Destructive wildfires in Europe and the suicide of a black professor are closely linked, even though they seem utterly unconnected. The tissue that joins these unhappy events is an activist matrix sometimes referred to as the “omnicause.”
The omnicause, a name coined in 2023, is the protean blob of leftism that engulfs whatever it touches and lets its leaders turn their vast flock of sheeplike protesters from one direction to another whenever their political agenda makes it expedient to do so.
It doesn’t matter whether the latest need is to obstruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to demand that there be “No Kings,” as though America were genuinely in danger of restoring monarchy, or to rally demonstrators against all billionaires except the ones who finance the leftist demos.
It’s the omnicause that allows you to guess with some accuracy that someone horrified about “systemic racism” will also be a climate alarmist and will believe terrorist claims of Israeli genocide. The issues aren’t substantively connected but are bundled together in a coalition of gullible militancy. The omnicause is a network of reflexive alliances nurtured by a disposition of grievance, and it shows how far our culture’s intellectual and institutional decline has deepened.
Wildfires in France recently produced dramatic photos of tourists sitting on beaches gazing at a horizon in flames. Some of the area burned is in Provence, which, partly because it’s where Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso painted, appeals to the romantic imagination of English-speaking peoples. There were evacuations. American, British, and other newspapers expressed conscientious alarm.
You wouldn’t guess from this coverage that wildfires are at record lows worldwide. As the skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg noted in the past week, every continent and every category of wildfire — savanna, grasslands, forests, and cropland — is seeing less combustion than usual. The globe has probably never burned so little as it is in 2026.
In the developed West, however, random and dramatic weather events are like a sip of Scotch to a chronic drunk. Just a nip will push us over the edge into an anti-growth, anti-human delirium. The most destructive conflagration, however, is the alarmists’ hair on fire. While the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed a little in the past 250 years, it is not a calamity, yet it has distorted policy, which has in turn cost trillions of dollars in lost productivity and wealth creation and perpetuated miserable living conditions in undeveloped parts of the world.
The public isn’t fooled about climate change anymore, and the subject doesn’t rank on the list of voter concerns. People have watched as actual events and real warming turn out to be nothing like the predictions of doom. There is, for example, no statistically significant overall loss of ice coverage of the Earth’s surface, even though we are 13 years beyond the date on which the BBC said the polar icecap would melt entirely in summer months.
Perhaps it was this loss of interest in climate, plus the fact that the boy (or girl) had cried wolf too often, that prompted Greta Thunberg, poster child of climate alarmism, to switch her focus to anti-Israel and pro-terrorist activism without a backward glance at the warming atmosphere.
Remember how, as a 16-year-old wunderkind in 2019, Thunberg addressed the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City and, glaring at the grown-ups, demanded, “How dare you?” How dare you steal my childhood and my dreams with talk of “eternal economic growth” while “people are dying … ecosystems are collapsing … [and] mass extinctions” are coming?
As committed as she sounded, she flipped easily from climate to an issue that became the sine qua non of leftism as soon as the news cycle turned that way. Seeing which way the activist wind was blowing, she rounded upon Israel in the wake of Hamas terrorists’ Oct. 7, 2023, murder of 1,200 Jews, donned a cosplaying terrorist keffiyeh, and set off on successive flotillas to relieve the nonexistent genocide in Gaza. She could do this because both issues are part of the omnicause. Her climate extremism marked her out to be a rabid antisemite and terrorist sympathizer, and she could slide seamlessly from one to the other.
Crucially, when Thunberg stepped into the spotlight in 2019, the United Nations, great universities, and other august institutions that historically saw their mission as setting norms of academic rigor and making sense of the world’s challenges, treated her as a savant rather than what she was — a sour teenager on the spectrum who had been humored disastrously by overindulgent parents. The profs and pundits swooned and bowed to her as a guru, an adolescent truth teller who saw through the West’s pretenses and declared that capitalism had no clothes.
That is also what we’ve just seen so appallingly in the sad tale of Jason Arday, the youngest black man ever to be appointed a professor at Cambridge University, one of the world’s most elite and admired places of scholarship and learning.
Arday invented his academic qualifications and burnished his resume with a wholly fictitious list of universities that had employed him. He added various absurdities, such as that he ran six marathons in six days, including when he had a broken leg.
For three years after his elevation to the pinnacle of honor, he has basked in the adulation of a university establishment and of television and other institutions that are supposed to guide our culture and make sense of the world, but who rolled over in delight rather than checking whether any of Arday’s claims were true.
Eventually, he was exposed as a plagiarist and fantasist. He resigned in disgrace on Aug. 5 and died by suicide a week later. The usual leftist suspects, university faculty, and race relations industry immediately accused academics and news outlets that had exposed Arday of being responsible for his death.
But it was they, the people who shirked their duty to seek the truth so they could put a lightweight of an approved race on a pedestal, who created the circumstances in which the tragedy of Jason Arday could play out. As author and journalist Charles Moore wrote this week, “If Cambridge University had found out properly about Arday much earlier instead of parading the poor man like some exalted tribal chief captured by colonizing explorers in the 18th century, it would not have exposed him to this shame.”
Fleet Street journalists in the 20th century wryly quoted a cynical maxim: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” This did not describe general practice back then and was mostly a token of self-deprecating humor among those who cheerfully called themselves “hacks.” But today it exactly captures the modus operandi of celebrated universities, news and entertainment media, a large proportion of left-wing activists, and a host of others whose work was traditionally to discover and deliver the truth.
The wildfires of Europe and the tragedy of Jason Arday, plus a thousand stories written or broadcast over the past two to three decades, demonstrate that setting aside the facts to propagandize the public is precisely what the cynical and hypocritical arbiters of received opinion do every day.