A Recipe for Greta Thunberg

How parenting, culture, and genetics combined to create one of the most annoying young women on the planet.

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Greta Thunberg arrives at Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport after participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla that was detained by Israel, in Athens, Greece, October 6, 2025.

Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters

The cause Greta Thunberg most believes in, I suspect, is causes. Those of us subjected to her for a decade now have seen her graduate through every Current Thing from climate change to Palestinian liberation, and now she has turned up in France to support students (allegedly) protesting dilapidated school buildings. It’s easy to see in this a kind of popular-front leftism whose target is the Western project writ large. Favoring everything that could be over everything that is, in the only civilization in the world that rewards that sort of thing.

But while I certainly believe that ideas have consequences, I’m increasingly interested in the way those ideas interact with biography to create incentives. And Thunberg’s biography certainly supports her remarkable ideological versatility.

Daniel Foster

About the Author

Daniel Foster

Daniel Foster is a contributing editor at National Review.

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