The ABC Blows ‘Colon Gas’ for Greta

If you’re wondering how Greta Thunberg is getting along these days, the now 21-year-old is busy demonstrating about Israel’s alleged “genocide”, and chanting “Crush Zionism!” outside Israel’s embassy in Stockholm. As Sky News’ Rita Panahi puts it, the ‘miserable little doom goblin’ is now a Middle East expert.

Try checking back on the ABC’s five-year worship of the Swedish school truant. It’s a case study in how the taxpayer-funded propaganda machine flouts the impartiality demanded by its Charter. Here’s some latterday Thunberg activism[1]:

In Leipzig last January she addressed a pro-Palestine demo, telling the crowd that no-one should stay silent “when a genocide is underway and people are being deprived [by whom?] of the most basic human needs.” While the press reports are sketchy, they don’t mention her condemning the Hamas butchery of October 7, hostage-taking or the Hamas human-shields strategy.[2]

Of some interest is what happened to a Leipzig TV reporter and his assistant covering the demo. They were “massively harassed by stewards and demonstrators from the anti-Israel demonstration” and followed as they tried to leave. Pursued to a tram stop, the pair were “first verbally attacked by three demonstrators in Palestine garb, including a steward, and then brutally beaten”. When the journalist fell, assailants kicked his head. Both crew were hospitalised with head injuries. Their TV station manager condemned the attack, and wished the pair speedy recovery. No arrests were reported.

Thunberg was not in any way responsible for the attack by her followers, but there is that saying, “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows”.[3]  Imagine how media reports would brand demo leaders here protesting against, say, Prime Minister Albanese, if the protest stewards bashed two ABC reporters into hospital with head injuries.

Throughout this year Thunberg has been at demos mouthing Hamas talking points and getting arrested for civil disturbance. At the Eurovision finals the mob howled abuse at the Israeli contestant and riot police dragged Thunberg off “as photographers flock around her.”

Thunberg also took part in Stockholm University’s occupation by pro Palestine/Hamas agitators, where she demanded the university cut ties with “the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel”. Her hate-Israel shtick has even alienated her Fridays For Future cult in Germany. In Amsterdam a climate activist grabbed her mike and snapped, “I’ve come for a climate demonstration, not a political view.”

Thunberg’s rationale, feeble as it is: “There is no climate justice without human rights.”

Sadly, adult Thunberg is today neither small, cute nor such a moral beacon for green-washed kids and low-IQ adults.[4] I suppose Thunberg turning Hamas fan-girl doesn’t lower the ABC tribe’s opinion of her in the slightest, but normal people might wonder.

I suppose Thunberg turning Hamas fan-girl doesn’t lower the ABC tribe’s opinion of her in the slightest, but normal people might wonder.

The ABC avidly covered Thunberg’s rise and rise since she started her lone “School Strike for Climate” as a 15-year-old on Stockholm’s Parliament steps in 2018. I’ve combed ABC items back to 2019 and never once did I come across any ABC person or interviewee showing scepticism about Thunberg’s climate crusade, let alone concern about her mental health. Instead, ABC types kissed her feet and brought on guest talent to amplify their hosannas.

Thunberg’s zenith at the age of 15 was her “How dare you!” speech to the UN General Assembly in 2019. Just to hint at it sets most of us chortling: “How dare you!”. But the ABC had a melt-down of child-worship. I accessed ABC clips of her rant so often I can almost recite bits by heart:

 You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words… People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

The finest example of the ABC’s separation from mainstream Australia was a chat session on Newcastle Drive between Paul Culliver and his guest Tony Wilson of Speakola, purportedly a connoisseur of the world’s and history’s greatest speeches. He’s studied 2,000 of them and said Thunberg’s was the second-best of 2019 globally: “It hit me like a tonne of bricks … she’s able to accuse a generation in a quiet [eh?] voice, very emotional as well. Thunberg is emerging as the best speaker in the world.”

Culliver (at 6.10mins, whispered): “It still makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?”

Wilson: “It’s incredible … jaw clenched … ‘It is you I am looking at! I will hold you responsible!’ She’s able to look into the eyes of the world, incredible!’

Comparisons then flowed with Churchill’s ‘fight them on the beaches’, Martin Luther King having a dream, Obama’s odes to Islam, the lot.

Of all the honey-and-roses treatments, the most ludicrous was by ABC star Sarah Ferguson (Nov. 2022). Ferguson and her 7.30 handlers managed to tee-up a Zoom visit with Thunberg at her home in Stockholm. Awe-struck, Ferguson was ecstatic. The ABC posted her 19-minute interview, and a cut version of 8 minutes aired on 7.30. Ferguson interrupt Thunberg? No way! Would she interrupt the Sermon on the Mount?

Sarah’s leading questions and assumptions are a good pointer to her personal views which, of course, seep into her ABC output. You can intuit that she revelled in Covid lockdowns and has never checked the power grabs, lies and stench emanating from the office of America’s Covid czar Tony Fauci, replicated by Victoria’s Dan Andrews and other premiers.

