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Greta The Eco-Grouch Has No Patience For Democracy Or Your Lifestyle

by Jonathan S. Tobin
August 05, 2019, 3:24 PM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 7 mins read
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Greta Thunberg activist protestThe heroine of the environmental movement is on her way. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish celebrity protester, has finally figured out a way to bring her extremist message to the New World.

Thunberg, who has been the focus of adulatory coverage throughout Europe and in mainstream American outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, and a cover story in Time magazine, is a teenage sensation leading a movement of angry European children.

Thunberg and her fans are demanding that their country’s governments act to stop global warming.

What’s more, they are denouncing as sellouts even those who agree with their goal but are reluctant to adopt the extremist measures such as those Thunberg’s ally Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) put forward in the Green New Deal.

To promote her cause, Thunberg skipped school every Friday for the last year (she’ll be taking the 2019-20 school year off) and held a weekly vigil outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Reportedly, tens of thousands of fellow students have been following her lead to play hooky.

Thunberg’s notoriety is based not only on her activism but on the example she seeks to set by leaving no carbon footprint.

Unlike her fellow tree-hugging celebrities, such as Britain’s Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio, and former President Barack Obama, who all attended the so-called Google Camp event on the environment at a Sicilian resort and arrived there in 114 private jets (which will pump an estimated 784,000 kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere), Thunberg not only tries to avoid plastic wrappings on food, she also takes trains to climate change shindigs, where she lectures her elders on what they should do.

Faced with the problem of how to attend such events elsewhere on the planet, she joyously announced a solution on Twitter.

She was, she said, able to attend a U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York this month and another such event in Santiago, Chile, in December with the help of the owners of a sleek 60-foot sailing boat.

So, thanks to the Malizia II, a $10 million luxury racing yacht that a grandson of the late Princess Grace of Monaco will pilot, Thunberg will bring her brand of intolerant scolding to the shores of America in August.

Children Can Do No Wrong

Thunberg and her movement operate with some clear advantages. Since they are a children’s crusade, they are credited with the best possible motives and not asked to fully or coherently explain their goals or how they might be achieved without doing more harm than good. 

Their impatience with the business of democracy in which one must persuade people rather than merely issuing diktats is similarly depicted as evidence of their high ideals rather than ignorance or anti-democratic sentiments.

As for journalists who point out the flaws in these young people’s arguments, the inconsistency in their behavior, or ponder whether children should be skipping school to pursue a political agenda, progressives denounce them as bullies picking on nice kids.

Politicians who have the temerity to push back even mildly against the lack of respect and common courtesy that Thunberg and her followers consistently demonstrate must expect a tidal wave of criticism for their so-called insensitivity.

Anyone who doubts this needs only to think back to what happened when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had heard enough from a group of teenagers who lectured her about what she should do and the viral video that came out of their exchange last February, in which she attempted to teach them how democracy works.

Environmental Extremists Created Greta Thunberg

The behavior of Thunberg and the kids she has helped inspire is an understandable product of the apocalyptic rhetoric of environmental extremists.

Thunberg’s extremism is a direct result of the tactics of environmentalists who realized they got more attention with wild predictions of planetary doom only loosely tethered to reality than more measured discussions about the climate.

No one should be surprised that children are behaving in this way when extremists are teaching them that the world is basically coming to an end and that we’re all going to fry as a punishment for the sin of benefiting from the prosperity the Industrial Revolution and capitalism created.

Many Americans mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal plans. But Thunberg and her fans see it as a messianic blueprint to save humanity that must take priority over a lowered standard of living for humanity, economic development, individual rights, and the basics of democracy.

Rather than being shocked at the children’s willingness to ride roughshod over even those who share their worries about the climate but don’t wish to get rid of modern conveniences that make everyone’s lives better, save lives, and create prosperity, onlookers cheer these children as righteous crusaders for a noble cause.

Devastating Personal Troubles

As a revealing profile in the New York Times published in February made clear, Thunberg’s personal story is not a happy one.

The daughter of an opera star and an actor, she was a bright student but fell victim to the pressures of adolescence and bullying at school.

At the age of 11, she “had fallen into a deep funk. She stopped going to school. She stopped eating. She stopped growing. She spoke only to family, and, at school, only to one teacher.”

According to her own account at a Stockholm Tedx talk, she was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism.

Thankfully, she eventually pulled herself out of this depression by focusing on her worries about the climate.

She now says that “being on the spectrum” of autism is an advantage because it allows her to see the world as a place where “almost everything is black and white.”

Making it clear that her activism is a form of life-saving therapy, she has told The Guardian, “I feel like I’m dying inside if I don’t protest.”

While Thunberg’s achievement in surviving her devastating personal troubles is to be applauded, it has bred in her an absolutist attitude that is far from attractive.

She bullied her mother to give up her career because it involved air travel and forced her parents to adopt a vegan diet although she publicly complains that her mother sometimes sneaks cheese into the house for late-night snacks.

