serengeti thugswarm
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this takes different forms, eg BLM blk woman in portland, vs greta, vs mann.
see RETALIATION
mostly on line or in media, but can escalate to physical assault
if you’re taking flak, you must be close to the target. note that all eco-heroes (nearly, interesting to look at anomalies?) are targets
aha: ideol entre are like a virus picking a lock: they are always looking for target so get paid/rewarded/promoted/clicked/liked, which boosts brand/visiaiblity, which boosts market price; also always looking for a niche, which is an aspect of cred/expertise/notoriety
i forget origin/meaning of serengetti plain metaphor (predators go after the strays?)
thugswarm i think came out of alt right co-ordination of attacks via 4chan and other chat/forums; but historian woman who went after buchanan swarmed by libtard economist hacks?
aha 320: this general cat/node is for character assassination, so goes back to McCarthy witchhunts, eb harrsion vs carson? acorn, van jones more recent scalps;
Bermnan and Entine are hit men (they'd be enforcers if went after non-left/green targets.
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gil bk yarvin defense
p 63 2010 pt sp bitcoin RAGE old OS nick land dark enlightenment a16 occult
tunny petit; 86 conf apear protests, sri thugswarm jrnlist
-=-=
KIRK 6 POST SHOOTING
REUTERS
Screen capture of Jimmy Kimmel after returning to television on September 23, 2025
‘MASSIVE PURGE OF THESE EVIL PSYCHOS’
The campaign to punish Kirk’s critics began almost immediately.
About 30 minutes after Trump’s announcement that Kirk had died, right-wing influencers mobilized. Among the first was Chaya Raichik, operator of the widely followed Libs of TikTok account, which had posted on X, “THIS IS WAR,” before highlighting a Massachusetts teacher who had written: “Just a reminder, We’re NOT offering sympathy.”
By night’s end, Libs of TikTok had published or reposted the professional details of 37 individuals, often accompanied by commentary such as “absolutely vile,” “Your tax dollars pay her salary,” or “Would you want him teaching your kids?”
“It’s actually terrifying how many of them are teachers, doctors and military members,” Libs of TikTok wrote the next day. “We need a massive purge of these evil psychos who want to kiII all of us for simply having opposing political views.”
In the week after the shooting, Libs of TikTok shared the names and profiles of at least 134 people accused of celebrating violence or mocking Kirk’s memory, frequently tagging Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi. At times, the influencer posted disciplinary actions taken against specific government employees.
Screenshot of the Libs of TikTok X account on September 10, 2025
“BREAKING: This marine was fired,” Libs of TikTok posted on September 12, a day after calling out a Marine Corps captain. The officer had responded to Kirk’s death by posting an emoji of clinking beer mugs, according to a screenshot the influencer shared with followers. Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the beer-mug post; the captain declined to comment. Libs of TikTok also reported similar disciplinary actions involving an Army Reserve officer and an Army colonel who had commented on the death on social media.
The Pentagon and the Justice Department issued statements condemning celebrations of Kirk’s death but did not address questions about their relationship with Libs of TikTok.
Right-wing influencer Scott Presler began posting screenshots of Kirk commentary, too.
“Take a screenshot of EVERY single person celebrating today,” he told his followers on September 10. “You bet your behind we will make them infamous.” Over the next week, Presler shared posts on X about 70 people who had commented on the killing, and wrote in one message: “Almost every person we’ve posted about – who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination – has been fired.” Presler didn’t respond to requests for comment.
For many on the right, outraged by celebratory reactions from the left, the wave of firings became a form of catharsis.
“It’s good that they are shamed and humiliated and must live with the repercussions for the rest of their lives,” right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh told his audience as he discussed the firings. “It’s good if they wake up every day until they die wishing they had not said what they said.” Asked for comment, Walsh emailed back: “f**k off.”
...
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9 25
In an article for the New York Timespublished Sunday, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, argued that modern political outrage operates according to what he calls mob logic, a form of communal outrage grounded in shared expectations and social coordination.
