Keeping up with the Joneses: how Chris Packham became a doomsday cult leader commanding an army of terrorists
With brainwashed followers ready to sacrifice their futures for his climate cause, the former children's TV presenter's influence has become dangerous
In the 1960s and 70s, men wearing sandwich boards alerting people to the approaching ‘end of the world’ began appearing in town and city centres across the world. It was assumed they were lunatics and ever since, they’ve featured in television programmes, films and newspaper cartoons to add comedy value.
Throughout those decades, the media was scrutinising the People’s Temple, a cult led by American Jim Jones. Initially drawn by a shared paranoia of nuclear Armageddon, which was common in the days of the Cold War arms race, its members willingly embraced an authoritarian brand of socialism preached by Jones.
This included physical punishment and psychological cruelty, according to defectors. However, when a ban on sex prompted a handful of members to leave in 1973, Jones said everyone else should kill themselves and leave a note explaining the mass deaths were the result of harassment they received as a minority socialist movement.
Towards the end of the ‘70s, the spotlight on the cult’s bizarre activity was so intense, Jones sensed the end was nigh. To avoid the embarrassment of an arrest and messy court cases, he ordered the “revolutionary suicide“ of his followers, more than 900 of whom complied, swallowing a grape-flavoured juice drink spiked with cyanide.
Fast forward half a century and there’s a more widespread cult that’s equally as sinister, yet somehow fashionable. Drawn by unproven claims of apocalyptic climate change, its members willingly embrace an authoritarian regime that demands they sacrifice their freedoms to save the world. Convinced their existence contributes to the planet’s destruction, they punish themselves by supporting stricter laws, higher taxes and a lower standard of living in the hope it will avert a global catastrophe.
Chris Packham is a prolific spreader of this doctrine. As a high-profile climate alarmist, he stirs fear on social media with unfettered disaster porn inaccurately blamed on human activity. Like Jones, Packham offers socialism as a solution.
“If we continue to burn fossil fuels, we're doomed,” he insisted on Sustainababble podcast in December 2022. “Our fight… is very much against very rich people with a vested interest in keeping some aspects of capitalism. The system persists and that is currently endangering all life on Earth.”
Having been on UK television since the 1980s, he is a household name with a substantial following. Fans comply with posts telling them to sign petitions, join protests, nag their parents, etc, to spread awareness about the end of the world and how they need to give up their way of life to save mankind.
“I’m here because I don’t have a future,“ wailed hysterical Just Stop Oil protester Louise Harris in November 2023, angry at the government “betraying young people” by licensing new oil and gas projects. “Why does it take young people like me, up on a fucking gantry on the M25, for you to listen?“
Despite her impressive stunt, most people weren’t listening. They were more concerned about chaos JSO caused blocking London’s ring-road for four days.
People missed medical appointments, work, job interviews, holidays, school, deliveries and funerals. Thousands who had nothing to do with the oil or gas industry were negatively affected and millions of pounds of public money was wasted on the police response and protest-related prosecutions.
The disruption came two months after Packham’s Is it time to break the law? ‘documentary‘ aired on Channel 4 in the UK. In it he makes numerous untrue statements about environmental threats he insists are the result of man-made climate change. He uses these claims to justify filming young people throwing paint on the door of a think tank that supports the use of oil and gas.
“They're forsaking their freedom,” he moans in the programme. “They're being jailed for crimes, which some of us might question the degree of criminality involved… I applaud and support your actions… We have all recognised that we need to expand our scope for effective protest… We've got to find that point where we all step up. We take one step at this point beyond our comfort zone.”
Packham told these people they needed to do their bit - legal or not - to save all life on Earth from extinction. He knew exactly what would happen to them after committing criminal damage or interfering with the nation’s vital infrastructure.
Had they avoided prison, it would have been impossible to paint them as martyrs whose ‘human interest’ stories can more easily sell a movement that makes no attempt to hide its anti-human agenda. The irony is a sign of the cult’s desperation in the face of growing public disapproval.
YouTube blogger ‘Ex British Army Paz49’ discusses the sentencing of the M25 protesters in his podcast episode Why Chris Packham Should Be In Jail. In it, he quotes the judge’s opinion: “Your fanaticism makes you entirely heedless of the rights of your fellow citizens. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide that your fellow citizens must suffer disruption and harm and how much disruption and harm they must suffer simply so that you may parade your views.“
While listening to that podcast, my mind flashed back to Monday 29th September, 2014. I was sitting in the back of a taxi in a traffic jam in Hong Kong. The delay was due to students blocking roads in an attempt to pressure Beijing into speeding up the city’s democratisation, which it had agreed to do in the handover deal.
