In February 2019, a clip of a bunch of
elementary-school students getting chastised by California Senator Dianne Feinstein went massively viral. In the clip, which was posted by the environmental group the Sunrise Movement, the children urged the Democratic Senator to reconsider her refusal to support the Green New Deal. In the clip, you can slowly see Feinstein lose her patience with the children until she snaps. “I’ve been in the Senate for over a quarter of a century and I know what can pass and I know what can’t pass,” she scolds.
On social media, reactions to the clip were split into two camps. On one side, many criticized Feinstein for adopting such a harsh tone with a group of scared children, and for being so dismissive about their concern for their own futures.
On the other, many accused the children’s teachers and parents of cynically weaponizing them for the benefit of pushing their own political agenda. The latter was approximately my view at the time the clip went viral: watching a group of small children harangue an elected representative on an issue I felt they could independently know nothing about made me uncomfortable, and as a parent I was unsure whether I would want to see my own child used in such a fashion.
I was in the wrong camp. I realize that now. And what made me realize this was seeing
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who drew widespread ire from conservatives after delivering an impassioned speech at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. “People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” she said. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.” In her speech, Thunberg was soft-spoken yet straightforward, eloquent yet extremely impassioned. Her speech was covered by pretty much every media outlet, serving as grist for conservative trolls like
Candace Owens,
Tucker Carlson,
and the president. Such “pundits” attacked the 16-year-old for everything from her perceived histrionic tone, to her appearance, to even her neurological differences. (Thunberg is on the autism spectrum, and has referred to her Asperger’s diagnosis as her “superpower” as an activist; in a rare move of contrition, Fox News issued an apology after
commentator Michael Knowles referred to her as “mentally ill.”)
Perhaps the most common allegation levied against Thunberg by the right was the claim that she was not acting of her own volition, but serving as a tool to promote her parents’ views about
climate change. Over and over, the consensus on the right was that a teenage girl could not possibly come to her own conclusion about the climate crisis without being indoctrinated by her parents — or, as Carlson put it, Thunberg was an example of the left using “children to demand power.” As
the Parkland kids proved last year, of all the gripes the right has about the left — that they are elitist and privileged, that they eschew the values of the working class in favor of
Hamilton singalongs and gender-neutral bathrooms and trigger warnings — nothing makes them **** their diapers more than seeing a child espouse left-wing talking points, be it about reproductive freedoms or gun control or, in this case, the right not to have our homes and loved ones consumed by rising sea levels.
In many ways, this argument was an expertly crafted hybrid two of the most common strains of right-wing thought: the paranoia-fueled idea that positive media coverage in any form, particularly of a prominent young woman, is the result of a vast left-wing conspiracy; as well as the cynical belief that anyone who appears to exhibit anything other than Ayn Randian self-interest must be either a propaganda tool, or motivated by less than altruistic principles. But it also happens to be wrong, for reasons that go far beyond Thunberg. There is a long, long history of children in activism, with many risking their own welfare to put themselves on the front lines for their beliefs.