Pinker began by describing how theassassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk elicited an intense wave of symbolic reactions: Kirk was sanctified as a martyr, and dissenters were attacked for failing to show proper devotion.
The response, he contended, aligns with the phenomenon that economist Thomas Schelling and anthropologist John Tooby termed “common knowledge,” in which an event becomes a shared social signal that everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on.
According to Pinker, communal outrage follows a predictable sequence:
A public attack is framed as targeting a person because of group identity. The story spreads rapidly — sometimes amplified or distorted. The victim becomes a symbolic figure for the group. The incident is treated as an intolerable violation, and doubt or questioning is stigmatized.
The group then retaliates disproportionately, often targeting perceived enemies regardless of their actual involvement.
Pinker sees the post‑Kirk reaction as a textbook case: political leaders threatened reprisals, agencies pressured media, and public figures called for broad retribution. Meanwhile, private citizens demanded firings and punishments of anyone whose statements deviated from the sanctified narrative.
*The psychologist distinguished communal outrage from calculated revenge. He noted that revenge is targeted, proportional and strategic. Communal outrage, by contrast, solves a coordination dilemma — the problem of how a group acts in concert when multiple strategies exist but only one can succeed. Outrage becomes a focal point: a visible, unanimous act that signals dominance and enforces internal solidarity, he argued.
He identified two coordination problems that outrage resolves:
Dominance contest, when a group that fails to defend a member signals weakness and invites further attacks. A conspicuous rebuttal reasserts status in the face of the audience of rivals.
Internal cohesion, which means Individuals may hesitate to act unless they see others doing so. An outrage incident makes public the moment to unite and act together.
Pinker drew parallels with historical episodes of communal outrage — from the U.S. battleship Maine explosion, to the Reichstag fire, to the Arab Spring, to the reaction sparked by George Floyd’s killing — and notes that the outcomes differ depending on how the incident is framed and how “outrage entrepreneurs” shape the narrative.
"It’s often been pointed out that Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement have a chronic sense of being disrespected. Mr. Trump fumed for decades about being looked down on by coastal elites, and his pique has grown with each investigation, indictment and impeachment. For many of his followers, these insults merged with a smoldering resentment at the creeping takeover by leftist values in public life, from government mandates to popular entertainment," Pinker wrote.
He added: "Mr. Kirk’s killing is, for all of them, a perfect outrage incident. As an advocate of MAGA willing to take the battle to the enemy, Mr. Kirk was a pre-eminent symbol of the coalition. And his suspected killer, an internet-addled loner with a gun, nonetheless has enough left-adjacent trappings (a transgender partner, some antifascist memes) that he can be mentally fitted into a vast liberal conspiracy. The shooting was an unendurable public offense, which mobilized the coalition to muster its forces, in this case a combination of government muscle and social media shaming mobs, to rectify the affront."
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[### Stealth Attack on Liberal Scholar?
Inside Higher Ed
https://www.insidehighered.com › news › 2017/07/12]
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/12/historian-alleges-coordinated-criticism-her-latest-book-which-critical-radical-right
Jul 11, 2017 — MacLean's critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book, MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars.Read more
COllusion, alternative facts, shadowy billionaires: the words sound ripped from the political headlines, but they also describe the controversy surrounding Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America(Viking). And story keeps unfolding, with MacLean’s critics alleging inaccuracies and other problems with her book, MacLean in turn alleging a coordinated attack against her by libertarian scholars with ties to dark money, and others still accusing MacLean of trying to dishonestly promote favorable online book reviews.
MacLean declined comment on the matter through her publisher, which said it hopes discussions will soon return to the content of the book. Her named critics, meanwhile, deny any coordination in their takedowns of her work.
