Climate Activist Greta Thunberg, Most Known for Skipping School, Named Time's 'Person of the Year'
See what skipping school can do for you?
Time magazine on Wednesday unveiled its “Person of the Year” issue, announcing that Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist who made headlines this year by spreading worldwide propaganda over global warming, had won the honor.
Not the Hong Kong protesters who are literally putting their lives and freedom on the line to fight Beijing’s barbaric tyranny.
Not the anonymous “whistleblower,” whose cowardly act of partisan subversion has plunged the world’s only superpower into a political crisis.
Not even President Donald Trump’s continued shaking up of the established political order can apparently compare to the earthshaking appeal of a teenage Swede with a chronically hectoring personality.
In a column that was an odd, cloying combination of simpering and hyperbolic, Time Editor in Chief Edward Felsenthal wrote that “Thunberg has become the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet — and the avatar of a broader generational shift in our culture that is playing out everywhere from the campuses of Hong Kong to the halls of Congress in Washington.”
As travesties go, it’s down there with then-President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for basically not being George W. Bush.
Like Obama, Thunberg personifies leftist aspirations, even though leftists don’t seem to be sure what they are.
Like Obama, Thunberg benefited from a comparison to a Republican American president loathed by liberals worldwide.
In fact, President Donald Trump’s Twitter post sarcastically praising Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations in September might have sealed her win. Time’s profile of Thunberg announcing the award specifically noted that she’d “sparred with the President of the United States.”
And like Obama, Thunberg has accomplished nothing in reality. (To be fair, she’s only 16. Obama didn’t have the same excuse).
Naturally, liberals swooned over the Time announcement on social media. But there were sane users who expressed their opinions, too. And they weren’t so complimentary.
The power of the youth are the Hong Kong protestors. Well i guess TIME does not have the guts to stand up to China. SAD.
— SAP (@sindahpsp) December 11, 2019
Our schools are building armies of Gretas. She is the ideal liberal child and liberals love putting children at the forefront of political battles.https://t.co/US80g1e0GY
— Marina Medvin (@MarinaMedvin) December 11, 2019
Time Magazine has succeeded in totally discrediting itself.
— Laird Baldwin (@DrLairdBaldwin) December 11, 2019
I’m old enough to remember when Time was a serious publication, and not a virtue signaling native ad pamphlet.
— 4th Amboy (@4thAmboy) December 11, 2019
That last one makes an excellent point. The Time “Person of the Year” used to actually mean the honoree was really influential.
Even if it had a leftist bent — like the 2015 anointment of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her disastrous refugee policy — it carried some heft.
But this?
According to Fox News, finalists for the honor included the Hong Kong protesters, the anonymous “whistleblower” who sparked the current Trump impeachment drive, soccer star Megan Rapinoe, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, of course, Trump (“Person of the Year” in 2016).
Any one of them, even Rapinoe and her fingernails-on-the-chalkboard charm, would have been better.
She actually won something, at least.
According to the Time hagiography, Thunberg, the youngest person to ever with the “Person of the Year” honor, “began a global movement by skipping school: starting in August 2018, she spent her days camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament, holding a sign painted in black letters on a white background that read Skolstrejk för klimatet: ‘School Strike for Climate.’”
There are probably millions of kids worldwide who are kicking themselves for not thinking of finding a cause to skip school first.
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