RUSH: So I got a note, an email. “Rush, I don’t believe you, people are praying to plants. I just don’t believe you.” I can’t tell you how that offends me. After 30 years, I don’t make stuff like that up. Now, I know that I’ve run scams, I’ve run parodies and I’ve run satire. But, you know, I don’t do a lot of that anymore, folks, because it doesn’t work.

There’s such a decline in sense of humor these days that you gotta really, really — in fact, I don’t need to do satire or parody because these people have become it. Like this is a totally true story. It’s in the Washington Examiner. Here’s the headline: “’Absolute Theological Bankruptcy’: Union Theological Seminary Students Confess Climate Sins to Plants.

“Students at Union Theological Seminary prayed to a display of plants –” weeds! “– set up in the chapel of the school, prompting the institution to issue a statement explaining the practice as many on social media,” were making fun of it.

Now, this seminary, Union Theological Seminary, is the nation’s oldest independent seminary, and they put out a statement. They said, “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them,” the plants, “to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

This was dead serious. I’m not making up a word of this. “The ceremony, which is part of professor Claudio Carvalhaes’ class ‘Extractivism: A Ritual/Liturgical Response –’” No, my friends, sadly this is very real. These are seminary students. They’re at an institute of theology. Supposed religious people praying to weeds.

Remember the golden calf? If you had any doubt that global warming or climate change, whatever, has become a religion, do not doubt that anymore. These nuts are actually confessing the sins of humanity to plants and asking for forgiveness for their sins.

Let me read you this quote again. “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?” The weeds in your life?

But here’s something in this column. Leftists have always been flipping idiots and somehow we’ve survived, no matter how crazy, no matter how deranged, no matter how deluded, no matter how wacko they are, we have survived. And in many cases we have thrived and triumphed, or, on the other hand, I guess we could say that they have been making progress for 80 years.

But we have been trying to defeat this. We’ve been trying to defeat this with logic. We’ve been trying to defeat this with science. We have been trying to defeat it with common sense, with adulthood. We’ve been trying to talk sense into people, and still it overwhelms them. It does become a religion to them. And I know why. I know how they’ve done this. It’s very simple.

Everybody wants meaning in their life. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to think they are important. That’s the starting point, that’s the psychological realization that the advocates of this particular movement have. They know that your average Tom, Dick, and Harry out there who are anonymous, even on Twitter or not, they want to be relevant. They want to think they matter. They want to think they’re making a difference.

But they’re not. So how do you bring ’em aboard? Well, the first thing you do is you tell them that the very place they live is threatened and they might die, but they can save it, even though they are part of the problem.

See, this is key! They are part of the problem. Unbeknownst to them, they were living their lives and they were destroying the planet. They were driving SUVs. They were eating beef. Whatever it is, they have been destroying the planet. But here comes the redemption, folks, here comes the salvation. You can save this planet. You can get redemption for your sins. How could you matter any more than being one of the saviors of the planet?

So you take some people who are basically unknown, anonymous, not factors in much of anything, and you’ve now just converted them. Like, did you see — I wonder if we’ve got sound bites of this. There’s this young 16-year-old, Thunberg from Sweden or some such thing, the 16-year-old climate change activist, and she was brought over to testify on Capitol Hill. And she did so yesterday, 16 years old as an expert.

And what does she do? She comes over here and starts blaming the United States for the destruction of the world and blaming the United States for covering it up and blaming the United States for not being honest and telling its citizens the danger that we’re all in, not being honest about the nature of the crisis. And she’s being questioned like she was a Hollywood actress having expertise in this.

She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but she cares so much. She cares so much that it was compelling. And it was cute. You know, the reaction, “Look at this, 16 years old, look at that maturity. This woman.” So she automatically had an audience because she’s fulfilling the political objective of this movement, advancing the agenda. And then she made a big deal, she made a big deal how she didn’t fly here from Sweden. Oh, no. She went on a boat that was carbon neutral. It took two weeks to get across the ocean from wherever she got on it to wherever she got off of it in New York or Washington, wherever.

Her name is Greta Thunberg or some such thing. Well, what they don’t tell you is, they had to get the boat back to Sweden or wherever. So the crew, to get the boat back, flew over, committing a gigantic carbon footprint in order to get the boat back. There wasn’t any savings. There wasn’t any neutrality in the carbon footprint. It was all a joke. But it allowed her to make herself look legit and real, 16 years old. And this is how they do it, folks. They scare the hell out of people. This is what Democrat stuff is today. This is what liberalism is, scare the hell out of you.

Wait ’til you see what’s going on (I think it’s at Sandy Hook), how they’re scaring kids. They’re scaring parents in the school district here. It is the whole nature of the game: Scare everybody to death and promise a solution or promise that you don’t have to be scared with us around, with the Democrats. So they’ve got everybody scared to death there isn’t gonna be a habitable planet. Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out a list — complete with actual graphics of newspaper and magazine headlines — of all of the phony, all of the fake, all of the incorrect and blatantly wrong predictions of climate demise since the mid-seventies.

It’s impossible… It’s so big, it’s impossible for me to print it. It would be impossible for me to show it to you. It’s that detailed. Magazine stories, newspaper stories and headlines, actually clipped out from the newspapers and taken a photo of. The predictions of doom and gloom — and they started in 1975 that an ice age was coming. If we didn’t do something by 1979, then we were gonna freeze to death. But then it wasn’t getting any colder, so they changed it to “warming” starting in the early 1980s. They haven’t been right about anything.

But they’ve made it a religion, and they’ve got these people scared to death, and they’ve promised them redemption. So people whose lives, in their own minds, are inconsequential and irrelevant now have purpose, now have meaning. They’re now important. They are saving the planet. But you’re never going to talk them out of what they believe. It’s become a religion. It’s so bad that now Union Theological Institute is having its students pray to weeds, asking for forgiveness for the sins we have committed in destroying their lives.

But the thing to remember, as I pointed out, is that all this madness, this lunacy has been going on for as long as we’ve all been alive, and we have continued to triumph over. It’s still an obstacle, it’s still a pain. They’re still coming for your kids and trying to co-opt ’em with this stuff, and they’re coming at ’em from kindergarten on up, and they’re not stopping. It’s something you have to pay attention to, and if the Democrats ever do really get empowered enough to implement some of this stuff, then they are gonna wreck the economy. But I have faith that it’s actually not gonna happen. This Saudi oil field explosion is a gold mine for the climate change crowd, and they haven’t glommed onto this yet for some reason.