“The allegations she raised are fanciful and potentially libelous,” said David Bernstein, University Professor of law at George Mason University, who recently wrote unflatteringly about MacLean’s book in a post on a blog at The Washington Post. No one “urged me, asked me, beseeched me, paid me or otherwise tried to influence me to blog about the book.”
Some nevertheless say they worry that swarm-style attacks on progressive scholars’ works -- especially in an era of online harassment of professors and plummeting public trust in academe -- could become a new normal. MacLean, they say, is the victim of just such an effort.
There’s “absolutely no question that left-wing scholars and scholarly ideas are under attack,” said Jacob Remes, an historian and clinical assistant professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Citing a recent pattern of threats against liberal professors, Remes said cases involving even more vulnerable faculty members “show how we need to defend scholarly norms and insist that debates over scholarship remain that -- scholarly debates -- and not become Fox News-like partisan free-for-alls.”
Referring to MacLean’s case in particular -- in which she's asked supporters to police websites for seemingly inauthentic comments about her book, and supporters have called out her critics for not disclosing their ties to anti-regulation, libertarian philanthropist Charles Koch -- Remes added, “Voting down one-star reviews from people who clearly haven't read a book, or asking that beneficiaries of Koch largesse identify themselves as such in reviews, seems a small way of doing that.”
A Book for the Times
MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke, released her new book last month to immediate praise. Democracy in Chainstraces the roots of capitalist libertarianism -- the kind today embodied and funded by the Koch and his brother, David -- back to the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan, who taught at George Mason. Her thesis is that Buchanan was the architect of a long-term plan to take libertarianism mainstream, raze democratic institutions and keep power in the hands of the wealthy, white few.
Unsurprisingly, the book resonated with many critics, who tended to describe it as a book for our time (one NPR review called it "2017 Bingo"). But others began to take issue with MacLean’s scholarship, describing it as another symptom of an alternative facts-driven era. One of the first negative reviews, by Russell Roberts, the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, accused MacLean of deliberating taking out of context the work of Tyler Cowen, the director of the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason. (Roberts has taught economics at George Mason, a favored campus of the Charles Koch Foundation, whose growing financial influence in academe is well-documented; George Mason accepted nearly $48 million from Koch from 2011 to 2014 alone, according to a 2016 Associated Press report. The university's law school also was last year renamed after the late, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as part of a $30 million deal involving funds from Koch and an anonymous donor.)
“She ignores anything in Cowen’s essay that conflicts with her portrayal of Cowen as a sinister enemy of American institutions and democracy,” Roberts wrote, explaining that MacLean had, for example, suggested that Cowen had once written that the free market would be better off with fewer democratic checks and balances. In fact, Cowen had written that while such a change could lead to good outcomes, it could also lead to “very bad” ones.
MacLean responded to Roberts, accusing him of selectively quoting and misrepresenting statements from her own book (and questioning if he actually read it). Ultimately, she asked, “Is it true that Koch-subsidized libertarian scholars, including Buchanan and Cowen, have posed democracy as a problem for their arch version of capitalism?”
:{Soon, though, the criticism came rapid-fire, with a number of academic reviewers with either past or present ties to the Koch Foundation making similar claims against MacLean: misleading quotations; questionable links between people, events and ideas; and a misunderstanding of some of the economic theory underpinning her arguments.
Jonathan Adler, the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and a graduate of George Mason’s law school and one-time visiting professor there, published a running account of the allegations in a Washington Postblog post on the same day Bernstein published his piece in the Post. Soon even MacLean’s Duke colleague Michael C. Munger, a professor of political science, economics and public policy, called her out.}:
In an article for the *Independent Institute*, Munger said MacLean had crafted a well-written but merely speculative history, such as by including imagined conversations between historical figures that come across as real.
“The problem with history, of course, is that many narratives about a few cherry-picked events and documents are ‘plausible,’” he wrote. “The task of the historian is to try to distinguish among plausible accounts ‘through careful sifting of evidence and respectful encounters with opposing points of view.’ There is none of that here. Even a casual familiarity with the basic facts of James Buchanan’s life and scholarship, and of the growth and success of the public choice movement, reveal far simpler, and more plausible, explanations.”
