Trump Cult Triggered As Time Magazine Names Greta Thunberg Person of the Year
The persecution complex of ultra partisans across the political spectrum never ceases to amaze me. With the cult of Trump, it’s reached new levels of delirium.
The selection of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg as Time Person of the Year for 2019 is being widely scorned by fans of the Dear Leader on social media as I write this.
The usual suspects, like Don-Don Junior and Newt Gingrich have taken the lead in complaining. And a lesser-known cult acolytes have spewed the kinds of personal attacks that we’ve come to expect against those who fail to toe the line.
https://twitter.com/JoeTalkShow/status/1204820556278837248?s=20
She is the youngest person to receive the title in its 92-year history and is championing a cause literate people who don’t worship at the altar of the almighty dollar understand to be the biggest issue facing the planet.
Thunberg’s courage and devotion to a cause has inspired young people to step up worldwide. This surge of activism in other countries goes beyond climate change, addressing the uncertainty young people are facing about the future.
In Hong Kong, threats to democracy have led to months of protests by young people who have adopted as their rallying cry the martial artist Bruce Lee’s famous quote, “Be formless, shapeless, like water.”
Protests in Chile have focused on inequality and corruption. Ongoing demonstrations against the countries’ political systems have transcended sectarian lines in Lebanon and Iraq.
Some demonstrations erupted over specific grievances, such as proposed legislation in Indonesia to weaken the country’s anti-corruption agency and reduce the personal freedom of citizens.
In Catalonia, thousands of people decried a Spanish Supreme Court’s decision to jail nine Catalan separatist leaders, paying tribute to Hong Kong by adopting some of their tactics, including staging a blockade of Barcelona’s airport.
Protests in Haiti, Egypt, and Bolivia have expanded beyond their original aims into calls for their governments to resign.
In countries including the US, UK, Germany, Spain, Austria, France and New Zealand, environmental demonstrators have glued and chained themselves to roads and vehicles, and tried to disrupt busy city centers.
Time’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal explained their decision, saying she represented a “broader generational shift” of young people demanding change:
When she first heard about global warming as an 8-year-old, Thunberg says she thought, “That can’t be happening, because if that were happening, then the politicians would be taking care of it.” That they weren’t is precisely what motivated her to act, as it has youth the world over who are forcing us to confront the peril of our own inaction, from the student-led protests on the streets of Santiago, Chile, to the young democracy activists fighting for rights and representation in Hong Kong to the high schoolers from Parkland, Fla., whose march against gun violence Thunberg cites as an inspiration for her climate strikes.
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Joan McCarter explained some of the additional significance of the choice of Thunberg:
The tradition, the magazine’s editors write, has been “rooted in the so-called Great Man theory” of powerful individuals influencing the world—emphasis on the “Great” and “Man” in the past. Kudos to TIME for recognizing that it’s time to upend that tradition and that the immense challenges of 2019 demand “leaders with a cause and a phone who don’t fit the old rubrics but who connect with us in ways that institutions can’t and perhaps never could.”
Thunberg, they write, “is also the first to note that her privileged background makes her ‘one of the lucky ones,’ as she puts it, in a crisis that disproportionately affects poor and indigenous communities.” She’s smart enough to recognize that and smart enough to use that privilege. “I’d like to tell my grandchildren that we did everything we could,” she told TIME, “and we did it for them and for the generations to come.”
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https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/1204804794289926146?s=20
Time Magazine’s five Person of the Year finalists included President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the whistleblower who filed the complaint against Trump over his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.
Donald Trump, as has been the case in many of the magazine’s recent choices in election years, was Person of the Year in 2016. He's also infamous for having faked Time Magazine covers with his photo hanging in his golf clubs.
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In related news, the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr attacked Time for their selection of Greta Thunberg, mocking her as "a teen being used as a marketing gimmick."
Junior also made the news on his own, thanks to a ProPublica story:
During a summer 2019 hunting trip, Donald Trump Jr. killed a rare argali sheep. The Mongolian government issued him a hunting permit retroactively and he met with the country’s president...
...Trump Jr. shot his argali at night, using a rifle with a laser sight, the guides said. He stopped the local hunting guides from dismembering it at the kill site, instead instructing them to use an aluminum sheet to carry the carcass so as not to damage the fur and horns, said Khuandyg Akhbas, 50, one of the guides. He also killed a red deer, which similarly required a permit.
“At night, we couldn’t find where the animal fell, and we used our light from our phones to find the animal,” Akhbas said, describing the argali hunt. “In the morning they took the animal by truck to the mountain and shot a video on top of the mountain.”(Emphasis mine)
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1204797489817276416?s=20
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Lead image: Screenshot from Time's announcement