Sarah outs herself also as a foe of Australia’s coal and gas exports which enable her $450,000 paypacket (my guesstimate)[5]. Sarah believes in all the “global boiling” nonsense emanating from the corrupt UN. And Sarah, judging by her remarks, thinks the world’s poorest nations — Togo, Niger, Rwanda, South Sudan and Kiribati and the like — strikes me as believing they ought to be “stopped” from raising living standards through cheap fossil energy.

Here’s Sarah quizzing Thunberg- I haven’t included the answers because who cares what a teen truant believes?

♦ You make the point that the richest countries are responsible for more than half of the world’s CO2. How do you stop developing nations making exactly the same mistakes as they grow? [Sub-text: Thunberg as global power broker].

♦ I want to talk to you about Australia. We’ve got a new [Labor] government who says, in their words, they’re committed to dramatically lowering Australia’s carbon emissions. But at the same time Australia is one of the biggest exporters of coal and gas to the world. If you had one message to the Australian people, what would it be? [Thunberg as Australia’s moral beacon].

♦ The view of successive governments here has been that it’s up to the countries we export to, to be responsible for the emissions that the colon gas produces [“colon gas” is a transcript slip. It should be “coal and gas”]. Do you accept that argument? [Thunberg as global emissions commissar].

♦ You say in your book [“The Climate Book”, 2022] that we can’t live sustainably within the world’s economic system and there are predictions that the world economy will double in size by 2050. So how do you produce the kind of change that you want to see in the face of that? [Thunberg as developmental economics Nobelist].

♦ Is it your argument that burning coal carries bigger risks than nuclear power? [Thunberg as nuclear engineer/analyst]

♦ You clearly think that the phrase “climate change” isn’t enough now to describe the situation that we’re in; the climate is breaking down and destabilizing. Do you think that that process is irreversible? [Thunberg and Ferguson as an apocalyptic duo].

♦ The big climate change conference in Egypt [COP27] is about to start.You condemned the last one as a failure and a PR exercise and you said that the leaders were guilty of decades of “blah blah blah”. Do you expect any more from this one? [Thunberg as climate diplomacy princess]

Sarah did come a gutser at the end:

Ferguson: You say you take some hope from the great shifts in behaviour we saw during Covid. You put a lot of that down to simple unadorned scientific facts being communicated to the public. I wonder if that is part of the reason you have been so successful — the straightforward recitation of the facts?… Am I right in what I say about covid, that you see dramatic change in behaviour because of science? (from 18mins).

Thunberg: …The media can treat an emergency as an emergency. Having said that, the way that some people handled the Covid pandemic is very very questionable. [Sweden eschewed lockdowns, see “The Covid-19 lesson from Sweden: Don’t lock down.”].[6]

Sarah (hastily): Nonetheless, there is something [good] about a straight forward message that is able to impact humans.

The ABC so adored Ferguson’s interview that it ran grabs from it everywhere during several days.

The ABC so adored Ferguson’s interview that it ran grabs from it everywhere during several days. Here’s an example:

Climate activist Thunberg has called on the world to wake up to the climate emergency, days out from this year’s UN Climate Summit in Egypt. But despite the bleak predictions, she says we still have time to save the world.

Here’s just a few samples of the ABC saturating its airwaves with Thunberg.

ABC EDUCATION

Brainwashing 8-year-olds with green piffle is in the ABC’s DNA. Try this from ABC Kids Listen:

Let’s look back at more awesome stories about awesome kids…

 First up, let’s meet a girl named Thunberg. Thunberg is 16 years old and she’s from the country Sweden and she’s just done something pretty amazing! Thunberg’s spent about 2 weeks sailing on a boat all the way from the country England, across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America.[7] The boat she travelled in though wasn’t just any boat. It was solar-powered! She chose to travel this way instead of flying in a plane, so she could send an important message about planet Earth.

Our planet is getting warmer and Thunberg believes that us humans have a lot do with it. Thunberg says she won’t fly in a plane because they are a big problem for our environment. You see, airplanes use petrol to fly [what!] and petrol pollutes the air. But Thunberg thinks it’s not too late for us to make things better.

There’s a problem with this ABC oft-repeated emissions-light-sailboat narrative. Skipper Boris Herrmann and team leader Pierre Casiraghi flew back from the US. And two crew flew transatlantic to the US to take the carbon-fibre Malizia 11 sailboat home. If Thunberg really wanted to save emissions, she’d have bought herself a return air ticket.

The ABC school propaganda item Did You Know brackets Thunberg as a Nobel Peace Prize candidate with previous winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by a follower of the Religion of Peace for wanting to get an education. Thunberg might become an even younger winner, ABC enthuses. (She didn’t).

ABC classroom fodder includes interviewing a high school activist Tess Harkin, a Thunberg acolyte. Harkin says,

I have to think about where I’ll go to university or where I’ll live or if I’ll have children. I don’t know that I can really justify, if nothing changes, bringing in more people into a world that’s overburdened with how we are currently living. But also if I’m already seeing the impacts and if my friends are already seeing the impacts of climate change, I don’t want to think about what my kids will be seeing, what their kids will be seeing, and it has impacted how I live. Now I’m a vegetarian, mainly for environmental reasons… something needs to be done and if the government is not doing it then someone needs to, and I think that has been put onto us students who are worried.