Many of MacLean's supporters question the critics, however, who they argue are offended by a tough look at libertarian heroes.
Ideological Comment War
Apart from the academic reviews, MacLean and others said, anonymous critics were trolling her online, posting uninformed, biased reviews ofDemocracy in Chainson Amazon. In a social media post that MacLean did not authenticate to Inside Higher Ed, but which has been widely shared online by her supporters, she allegedly asked friends and colleagues to help defend her book against an apparent coordinated attack.
“I really, really need your help,” MacLean is said to have written. “This will sound nutty, I know, but it’s actually happening: the Koch operatives and the riders of their academic ‘gravy train,’ as James Buchanan called it, are working very hard to kill Democracy in Chains -- and to destroy my reputation (as they have done to climate change scientists and others bearing inconvenient truth).”
By using thePostblog posts, the note says, critics "make it appear to the ordinary web surfer that the [newspaper] itself is trashing my book when it’s really the Koch team of professors who don’t disclose their conflicts of interest and the operatives who work full-time for their project to shackle our democracy. The other side was getting top placement because their team was clicking and reclicking and sending embedded links, and the velocity of their activity drove up their links.” (It should be noted that the blogs in question are affiliated with the Post, but authors' views are solely their own.)
The note suggests that supporters can help by googling MacLean and her book and clicking on “real” listings to push them above allegedly paid returns, and promoting as "helpful" Amazon reviews that appear authentic. "The operatives are juking the Amazon stats so that their hit jobs (by people who in nearly every case never read the book) come up first by the number of 'helpful' votes," it says. MacLean also warned readers about a propaganda-style wiki page set up by someone with a pseudonym.
“People: this is real,” the post reads. “I won’t be the last they set out to get."
MacLean did not respond to a request for hard evidence of the Amazon review gaming. But there is an unusual preponderance of top five-star and bottom one-star scores forDemocracy in Chains. Back-and-forth-style comments on the reviews abound, amounting to what Connor Gibson, a research associate for Greenpeace, called an "ideological comment war." MacLean’s Wikipedia page already includes much of the controversy surrounding her book.
"They want her publisher to fear promotion, and that's a real threat, since bookstores are also inclined to drop promo efforts if Amazon reviews are low," Gibson said.
Some academics on social media have said that they support MacLean but question asking supporters to police her online reviews. And it appears that the online review police don’t like it either: Fakespot and Trustwerthy, Amazon review authenticity analytics sites, downgraded the book’s rating, to a D and 1.5 stars, respectively.
Still, it’s not hard to imagine that such a close reading of her book by so many scholars with affiliations to Koch -- largely undisclosed in the critiques -- could be some kind of conspiracy.
Asked why he didn’t disclose the fact that he’s received Koch-funded grants within his review of MacLean’s book, Munger said he’s never hidden the relationship (the grants are included on his faculty webpage, for example). Moreover, he said, he wasn’t defending Koch within the piece, just Buchanan.
No Knowledge of Coordination
“I have no knowledge of any coordination” among MacLean’s critics, Munger said. “My interpretation is that MacLean's near total lack of knowledge of basic political science simply independently offended many different people.”
Phillip W. Magness, a historian and former academic program director at the Koch-affiliated Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason, and another of MacLean’s public detractors, said History News Network invited her to respond tohis critique at that site. (She hasn't.) Magness also said he knew of no coordinated attack, “only that Buchanan was a widely respected scholar who she has misrepresented to the point of caricature. It can't be surprising that his many former students, faculty colleagues and friends would scrutinize a book that makes bombastic and conspiratorial charges against him.”
Gibson, the research associate at Greenpeace, tracks Koch-funded higher education programs. The fact that scholars have not cited their ties to Koch while using their academic affiliations to respond to MacLean is a fundamental problem, he said. And given that Koch money is central to MacLean’s narrative, he added, disclosure would matter in any kind of response to the book.
