That’s a Wrap for Greta Thunberg

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, June 05, 2025

 

A brief note on everybody’s least favorite hectoring eco-scold: I regret to inform you that Greta Thunberg is in the news again. It barely matters why, really — more nonsense about Gaza and “genocide.” We’ll get to that in a moment, but that’s not really why we’re here.

 

You remember young Greta, right? The vinegar-rictused, Swedish ecological activist whom the media turned into a global celebrity back in 2018? You probably recall some of the details, but it’s always healthy to remind ourselves of what an amazingly different era 2018 was: A teenage girl successfully leveraged her ecological neuroses to trick her parents into letting her skip school on Fridays.

 

This would have been impressive enough, but then — in a move that surely must have surprised even her — the global leftist elite also decided to grant Thunberg worldwide fame and Unquestionable Moral Authority in the bargain. She was the perfect avatar, after all, eager to read from a script they had been writing in their hearts for decades now: The planet is dying, future generations are doomed to tragedy, it’s all the fault of us selfish oil-guzzling adults — and now, here’s an enraged 15-year-old girl to guilt-trip you about it.

 

Who can forget the climax of it all, the legendary comedy of Thunberg’s 2019 United Nations address? Visibly reading from a script and adopting actorly mannerisms — shrieking “HOW DARE YOU?” and bawling about “stolen dreams” and “stolen childhood” like she’d been up for 72 straight hours avoiding Freddy Krueger — Thunberg condemned the capitalist West for desecrating the hopes of neurotics like herself. “We’ll be watching you,” she warned icily, a beady-eyed Madame Defarge knitting the names of everyone over the age of 30 into her execution rolls.

 

Folks, it was wild. If you weren’t paying attention at the time, I almost pity you; you’d have learned a lot about where the world was heading. Although the George Floyd–era “racial reckoning” of 2020 is generally acknowledged nowadays as the peak of the woke era, it’s clear in retrospect that it was already here in 2018. (In fact, “peak woke” arguably began on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump outraged progressives’ belief in their own political and moral inevitability by winning the presidency.) A neurodivergent teenage girl was granted supreme moral authority over mankind by adults desperate to weaponize her “vulnerability” to club the world into bending to the eco-socialist agenda pushed by her handlers. We were asked to take it all extremely seriously.

 

It must have been an amazing high for Thunberg to be the center of so much adulation. I suspect this because she has been chasing that high ever since, long after the media gaze moved on. In the Biden era, the media were no longer interested in highlighting the urgency of youth apocalypticism. (That was more important to emphasize when Trump was president.) And so the spotlight vanished.

 

Hungering for continued relevance, Thunberg responded by escalating her tactics, seeking arrest at anti-mining and anti-oil protests across Europe to garner headlines. But the media reaction was tepid, and the thrill was gone. It surprised me not the slightest bit when she instantly transitioned from environmental activism (old and busted) to pro-Palestinian activism (new and sexy with the kids these days) in the wake of the October 7 massacre. A year later, she was performatively arresting herself on podcast appearances to signal her solidarity with Hamas.

 

And now, apparently, she’s on a boat as part of an activist flotilla headed towards Gaza for . . . no particular reason, really. They claim they’re carrying relief supplies to “lift the siege of Gaza,” but that’s obvious pretext for what is transparently a low-stakes international publicity stunt. Israel will almost certainly seize Thunberg’s boat and interdict the rest of “Freedom Flotilla” before it reaches land. Those aboard will assuredly have their iPhones out to film the affair. Slogans will be shouted, clips will be posted. And when the day is over, all involved will congratulate themselves on a job well done: Way to go, making real change in the world.

 

I’m at least mildly impressed by the brazenness of it all: Thunberg is inserting herself into the frame of a picture unrelated to her, because she is an important person whose mere presence must be given appropriate deference. The self-regard would be inexplicable were we not talking about a coddled activist who also briefly became the most important teenager in the world — and has been haunted by it for the rest of her life.

 

As for myself, I couldn’t care less about Thunberg’s fate. If the Israeli Navy wants to hole her boat below the waterline as the French did to sink the Rainbow Warrior, then it’s no problem of mine. I don’t ever want to write about her again, and unless she escalates to suicide bombing, I intend not to. For as much as her astringent mien and unearned pretense make her a figure of comedy, I find her morally repulsive.

 

But I confess that I also love Greta in at least one way: I’m thankful for her existence as an almost novelistically perfect “character type.” Thunberg is the fulfillment in the flesh of an intellectual conceit: the brutally perfect embodiment of an entire younger left-wing generation’s hopeless attachment to the politics of gesture as opposed to the politics of hard work; politics as little more than an externalized expression of narcissism; politics as a plea for attention from an otherwise indifferent world.

 

With that as Thunberg’s guiding star, no wonder she has captured the attention of a similarly lost segment of progressives. Watching both principal and audience mutually dysfunction like this, spiraling downward together in a self-radicalizing vicious cycle, is almost sickeningly poetic to me — a strange affirmation of the eternal truths and verities of all such human feedback loops. I can almost guarantee that the next time she’s in the news, it will be for something crazier than this. Because that’s the only way she’ll be able to get back in the news.

 

I have little doubt that Greta Thunberg is sincere in her convictions, but that is only because I have little doubt that Greta Thunberg’s sincerest conviction is a desperate desire to remain important. She will continue to escalate, both in her rhetoric and her actions, in pursuit of that goal. And when she finally crosses the line irrevocably, as she likely will, I’ll make sure to remember every person or institution that supported her and cheered on her journey.