Author Declan Finn posted this image on Facebook this morning in regard to the little Swedish meathead who addressed the UN yesterday. Of course the image was almost immediately removed by Fascistbook’s censorbots.
While it’s a shame that the ubiquitous social media platform of our day is wholly-owned by the left-wing progressive movement and isn’t interested in hearing or seeing opinions that run counter to its narrative/dogma, that’s not really what this post is about.
The Children’s Crusade in 1212 is not well-attested, other than by a few lines found in various and sundry church chronicles of the age. What seem to be the facts are that two young men, one in Germany and one in France, caught the Crusading fever (possibly through visions of Jesus Christ) and managed to get tens of thousands of youths to follow them on an abortive attempt to reach the Holy Land. This attempt appears by all accounts to have ended in Italy, where these thousands of children were in actuality sold to slave merchants and either ended up in Tunisia or died in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea.
In effect, the Children’s Crusade ended in tears for all involved.*
Lately, progressives have latched onto the idea that crying children (or at least, children who have an axe to grind) make great ambassadors for the ideas they can’t seem to get over to the great unwashed American public. We have seen David Hogg, survivor of the Parkland massacre who was turned into a Nazi-like caricature by anti-gun groups and sent out on the road to stump for gun control that as anyone who has any sense knows would not have stopped what happened at Parkland. This nasty little child was and continues to be exploited by the progs, who suppose him to be a great weapon in the march to supplant the Second Amendment and put an end to “gun culture” in the US, but who seem more to be handing the GOP an in-kind donation to the Trump 2020 campaign every time he opens his mouth — which, thankfully, seems to be happening less often as his 15 minutes expire.
Then comes the 9-year-old whose wholly-inaccurate study of what happens to plastic straws after they are discarded was seized upon by the progs to…to…stop Americans from using plastic straws? Because plastic straws are floating into the oceans of the world and creating some ill-defined havoc for sea life or some shit? The only problem with this bold statement being that the blame being placed on Americans for this was quickly debunked after an actual scholarly study was released showing that 90% of the plastic in the oceans today emanates from just ten river systems in Africa and Asia — five of which originate in China.**
Of course, some of that waste may well be American trash that was sent to China or other countries to be recycled, but that still doesn’t place blame on Americans — it places blame on recyclers in those countries who decided it wasn’t economical to recycle waste plastics anymore, so they simply dumped them in places where the plastic was able to make its way into the rivers and thence to the sea.***
And yet, in some places today, BY LAW, you can’t get a plastic straw with which to drink your soda because of that 9-year-old’s wholly-inaccurate “study”. Never mind the ACTUAL study that was done that debunks it. Again, every time folks can’t get a straw to drink their soda at a fast-food joint, the progs think they are winning — but they’re not. It’s just another in-kind donation to the Trump 2020 campaign.
So finally, we reach the epitome (to date) of “it’s for the children!” progressive nutbaggery: Swedish meathead, er, teenager Greta Thunberg, in whose honor the above photo was shared by our friend Declan Finn on Facebook, only to see it censored away because swastika bad.
Ms. Thunberg is a very pissed-off young girl who has been fed a head-full of mush by adults regarding the soi-disant “climate crisis”. She has become so outspoken on the issue (and in placing blame on adults for fucking up her future by not doing anything about this non-existent “crisis”) that she has managed to lead a Children’s Crusade of her own, in the form of something called a “school strike for climate”, which she has been doing on Fridays back home in Sweden for some time now, and has inspired “millions” of students world-wide to do the same. Apparently some hundreds of American children heeded her call to play hooky on a Friday back in August and marched with her on the UN in New York for something most of them don’t actually understand, but figured what the hell, we get to cut school to do this.
Yet her head remains full of mush, as Gregory Wrightstone notes at PJ Media (see the link above for “school strike for climate”):
She did admit that “I am not a scientist. I don’t have the proper education.” She is quite correct in that regard. It is not just that she is blissfully ignorant of many climate facts, but what she does supposedly know is just so wrong. If she were to return to the classroom, her lessons should serve to calm her fears.
Wrightstone goes on to explain that there several strongly-held climate dogma “facts” that simply aren’t true, like:
- The fact that there has been no warming since little Greta was born
- Excess CO2 is actually fueling plant growth and making the Earth more “green”
- Warming periods throughout history have actually been the best times for human prosperity and advancement
- Cold weather kills 20 times more people than hot weather
- Clean-burning fossil fuels like natural gas used for home heating in developing countries rather than wood- or dung-fueled fireplaces would save an estimated 1.6 million people from fatal respiratory illnesses related to using such primitive fuels
- Higher costs for energy produced by “renewable” sources actually would hurt poor people more than rich people.
But as he says, since she’s not in school to learn these lessons, she continues her demagoguery through mush-headed ignorance.
And of course, who stands to benefit from little Greta’s temper tantrums over climate? Why, the Climate Industrial Complex, of course. The usual suspects.
