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As a ‘climate activist’ she started as a parody, passionate and articulate about a hot topic but dismissable as a child. But when you start to say certain things, you lose broad appeal. You can go out and rail against the ‘elites’ ‘rigging the system’ to ‘keep us down’ but the moment you say the ‘bourgeoisie’ are ‘exploiting the workers’ and ‘using capital to wage a class war,’ you are not getting broadcast, and not being listened to by many people. People love Marxism by other terms but if you use the Marxist words, you won’t be taken seriously.
It seems in general that attention isn’t even On climate change like it was before covid. The news platforms are filled with populist governments wars and genocides. Eve. Though climate change is the greatest existential threat it’s ability ro grab attention has faded
Climate change is brought to you by lobbying networks that spans multiple industries. Why stop us when we can convince you to just let us.
We don’t want to actually fix the causes of climate change, that would be silly and harm to the poor billionaires.
We want you to think its your fault, and to stop using plastic straws.
She’s always made that connection… since day one. The whole “How dare you!?” Speech was about people still only talking about making profits of climate change rather then doung Everything to prevent more change from happening.
The reason she’s not the center of media attention any more is because she’s been the center of attention for years already and viewers/readers aren’t as interested in her any more. Her name doesn’t pull as much attention any more.
I think the media coverage drop off is due to her getting older (and thus more “ordinary” - less newsworthy), and due to her not changing her issues or opinions much (and thus there is nothing “new,” to report). Our newstainment system wants new and fresh and cute. Not serious and persistent.
The ship she was planning on boarding to Gaza was literally attacked by Israel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_Freedom_Flotilla_incident
There is plenty newsworthy here.
Counterpoint: Israel attacks absolutely everything around it for no fukken reason, so nit newsworthy.
You are not wrong, but I don’t want to admit that you are right since it’s so depressing
I like that. You’re not wrong but I don’t wanna admit you’re right.
Counter-counter-point: Greta is a story of violence against a pretty white girl which all else being equal would normally mean big media attention in western media. But it isn’t getting much attention because it doesn’t play into the interests of the western corpo-state.
Contrast the coverage of what happened to Greta to the recent shooting of the Israeli diplomats.
I don’t think I’ve heard her called pretty before, she’s certainly not known for her looks (good or bad).
This Statement is ANTI SEMETIC! You LOVE HITLER!
-The ADL!
Our newstainment system wants new and fresh and cute. Not serious and persistent.
Don’t derail the attention somewhere else. News are mostly about the same popular people who have been under the spotlight for decades, there actually no much space for neither fresh or cute. It is implied in the picture why the media coverage drop.
And where are the huge climate protests like back in the day? That’s what she was talking about that gave her coverage and now we don’t talk about it anymore…
how dare you
You think wrong
Nah. She just doesn’t really have anything to say. “Carbon bad” isn’t really a message in 2025.
She’s an activist in that she gets arrested a lot but there’s plenty of people really achieving things that don’t have the social media clout she does.
She also doesn’t have any special credibility. Why would you interview a serial protester when you could interview an expert.
As an aside I’ve learned that any thing less than breathless support for her on lemmy will earn a deluge of downvotes. So have at me dweebs - express your support for this tapped out child star with your spiciest downvote.
Whining about downvotes? That’s a downvote.
Sometimes i even downvote people i agree with for bitching about downvotes lmao
Hah. Not whining at all. Just acknowledging that my opinion on this is not a popular one, while antagonising the 14 year olds who admire her.
I’m 45 and I’m inclined to agree with most of what she says.
51 and same, but maybe I’m just naive in wanting a world where my future grandchildren might be able to see a field full of fireflies once again.
I didn’t say I don’t agree with her. I’m saying she doesn’t have any special credibility. I’d rather hear from an expert on climate change and mitigation thanks.
She hit the news 7 years ago. Anyone that has heard about her is likely voting age by now. Shaking your fist at the clouds?
News about her generally irritates conservatives who go out of their way to criticize and mock her. So I while I am generally aware of her and admire her commitment to the environment, her ability to get press that annoys the conservative ultra capitalists who hate windmills and solar fields gives me joy. She just triggers them while never thinking about them.
You’re a whiner and an AH
Sure mate.
Hubris detected. Opinion ignored.