“This is how these guys get away with a guise of independence when their research hits the public realm, or the policy maker's desk,” he said, noting that many of the critiques he’s read focus solely on MacLean's preface -- the least referenced, most dramatized section of the book.
...
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an 12 24 see rumble nyt
Brigading is a slang term for an online practice in which people band together to perform a coordinated action, especially a negative one, such as manipulating a vote or poll or harassing a specific person or members of an online community.
The verb form brigade is also used.
These terms were originally used on the forum website Reddit in reference to vote brigading, in which users coordinate to inflate vote tallies, but they are now used in many different online contexts. Examples include mass direct messages sent to a person’s social media account as a form of harassment or a coordinated effort to dislike a certain post.
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published a study this week that found that, around the 2018 midterm elections, Ms. Omar and Ms. Tlaib were in the cross hairs of a tiny band of Islamophobes, long before Mr. Trump elevated them in his tweetstorms, and likely before they were even on his radar.
https://www.ssrc.org/publications/view/islamophobia-stoking-fear-and-prejudice-in-the-2018-midterms/
#Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 Midterms
Pintak, Lawrence, Albright, Jonathan, Bowe, Brian J. and Pasha, Shaheen
This report examines the campaign experiences of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and other Muslim candidates who ran in the 2018 US midterm elections. While many Muslim candidates reported limited encounters with Islamophobia among their constituents, a social media narrative of manufactured outrage was disproportionately Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynistic. It was heavily influenced by a small number of agents provocateurs, whose hate-filled messages and disinformation were amplified by networks of accounts operating on a scale that signals the involvement of organized networks. These operations largely replaced Breitbart and other extreme-right media entities that were the primary source of anti-Muslim dialogue in the 2016 presidential campaign.They spread hate speech like a virus on social media through both human interaction and the use of bots, sockpuppets, and automated “cyborg” accounts, poisoning the political narrative, drawing in both likeminded and unsuspecting individuals, and disproportionately amplifying—and, for some, normalizing—the message of intolerance.
Download #Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 Midterms here.
Title#Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 MidtermsAuthorPintak, Lawrence, Albright, Jonathan, Bowe, Brian J. and Pasha, ShaheenPublishedSocial Science Research Council, November 5, 2019On the web#Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 MidtermsCitationPintak, Lawrence, Albright, Jonathan, Bowe, Brian J. and Pasha, Shaheen, #Islamophobia: Stoking Fear and Prejudice in the 2018 Midterms (Social Science Research Council, November 5, 2019), https://doi.org/10.35650/MD.2006.a.2019.
==
see rww on greta
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rage-on-the-parkland-teens-exposes-the-rights-ideological-exhaustion/
==
thugswarm for adults? serengetti
Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.
Thunberg gained prominence after she began skipping some days of school to protest climate inaction outside Swedish parliament. She spearheaded the school walkouts that saw more than a million children across the globe leaving their classrooms to demand action on global warming.
She has addressed world and U.N. leaders and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Later this month, she'll sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a 60-foot yacht powered by solar panels and underwater turbines on her way to participate in the U.N. climate talks in New York (*see related story*).
But the success of Thunberg — who describes herself on Twitter as a "16 year old climate activist with Asperger" — remains a sore point for those who reject mainstream climate science and some who have helped shape or encourage the Trump administration's rollback of climate policy.
They frequently point to Thunberg's autism, claim she is used by her parents and compare her call to young people on climate change to "Hitler Youth." They have pointed to her "monotone voice" and framed her as a "millenarian weirdo" with the "look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes."
A recent opinion piece in The New York Times prompted an outcry among climate hawks and Thunberg's allies, who said the newspaper was validating these types of personal attacks on the teenage activist.
