On April 22, 1970, a trio of radical schemers established the first Earth Day, an event cleverly crafted to assault capitalism, free-markets, and humankind.

The plot was conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WS).  You think AOC and "The Squad" are crackpots? Nelson paved their paths. He was Washington’s original environmental activist as well the mastermind behind those ridiculous "teach-ins" which were vogue in the Sixties and early Seventies.  During the teach-ins, mutinous school instructors would scrap the day’s assigned curriculum, pressure their students to sit cross-legged on the floor, “rap” about how America was an imperialist nation, and converse about Marxist collectivism.

Nelson’s teach-in efforts were furthered by a young man named Denis Hayes, formerly Stanford’s student body president and well known for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests.  

Rounding out the troika was Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, author of the 1968 Malthusian missive Population Bomb, wherein he infamously spouted wild allegations equating the earth’s population with a cancer that needs to be eradicated: 

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.  The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

In ‘69, following a much-hyped oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast and the drug-induced vibes cast across the nation via the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Senator Nelson met with Ehrlich and Hayes to create a national teach-in on the environment. After careful consideration, a name and date were chosen:  the inaugural Earth Day would be celebrated April 22, 1970—the late Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin’s Centennial birthday.

Environmentalists are fond of Lenin.  He was the first disciple of Marx to capture control of a country. The opening act of his horrendous seven-year reign commenced with a Marxist mandate: the abolition of private property. In short order, Lenin implemented his signature decree, “On Land,” declaring that all forests, waters, and minerals belong to the state. Harvesting or selling timber or firewood, mining coal, or diverting water for farming was strictly prohibited. Millions died from starvation and hypothermia during Lenin's regime, as he thought more highly of the environment then he did of his people.

In a New York Times article published the morning after the first Earth Day headlined, “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day,” young Hayes bragged that five years earlier he fled overseas because “I had to get away from America.”  Hayes was so committed to his anti-capitalist cause that he insisted his organization would not produce Earth Day bumper stickers. “You want to know why?” he explained to the paper, because “they go on automobiles.”

Earth Day has never been a celebration of the beauty and bounty of this awesome terrestrial ball. It’s always been an assault on humanity.  During the first decade of observances people were proclaimed the polluter.  By the Eighties, mankind was cast as the tree killer. It was Vice President Al Gore’s influence in the Nineties that finally raised the global warming scare, providing compatriots at Earth Day headquarters with the ultimate hook on which to hang their red berets: humans -- particularly Americans -- were screwing up the entire planet’s climate.

Rather than join in the Marxist falderal designed to hammer the American way, let’s give thanks for our nation’s abundant resources and dedicate ourselves to electing leaders who will reclaim our natural capital from the stranglehold of regulations, policies and laws that are more in keeping with the tyranny of Marx and Lenin, than the liberty of Locke and Madison.

Brian Sussman is the author of Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property.