Before I tell you a story about celebrity youth activist Greta Thunberg’s inevitable ideological journey from climate-change apocalypticism to bug-eyed antisemitic Hamas advocacy, I trust I’m not offending sensibilities around here by saying that she has long been, from soup to nuts — emphasis on “nuts” — one of the most fundamentally ridiculous people on the face of the Earth she seeks to save in terms of international politics. When this vinegar-rictused, hectoring scold first burst onto the scene in 2018 at age 15 by refusing to go to school, people old enough to remember other ephemeral youth political movements were wildly amused at how easily and immediately she ascended to activist Olympus, sitting in Zeus’s golden throne as The Most Important Child in the World. (It’s good to be occasionally reminded of how stupidly some cults of personality begin.)
What we failed to appreciate, perhaps, was her staying power. As a young, autistic, ultraprogressive martinet, bleating prophesies of impending environmental doom and playing upon Boomer guilt and the Bene Gesserit–like preconditioning of the entire Millennial and Zoomer generations, she indeed spawned something akin to a cult of personality around her own celebrity activism. (It is now a well-remunerated profession for her.) And since not everyone can meet with Vladimir Putin, her aspiring imitators and acolytes have inevitably had to escalate to stunts such as gluing themselves to Leonardo’s Last Supper with demands to shut the world down, instantly, in order to match her galvanizing ability to claim the spotlight.
But Thunberg herself gave in to the natural temptation to escalate first, and quickly. Smart commentators initially stood aside from the absurdity of a 15-year-old’s prescribing solutions for mankind’s most knotty problems and said, “Wait for what comes next,” because we’ve seen this movie with a hundred other wunderkinder since the internet age took flight — propped-up political sock puppets repeating a script memorized from an older generation’s political anxieties — and it rarely if ever ends well. The metaphorical graveyards are full of underaged political activists who either repudiated their younger days or went on to dire ends. And in terms of how they end up aging, there are even fewer success stories than there are among Hollywood’s child stars. (This is probably the only opportunity I will ever get to metaphorically link Ben Shapiro to Kurt Russell in the same sentence as “notable outliers,” so I might as well take it.)
A lot of people get a whiff of public fame and celebrity and keep chasing the dragon, whether out of self-regard or a belief that they’re “making a difference.” (Hey, it beats doing schoolwork.) With that understanding, cut to Greta a year later from her staged 2018 walkout, now addressing the United Nations at Turtle Bay in 2019, shrieking, “HOW DARE YOU?” and screaming about “stolen dreams” like Björk being led to the hangman in Dancer in the Dark. Those of us on the right treated it as a moment of high comedy; the rest of the media world treated it as a recreation of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, with equivalently rapturous reviews. Because here’s the other unfortunate truth: Rhetorical escalation works, especially when delivered by an avatar well armored by youth and mental disability against serious criticism.
But really, the problems were instantly noticeable with Thunberg: She channeled her anxieties into an obsession with environmental doomsaying and was devastatingly enabled in her madness by her parents. Thunberg forced her mother, an international opera performer, to give up her career to reduce her “carbon footprint.” Read about how her husband describes it in a 2019 interview with the BBC: “To be honest, [Thunberg’s mother] didn’t do it to save the climate. She did it to save her child, because she saw how much it meant to her, and then, when she did that, she saw how much [Greta] grew from that, how much energy she got from it.”
No surprise, there; a certain type of antisocial, poorly adjusted personality always gains strength from discovering it can bend others to its will by maximal emotional extremism and threats. And Thunberg leaned heavily into the moral guilt trip, like a cannily trained manipulator: “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words.” She walks around arguing that her generation may not have a future anymore because “that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money” (as opposed to, say, “provide Greta Thunberg with the living standard that she and countless billions of others enjoy and that makes her activist lifestyle possible”). She still stages online “Fridays for Future,” dialing in remotely to show the colors on a weekly basis.
So I suppose it was inevitable that, chasing that activist high, things would escalate once more. Since graduating from high school — a genuine achievement considering how many days she missed — Thunberg’s now getting into the harder stuff. No longer a minor, she’s enjoying getting arrested during anti-coal-mining protests in Germany (which combines awkwardly with her nominal support for Ukraine in its war against Russia). But because the world’s eyes are on different matters these days, it was only a matter of time before Greta went “full Hamas,” so to speak.
