The Anti-Thunberg Hysteria.

[A]

This year’s UN Climate Summit in New York came and went with little achieved and if something memorable came out of it it was the global protests preceeding it and Greta Thunberg’s scathing speech, delivered with impressive frankness and lucidity by a 16 year-old girl away from home, before the cameras and a huge audience of high-ranking strangers. And to top it all off, Thunberg, whose mother language is Swedish, made her speech in faultless English.

An admirable and articulate and brave young woman, if you ask me.

And brave and strong she will need to be for she, knowingly or not, is wearing the same bullseye Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib (US) or Jeremy Corbyn (UK) have been wearing for a while, the main difference being that Thunberg is young enough to be their daughter or even granddaughter.

The first sign I noticed that Thunberg would not be spared the vileness of the powerful came from Australia.

Last May, days before the so-called federal elections on climate change, Amanda Vanstone (formerly a COALition senator and Minister in the Howard Government, who got a gig paid for by the Australian Treasury in the allegedly Left-wing Radio National) interviewed British calumnist Brendan O’Neill (a kind of Norman Podhoretz/Sidney Hook knockoff, sans the pretence of intellectual sophistication) over Thunberg. O’Neill’s thesis was that Thunberg was the obtuse pawn in a diabolically clever Left conspiracy against capitalism: nobody would dare say anything against her, however crazy her utterances (to wit, do what the scientists say) might be. You know, young and female -- in O’Neill’s mind -- equals bimbo. To which Vanstone, the no longer young female defender of capitalism, can only agree.

In late July, Andrew Bolt, never reluctant to plumb the depths of filth, proved O’Neill entirely wrong: Thunberg -- Bolt wrote in an opinion piece -- was the “deeply disturbed” “priestess of the [climate change] cult”, whose “following” just so happen to include virtually every single scientist on the planet. The Elders of Zion cabal of thousands of reputable, well-known, knowledgeable scientists, evidently, underestimated Andrew Bolt, their better.

Over time, the character assassination attempts against Thunberg seem to oscillate between those two extremes: O’Neill’s patronising faux compassion, and Bolt’s outright vitriolic personal invective.

An exception in that pattern, surprising by its originality and indeed moderation, came a few days ago, right after Thunberg’s speech, from no one else than Donald Trump (credit where it is due).

On the other hand, some American bottom feeder named Michael Knowles chose the more direct and openly hateful approach: Thunberg was a “mentally ill Swedish child”.

Scott Morrison, the Trump toady, preferred the more hypocritical approach: he is deeply concerned about those silly kids’ eco-anxiety, which he refuses to alleviate by actually doing something about climate change. Instead, he would give them a virtual lobotomy bullshit them into stupidity.

So far Thunberg seems to have managed that onslaught admirably well.

But, brace yourself, Greta and kids: the latrine overflowed and many writhing shapes can be seen among the fetid vapours.

I wonder, wouldn’t that have something to do with those kids’ anxiety?

Image Credits:
[A] “On 16 April 2019, Greta Thunberg is invited by the European Parliament to close the sessions of the Committee on the Environment”. Source: Wikimedia. Author: European Parliament from EU. File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The licensor does not endorse me or my use of the file.