As far as I was concerned, the matter was irrelevant since nothing much had changed in the 17 years since the handover, other than Honkongers gaining the right to vote for lawmakers, something they never had under British rule. Plus, I was on the way to Queen Mary Hospital’s cancer clinic and had more important things to worry about.
The previous year I’d been diagnosed with lymphoma. Doctors couldn’t understand what happened to my white blood cells. The neutrophil count was extremely low. I had almost no immune system and was quickly dying. I was put in a coma that lasted about three weeks. At least once my organs failed and I was ‘dead’, flatlining for several minutes. They plugged me into ECMO, which pumps blood and air in and out of your heart and lungs when they stop working properly.
When I woke, I couldn’t speak as my vocal cords were paralysed. Nor could I eat normally as food would go straight into my lungs. I was skin and bone and once out of intensive care, it took weeks to get enough strength to walk.
Three months after being admitted, I checked out, still with cancer, walking with a stick, chemotherapy looming and my doctor telling me I could “drop dead any minute”.
I kept going to QMH for weekly blood tests, which continued after six months of chemo killed the cancer and was the reason I was in the taxi. I was nervous about the results, knowing that if the cancer came back, it would be much harder to cure and probably kill me.
I was fuming at the protesters - not just because they began their threatened action early, but because many were not even born when I moved to Hong Kong in 1993. Like JSO’s young climate army, they were being used for an agenda that had nothing to do with the cause they were fighting for.
The mostly-peaceful yet inconvenient protests fizzled out after a month or two, but five years later, they returned like a vengeful cancer.
‘Activists‘ were paid thousands of pounds a day to form gangs, cause criminal damage and fight police. Opponents of the movement were viciously attacked, shops and banks smashed and torched, stations vandalised and roads blocked. Millions of dollars of damage was caused and for weeks, hundreds of thousands of people had a lot harder time getting to work. It was the JSO protests cranked up a few notches and a sign of what the UK’s crazed climate movement might be capable of next.
Cancer patients were among those stuck on the M25. When confronted about it on Good Morning Britain in January 2025, Packham made no attempt to sound sympathetic during a sustained grilling. In between spouting false claims about ‘man-made’ natural disasters, he was more concerned about the rights of the climate martyrs imprisoned for their potentially-disastrous actions.
In his podcast, Ex British Army Paz49 identifies JSO as terrorists: “One person who should be joining them [in prison] is Chris Packham, and he should be there because he incited these people to do what they did. He has a responsibility here.”
Packham has openly suggested that terrorism might wake the world up to what he sees as an impending, yet avertible, climate doomsday.
“I was on the beach… walking the dogs,” he told Sustainababble. “I stood beneath two giant metal structures and on them it said: ‘gas pipeline’. And they were coming from a refinery, which is very close to where I live and they were clearly going out under the sea… I just sort of thought: ‘They're just pumping that gas and they're using that fossil fuel. What would happen if I stopped that gas from flowing?’”
“We'll have to up the stakes,” he went on. “We will have to increase our threat… We're going to have to get to the point that we will have to stop the flow, not ask people to stop the flow… and that means things will turn violent.”
He upped the stakes at Hen Harrier Day in August 2024. While sharing the stage with fellow Wild Justice members Mark Avery and Ruth Tingay, he encouraged the mass suicide of Barclays bank customers by them sticking their heads in buckets of petrol and setting them on fire. Avery looked uncomfortable, while Tingay smirked like a naughty schoolboy standing outside the headmaster’s office.
This was a new extreme in Packham's escalating angry rhetoric against non-believers of apocalyptic man-made climate change. Outbursts have targeted couples having ‘too many’ children and people donating money to cancer research: “We need to stop chasing cures for cancer… The health of the planet goes beyond the health of human beings.“
Now he is putting up posters on bus shelters and in the Tube accusing oil and gas company executives of “murdering life on Earth”. He’s bragging about it to his more than half-a-million followers on X. If just one decides to take the law into their own hands, will Packham be held responsible? Will he be sympathetic to the victim’s family? Both seem unlikely, since he’s told his fan club it’s OK to break the law.
While journalists ‘called out‘ Jones, leading to his downfall, Packham seems untouchable when it comes to preaching his dangerous ideology. His calls for radical punishment of non-believers of the climate doomsday cult have reached mainstream acceptability.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t JSO 2.0 sleeper cells prepping for war on anyone they perceive as a ‘planet killer’ when things eventually “turn violent“. Perhaps it’s who you bank with that makes you a target. Or how many kids you have, whether you eat meat and what type of fuel you put in your car - or the bucket you stick your head in.
Great piece my friend. Took me on a nostalgic ride, and reminds of the ever present quackery that exists on this planet. But it's more than just that! We all want a healthy existence, in body and environment. But climate quacks shouldn't be allowed to take the moral high ground with their scientism. Glad there are people in the world like you to help shine light on unveiling truths. Well said!