There were warnings. To commemorate the 270th week of her Friday “climate strike,” Thunberg tweeted a photographic declaration of solidarity with Palestinians — bad enough given the context of Hamas’s terrorism but unremarkable when it comes to current youth idiocy, if we’re being charitable. The stuffed octopus by her side was a bit more worrisome, however, given common antisemitic tropes. We were later assured, after the tweet was deleted, that this was merely a “comfort octopus,” which Thunberg requires as an autistic person. There was no discussion of the fact that we are asked to take world-altering economic, political, and environmental guidance from a 20-year-old. But of course that pretense couldn’t last long, and now Greta’s out and about in the streets of Stockholm, attending pro-Hamas rallies and screaming for the end of Israel. Last week she was spotted in the crowd chanting in Swedish, “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? CRUSH ZIONISM!”
There’s nothing at all to say about the substance of her position — she is equally as convincing and meritorious as an advocate for Jewish persecution as she was for zero carbon emissions — except to end this sad bildungsroman by asking ourselves: Was it always going to end this way? It’s incredibly tempting to say yes and concede to the inevitability of her decline into fashionably activist racism: After all, that’s where the “heat” is among the youth at the moment. And it’s hardly a new observation that leftist political identity in our modern age tends to come as a package deal. (Find me a non-Muslim member of Students for Justice in Palestine who doesn’t also self-describe as “green” or pro-LGBT and I’ll wait here, forever, while you’re out searching.)
But what about the media that elevated her and continue to elevate her? What does it say about the media, so resolutely concerned with their “gatekeeper” status, that they took a mentally disabled 15-year-old, turned her into a world celebrity, and have encouraged her to chase public disgrace in such a way? (Even more ominously: Does anyone expect Thunberg’s credibility among these same people to suffer?)
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Ultimately, Thunberg owns her morally twisted positions and affirmatively harmful activism. But, after having suffered through half a decade of this arrant moral nonsense only to have it predictably revealed (like a noxious corpse-flower bloom) that, atop her insane environmental beliefs, she is driven also by a loathing for Jews, my eyes turn to all those that elevated a child and helped warp her into this. Everyone who participated in this spectacle is indicted in one way or another. And now we move on from the wreckage.
The ‘Progress’ of Greta Thunberg
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30.11.2023
Before I tell you a story about celebrity youth activist Greta Thunberg’s inevitable ideological journey from climate-change apocalypticism to bug-eyed antisemitic Hamas advocacy, I trust I’m not offending sensibilities around here by saying that she has long been, from soup to nuts — emphasis on “nuts” — one of the most fundamentally ridiculous people on the face of the Earth she seeks to save in terms of international politics. When this vinegar-rictused, hectoring scold first burst onto the scene in 2018 at age 15 by refusing to go to school, people old enough to remember other ephemeral youth political movements were wildly amused at how easily and immediately she ascended to activist Olympus, sitting in Zeus’s golden throne as The Most Important Child in the World. (It’s good to be occasionally reminded of how stupidly some cults of personality begin.)
What we failed to appreciate, perhaps, was her staying power. As a young, autistic, ultraprogressive martinet, bleating prophesies of impending environmental doom and playing upon Boomer guilt and the Bene Gesserit–like preconditioning of the entire Millennial and Zoomer generations, she indeed spawned something akin to a cult of personality around her own celebrity activism. (It is now a well-remunerated profession for her.) And since not everyone can meet with Vladimir Putin, her aspiring imitators and acolytes have inevitably had to escalate to stunts such as gluing themselves to Leonardo’s Last Supper with demands to shut the world down, instantly, in order to match her galvanizing ability to claim the spotlight.
But Thunberg herself gave in to the natural temptation to escalate first, and quickly. Smart commentators initially stood aside from the absurdity of a 15-year-old’s prescribing solutions for mankind’s most knotty problems and said, “Wait for what comes next,” because we’ve seen this movie with a hundred other wunderkinder since the internet age took flight — propped-up political sock puppets repeating a script........
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