Addicted to Protest

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, October 17, 2026

 

I’ll be honest: I’ve never liked Greta Thunberg.

 

That might sound mean, but that kind of animosity is one of the reasons she became a dashboard saint for climate justice in the first place. The fact that she was a ponytailed 15-year-old, a Joan of Arc of global warming, was a feature, not a bug. When people criticized her uncharitably—but also charitably—her defenders could claim the critics were picking on a little girl.

 

I’m not insinuating anything here—her fans were quite open about it. Here’s Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian (emphasis mine):

 

Greta Thunberg’s unique strength when she first emerged as an activist was that, as a child, and one with Asperger’s to boot, she had almost unassailable moral authority. Her critics argued that if she was old enough to tell world leaders what to do then she should be old enough to take the heat for it, but most people recognise that hers is still an innately vulnerable age; not quite a child, not quite grown up, instinctively evoking protective feelings in anyone with an ounce of humanity…. initially even her detractors accepted that to argue back as robustly as one might with an adult would seem bullying and unkind. It is a twisted testament to her success that the gloves have now come off with a vengeance, but it’s frightening all the same.

 

I’m not fond of any arguments that come with claims that the identity of a person, any person, gives their opinions “unassailable moral authority.” Now I should clarify up front that I think there are times when someone’s feelings can have an almost unassailable moral authority. Politics is full of examples where this very human fact is exploited. Parents of daughters raped and murdered, victims of all manner of crimes, female athletes deprived of their victories by biological males, survivors of school shootings: The victims dragooned into political fights to put a human face on policies and controversies are a regular feature of politics. Indeed, one of the few lamentable mistakes Ronald Reagan made as president was to turn a portion of his State of the Union addresses into a parade of human props. The whole point is to take a person’s unassailably legitimate feelings and make it hard to argue against the cause they’re made to represent.

 

But feelings aren’t arguments.

 

To her credit, when Greta Thunberg emerged as an international human shield for climate change, she made some arguments. She also provided an enormous number of theatrical and demagogic “How dare you!” outbursts.

 

The crux of her argument was that climate change was such an important crisis that nothing else should matter. Again, that’s no insinuation on my part. “The emissions are increasing and that is the only thing that matters. I think that needs to be our focus,” she told The Guardian. “We cannot talk about anything else.” The headline of the article: “Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t.’”

 

When she appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, she said:

 

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.

 

She said similar things at the U.N., at the EU Parliament, and no doubt at the Stockholm Starbucks. I think her arguments, shorn of their emotional candy coating, were literally and figuratively juvenile.

 

And whenever she was criticized for arguing that her personal feelings of anxiety should be translated into a global panic, her defenders attacked those who disagreed. She was like an earnest, proudly autistic version of the Jon Stewart “clown nose on, clown nose off” shtick. (For those of you who don’t remember, Stewart loved to deliver often brilliant, highly partisan attacks and then when people responded seriously, he’d say in effect, “Hey, I’m just a comedian.”)

 

Now, I think some of the attacks on Thunberg were gross, immature, and even cruel. But I also find the tactic of hiding behind children to make your arguments so that you can attack anyone who criticizes them for picking on children to be wildly cynical. Making a kid an ideological child soldier and then attacking grown-ups for shooting back is not exactly honorable or decent.

 

In 2019, The Washington Post ran an irate op-ed titled, “Politicians and pundits used to refrain from publicly attacking kids. Not anymore.” Another columnist for The Guardian began a tirade with: “A bunch of grown men have begun bullying a schoolgirl.” That “bullying,” the author explained, was “proof the right has run out of ideas.” I am happy to condemn some of the attacks on the kids, but I am also happy to condemn the tactic of putting kids in rhetorical harm’s way.

 

We should catch up on what Thunberg, now 23, is doing these days. This week she was in France lending her eminently assailable moral authority to the protesters in France setting fire to cars, purportedly in anger over substandard spending on schools. “The whole world is watching with awe,” she said approvingly of the protests, which included one teen taking a makeshift blow torch to a woman’s face. “This generation is one that has been growing up with a sense of hopelessness for the future, when we can see our future and our rights taken from us,” she said. “Of course people are going to fight back.”

 

One might wonder what school funding has to do with climate change. Also, back in 2019, Thunberg insisted that she didn’t want “hope,” she wanted “panic” over climate change, “the only thing that matters.” Now she thinks a lack of hope justifies pretty much everything she approves of. Pick a lane.

