KAROL MARKOWICZ: Brainwashing campus activists starts long before college.
What we’re seeing on our campuses is the culmination of many years of leftist activists pushing kids to the forefront to spread their propaganda.
And it’s not remotely just board books like “A is for Activist” that introduce toddlers to the idea of protest before they even set foot in school.
Teachers push their agenda; whether climate change, gun control or the war in Gaza, they’re focused far less on teaching children how to think than what to think.
The goal is to turn kids into activists, and the sooner the better.
After all, children can be valuable for shutting down debate.
Their youth implies innocence and seems to confer moral authority: How could anyone argue with an innocent child?
Greta Thunberg famously quit school to campaign against climate change.
It was impossible to challenge a pig-tailed child, even if she demanded the world stop functioning.
Recall her tearful “how dare you!” in front of the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019?
It reverberated widely because of her age.
A grown-up making the same plea would be seen as unbalanced.
Yet the idea of Greta as a climate-warrior spokesperson was born when a grown-up activist saw how teen anti-gun crusaders, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., viciously attacked ideological foes with minimal pushback.
No one could argue with a traumatized teen — and that was the point.
The concept has only spread since.
It’s nothing new for the left — Thomas Sowell was writing about “Mascots of the Anointed” back in 1995, and long before Greta, there were earlier enviro-youth programmed to inflict maximum guilt:
I just dug up this clip from 1992…
Severn Cullis-Suzuki's speech to the UN in 1992 on climate change sounds an awful lot like Greta Thunberg's in 2019.
I cut the two together to show just how similar the language is: pic.twitter.com/18ptTzX4M4
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 26, 2019
But as Iowahawk warns the rest of us:
If you are laboring under the belief that we need to heed the unsullied peak moral vision and judgment of 18-25 year olds, ask yourself why there isn't a rental car agency on Earth that would hand them keys
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 6, 2024
And as America’s Newspaper of Record noted in 2019 at the height of Green Nude Eel mania: Democrats Introduce Debate Strategy Of Holding Up Small Child Whenever Their Positions Are Challenged.