The Associated Press appears to believe that people are waking up every day having nervous breakdowns over the spectre of — wait for it — climate change.
AP lifestyle writer Leanne Italie put out a crackpot piece of green freak propaganda June 25 that competed with The Babylon Bee for funniest satire of the day. “Anxiety, grief, anger, fear, helplessness. The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people.”
Yes, this was a real sentence in what is supposedly a news item. It just got worse: “Many worry about what the future holds, and a daily grind of climate anxiety and distress can lead to sleeplessness, an inability to focus and worse. Some young people wonder whether it’s moral to bring children into the world. Many people grieve for the natural world.”
Who's responsible for trying to scare people to death? Journalists, for sure.
But never fear, exclaimed Italie: “Activists, climate psychologists and others in the fight against climate change have a range of ways to build resilience and help manage emotions.” AP actually pays writers anywhere between $60,000 and $101,000 a year to pollute its website with a heavy overdose of this kind of brain-dead codswallop.
Italie’s prescriptions were just as bonkers as her initial thesis. They ranged from telling readers to “convince more residents to give up grass lawns and increase biodiversity with native plants,” to making themselves a “positivity sandwich.” Yes, a “positivity sandwich,” which Italie described as when one begins “with a good piece of news, followed by a harder tidbit, then finish[ing] with a second feel-good story.”
Italie even elevated the ramblings of a so-called expert on eco-psychology (yes that’s apparently a thing), of whom she wrote, “One of her most important missions is helping people find their words to talk about climate change in pursuit of resilience.”
As if this load of global warming slop couldn’t get any more cringey, Italie highlighted the story of a nutty mother who was so obsessed with climate Armageddon she regretted giving birth to her son.
‘I am generally a very happy person and I’m very optimistic. And I’m still that, but sometimes it becomes very difficult to manage. Like, what will happen and thinking about the long term, she said. ‘At points, I’ve regretted bringing a child into this world, knowing how things could get much, much worse.’
People like this shouldn't be defined as "very optimistic." But for Italie, this mother served as a proper case study to complement the climate fear porn she was foisting on her readers. “Part of managing her own emotions is trying to model sustainable behaviors for her son while educating him on the importance of helping the environment,” Italie propagandized. “The family drives an electric vehicle. They don’t eat meat and have encouraged extended family to do the same. They recycle, compost and limit travel by air.”
But what more can you expect from an outlet that openly admits that it’s getting millions in funding from climate-obsessed interest groups, while still purporting to be “unbiased news?” This effectively made the AP a propaganda arm of the climate change lobby, and clearly a home for eco-fanatical nut-jobs masquerading as journalists.
If AP wanted to sell us a “positivity sandwich," they would surround their fearful theories of the future with the good news that all of the media's crackpot predictions in the 1990s or the 2000s -- that the Earth would be doomed within ten years -- didn't pan out.
