Our Children Are Not Tools of Your Green Propaganda
Since the release of Pink Floyd’s classic song, Another Brick in The Wall, Part 2, it has become the credo of every disaffected youth since. For all the kids who despised sitting in classrooms, day after day, listening to their mediocre teachers, droning on about topics that they both loathed and knew would drop out of their heads within 30 seconds of them sprinting out of the final exam; all for the sake of beefing up their transcript to get into a “good” college…this was their anthem.
However, today, while teachers pose at least the same, if not a worse, problem than when I was in school, some of what is being taught is much more pernicious. Much has been written about how the mind viruses of critical race theory and gender theory have infected our schools. Still, another piece of agitprop one goes on, seemingly undetected, but with an equivalent amount of zealotry.
I don’t know if “Critical Green Theory” has been trademarked yet, but if not, I charge $5 per use and a discounted $4 per use for my substack subscribers (another benefit of membership…lucky you).
If there are any liberals out there reading this, frothing at the mouth and screaming, “you literal Hitler science denier,” let me make two points for you. First, I think climate change is occurring; however, the apocalyptic, end-of-days prophecies are very Jonestown, mass-suicide-like. Second, please stop reading my Substack.
Like all cults, one feature of the Green variety is its need to indoctrinate the children into their doomsday predictions, despite what other damage you may be doing to their fragile minds. As a case in point, check out the op-ed recently posted on the Hill:
In Stuart Mackintosh’s op-ed, because the outcome of the recent COP27 meeting gave him a <crying emoji face>, he argues for weaponizing children’s mental health to further his climate change agenda. Consider these three points he makes in the piece:
Depression and anguish can lead to action. The alarmed act. The anguished shift behaviors and choices.
and
In elections where outcomes are affected by base turnout and independent voters’ worries, climate change positions are important, especially for younger, more diverse voters. [emphasis added]
and
Today three quarters of young people polled said the future is frightening and 64 percent said governments were not doing enough. Fully 45 percent of 10,000 young people polled in the global study, led by the United Kingdom’s University of Bath and the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, said climate anxiety is affecting their daily lives.
So, according to good ole’ Mack, it is good, no beneficial actually, to drive young people into “depression” and “anguish” because it will get them more politically active in their support of the Green apocalypse narrative.
He makes this argument at a time when young people in the US are already suffering a mental health crisis from the effects of, among other things, social media and the irresponsible covid school lockdowns. According to a Center for Disease Control (CDC) study published in March this year, nearly half (44%) of high school students responded that they have felt persistently sad during the past year. Even worse, according to the National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI), 20% of high school students report serious thoughts about suicide, with 9% reporting an attempt at taking their own lives.
Nonetheless, keep pushing, says Mack; we need to nudge them closer to the edge of madness in order to save the polar bears (oh wait, they’re actually doing well, anyway). There is nothing else I can say other than this is the production of a sick mind and one no one should want anywhere near their child or anyone else’s.
According to his article, Mack and his ilk have already done a bang-up job creating outsized fear and anxiety among our kids regarding climate change, so what’s the next evolution of their proposed mental health hostage situation? Have them hold a gun to their heads until their parents put up solar panels? Hold an OD dosage of fentanyl in their mouths and threaten to swallow unless their parents buy a Tesla?
I’d wish to claim that Mackintosh is unique in his twisted worldview, but alas, that is not the case. This is simply the latest in a long line of fanatics who want to weaponize children’s mental health for the sake of their environmental hobby zealotry.
Let’s consider the Virgin Mary of the Green cataclysm movement; the autistic, mentally-ill little girl whose spittle her sycophants believe to be their environmental holy water, from which they could be absolved of their private jet-flying, cow-farting sins: Greta Thunberg.
While Greta is seen as a heroine among the Green-cult set, the reality is that she should be a cautionary tale. Greta is the typhoid Mary of the weaponization of Green mental illness. At the point in her life when she should have been in counseling, the adults in her life trotted her out as some soothsayer, who the Green fanatics saw as a useful tool…her mental stability be damned.
But for the Green movement at large, using her to push the Chicken Little environmental story was a massive blunder. To convince the lucid to come around to your perspective, you need two things: rationality and passion. On a scale of 1-100, Greta was (and is) a 100 on the latter and a -100 on the former. When you have someone this misbalanced between the two, you repel the people you are trying to convince. Personally, her becoming the spokesperson for the Green movement was the thing that fully repelled me from them.
