Rebellion” movement in Canberra by Socialist Alternative. Stern, along with Grace Hill and Priya De (again of Socialist Alternative), was one of the organisers of the “Uni Students for Climate Justice” Canberra event on the 21st of June where ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury spoke in front of a giant Extinction Rebellion flag.
Kim Stern, Nicholas Carlton, Grace Hill and Wren Somerville were also organisers of the August 9th “Walkout” for Climate Justice at ANU. Stern was also spotted at a failed Extinction Rebellion “Swarm” event in Melbourne in September, organised by Socialist Alternative activist Natalie Acreman, where the widely predicted “thousands” turned into actual dozens of protesters. Stern, like many Socialist Alternative activists, has been moved around the countryside, attending both Monash in Melbourne and ANU in Canberra in the same year to better serve his organisation’s cause. Stern served as the 2018 LGBTI officer for the National Union of Students after being elected on a Socialist Alternative ticket.
Steve Evans of the Canberra Times didn’t think it was worth mentioning that the organiser of a protest attempting to disrupt the centre of our nation’s capital is also a well known organiser for Australia’s largest Marxist group. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe he did know but didn’t want to tell. He was, after all, just following in the footsteps of his Canberra Times colleague Sherryn Groch, who wrote a long and detailed piece for the same paper which portrayed Stern as a courageous and creative hero.
Which gets to the point: for supposed “rebels”, the Marxists infiltrating and taking over Extinction Rebellion seem to have a lot of support from sections of the media. Even when high-ranking police officers warn about them, our supposedly “right-wing” corporate press still ignores their extremist views and praise their disruptive actions.
The truth is that Marxists in 21st-century Australia would be nothing at all without their friendly fellow travellers in the media like Steve Evans and Sherryn Groch. Which is perhaps something those of us stuck in traffic, while the extremists they cheerlead for disrupt our cities, should remember the next time those same journalists start squealing about “press freedom” and the sanctity of the fourth estate.
If you use your freedom and power as a journalist to cover up for totalitarian followers of the most murderous ideology in human history, then perhaps you don’t deserve it as much as you might think.