I&I Editorial

Swedish teen Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations on Monday about global warming. What she said is unimportant. The fact that she was handed the pulpit of a supposedly sober and deeply reflective body is all we need to know. We’ve been overcome by mass hysteria.

Thunberg is a 16-year-old girl just like many others in the West. But unlike all others, adults have lifted her upon a green pedestal, treated her as if she knows something others don’t. Listen to her, they demand, because, well, exactly why should we listen to her?

Thunberg is a human shield for global warming alarmists who want to shut down debate. Because she is a child, she cannot be criticized. But it’s acceptable for her to rant on about a subject few, including thousands of scientists, even know much about.

Have we lost our minds?

Greta’s U.N. appearance was covered by a worshipful media happy to tell us she made a “scathing speech,” “has guts,” accused someone of stealing her dreams and her childhood, swears she’ll “never forgive” whoever did her wrong, and “shot a brutal glare at (President) Donald Trump.”

“Monday was a reminder of just how formidable and emotionally on point she can be at speaking truth to power,” said a Vox writer, employing the empty cliche that should not be used by anyone past their sophomore year in high school.

Yes, if we’re listening to a teen who skips school on Fridays to protest a lack of climate policies, who has “bullied her mother to give up her career because it involved air travel, and forced her parents to adopt a vegan diet,” who is regarded as prophetess, we have lost our minds.

Thunberg-mania is only one example of our spiral into climate lunacy. There are, in fact, many exhibits that indicate we’ve lost our ability to think clearly:

• Scolds with nothing better to do shut down the lawful and peaceful activity of driving Monday in Washington, D.C. It was a case of the unproductive blocking the productive, and was largely tolerated. There only a few dozen arrests among a hundreds if not thousands of protesters throwing a tantrum.
• Adults allowed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of children to walk out of their schools Friday in a “climate strike.”
• Last week, New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler said “I don’t know if human life will survive 50 years. We may face, the climate scientists tell us, the sixth mass extinction in the history of the globe.” If we don’t regard the climate fight to be “more important than a world war,” all that will be left, he says, are amoeba.
• With those comments surged the hearts of those who have “extinction lust,” in which the warming alarmists, if we might borrow and adapt a phrase from Virginia Postrel, “seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of” a climate disaster that wipes out humanity for its sins against Gaia.
• Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang yearns for a world in which “we might not own our own cars” because private car ownership as “really inefficient and bad for the environment.”
• Marianne Williamson, another Democratic White House hopeful, wants to establish “mandatory national service, one year, for people between 18 and 26” to “fix this climate … fix this country.”
• And, of course, the eyes-wide-shut alarmists bitterly cling to their hockey stick (which has been called “100% fraudulent,” an “artifact of poor mathematics,” a creation of “data manipulation,” and “academic and scientific misconduct”), and the story that 97% of scientists support the global warming narrative peddled by the alarmists (which is a purposely deceptive tale).

Every adult who has elevated this school girl to divine status, who believes she has anything of substance to add to the conversation, who are dancing madly to the mass delusional music only they hear, needs to understand how foolish they look to rest of us. Previous generations would have laughed at their behavior. Maybe a large dose of ridicule will bring them back to reality.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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