The government of the Netherlands seems to be willing to starve Europe to browbeat Dutch farmers about climate change, and American corporate media outlets are largely ignoring it.
The Netherlands is demanding its farmers drastically reduce their herds of livestock in order to eliminate 50 percent of the nation’s nitrogen pollution by 2030. [bold, links added]
That leaves just eight years for farmers, whose livelihoods revolve around cultivating land and raising animals, to figure out how they can keep supplying the continent with food.
Under the new “green” restrictions, many generational farmers say that they risk bankruptcy or being forced out of the industry altogether.
Even the government has admitted that “The honest message … is that not all farmers can continue their business.”
That’s why, for more than a month now, large numbers of these Dutch farmers have protested government policies forcing them to wreak havoc on the nation’s agricultural industry.
A disruption like this, to a nation that is the “largest exporter of meat in Europe and the second largest exporter of food overall after the United States,” will also likely exacerbate food shortages caused by the Ukraine-Russia war throughout the European Union and other parts of the world.
Despite the effects of the Dutch farmer protests on not just the global food supply but global climate policies, the issue has received little to no attention from corporate U.S. press outlets.
Aside from a couple of general rundown articles from Reuters and ABC News, the American media has failed to report on the Dutch farmer’s concerns in any depth, much less address the implications the protests, and the climate policies that triggered them, have for the Netherlands and the rest of the world.
The media’s scant coverage of the protests certainly isn’t on the front pages or during prime time.
As a matter of fact, it is framed to claim that farmers in the Netherlands “oppose pollution cuts” that could “protect human health and vulnerable natural habitats from pollution in the form of nitrogen oxides and ammonia.”
That’s quite a dishonest way to smear the industry that “is a [global] leader in efficient and sustainable agriculture.”
This time, instead of taking sides like they did when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau smeared Canadian truckers for their Covid mandate protests, the American media has taken a backseat.
They don’t want to give attention to the issue and it’s no surprise why: It would hurt their ability to fearmonger about the climate.
Much like the Canadian trucker protests, tens of thousands of farmers in the Netherlands participated in tractor caravans that brought traffic in the center of the country to a standstill.
And much like the Canadian government’s extreme crackdown on drivers who didn’t want to be forced into getting the Covid jab, the Dutch government is shunning farmers, who are largely conservative, for daring to question its leftist climate agenda.
In some cases, Dutch police have even fired shots at the protesters, and the prime minister reportedly said in private company that he believes the farmers are “a-holes.”
The corporate media found the Canadian trucker protests worth covering because it gave them ammunition to further taint Americans who were against Covid jab mandates.
They simply parroted Trudeau’s disdain for the Freedom Convoy’s “unacceptable views,” and channeled it into their ongoing campaign against anyone who dares question the Biden administration’s narrative on the virus.
As my colleague David Harsanyi has noted, for years now the corporate media outlets have “enabled destructive climate change hysteria.”
In some cases, the corrupt press has even dredged it up by promoting destructive climate policies such as the Green New Deal and highlighting sham polls claiming climate change is a top priority for voters.
In other cases, the media have been the ones Big Tech censors turned to when their narratives about ineffective “green power” and other climate propaganda were threatened.
If corporate media show the world that so-called green policies will hurt their food supply and ravage the lives of tens of thousands of hardworking people like the Dutch farmers, they might not only lose even more credibility with Americans than they already have but also inadvertently bolster the case that climate policies like the ones adopted by the Netherlands will be disastrous.
Read more at The Federalist
It’s about time that the policymakers and their aides were told that they must give up two weeks of their annual vacation and go live and work on a farm. A little bit of ‘hands-on’ education might do them a world of good.
Could be done in any number of countries around the world.
What were seeing in the Netherlands is rebellion against Big Brother Agenda 21 the UN and the Globalist plans to force us all to go vegan all over a fake crisis