Video posted by the Austin American-Statesman from a protest in front of the Texas Capitol that saw seven taken away in handcuffs in Austin on Monday includes Sierra Club representative Tane Ward continuing his attacks on capitalism. At the protest, Ward engaged in a long soliloquy in which he described capitalism as a “sickness”:
“The sickness that we have in our society is because of the sickness that we have in our hearts. It is the sickness that we put upon this land and on these people. This sickness, rooted in colonialism, administered by capitalism, is a disease and the symptoms of this disease we are very familiar with. We’re familiar with injustice, we’re familiar with corruption, we’re familiar with poverty, and we’re using to focusing on all of these symptoms. We’re used to focusing on the sickness and those that fight monsters must be careful that they do not turn into monsters. Before you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you and often times we find when we fight the sickness over and over again, that we start to become sick.”
The Sierra Club leader went on to demand an end to oil and gas development in Texas, as well as advocating for other far-left policies that he believes are tied to energy policy. Ward proclaimed that free, “culturally relevant” health care was tied to oil and gas development and stated that having an abortion was “culturally normal” and a “marker of a healthy society”:
“So we are taking this fight here to the Capitol and we’ll take it to the hearts of our people. We’re going to stand at the Railroad Commission who give out permits, who rubber stamp every day for the oil and gas industry, allowing fracking and fracked injection wells in our state to demand that we stop. But that’s not all we’re asking for because we understand that the health of our people is directly tied to this. Everyone in this country deserves to have health care, period. And that health care should be culturally relevant to whoever wants it for what they need. We should also cover fully the rights of women, including the right to have an abortion, as well as for maternity care, these things are culturally normal, they are part of who we are as a people, they are markers of a healthy society.”
Ward and other Texas Sierra Club employees have long made their opposition to capitalism clear. In early 2017, The Daily Caller reported on another of Ward’s anti-capitalism appeals, calling it a “dying beast”:
“This is a last, violent gasp of a dying beast. Capitalism is dying. What happens when a beast is dying? It lashes out with teeth and claws. But don’t worry about those teeth and claws, don’t fight the teeth and claws, that’s how you get hurt. The claws you see here standing in front of this building, don’t get angry at those claws, they will die with the beast.”
