Way back in the ancient time of 2015, Matt Drudge found himself befuddled about why he was suddenly seeing actress Amy Schumer everywhere, when he didn’t find her particularly funny, insightful, or enjoyable. “Who is Amy Schumer? Where did she come from? Why is she being force-fed on population?” (The actress is Chuck Schumer’s cousin, and looking back I wonder if Drudge was implying that family connections were a driving force behind her then-burgeoning fame.)
Every now and then, you see some figure plucked from obscurity who is touted as the Next Big Thing, often with very little sense of why this person is so magnificent and head and shoulders above the rest. It is as if someone — some Hollywood super-agent, or magazine editor, or television network executive — has hand-selected a person and declared, “This person is going to be a star, come hell or high water.” A switch gets flipped, a high-tech pop-culture media whirligig swings into action, and suddenly that person is everywhere.
Sometimes you see it in Hollywood — Why was Ezra Miller in so many Hollywood blockbusters for a stretch? Why did Shia LaBeouf become the sidekick to every 1980s pop-culture icon? — and sometimes you see it in the world of politics — Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams come to mind. Back in 2022, I jokingly referred to it as the “celebrity-industrial complex,” all those glossy magazines that can put someone on the cover and make someone’s face recognizable and their presence seem ubiquitous.
I thought of that as I saw Greta Thunberg now wearing a keffiyeh and leading pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel marches in Europe, declaring, “If you as a climate activist don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist. . . . You cannot be neutral in a genocide!”
Then there’s this recent wrinkle regarding Thunberg:
Politicians in Germany think that climate activist Greta Thunberg should be banned from entering the country over her participation in pro-Palestinian protests, according to the domestic policy spokesman for Germany’s biggest opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union.
Alexander Throm told BILD newspaper that it would be “not only appropriate but even necessary that the Federal Minister of the Interior issues an entry ban against this anti-Semite in the future.”
Throm said of the climate activist, “anyone who enters Germany to incite hatred against Israel and denigrate our police has no place in Germany.”
Now, when even the Germans are saying that you’re too hateful toward Jews . . .
In March 2020, a book review by Caitlin Gibson of the Washington Post noted, “Before Greta Thunberg became the face of the global climate movement, before she was Time magazine’s Person of the Year and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, she was an 11-year-old child who suddenly stopped eating.”
“She cried at night when she should have been sleeping. She cried on her way to school. She cried in her classes and during her breaks, and the teachers called home almost every day,” [Thunberg’s mother] writes, recalling her fifth-grader’s sudden spiral in 2014. “She had disappeared into some kind of darkness and appeared to stop functioning.”
Thunberg had stopped playing piano, stopped laughing, stopped talking. She would eat only minuscule bites of certain foods prepared in a certain way by her agonized parents, who watched as it took their daughter hours to finish a plate of three or four gnocchi. Within months, Thunberg had lost 20 pounds, and her pulse and blood pressure showed signs of starvation.
Does . . . that sound to you like a person who ought to be catapulted into the spotlight of global celebrity? A good person to elevate to the level of a child prophet?
Back in 2018, someone decided that 15-year-old Thunberg would address the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and with her sneering face and sanctimonious outrage — shrieking “How dare you!” — she instantly become the face of the climate-change movement, Veruca Salt crossed with Rachel Carson.
Within a year, Thunberg was declared Time magazine’s person of the year.
Now as we watch Thunberg insist that the only way to be a true climate activist is by adopting the notion that Israel cannot continue to exist — that’s what those “decolonize from the river to the sea” signs mean, whether those holding them understand it or not — can we all now recognize that perhaps turning a troubled young teenager into the face of a global movement wasn’t such a swell idea?