Thunberg, who, as the Times noted, doesn’t smile much, is happier now that advocacy on the climate has given her life meaning, but her primary means of communication is lecturing.

Like the kids who told off Feinstein, Thunberg has no patience for any discussion about the havoc that might ensue if her absolutist views were enacted.

Nor did she seem to bother much with trying to persuade her listeners when she stood vigil during her weekly truancy sessions, dubbed “Fridays for the Future,” which other kids on the continent began to emulate.

A Love-Hate Relationship with the Left

The same is true even when interviewers fawn all over her, such as the time Fareed Zakaria on CNN treated her as a role model rather than an angry teenager armed with only a rudimentary understanding of science and none of economics and democracy.

Her politics appears to be a matter of people listening to her and then doing as she says.

But not all environmentalists are thrilled with her celebrity. Many understandably see her emphasis on personal behavior and people giving up meat, cheese, plastic, and air travel as bound to undermine their cause.

They want the sole focus to be on governments, not the forlorn hope that people living in the 21st century will be content to live like they are in the 19th because Thunberg tells them it will save the planet.

But it’s likely these concerns will be forgotten in the collective mainstream media swoon for Thunberg when she sails into New York sometime later this month and lectures Americans to ditch their comforts in order to be counted among the righteous. 

However, it would be a mistake to focus the discussion about her activities on whether she’s wrong about the imminent doom of the planet if we don’t stop eating cows and using airplanes.

Few are noting the children’s profound hostility to the democratic process, something that necessitates treating opposing views with respect and bothering to answer criticisms.

It’s not just that Thunberg is helping to distort the debate about the climate, but that the spirit of her activism is indicative of the way the left treats discussion of any issue, whether it is health care, guns, or taxes.

Greta Thunberg’s liberal cheerleaders fail to see that validating an approach that sees the only way to achieve objectives as shaming and silencing opponents do more long-term damage to democracy than anything their political opponents do.

Read more at The Federalist

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Comments 8

  1. Ve2 says:
    6 years ago

    There is wisdom in the old saying, Children should be seen but not heard.

    • Dave O says:
      6 years ago

      Greta is coming over to U.S. to organize our children, turn them all into mindless activists for the cause.
      I thought our schools were doing that just fine without Greta’s help.

  2. JayPee says:
    6 years ago

    I suggest we organize a new
    CHILDRENS CRUSADE
    to march upon the middle east
    as well as the gargantuan polluters
    china. indonesia and india
    to convert them to the eco-sensible and
    egalitarian way of thinking

    After all
    We’re all in this together
    why don’t we unite with each other and
    join for a common good just cause ?

    It will be just as successful as the last
    children’s crusade.

    This is the whole problem with the
    leftist jerks

    They think their opinions are so logical
    that all of humanity must recognize that they are

    INFALLIBLY RIGHT !

  3. David Lewis says:
    6 years ago

    The people pulling Greta’s strings have kept her true to the beginning global warming movement. Our life style was considered excessive by many back then as now and it is the destruction of our life style rather than saving the planet that is one of the primary goals of the climate change movement. Activist knew back then as now that destroying the common man’s life style is something that can’t be done through democracy. Maurice Strong, the father of the UN IPCC, said “Our concept of ballot box democracy may need to be modified.”

  4. TemplarOz says:
    6 years ago

    If nothing else, Thunberg’s scientific naivety, activism and 15 minutes of fame, will hopefully highlight the double standards of Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Obama and all the other climate alarmist jet setters.

  5. Shoki Kaneda says:
    6 years ago

    Greta thinks she can see CO2. Perhaps not insane, but certainly a bit delusional.

  6. Alan Stewart says:
    6 years ago

    From a Dr. Jordan Peterson in a Q&A session in Australia. He was trying to dissuade (unsuccessfully) a young woman from joining mass protests which are all too often of a ‘Save the World’ nature. He suggested taking on small causes that an individual can strongly influence and with success and peer recognition of those successes tackle larger issues that through your recognized leadership ability you can substantially influence.
    The young do not understand that their fervent moral mass protests do not influence national leaders and here is a prime example from some numbers I saw briefly today. In the sixties millions worldwide for years staged Ban the Bomb protests. The net result is that in 2019 between China, Russia and the U.S. there are approximately 13,000+ nuclear tipped ballistic missiles still in existence.
    The Auzzie lass does not realize that all systems are hierarchical and the individual at the top who has earned that position should make decisions, not the unskilled individual at the bottom.

  7. Spurwing Plover says:
    6 years ago

    Its time for parents to be more aware of the kind of lies they aim at kids this young Watermelon(Green on Outside,Red Inside)Its just another Child’s Crusades only wanting the whole word to Go Green and return to a primative existence commiting Human Sacrifice and worshiping False Gods and False Idols

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