September 27, 2019

Climate Rhetoric Begets Child Abuse … and Suicide

Alarmists have convinced young people that there is no hope for earth.

Greta Thunberg’s prominence is sullied by the incredibly unfortunate reality that the teenager has been grotesquely proselytized and exploited by a cabal of opportunistic adults intent on leveraging a fraudulent climate crusade to elevate globalism, dispense with capitalism, and rupture the fossil-fuel industry.

Thunberg has made two particularly inauspicious remarks this year, starting at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, where she conveyed, “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 you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.”

Then, at this week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit, she intoned, “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Ricochet editor-in-chief Jon Gabriel observes, “None of this is healthy, neither for Ms. Thunberg nor for anyone else. Especially other kids.” Indeed it’s not.

As foolish as it may sound to rational thinkers, climate anxiety is blighting the impressionable minds of our youth. An extremely disheartening tweet is currently floating around Twitter in which a man informs us that a 14-year-old kid at his wife’s school took his own life due to overwhelming fear related to climate change.

Furthermore, Gabriel notes, “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one-third of all 13- to 18-year olds will experience an anxiety disorder. The numbers continue to go up; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety in children and teens rose 20 percent. The suicide rate for young Americans is now the highest ever recorded. Between 2000 and 2017, the number of suicides has doubled for females aged 15 to 24. Males between 15 and 19 killed themselves at a rate of 17.9 per 100,000, up from 13 per 100,000 in 2000.”

In other words, while committing suicide over something as nuanced as global warming should be incomprehensible, child anxiety isn’t all that unusual. And it can come in any form. Child suicide “is no joke,” says Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who broke ties with the organization in the 1980s. “Young people have always been vulnerable to feelings of hopelessness. Greta is fueling those fears.”

And yet it’s very important that we peg the real catalyst of that fear. It’s not Thunberg. It’s those who have convinced her and others that “mass extinction” is underway. The corollary is more suicides.

We’re constantly being lectured that people will die from global warming. The irony is that people are dying over global-warming rhetoric.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.