Youth Activist Greta Thunberg: Scorned by Misogynists and Climate Change Denialists
Climate deniers are in a tizzy. A world wide wave of misogynist rhetoric and misinformation seeks to discredit a youth movement aiming to keep the planet habitable. Their bile offers up a case study on the intersectionality of reactionary ideology.
Lacking facts to shore up their arguments, climate change denialists are waging a rhetorical battle seeking to discredit moral arguments against the effects of an economy based on carbon sources of energy.
Just over a year ago, a (now) sixteen year old Swedish student started skipping school on Fridays to demonstrate outside the Swedish parliament, holding up a sign calling for bold climate action.
Greta Thunberg’s tenacity began attracting media attention, inspiring the Fridays for the Future school climate strike movement. In the months following her speech to the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world.
Last week she arrived in New York after sailing the Atlantic a 60ft racing yacht equipped with solar panels and underwater turbines; a carbon neutral transatlantic crossing.
Thunberg is in the US to attend the UN Climate Action Summit and participate in protests starting September 20 as part of a Week of Action urging governments around the world to make systemic changes to reduce planet-heating emissions.
The crowds cheering her entry in the U.S. belied the editorializing of denialists and their allies, which started the moment her travel plans became public knowledge.
Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun carried a column by Andrew Bolt suggesting that Thunberg’s autism made her an unworthy messenger:
No teenager is more freakishly influential than Greta Thunberg, the deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement.
Her influence is about to grow even more outsized and not just because the 16-year-old Swede has been nominated for the Nobel prize.
Thunberg has announced she’s finally going to the United States, the last bastion of the heathen, to preach the global warming faith to the Americans...
...I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru.
https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1167916177927991296?s=20
New York Times columnist Christopher Caldwell warned readers that the climate emergency message conveyed by Thunberg and other activists urging immediate action posed a threat to democracy itself.
Democracy often calls for waiting and seeing. Patience may be democracy’s cardinal virtue. Climate change is a serious issue. But to say, “We can’t wait,” is to invite a problem just as grave.
Wow. All that vitriol must have some underlying motivation.
Martin Gelin at the New Republic in The Misogyny of Climate Deniers points to research based on the language used by denialists. Male reactionaries perceive activism as a challenge to their way of life …”for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”
As Thunberg approached America, she was followed by a tsunami of male rage. On her first day of sailing, a multi-millionaire Brexit activist tweeted that he wished a freak accident would destroy her boat. A conservative Australian columnist called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement,” while the British far-right activist David Vance attacked the “sheer petulance of this arrogant child.”
In the U.S., former Trump staffer Steve Milloy recently called Thunberg a “teenage puppet,” and claimed that “the world laughs at this Greta charade,” while a widely shared far-right meme showed Trump tipping The Statue of Liberty to crush her boat. We can expect a surge of similar attacks in the U.S. as she arrives in New York this week.
While these examples might feel like mere coincidence to some, the idea that white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to climate-denialism—some of the research coming from Thunberg’s own country. Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, which recently launched the world’s first academic research center to study climate denialism, have for years been examining a link between climate deniers and the anti-feminist far-right.
As Amanda Marcotte says in Misogyny, meet hypocrisy: Climate deniers go after AOC, Greta Thunberg with sexist attacks at Salon:
The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly clear: The climate crisis is real, and mostly caused by human activity. Morally, the position of denialists is indefensible, because their chosen path — to do nothing or worse yet, increase greenhouse gas output — will harm not just future generations, but ordinary people around the world who currently suffering from increasingly extreme weather events.
So conservatives have to rely on personal attacks aimed at environmental activists, dragging the debate away from any actual issues of substance and into a cesspool of culture war resentments. By targeting young female activists or political leaders with sexist stereotypes, climate denialists can distract from both the scientific facts and from the moral imperative to do something. Instead, they’re trying to make the whole issue be a proxy war the fragile egos of male conservatives, eager to lash out at any woman who makes them feel small by being smart and capable.
Greta Thunberg is by no means the only messenger under attack by these malevolent defenders of the dirty oil economy. And as others have pointed out, the feminization of environmental advocates--Al Gore comes to mind--is a long standing method of attack.
We were supposed to infer weakness thru those writings, because women are weak in the world view of the men charged with running things.
In Who’s Afraid of Greta Thunberg? Al Jazeera’s Andrew Mitrovica praises her activism and denigrates her attackers:
In words and deeds, Thunberg is the embodiment of philosopher Howard Zinn's admonition: "We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world."
Of course, the marauding swarm of vitriolic right-wing climate-change deniers see Thunberg - not how the prophetic Zinn envisioned her - but as a tiny, pretentious zealot who threatens the existing order. Their order. Their comforts. Their traditional "way of life".
De rigueur, they have set out to discredit and, if possible, to destroy Thunberg with their, by now, familiar and crass modus operandi.
They have mocked her. They have belittled her. They have denigrated her. They have insulted her. They have dismissed her. They have questioned her motives. They have suggested she is anti-democratic. They have, in the fetid recesses of the internet, even threatened her.
At 9am on Friday, September 20th, students at multiple schools throughout San Diego will stage walkouts in support of urgent action on climate change.
For more information visit: https://globalclimatestrike.net/
The local organizers are SD350: https://sandiego350.org/blog/event/civi_event_833/
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/332874934292288/
https://youtu.be/iU7IhINREcI
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Finally...
https://twitter.com/HoarseWisperer/status/1168685334944727040?s=20
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