Destructive wildfires in Europe and the suicide of a black professor are closely linked, even though they seem utterly unconnected. The tissue that joins these unhappy events is an activist matrix sometimes referred to as the “omnicause.”

The omnicause, a name coined in 2023, is the protean blob of leftism that engulfs whatever it touches and lets its leaders turn their vast flock of sheeplike protesters from one direction to another whenever their political agenda makes it expedient to do so.

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It doesn’t matter whether the latest need is to obstruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to demand that there be “No Kings,” as though America were genuinely in danger of restoring monarchy, or to rally demonstrators against all billionaires except the ones who finance the leftist demos.

It’s the omnicause that allows you to guess with some accuracy that someone horrified about “systemic racism” will also be a climate alarmist and will believe terrorist claims of Israeli genocide. The issues aren’t substantively connected but are bundled together in a coalition of gullible militancy. The omnicause is a network of reflexive alliances nurtured by a disposition of grievance, and it shows how far our culture’s intellectual and institutional decline has deepened.

Wildfires in France recently produced dramatic photos of tourists sitting on beaches gazing at a horizon in flames. Some of the area burned is in Provence, which, partly because it’s where Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso painted, appeals to the romantic imagination of English-speaking peoples. There were evacuations. American, British, and other newspapers expressed conscientious alarm.

You wouldn’t guess from this coverage that........

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