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The Left’s Cynical and Childish ‘Climate Strike’

What is even more obnoxious than thousands of smug, self-righteous leftists preaching hysterically about the Church of Mother Earth and the imminent destruction of our planet due to “global warming?” Hearing this same song-and-dance from a bunch of literal children.

And that is exactly what the Left and its enthusiastic enablers in the corporate leftist media have unleashed upon us. No matter how much you may have tried to resist it, chances are that you have seen some images, videos, and social media posts crammed into your feed recently from the #ClimateStrike sensation.

Even though this march is yet another vain effort that will fade into oblivion with the passing of time—just like the Women’s March or the “March for Our Lives” events—the Left and its allies in the press have tried like hell to make this one stick even harder, with their apocalyptic message. Look no further than MSN’s “Spotlight” aggregate page, featuring headline after headline groveling at the feet of the holy and untouchable figureheads of this ridiculous movement: The children.

Let’s just take a look at some of the most stomach-churning examples of this totally organic and not-orchestrated-in-the-slightest media narrative:

Think of the Children, But Don’t Listen to Them

As with the anti-gun protests in the aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the Left is rushing to use children as their human shields to defend otherwise insane and indefensible policy positions. Just as leftist organizations and media outlets exaggerated the number of teenagers present at the original “March for Our Lives,” they are similarly twisting the extent of youth involvement in the climate change movement to their advantage.

First, as has been widely reported, the vast majority of students around the country who participated in Friday’s “climate strike” were given excused absences from school to join the protest on Friday.

Think back to when you were in high school, just 16 years old: Wouldn’t you take advantage of every single opportunity to skip school for a day, especially on a Friday, and especially if it meant chilling with your friends at some dumb protest? There is no more surefire method to draw bodies out for your event, even if many of them couldn’t care less about electric cars or flatulent cows, than to offer an excused absence from school. So it’s pretty safe to say that this tactic dramatically inflated the attendance at most of these rallies.

Second, if the “March for Our Lives” fiasco was any indication, a movement with children as its figureheads is likely to fail. Despite the national media attention and undying support from the entirety of the Democratic Party, the anti-gun Parkland kids couldn’t even get a single anti-gun bill passed in their home state of Florida, and instead gave us nothing more than a spectacular display of fake tears when one of their championed gun ban bills failed. If anything, their efforts led to a dramatic pendulum swing to the opposite side of the spectrum, as Governor Ron DeSantis signed even more pro-gun bills into law.

New Talking Heads, Same Talking Points

Who (besides Harvard’s admissions office, which admitted the otherwise unqualified David Hogg) really cares what a bunch of children have to say? We have age limits on many important parts of life for a reason. You cannot drive until you are 16, you cannot vote or enlist until you are 18, you cannot drink until you are 21, and you cannot run for federal office until you are at least 25. Empty-headed children like Greta Thunberg are proof of why these limitations exist.

At her testimony before Congress, the 16-year-old global warming wunderkind who came out of nowhere even admitted that she had nothing new to say. She stated, point-blank, that she did not intend “to offer any prepared remarks at this hearing,” instead simply submitting as her testimony the “IPCC Special Report on Global Warming” from last year, and adding “I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists.”

So, if this girl is literally admitting before the United States Congress that she has absolutely nothing new to add to the conversation…then why should we care about her? She is merely regurgitating talking points from higher authorities, the same authorities who, undoubtedly, bankrolled her entire un-organic crusade in the first place. Chances are she was chosen because of her mental disability, which makes her just that much more “sympathetic” to a general audience.

Children of the Climate

The Left’s idolization of children as somehow representing a political force of the future is indicative of a broader, more sinister approach to politics generally. There are two major reasons for this. First, it is one of their most recently developed tactics for attempting to mask their dangerously radical positions with ethos, whether it’s using dead children to cover for their efforts to ban all guns, or using disabled children to advocate for the strictest environmental regulations imaginable.

But more significantly than that, it is indicative of their new dystopian worldview, where some greater international law trumps national sovereignty, and wherein children have far greater autonomy than ever before in human history.

For the former, the fact that Thunberg, as a Swedish citizen, is now lecturing Americans about what they should or shouldn’t do, is representative of their globalist agenda to see national barriers broken down through appeals to combat a supposed “global” problem. The United Nations has pushed similar efforts advocating worldwide gun control.

As for the increased autonomy for children, it is no secret that modern education systems have been nothing more than far-left brainwashing facilities ever since the rise of the Frankfurt School, with insidious Marxism and anti-American sentiment being ingrained into the most recent generations of college graduates.

At the heart of these re-education efforts were a “question everything” mentality, aimed at generating disrespect and distrust between our youth and the preceding generations, for the purpose of giving children more control over their own lives at alarmingly early ages.

Lately, these efforts have dripped down into high schools and even elementary schools. The most visceral example of this has been the Left’s recent efforts to indoctrinate kids with the LGBTQ agenda, whether through the truly reprehensible phenomena of “drag queen story hours,” to become drag queens themselves at 11, or the push for children to “decide” their gender as young as 7 years old.

Now, the Left is trying to give mere teenagers a similar level of autonomy and authority when it comes to something as complex as environmental science. In this day and age, the extent of most high schoolers’ love of plants can be found in how much weed they smoke; the slightly more sophisticated ones get their science lessons from binge-watching Breaking Bad on Netflix.

Yet to the Left, these children are the “leaders of tomorrow” when it comes to the environment, just as much as the “experts” on gun policies are kids whose experiences with guns go no further than the latest “Call of Duty” installment.

Put simply, they want us to submit to the will of hysterical children because the Greta Thunbergs and David Hoggs of the world most accurately reflect the mindset of today’s adult Left: a cult of drones who are ill-informed, hyperemotional, over sensational, devoid of common sense, and adverse to facts. And they want all of us to be just like them.

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About Eric Lendrum

Eric Lendrum graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the Secretary of the College Republicans and the founding chairman of the school’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter. He has interned for Young America’s Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the White House, and has worked for numerous campaigns including the 2018 re-election of Congressman Devin Nunes (CA-22). He is currently a co-host of The Right Take podcast.

Photo: Cory Clark/NurPhoto via Getty Images

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