This year, Time magazine chose Greta Thunberg as its Person of the Year, a recognition of her incredible success in growing a one-person school strike into the largest ever climate protests.
Unsurprisingly, deniers did not exactly take the news in stride. A WUWT post called her an “angry, whiny, self-righteous high-school dropout.” At the Washington Examiner, they asked if Greta has succeeded in pushing through policies reducing emissions. (This fundamentally misunderstands the premise of her activism: that governments need to act to reduce emississions! If they were doing it already, she wouldn’t need to protest!) And then the very intelligent folks at the Daily Caller asked Time what its carbon footprint is, doing everything it can to keep Mr. Gotcha relevant.
Rush Limbaugh was predictably outraged that the “indoctrinated propagandized teenager” was chosen, claiming that the climate movement is “slowly suffering great damage from the poisonous hatred that is coursing through their very existence.” Meanwhile, The National Review ran a piece by David Harsanyi describing her as “a finger-wagging teen bereft of accomplishment,” and asks “if there has ever been a less consequential person” to be picked. (Yes, considering 2006’s person of the year was “You,” David Harsanyi.)
And then, of course, there was the tweet. While his campaign tweeted out a photoshopped Time cover featuring Trump’s head on Greta’s body, the President of the United States had nothing better to do on the morning that the House of Representatives discussed impeaching him than fire off a sarcastic tweet at Greta (one of over 100 tweets yesterday) suggesting she “work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”
(As the Guardian pointed out, the fact that Trump attacked a child just days after conservatives cried foul about a non-attack on Trump’s son makes it pretty clear the controversy was manufactured.)
Trump’s attack kicked up another round of breathless coverage, with the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and the DailyWire all writing pieces on how Trump trolled the teenager, essentially proving Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty’s point that the worst part of Trump’s immature trolling is that his base loves it.
In response, the ever-unflappable Greta changed her Twitter bio to read “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend,” and another round of stories took off.
AOC called out Trump’s obviously very “mature temperament,” in “getting rankled by a 16 year old activist.” Someone else suggested that Trump’s capitalization suggests it’s really the 2003 film Anger Management that Greta has a problem with, while another asked if it’s “too late to explore being jealous of a 16 year old girl as an article of impeachment?”
It was Breitbart, though, that dedicated the most (virtual) ink to Thunberg’s recognition. In addition to the initial announcement story and a piece about her updated bio in response to Trump’s tweet, they also covered Hillary Clinton’s tweet congratulating Greta, and made a whole post about Julián Castro’s tweet saying that Trump “mocking a 16-year-old on Twitter” makes it clear why “one of them is Person of the Year and the other is unfit for office.”
There was even a surprisingly astute take from Breitbart’s Frances Martel, which discussed the ways in which media’s white-ness plays a role in its decision to focus so intently on Greta. That said, it didn’t go so far as to actually highlight other climate activists of color like Vox did!
Brietbart’s piece de resistance, though, was of course from James Delingpole, who compared Greta to some of Time’s past winners. “From Hitler and Stalin to Greta Thunberg,” the headline read, “Time loves to celebrate totalitarian icons.”
While it’s hard to argue with that, Delingpole might want to tone it down, seeing as how in 2016 the “totalitarian icon” Time chose was none other than Donald Trump.
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