Politics

“Where Are The Adults?”: 16-Year-Old Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Just Wrecked Andrew Bolt

Come for the Queen you best not miss.

by Joseph Earp  2 August 2019
Greta Thunberg and Andrew Bolt

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16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg has committed what many boomers consider the ultimate crime: caring deeply about averting the forthcoming environmental apocalypse.

The teen first came to the attention of the general public after staging a solo protest out the steps of the Swedish parliament back in 2018. Since then, she has spearheaded the school strike for climate movement, delivered a series of stirring speeches about the need to take immediate action, and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But according to some of the ignorant boomers who are directly responsible for the impending catastrophe, Thunberg should better learn her place, and sit quietly and wait for the entirety of human civilisation to collapse under the weight of famine and war.

That’s certainly the opinion of Australia’s Andrew Bolt, who wrote a deeply offensive and insult-riddled column that attacked Thunberg’s personal history, presumably an implicit admission that her actual arguments are airtight and above reproach.

Calling her “strange” and “fragile” while pouring over her mental health history and referring to her Asperger’s syndrome as a “fault”, Bolt’s column crosses a line from political commentary into unethical muckraking.

Not that the Herald Sun, the paper that printed the smear, seem to have any shame about their 59-year-old columnist attempting to criticise a teenager by peddling stereotypes about mental health. The newspaper tweeted out Bolt’s column with an excerpt that called Thunberg “deeply disturbed” — which is precisely how the teenager herself first caught wind of it.

It would be entirely in her rights to ignore the attack altogether. But instead, the activist clapped back, not just at Bolt, but at the inaction and pettiness that defines the behaviour of so many climate change deniers, from politicians to commentators.

“I am indeed ‘deeply disturbed’ about the fact that these hate and conspiracy campaigns are allowed to go on and on and on just because we children communicate and act on the science,” Thunberg wrote. “Where are the adults?”

Given the global inaction from those who claim to be safeguarding the health of the planet, “where are the adults?” might just turn out to be one of the key questions of our age.

Feature image of Thunberg via Wikimedia Commons.