She is just trying to raise awareness (and it made some progress), despite all the wrong things you think about her, true or not, the effect is net positive to the planet. Do you hate living on a planet with fewer disasters that much? Do you hate people who try to make the world a better place? Please help me see this from your point of view.
She is just trying to raise awareness (and it made some progress)
You don’t have any evidence of that though do you. Everyone’s aware of climate change.
despite all the wrong things you think about her, true or not
This is kind of my point about Lemmy users. I haven’t said anything bad about her, but my comment was not vapid loyalty so here we are.
Do you hate living on a planet with fewer disasters that much?
This is a really silly question.
Do you hate people who try to make the world a better place?
I don’t hate people who try, but I get very frustrated by people who want to celebrate ineffective trying.
There are people who are actually making progress on mitigating the impacts of climate change. Greta is not one of them.
You don’t have any evidence of that though do you
A lot of kids who follow her probably changed to a more sustainable, more environment friendly lifestyle. And I see a lot more young people veering towards sustainable projects.
But I guess that won’t make a nice and easy graph for you. Does it?
I don’t particularly like her, but I have a problem with people downplaying and demeaning activism. It’s so rampant on reddit in any kind of protest post that doesn’t blow up to front page, you would almost feel they’re being targeted to lessen their reach. Just deflecting, derailing, demeaning any chance they get. The astroturfing is insane.
As long as they’re not making off money for themselves, hiding nefarious intent behind a cause, then getting sponsored and bought, let them do their activism for good.
It’s not that your intuition doesn’t make a graph, it’s that I have a strong suspicion that Gretas efforts at “raising awareness” are counter productive.
She’s precisely the wrong type of person to influence the kind of people who need to change their behaviour. She’s great at preaching to the choir, but that’s not going to save us.
Activism for the sake of activism is counter productive, because it makes people feel like they’ve done something to address the problem.
Excuse me while I go update my Facebook profile photo with whatever banner makes me look clever this week.
It is kinda like with Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton. It is very sus that they are killed once they started organising for class solidarity, regardless of colour, and speaking about wealth inequality.
Came here to say this.
What is the name of the Arab girl that advocated for girls education on the Arab world? She was also blocked out by the media the second she started talking about socialism and the injustices that the capitalist system brings in.
Malala Yousafzai
Edit: a couple corrections.
She’s Pashtun (Pakistani), not arab, but she is a practicing Muslim. She was fighting against the Taliban’s ban on girls from education, which is not a feature of the rest of the muslim world. It’s a feature of extreme fundamentalism, of any religion, not of Islam.
Did you read her book? I have it on my TBR list but it is a long list. I usually like to read fiction but try to do a nonfiction/memoir in about every 3-4 books (I read about 5/wk which varies d/t length).
Thanks you.
Edit: adicional thanks for the further corrections.
Indeed, first time I hear about this aspect of Malala Yousafzai’s activism. Thank you, wow.
For context: https://socialistworker.org/2014/10/15/the-malala-you-wont-hear-about (Compare also this thread, where someone makes clear that her being involved with socialism is no misunderstanding.)
TBH I think it’s because people mostly use news for entertainment and everything gets old.
Because governments were only using her for greenwashing and control public opinion.
Wasn’t she on those topics pretty much from the beginning? I think it really just boils down to the media (and people in general) just moved on to the next story. Greta’s initial appeal was that she was a kid who was effecting change and reactions. These days she’s just another 20-something that shows up at protests and people upvote on social media.
A lot of people in the comments are talking about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. as comparisons, but where they differ from Greta is that they started with protests but were able to successfully fold that into movements and action. X and King didn’t just protest, they didn’t just yell at the walls of the establishment and demand change. King was the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which organized protests, but also helped mobilize voters, lobbied congress, and helped to draft legislation. X was part of the Nation of Islam which was a particularly powerful group in the 1960’s which challenged Civil Rights issues in the court system.
For a long time Greta really hasn’t had much to add to the discussion on climate change other than to say stop doing what we are doing. She’s not part of some powerful organization, she’s not lobbying governments, she’s not challenging issues in the courts, and she’s not proposing solutions, she’s just pointing out the problems everyone already knows exists and powerful governments are already ignoring.
I think she’s closer to Rosa Parks - she’s a symbol fighting the good fight, but not the leader of the movement
FWIW Rosa Parks was part of an organization with a plan to achieve its goals. I wish the same were true of Greta.