Experts say relying on ad hominem attacks has significant collateral damage in that they dissuade people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from speaking publicly. While the language of describing someone as a "puppet" or abused by adults may appear coded, it's clearly a dog whistle that signals her words should be discounted because her mind works differently, said Steve Silberman, author of "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity."
"It's classic autism bashing," he said. "They feel at liberty to do it because autism has been framed as a pathology for decades, so they feel like they don't have to hold back, than just 'other' her, turn her into a freak when she's actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years."
Patrick Moore, chairman of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, which promotes the benefits of carbon dioxide, wrote on Twitter that "Greta=Evil." In an interview with E&E News, Moore denied that his numerous mentions of Thunberg's autism in media appearances and on social media were attacks on her disability but that he instead was "comparing her masters to Hitler."
He said that Thunberg's public speeches were written for her, that she was a "puppet" and that she was unable to answer questions in interviews because her ideas were not her own.
"They aren't her ideas," he said. "There's a reason why 16-year-olds don't vote, don't drink, don't drive, don't whatever. At that age, she is not an adult, and therefore she has no right to influence people in a political process."
Moore's group has been increasingly active on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration. CO2 Coalition co-founder Will Happer is now serving on the National Security Council at the White House and spearheaded a shelved plan to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science. Moore was recently invited by congressional Republicans to downplay an alarming U.N. extinction report.
Earlier this year, Trump enthusiastically tweeted a quote from a Moore performance on Fox News in which Moore said climate science was "fake news" and that more carbon dioxide would be good for humanity.
Moore said he was seeking to show Thunberg "is a full-blown tool of adults."
"She is being abused by her parents, by Al Gore, by society at large that is on side with this ideology as if there is a climate emergency," he said. "What a nonsensical, stupid concept, there is no climate emergency, I think you know, otherwise people would be fleeing from it."
While her critics claim to attack Thunberg for ideas, critiques that mention her personal traits are harmful and reliant on "prejudiced ideas about autistic people," said Zoe Gross, a spokeswoman for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. People are quick to label autistic traits, including tone of voice and facial expressions, as "creepy." She said criticism of Thunberg that highlights the way she speaks, answers questions and displays emotions is clearly an attempt to belittle her.
"Some people may be making assumptions out of ignorance ... but others are explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to," Gross wrote in an email response to questions. "It's upsetting to see any person being belittled because of their disability, especially a child. People with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders."
Thunberg's critics include those who have been close to the Trump EPA.
Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump administration's EPA transition team and has pushed to restrict the use of science at the agency, has referred to Thunberg as an "adult-exploited empty-headed child."
"She's ignorant, maniacal and is being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin," he wrote recently on Twitter.
At his congressional hearing, Moore testified alongside Marc Morano, who works for the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and has a blog that misrepresents and attacks climate science. Morano has been invited by the Trump administration to EPA events weakening the role of science at the agency; he was photographed giving his book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change" to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Morano's blog describes Thunberg as an "autistic prophet." In his Twitter feed, Morano retweets criticisms of her that center on her autism.
"She hasn't been called a mascot. Which; is really what she is. She'll get a Nobel Prize and a wanna-be Ph.d. from Harvard. For being autistic and not going to school," wrote one follower retweeted by Morano.
Conservative media have also begun using Thunberg's character traits in an attempt to minimize her words. A columnist at The Federalist, for instance, recently wrote that Thunberg's struggles with autism while growing up "bred in her an absolutist attitude that is far from attractive." An editor of the right-wing British magazine Spiked, which receives funding from the Koch brothers network,called Thunberg a "weirdo" and wrote that "there is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg."
Andrew Bolt, a Sky News host, recently wrote a column that called Thunberg "deeply disturbed."
"I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru," he wrote. "But Thunberg has something very rare as well: a sense of absolute certainty. She shows not the slightest doubt and forgives not the slightest compromise. This allows followers who are tormented with doubt and burden of freedom to relax into her totalitarian certainty. And in Thunberg's case, that certainty comes from what normally would be seen as a disability."