 

Of course, as many have noted, she thinks picking a lane is a false choice, because Thunberg has become seduced by the “omnicause,” or the “fatberg,” the idea that basically everything (progressives care about) is everything—a topic I wrote about almost exactly one year ago. She has spent the last few years chanting things like, “Crush Zionism.” Just last week, on October 7 (!), she attended a rally in Germany, amid chants of “There is only one solution: the Intifada Revolution.” Four years ago, she explained her new view that “[t]he climate and ecological emergency is, of course, only a symptom of a much larger sustainability crisis. A social crisis…. It’s all interconnected.”

 

I find all of this sad. Thunberg once explained in an interview that she considered her autism a “superpower” because it allowed her to focus on the climate emergency and it gave her “meaning in a world that sometimes seems meaningless.” Before she started on the climate warpath, she confessed, “I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder.” That’s sad. That’s not an argument for throwing billions deeper into poverty by prematurely banning fossil fuels.

 

In a way, I think Thunberg is an extreme example of a crisis of meaning that exists for a lot of people, mostly but not exclusively the young. I think she’s admirably honest about her autism and I don’t think it should be mocked.

 

But I also don’t think one young woman’s hunger for meaning and her fight against personal loneliness helpfully illuminates hugely important issues. The plight of French schools has nothing to do with her that she is not projecting onto the issue. Addiction to protest culture is not a malady reserved for the neurodivergent.

 

I’ve just started a really interesting book by Alexandre Lefebvre titled Liberalism as a Way of Life. I can already tell there’s much I agree with and much I will probably disagree with. One of the interesting points he subtly makes is that the “postliberal” critique of liberalism has some merit (even if he profoundly disagrees with postliberalism’s conclusions). He quotes Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed. “Liberalism,” Deneen wrote, “is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world.”

 

Lefebvre is very sympathetic to the postliberal argument that liberalism is more than just a political legal system; it’s a culture. I agree with that too. But I think I’m going to end up disagreeing with both of them about what that means.

 

The reason I bring this up here is to make a simple point. Liberal systems are a way—I would argue the best way—to find meaning, but I do not think they are very good at providing meaning. Deneen and I broadly agree on that. Lefebvre seems like he doesn’t (but I don’t want to be unfair and state that outright, though I have listened to some interviews with him that point to that conclusion).

 

One of the biggest points of freedom is being free to find a meaning that is meaningful for you. Part of the deal, therefore, is that, within very broad limits, you need to have a high level of tolerance for other people to choose sources of meaning you disagree with. I am sure Lefebvre agrees with me on that. Deneen’s position is different, because he thinks such freedom leads too many people to choose poorly and so we need to think of ways of providing meaning from above.

 

The problem with liberal culture isn’t the freedom, it’s the aspect of our culture that thinks cultural, economic, institutional, political, and even rational constraints on freedom are illegitimate or oppressive.

 

As with so many activism addicts, Thunberg buys into this way of thinking by indulging in all sorts of conspiracy theories about how corporate overlords are “killing the planet” on purpose. The omnicrisis is the result of powerful “Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression. … We need to dismantle them all.” Other meaning-thirsty young people on the left and right are even more adamant about all manner of conspiracies—orchestrated by billionaires, corporations, Zionists, Jews, the Deep State, etc.

 

Conspiracism is a species of narcissism, because it almost invariably places the conspiracy theorist in the position of prophet, truth teller, martyr, or hero. In other words, if the conspiracy is true, I have meaning. If it’s not true, I have to muddle through life trying to find a date, a job, a spouse, a boring traditional faith, etc. If I fail at these things, then I am a failure. Better to believe in an ornate cathedral of villainy behind the false facades of bourgeois life so I can blame my failures on it.

 

The whole idea of political liberalism is that the system we have is the system. But that isn’t exciting enough, it’s not Romantic enough, it doesn’t provide the kind of meaning conspiracists crave. It doesn’t fill the holes in their souls. Is it any wonder that the conspiracists of the left and right so often turn to illiberal silver bullets to slay the beast of liberalism? Is it surprising that the tip of the spear of the omnicause is now Palestinianism? In their fevered telling, flawed but liberal democratic Israel is a Nazi-like regime hiding behind a false mask of liberalism, while Hamas is a mere “resistance” organization of freedom fighters.

 

The whole idea behind a liberal culture is that people who disagree with you aren’t villains, liars, or accomplices in “colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression.” They’re just people who disagree with you and, when necessary, are free to tell you you’re wrong. Being disagreed with or told you’re wrong isn’t violence or oppression. But when your sense of meaning is bound up in explanatory theories for your unhappiness, it can feel that way. Our culture is struggling with the challenge of explaining that to people.

 

A first step toward fixing this problem is to teach more young people that feelings aren’t an argument.