Eco-loonyism is an upper-middle-class rite of passage

Greta Thunberg, the Shirley Temple of the apocalypse, let the cat out of the bag last week. She told the audience at her book launch that her environmental focus is merely part of her bigger secret plan to overthrow society. Apparently there’s a lot of ‘colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North’ that has to be stopped. Gosh. Some have framed this as millenarianism’s Bonnie Langford saying the quiet part out loud, but surely it was always obvious? 

More interesting, though perhaps even less unexpected, was her revelation a few days later to comedian Russell Howard (who wore the now-familiar ‘blessed by the Infant of Stockholm’ expression) that her critics were ‘heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged men’. Russell Howard is, of course, like the vast majority of Greta’s followers, a heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged man. What does this tell us?

Some have wondered why the eco-loons of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil aren’t heading to heavily polluting countries such as China or India to make their protests.