The sole reason Greta was valuable to the Green nihilists wasn’t that she was convincing to people with a fully developed frontal cortex; it was that her passion was convincing to those without that brain development… namely, impressionable children who zealots and conmen can easily convince.
And unfortunately, but probably not unsurprisingly, Greta is still treated as some kind of an expert, as you can see in her recent 1:1 panel interview at the London Literature Festival to promote her new book. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not.
In that interview, she advocates for covid-style climate lockdowns (which are being instituted in Oxfordshire, UK, though they deny that’s what they are doing) and the downfall of capitalism because that is the source of climate change (despite significant evidence to the contrary).
In one of the most upside-down world moments in recent interview history, the interviewer asks Greta if she has ever spoken to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and suggested what they should do with their money. If in true Joker in the Dark Knight style, Musk and Bezos turned all their money into one-dollar bills and threw it out of a helicopter, the random people who picked it up off the ground would do more good with the money than Greta.
I would call these unserious people, but the fact they are playing Russian roulette with children’s mental health means they are quite serious and must be treated as such.
We hear roughly the same inanity from the always even-keeled AOC, who has said that climate change is her generation’s World War Two because the world will end in 12 years if we don’t do something about it.
On Reddit, the subreddit r/climatechange, which is mainly trafficked by the sub-30-year-old set, has this as one of the most upvoted posts:
The post goes on to list various articles about how to manage feelings of hopelessness and anxiety around the climate apocalypse.
How about this recent, very understated article from Time by Gaia Vince, entitled Where We’ll End Up Living as the Planet Burns.
From the beginning of the article:
Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This migration has already begun—we have all seen the streams of people fleeing drought-hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and other rural livelihoods have become impossible.
The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats
Notice the dire adjectives and verbs Vince uses in her assessment to conjure up the optimal amount of panic among her readers, with the optimal amount of panic being the red-lining of the hysteria speedometer. Parts of the globe will be “lethal” to live in, and people are “fleeing” drought-hit areas.
In this self-fulfilling prophecy, Vince tries to convince us that, unlike the migrant trend, which has been ongoing for the better part of 150 years, the most recent and future migrants will migrate because of climate change. How will she prove this? By forgetting the Statistics 101 difference between correlation and causation, most likely.
But if I had to choose a favorite bit of recent Green nihilism, it comes from this Gizmodo article from this August. In this piece, Luke Kemp from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk informed us that one of the “plausible worst-case scenarios” would be nuclear war and climate change fusing together, “climate change exacerbates geopolitical conflict eventually resulting in a large-scale nuclear war...[a]fter the nuclear winter has lifted, the survivors face accelerated warming.”
Wow, that marriage sounds more destructive than the one in which Guy let Satan sleep with Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby. I was so enamored with this imagery that I decided to use the AI image generation software from midjourney.com to visualize what that marriage from hell would look like. Here’s what they came up with:
I’m not going to lie; the merging of climate change and nukes seem pretty kick-ass. If you gotta go sometime, that seems like the way to do it. And hey, at least we had windmills.
Later in the Gizmodo article, Kemp insists that he is not a Green Jim Jones; he is serious, damn it! “There is nothing alarmist about looking at plausible extreme risks...[w]e do it for car, and plane crashes without cries of alarmism. It is simply good risk management and science. The alternative of marching blind [sic] is naive and potentially fatally foolish.”
This perfectly encapsulates the mind of the Green nihilist. They confuse the concept of reasonable risk mitigation with being huddled in the corner of a room, in the fetal position, rocking back and forth, muttering incoherently about Exxon and dog food. If I didn’t know any better and only read this Gizmodo article on the topic, I would be strapping on my The End is Nigh sandwich board sign in the middle of Time Square. Unfortunately for them, we do know better. Unfortunately for us, our children do not.
Whether or not you fully swallow every gyration of the Climate Change movement, whether you take some and leave some, or if you discount it wholesale, I hope we can all agree that the weaponization of driving children insane is not a valid strategy that anyone should accept. It is far more dangerous than anything we will see from Climate Change itself.
After all, if in the process of turning our children into another brick in the green wall, you’ve ruined the minds of everyone who could possibly enjoy the planet, what are you saving anyway?
_Comstock