Two women with t-shirts reading “Riposte Alimentaire,” that is, Food Counterattack, entered the Louvre in Paris, made their way to the Mona Lisa, and yelled: "What is more important? Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food? Your agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work."
BREAKING: Climate activists threw soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum today. Employees responded by holding up curtains to block visitors from seeing.
These climate t*rr*rists need to be arrested and given long prison sentences. This needs to stop. pic.twitter.com/2sRi179Eih
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 28, 2024
This was a glimpse into the muddled mind of a leftist. The Mona Lisa has graced the world with its presence since the sixteenth century. When Leonardo da Vinci first painted it, he did not deny anyone the right to healthy and sustainable food by doing so. Nor does the renowned painting’s continued existence impoverish or starve anyone. And our agricultural system is indeed sick, not because of greedy capitalists heating up the planet, but because (for one thing) of socialist internationalists (like those of Riposte Alimentaire) who are forcing the closure of farms in Germany and the Netherlands, and destroying the livelihood of the farmers, in the name of climate action.
Nevertheless, despite their proclamation making no sense at all, they then proceeded to douse the protective glass that prevents terrorists like them from damaging the Mona Lisa with soup. But Riposte Alimentaire isn’t even alone in employing this lunatic tactic. Back in Oct. 2022, purple-haired climate doom fanatics from a group called Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup onto Vincent Van Gogh’s famed Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery in London, because it’s an oil painting. Really. That same month, activists hurled mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s Haystacks in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, before they glued their hands to the wall and settled in for a long day of climate hectoring, mythology, propaganda, and sloganeering. The Mosa Lisa has also been attacked before by a nut who smeared its protective glass with cake in May 2022.
It’s an annoying and stupid form of protest. Couldn’t all this soup (and mashed potatoes and cake) have gone to feed the starving people for which these leftists are supposedly agitating? In any case, there is going to be a lot more of it, and worse. One principal reason why this is so is that as this self-righteous and ignorant vandalism continues, authorities do little or nothing to stop it. At the Louvre on Sunday, all that museum security officials did was put black screens between the Riposte Alimentaire soup-throwers and the aghast museum visitors, who were then evacuated.
Related: Leftist Lunatic in Lipstick and Wig Smears Mona Lisa With Cake to Save the Planet
Authorities are likely hesitant to act because they are essentially just as far to the left as the climate protesters. Riposte Alimentaire demanded the integration of "food into the general social security system," and an end to an economic system that "stigmatizes the most precarious and does not respect our fundamental right to food." They want the French government to give citizens (and almost certainly non-citizens as well) $162 a month for food, with no strings attached. Whether you work or don’t work, whether you’re productive or not, no matter what, you’ll get $162 for food. Who will have to pay for this? Riposte Alimentaire was too busy throwing soup to explain that.
Despite their clear sympathy for the protesters, museums are likely to begin to institute more effective security measures. Then, however, the protesters are likely to up the ante as well. When they see that juvenile stunts in museums aren’t bringing the world back from the brink of the climate apocalypse they’ve been skillfully led to believe is on the horizon, they’re not going to stand down or reexamine their false premises. Instead, they’ll move from perpetrating what looks to be harmless pranks against artistic masterpieces to destroying them. On the one hand, leftists are tearing down statues of military and political heroes because of racism and other deviations from their political line. And meanwhile, they’re also targeting non-political artistic masterpieces to issue their lunatic calls for the implementation of socialism, a political ideology that has all too often been spectacularly oppressive and failed to bring economic justice.
Will the world’s artistic patrimony survive this madness relatively unscathed? We can hope.