True, the whole bus sit ins were planned. She wasn’t even the first one to do it.
That’s a great comparison.
I dunno but I think originally she was riding the “kid activist” clout. No offense but there are plenty of disaffected adults who dont have the media up their ass for no particular reason.
As you add more and more issues to the protests, the set of people that have the same opinion on every single issue gets smaller and smaller, until your movement falls apart.
In Germany around the same time, climate protests started to take stances on immigration and cultural approbation and also fell apart as a result.
Brother I don’t even know how you plan to sit here and pretend like those are separate issues. You can’t separate capitalism and climate change. You simply cannot.
That’s not the point they’re making.
As you add more issues, then the Venn diagram of overlap of all the issues gets smaller and smaller. It doesn’t matter if you think this is an obvious objective truth. What matters is what other people think, because you won’t have much of a “movement” without other people who agree and join you.
It’s not more issues. It’s the same issue.
It has a large overlap with the original issue. (I would say it’s a superset but no capitalism wouldn’t necesnecessarily completely solve the climate crisis.)
We can also do united fronts. We don’t all have to agree on everything to work on aset of issues
Exactly, and you literally cannot work on that issue if you don’t understand that capitalism climate change are linked. Any attempt to address climate change without addressing the problems of capitalism will always fail because capitalism is what is allowed it to get to this point and to continue to become worse. There’s literally not one thing you could do to address climate change that will not be undermined by the capitalist class. Anyone paying attention should know that right now.
Chefurka’s ladder of awareness moment
You have to take a step back and look at how politics actually works.
No one can do anything unless they get elected; and no one can take a strong stand on every issue and win an election.
In France the green party has always been on the left. They always talk about Muslims, the burka, feminism, or Palestine nowadays. That’s why voters are very confused.
Our greens too. And they also had to force closing nuclear plants, but when the closing date came closer and people started to ask where their power would come from, the greens said they’d built natural gas plants. Nobody took them seriously after that, and the decision of closing of nuclear plants was reversed.
Call me paranoid but that sounds like leadership was compromised by counter-interests.
It’s linked but Communism can also be unsustainable. Climate change is known since 1970 or such.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
There are only a few big billionaires. They could agree on protecting nature. I believe that they have chosen to continue for the northern shipping routes.
Educate the working class, instead of making them ignorant on purpose so they won’t revolt, so when they seize the means of production they think greener then?
Most people in the US right now read at a 6th grade level.
Don’t waste time trying to bring them up; change your message to something they understand.
“Tax the rich! No more billionaires!”
You can try that.
Ironically you could also try protecting nature by becoming a leading Capitalist and owning all means of production yourself.
But to become a leading capitalist you must exploit hundreds of thousands of people.
This process strips you of most of your humanity and empathy, thus you will likely no longer care about “protecting nature”.
For the influence to change the world, it will be millions or billions. You also have to exploit some nature to protect the rest.
This is a Stalin level of monstocity, or beyond.
Is it a price worth paying? Because even if it is something else, like a Communist approach, the efforts will be the same. E.g. if China ends up protecting nature globally, they have paid that price.
The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.
Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.
There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else’s. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:
None of us are free until all of us are free.
This is what happened to Occupy Wall Street in the US, and I’m convinced it was intentional movement busting.
Probably the same thing with the climate protests in Germany.
Germany elected a more left leaning government and they actually did pass some good climate legislation. That was aided by Putin cutting of fossil fuels to Germany as well, but the protests and public mood were certainly on the site of climate action. However the protests were having problems of bringing the same numbers on the street as before covid and the fossil fuel industry spend on a lot on busting the protests.
Then the far right really gained strength in Germany and that became the much more pressing issue, rather then climate change.
I think the occupy movement fell apart partly due to the fact that it never really coalesced around any sort of leadership group or figurehead. The list issues kept getting longer, the list of desired changes kept getting ever more diverse and contradictory, and there was very rarely anyone who could articulately explain to the general public what the movement was about.
@IrateAnteater @wizardbeard I think it was crushed by police repression and contrary to what you believe, I believe not having figure heads was the main strength of the movement
Not having any sort of centralized leadership is a double edged sword. Your movement gains resistance to authorities being able to knock out the movement with a couple arrests, but your movement becomes much more prone to fizzling out of you can’t somehow maintain focus, which is what happened to the Occupy movement.