ABC’s SCIENCE SHOW

No 1: Robyn Williams and the would-be autocrats of the ABC “Science” Show have been all over Thunberg like a fur coat. Among Williams’ interviewees were two purported scholars from the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism at Gothenburg Sweden, Martin Hultman and Paul Pule. They took the line that any criticism of Thunberg was “hate speech” from the likes of “industrial breadwinner masculinities” [I love that!][8] They continued, “So the hate speech against Greta Thunberg is part of that larger pattern that we are seeing.”

 No 2: The Science Show does a repeat wheel-out of kid climate activist Zofia Witkowski-Blake, “fresh from the school exams”. She says,

Internationally. Greta Thunberg harnesses rage and frustration to shock the establishment into change. We like stories and linking the future threat to emotion and pain now is how we understand that … Everyone is talking climate, and don’t get me wrong, it still looks overwhelmingly bleak … This year [2019] I went to the International Asian Science Camp in Shantou, China. A number of the lectures were related to climate change…

Zofia might by now have discovered that China is burning more coal than the rest of the world combined, with two new coal-fired electricity plants being approved every week.

The Science Show even brings on the ABC’s “comedians” Charlie Pickering and Craig Reucassel to deliver their tuppence-worth. Pickering relates frightening his offspring about warming and polar bears.

No 3: Still fixated on Thunberg, the Science Show even brings on the ABC’s “comedians” Charlie Pickering and Craig Reucassel to deliver their tuppence-worth. Pickering relates frightening his offspring about warming and polar bears:

…it’s not good for polar bears, so a lot of what my child loves about the world won’t be there when he is old enough to understand why it’s not there. How do I talk to him about why that’s the case? And it’s funny, you look at how clear-minded Greta is; that’s going to be every kid in the world.

Reality check for ABC “comedians”: polar bears in the age of mild global warming are doing fine, with a possibility their numbers have tripled since the low in the 1960s caused by sport shooting. Even RMIT-ABC Fact Check can find no data validating any overall decline.

ABC’s LISTEN

Having no sense of humour, ABC’s Linda Mottram was triggered by then-President Trump tweeting about Thunberg’s how-dare-you, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future, so nice to see”.

Mottram: I asked former Australian Greens leader and veteran protester Christine Milne for her thoughts. [An inspired choice, Linda!]

Milne: Well … what an inspiring young woman. You know, I just look at her and think ‘fantastic, look what she’s achieved’ … But what now needs to happen is that the passion that Greta has and her clarity of focus calling out leaders for failing to act, for failing to tell the truth, for saying that growth just can’t continue in the way that it has, that has to be translated into action … She’s so focused. Her clarity of thought is just brilliant … I certainly think her youth is on her side and we have to get behind her, absolutely, get behind her.

Mottram: Christine Milne, thank you very much for speaking with us.

ABC’s Q & A

Australia’s most execrable would-be prime minister, Liberal-lite John Hewson, is a fixture on the ABC. In the soon-to-be-axed Q&A he says,

Hewson: You know, when you get a Thunberg and moving a whole global motion – a movement”, I should say [he certainly should] – they still don’t listen. They don’t want to listen.

The worship of the Thunberg child by the ABC and the rest of the West’s legacy media illustrates how vapid and bankrupt the climate-catastrophe narrative is and always has been. If Australia is to spend scores of trillions of dollars on renewables and shut down our hitherto cheap and reliable power, we need better cred for it than a doom goblin in a keffiyeh.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Thunberg has called for a ceasefire without conditions such as release of Hamas hostages.

[2] It’s now known that “civilians” were guarding Israeli hostages at their Gaza apartments.

[3] Trump paid the price for the so-called insurrection by his supporters in Washington on January 6, although he’d told them to protest peacefully

[4] Thunberg has also become the heroine of countless books for kids. One example is “Greta and the climate crisis” by Amy Chapman, which is shamelessly touted as “the perfect book for aspiring climate activists age 8+.”

[5] The 2023 ABC annual report p230 says two staff who are non-management, non-senior-executive are in the pay-band $445,000-470,000. Ex-managing director Michelle Guthrie disclosed some years back that the top-paid ABC on-air talent was female.

[6] Peer-reviewed conclusion from a paper by two scientists at Lund University, Sweden: “Our results suggest that the Swedish policy of advice and trust in the population to reduce social interactions voluntarily was relatively successful. Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs.”

[7] In New York, Thunberg “had a blunt message for Democratic senators at the invitation-only forum. ‘I know you’re trying … but just not hard enough. Sorry,’ she said.”

[8] The Gothenburg vigilantes also wanted “ecocide laws” for prosecuting those allegedly killing the Barrier Reef — which has actually had record coral cover for two years straight.