In the New York Times opinion piece, The Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell called Thunberg a "complicated adolescent."
"Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle," Caldwell wrote. "She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a 'child' — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do."
Thunberg's autism actually informs her activism and motivates her to speak out against the falsehoods spouted by climate deniers, said Silberman, the author of "NeuroTribes." He said she doesn't pay any attention to the false notion of a "debate" in climate science.
Thunberg speaks like "one of the few people who has woken up out of this fever dream of bullshit that's spread by these right-wing politicians and oil company misinformation," Silberman said.
"Unlike most neurotypical people, she can't just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie," he said. "She can't abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally."
For her part, Thunberg has said that autism is "not a 'gift'" but that it "CAN be a superpower."
"I've had my fair share of depressions, alienation, anxiety and disorders," she wrote in a Facebook post in April. "But without my diagnosis, I would never have started school striking. Because then I would have been like everyone else."
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-low-will-they-go-climate-deniers-are-getting-personal-to-attack-this-16-year-olds-activism/
kos
One of deniers’ favorite lines, used to justify the fact that basically everyone who isn’t paid by fossil fuels debunks everything they say, is thatif you’re taking flak, you must be close to the target. It comes from World War II, when bomber pilots came under increasingly heavy fire as they approached the German’s most valuable assets.
Judging by that criteria, deniers are feeling downright terrified of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.
While most school children are busy enjoying summer, this August began with a risible attack on Greta by denier from down under Andrew Bolt, which predictably got picked up by WUWT. To her credit, Ms. Thunberg seemed relatively unfazed by major Australian newspaper the Herald Sun running Bolt’s piece calling her “deeply disturbed,”tweeting in response that yes, she is “indeed ‘deeply disturbed’ about the fact that these hate and conspiracy campaigns are allowed to go on and on and on just because we children communicate and act on the science.”
And the day after Greta’s tweet, none other than the bastion of mainstream liberal media, The New York Times, ran an op-ed attacking Thunberg. The piece was authored by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard. (Which may make you wonder about that “conspiracy campaign” targeting her.)
As Ted Macdonald notes in his Media Matters debunking of Caldwell’s piece, the essay includes “basic climate denial and personal attacks” that “echo those that have been made in right-wing media ever since Thunberg rose to prominence.”
...We’ve known for years that theSerengeti Strategy is a key tactic of organized denial. Coined by one of its primary victims, Dr. Michael Mann, this is the term for the process of singling out and focusing negative attention on someone deniers are particularly threatened by–akin to how lions seek out a single individual on which to prey. Because it’s basically impossible for deniers to challenge the science and evidence, they instead target individuals in the hopes of harassing them into silence.
But the attacks on Greta go even further. As E&E’s Scott Waldman reported on Friday, Thunberg’s openness about not being neurotypical has become a recurring theme to organized denial’s attacks.
In addition, then, to folks comparing her activism to the “Hitler youth,” accusations that she’s “being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin,” and simple tweets like “Greta=Evil,” we’re seeing what autism expert Steve Silberman described to Waldman as “classic autism bashing.” Silberman explains how deniers “feel like they don’t have to hold back” and can “just ‘other’ her, turn her into a freak when she’s actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years.”
For example, Waldman mentions attacks on Thunberg’s “monotone voice” and “look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes” that apparently make her look like a “millenarian weirdo.” As autism advocate Zoe Gross points out, these could be examples of people “explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to,” despite what should be an obvious fact that “people with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders.”...As well they should. And it’s not even always much of a disability, with Thunberg herself saying while it’s “not a ‘gift,’” it “CAN be a superpower.” As Silberman describes: “unlike most neurotypical people, she can’t just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie. She can’t abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally.”
Which, yes, it should. It should bother all of us viscerally.
So while their attacks are even more re-Gretable than usual, it sort of makes sense that she would be targeted. As far as activists go, she’s already had an inGretable influence, and she’s just getting started.
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