@IrateAnteater what are some good examples of somewhat successful movements with leaders?
Open a history book. The examples will usually be referred to as “revolutions”. The French Revolution, American Revolution, Russian Revolution. For something more modern, look at the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Also the left only kept growing afterwards
Yeah, occam’s razor, it wasn’t a sinister conspiracy to ‘bust the movement’, what you describe is something that can and has happened, many times, to causes, diluting them into a nebulous, impotent murk.
It’s not that deep.
I don’t know about occupy Wall Street but the climate protest in Germany suffer most from radicalization. Ordinary people want to peacefully protest climate change, not march against capitalism, barricade themselves in tree houses or glue themselves to roads in rushhour traffic. The movement was taken over by attention seeking radical far left ideologues and that’s kind of a turn off for most people.
@lemmylommy @wizardbeard all your examples are of peaceful protest. Is saving the climate important or is it not? If yes, then we need to become more radicalized
“Peaceful” is defined as “non-disruptive” or even “whatever authority wants” and not “doesn’t kill people”
we need to become more radicalized
later…
why does our movement have less popular appeal?
How can people really be so blind to not realize how one affects the other?
New York Mayor Ed Koch put it best.
“If you agree with me 51% of the time, vote for me. If you agree with me 100% of the time, see a psychiatrist.”
You don’t have to like the candidate to vote for them.
Its a big difference voting for someone or actually getting out protesting.
I look at it this way. The GOP doesn’t do a lot of rallies and marches, yet they have a lot of power.
They organize their ground game and get voters to the polls.
The GOP doesn’t do a lot of rallies
It also helps that they have a dedicated ‘news’ channel vomiting up their propaganda 24 hours a day in waiting rooms.
Maybe we should start pestering politicians with asking when they’ll invest billions in climate adaption to protect from flooding and drought. Except for USA where they’ll pretend nothing is happening.
“Pestering” is nothing.
Find the ones who are doing something and give them full support.
You have finite resources. Don’t waste time annoying people who are opposed, work full time for their enemies.
In Germany around the same time, climate protests started to take stances on immigration and cultural approbation and also fell apart as a result.
Fell apart according to who? The media? This is really what the post is trying to discuss. Why did Greta Thunberg media coverage drop once she started get involved in other protests too?
When Martin Luther King Jr. moved beyond equal rights for black people into protesting the Vietnam War and capitalism in general, he took a bullet to the face. I suppose Greta can consider herself lucky - so far.
Dr. King, Malcom, JFK, etc. etc.
There is no justice in this world. If youre out there believing in people I’m out here looking for you. Please give a sign.
Greta Thunberg’s name will be penned next to Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi in the history books of the future.
I wonder if those books will have a note how Thunberg’s name was one of the earlier examples of large-scale manufactured character lynching.
It was clear early on how capital felt about Thunberg that every media outlet seemed keenly interested in reporting not on what her message was, but about how people online hated her and were making memes about her, and the threats and backlash she received for doing things like… checks notes …traveling places.
She has been and continues to be objectively correct, her early messages where she said “shame on you” to the world’s economic giants have been made out to sound “cringe” in young people’s media circles and people still share and distribute images her making a funny face.
People are SO FUCKING SUSCEPTIBLE to this manufactured attitude, I had endless arguments on reddit on left-leaning, environmentalist communities with people who were like “Yeah we need to care about the environment, but do we really need her speaking for us? She’s all kinds of problematic” without being able to cite a single fucking thing she said that was wrong or bad.
You ALL need to understand this: When you see someone react to someone or something, you internalize that reaction whether you realize it or not. Your brain looks for patterns constantly. When you see things that repeat, when you see things that fit a pattern already establishing, your brain solidifies these associations.
When some right-wing chud shares an image of Thunberg or any activist making a weird face and say “total cringe” it doesn’t matter if you’re currently chained to a tree while you’re scrolling, your brain will attach to that association unless you make active efforts to de-conflate it in your mind. This is why so many people move right when we have a right-wing leader, this is why we have so many people dying on whatever hill Elon Musk points at. This is why most voters decided that it was “more interesting” to vote for Trump or just stay home. This is being done to you all on purpose.
I actually saw her in the news 2 weeks ago about her trip to gaza. Must just be your echo chamber that stopped caring about her.