Predictably, the best response, hands-down, to little Greta’s bitchy UN speech yesterday came from the expected corner:
This seems like a calm, measured approach from a seasoned parent to a teenaged brat, to me.
As for the people who are shocked, shocked that the President of the United States would administer the equivalent of a smack to the face to this sweet, young, earnest, bitchy brat, and believe that she should be accorded immunity from such things by virtue of her tender years, I can only say this: You can’t play the “she’s just a kid, stop criticizing her” card when the kid has stepped up to the table under her own power**** (or so we are led to believe). Like David Hogg, she has been given a bully pulpit by progressives who see in her only a means to an end, and she will be dropped like an old rag doll as soon as she is no longer useful to them.
Now, I will also say that even given all of the above, and for all that I am a grouchy, aging curmudgeon who believes firmly that the world will end when he dies, I do care about the future that we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren. All of this political theatre and climate religion being promulgated by progressives does not advance that future one single whit. Indeed, it endangers both our Republic and the civilization our Republic is supposed to stand for and protect.
So let’s sum up.
We don’t need socialism. Socialism killed millions of people over the last century. It’s still killing people today, all over the world. And you can tell that it’s a failure because its proponents keep trying to export their failed revolutions to the rest of the world. Putin. Xi. Maduro. And the list goes on and on, and includes all of the current Democratic candidates for President, as well as all the supposed “Democratic” socialists in our halls of Congress.
We don’t need gun control. Indeed, we need more guns, in the hands of well-meaning people who will use them for self-defense. Progressives have been trying to take our guns away for decades, claiming that as soon as we give them up, all this crime and nastiness will cease. We know that’s not true, because we can see all around the world where people have been disarmed, crime (including gun crime) continues at high levels. “An armed society is a polite society,” said Robert A. Heinlein, and we have not to date seen any evidence that he was incorrect in his assertion. Naturally, progressives don’t really want to stop crime by taking guns away; they want to stop our freedom by taking guns away. “If their ballots aren’t secured by arms, they’re worthless,” says the protagonist in H. Beam Piper’s 1962 SF novel Space Viking.
We don’t need climate religion. The US has done more than any other country in the world to reduce its carbon footprint. Yet progressives continue to hector us about reducing it even further, to the point where we simply would not have enough power to run our modern civilization. And they do this while conveniently ignoring the fact that China continues to dump several times more crap into the air than any other country in the world. And also while conveniently ignoring the studies that have completely debunked things like the “hockey stick” and the idea that the IPCC estimates of temperature rise over the next century are based on models that don’t actually reflect reality.
We don’t need kids telling how to run the world. For instance, we don’t need them to tell us to stop using plastic straws because they are floating out into the ocean and causing some sort of ill-defined havoc. It isn’t the United States dumping all of that crap into its rivers that lead into the oceans — it’s (again) mostly China, but also other third-world countries, that are responsible for that pollution. Telling me I can’t have a plastic straw to sip my drink does absolutely zero to alleviate that problem. So there’s another kid who can kiss my lily-white patrician ass.
For another instance, Greta Thunberg and her “how dare you ruin this world for me” speech to the sycophants at the UN yesterday. Fuck off and go home, little girl, and go back to school to learn something useful instead of continuing to churn that toxic proggie mush through your grey matter.
But if I don’t care about any of that, I don’t care about the children. According to the progressives, anyway, who’ve proven over and over that they only pretend to care about children when it gains them political capital. The fact is, as I have already said, I do care about the children…a lot more than the progs do, it seems.
And I’ll predict their current Children’s Crusade, like the ones before it, whether or not it succeeds, will only end in tears. The question is, who will be doing the crying?
God grant it’s the progs.
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* Indeed, it probably wasn’t a crusade at all (certainly was not a “proclaimed” crusade, so it lacked any official sanction of the Church), but rather may have been a general migration of people from Germany and France into the Mediterranean lands, from which the tale of a visionary youngster leading thousands of children on a crusade was spun.
** And by the way, what about all the other plastic generated by American fast food outlets? The to-go lids, the plastic cutlery, the Styrofoam containers (doubly-evil!), etc., etc., ad nauseum? I suppose that all magically disappears somewhere, leaving only the straws. (Yes, damn it, my tongue is FIRMLY imbedded in my cheek as I type this.)
*** Sorry, but I don’t buy the bullshit that says “It’s Americans’ fault for generating all that trash and then sending it overseas to be disposed of.” Fuck you if you think this, because you’re wrong. The overseas recyclers bought that trash from us, hoping to make big money off of it. It’s not our fault that the actual economics of plastic recycling make doing so unprofitable for them.
**** Progressives have a real problem with the idea that you can’t have it both ways, e.g., either Trump is the biggest idiot in the world or he’s playing seven-level galactic kriegspiel with every move he makes.
Which, by the way, is what they’ve said about every Republican president since Nixon.