Not a Surprise

It turns out that Naomi Seibt, the German girl put forward by the Heartland Institute as an answer to Greta Thunberg, is a white supremacist asshole.

I did Nazi that coming:

A young campaigner who has been hailed by climate sceptics as the right’s answer to Greta Thunberg has previously described a white nationalist who appeared to promote “white genocide” theories as one of her “inspirations”.

Naomi Seibt, a 19-year-old from Münster, Germany, who styles herself as a “climate realist”, has also had to deny she made remarks that could be seen as antisemitic following an attack on a synagogue last year.

Seibt has been described as the darling of climate change deniers and spoke at a small side event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – a high-profile annual meeting of rightwing activists in Washington that will also feature the US president, Donald Trump.

………

An examination of the young activist’s YouTube videos and interviews has revealed that Seibt has shown support for an alt-right activist.

In a YouTube discussion last year that was highlighted in a report by the German broadcaster ZDF, Seibt discussed an attack on a synagogue in Halle that killed two people who were outside the temple, and said Jews were considered to be “at the top” of groups who were seen as being oppressed. “Ordinary Germans”, she said, were “at the bottom”. Muslims, she added, were somewhere in between.

………

“It is clear that she is articulating – no matter how inarticulately – age-old tropes of Jewish power and white grievance: the idea that Jews are a privileged class and that white people are oppressed by them,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who studied the remarks.

………

In another YouTube interview describing her embrace of “views that were outside the mainstream”, Seibt referred to the Canadian alt-right internet activist Stefan Molyneux as an “inspiration”.

………

Seibt has been hired by a US thinktank called the Heartland Institute, which has traditionally been financed by fossil fuel and coal companies and is known for pushing radical anti-science theories about the climate crisis.

So not a surprise.

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