The look on Greta Thunberg’s face when Donald Trump breezed past her in a UN corridor this week was pure hatred.
She looked as if she would like to strangle the president with her bare hands, although she has never met him.
This is not a healthy emotion for a 16-year-old.
Nothing about the growing global stature of the fanatical Swedish teenage eco-catastrophist is healthy — for her or for the millions of little girls she inspires and frightens in equal measure.
Shortly after her Trump death scowl, we witnessed her in full emotional meltdown while addressing the UN’s climate summit.
The so-called climate emergency has become a personal torment for the schoolgirl.
“She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future,” Trump tweeted sarcastically afterward. “So nice to see!”
It was cruel of the president to mock the child’s distress as she berated world leaders, tears rolling down her cheeks, her breathing shallow, her face reddening and contorted with fury.
But it is true that she is not a happy young girl, and that is crueler, because she has been saddled with a burden no child should bear.
“This is all wrong,” she railed. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us for hope. How dare you!
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words . . . We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Her words and demeanor are those of a totalitarian dictator. She says people who don’t act on climate change are “evil.” The United Nations and Congress should never have given her their platforms.
She has taken literally what irresponsible adults have told her, that the planet is going to end in 11 years unless we stop using fossil fuels.
Her parents and the climate industry have exploited her youthful idealism and rigid obsessions. They have frightened her out of her mind and now are exposing her to condemnation and ridicule.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
They have indoctrinated her into believing a childish fantasy, one that has captured the imagination of millions of susceptible children all around the world, and is causing them to suffer, like Greta, what psychologists call eco-anxiety.
One British report found growing numbers of children and young adults are being treated with psychiatric drugs to alleviate climate anxiety.
Some are so certain the planet has no future that they’ve sworn off ever having children.
As irresponsible adult Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her 2.5 million Instagram followers this year, it is “legitimate” for young people afraid of climate change to ask, “Is it OK to still have children?”
Terrifying children with exaggerated stories about the threat of climate change is a deliberate strategy of eco-totalitarians. It is child abuse.
What Greta does not understand is that it also is a deliberate ploy by climate alarmists to advance their hidden agenda of destroying capitalism.
AOC’s former chief of staff let the cat out of the bag last week about her Green New Deal:
“It wasn’t originally a climate thing at all . . . we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy,” Saikat Chakrabarti told The Washington Post.
For Thunberg the fear is debilitating. She has spoken of her Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism, as a “superpower” but also she has suffered depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe anxiety, selective mutism and an eating disorder, after being fed climate propaganda at school at age 8 about starving polar bears.
So you have to admire the personal courage and integrity that have brought her to noisy, busy New York and forced her onto a very public stage. It does not come easily and clearly takes an emotional toll.
The kind way to deal with her anxiety would be to tell her that her belief that the world is going to end in 2030 is not supported by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released last year.
The kind way to calm her down would be to introduce her to sanguine scientists like British atmospheric chemist Scott Archer-Nicholls of Cambridge University, no climate skeptic, who recently told Physics World:
“The world is not going to suddenly end in 2030 if we don’t reduce carbon-dioxide emissions . . . One of my main worries with this [extinction] messaging is that it can give people the false impression that if we fail to address it soon, there will be a cliff-edge disaster, and that these views might fuel anxiety and depression or lead to rash decision-making.”
Greta is on the verge of hysteria now. How will she react when her demands are not met? They won’t and can’t be met. The planet is not going to end in 2030 and we will still be using fossil fuels, which underpin human progress and have dragged 1 billion people out of poverty in the past two decades.
Kid’s rights trans cend ma/pa’s
One thing the British Supreme Court got right this week was a decision to compel a transgender man to register as “mother” and not “father” on his baby’s birth certificate. The judges decided the child’s right to know the truth of its origins trumped Freddy McConnell’s new male identity.
“Motherhood was established by the act of giving birth,” says the commonsense judgment.
Let’s hope the Democrats pushing abortion rights for men will see sense, too.
Delta’s top-flight pit bull ban
Well done to Delta Air Lines for continuing its ban on pit bulls in defiance of absurd Transportation Department guidelines.
They are dangerous dogs bred for fighting, as poor Marlin Jackson found when he was mauled on a Delta flight in 2017 by an emotional-support pit bull.
Emotional-support animals on airplanes are inconvenient, at best, if not unsanitary. With more than 700,000 flying around the country each year, and rising, it’s clear the system is being abused by people too cheap to pay for their pet to travel in the hold.