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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2020 0:20:30 GMT
 The media often draws comparisons between Greta Thunberg and other teenage climate activists from around the world — but the latest teen to be compared to Greta could certainly not be considered a climate activist. Naomi Seibt is making waves online after The Washington Post profiled her earlier this week. Naomi's claim to fame? Being a rare teenage climate skeptic. If you want to learn more about Naomi being positioned as the "anti-Greta," read on. Who Is Naomi Seibt? Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old YouTuber and anti-climate activist from Germany. She was recently hired as the face of a campaign by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based "conservative and libertarian think tank" that influences the Trump administration, as per WaPo. She has made several public speeches detailing her core belief on the climate crisis: that it's not as bad as people like Greta Thunberg made it out to be. Where Did Naomi Seibt Come From? Naomi first started sharing her thoughts about the climate crisis on her YouTube channel in May 2019. Then, as told by WaPo, in November 2019, Naomi made a speech at a Munich think tank called EIKE, whose vice president is a well-known politician for Germany's far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD). James Taylor — not the musician, but the director of the Heartland Institute's Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy — caught her speech, and approached her to work with Heartland. In December, she made a speech at Heartland's forum at the UN's COP25 in Madrid. And then in January, Heartland officially hired Naomi as a face of its campaign to "question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming," as per WaPo. |
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2020 4:38:58 GMT
 Naomi Seibt, 19, who styles herself as a “climate sceptic” or “climate realist”, will this week address the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) near Washington, joining speakers including Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Seibt is in the pay of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank closely allied with the White House that denies established science showing humans are heating the planet with dangerous consequences. CPAC will be the biggest stage yet for Seibt, a so-called “YouTube influencer” who tells her followers Thunberg and other activists are whipping up unnecessary hysteria by exaggerating the climate crisis. “Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably anti-human ideology,” she has said. The teenager, from Münster in western Germany, claims she is “without an agenda, without an ideology”. But she was pushed into the limelight by leading figures on the German far right and her mother, a lawyer, has represented politicians from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in court. Seibt had her first essay published by the “anti-Islamisation” blog Philosophia Perennis and was championed by Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, who has been denied entry to the UK and US because of his political activism. A Facebook post by the AfD youth wing names Seibt as a member and she spoke at a recent AfD event, though she has denied membership of the party. |
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2020 21:20:09 GMT
Conservative politicians and leaders such as Rep. Liz Cheney, Sec. Betsy DeVos, Kellyanne Conway, and Vice President Mike Pence speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Fort Washington, Maryland.  Greta Thunberg has been in the global public eye for nearly two years now for her bold acts of climate activism and enthralling speeches given before world leaders. That means it has also been nearly two years since conservatives and climate change deniers have taken to attacking Thunberg, claiming that she is unqualified to speak on the topic and a for-profit protester who is somehow cashing in on the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real. Thunberg has been undeterred — continuing her activism and even getting a nomination for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize and becoming the youngest person ever to be named Time magazine's Person of the Year — so conservatives have decided that if they can't beat her, they'll just copy the formula instead. This week's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which will be headlined by President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, will also feature the main stage debut of Naomi Seibt, a 19-year-old German activist who has been branded as the "anti-Greta." Seibt shares a lot of similarities with Thunberg, from her appearance to the fact that she is a young person with a radical message related to climate change. But while Thunberg believes that it is the greatest crisis facing humanity and inaction could doom future generations to a barely inhabitable earth, Seibt views climate change as little more than an overdramatized hoax. She is on the record calling climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has claimed "climate change science really isn’t science at all.” The rise of Seibt, who has been presented as a YouTube influencer and personality, has seemingly come out of nowhere — but her newfound prominence is anything but authentic. It has been spurred onward by far-right groups across the world who have been looking for their own youthful spokesperson to push their messages. |
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Post by Admin on Feb 29, 2020 1:31:20 GMT
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.
The remarks were part of a video discussion that appears to have been deleted. They were seen by some experts as saying that Germans had less pity for “ordinary German” victims of crime than for Jews and Muslims. A portion of the discussion was included in a report by ZDF and is still available online.
Seibt did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, although her mother argued she is not a supporter of the far right.
At the conservative event, Seibt was asked twice about this article. She called it “ridiculous how the media cherrypicks things that I said” and said she is not an antisemite.
“In fact, I was commenting that I think it’s wrong to comment on different races and to view them differently,” Seibt said. “We should just all be regarded as the same. That is what I was actually saying, that is how I perceived the public view on different races or different religions.”
“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.
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Post by Admin on Feb 29, 2020 7:40:58 GMT
Naomi Seibt, the 19-year-old German climate science denier being marketed as the right’s answer to activist Greta Thunberg, praised a white nationalist while speaking on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.
During a question-and-answer session at the end of the panel entitled “Energy, Costs and Defeating the Climate Delusion,” a Business Insider reporter asked Seibt if she is still a fan of white nationalist Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian vlogger.
“I am still a fan, absolutely,” Seibt responded.
Just an hour earlier, The Guardian had published an article unearthing Seibt’s past praise for Molyneux, whom she called one of her “inspirations.”
Molyneux has for years peddled racist “white genocide” conspiracy theories in videos posted to YouTube. At the CPAC panel Friday, Seibt was asked specifically about 2018 comments Molyneux made in which he explicitly praised white nationalism, claiming Poland was “peaceful, free, easy, civilized and safe” because it is “essentially an all-white country.”
Seibt claimed these comments by Molyneux only sound racist when “taken out of context.”
“He’s not comparing other races, not at all,” Seibt said of Molyneux. “He is just describing his experience in Western countries and I know that to the extent, for example, if I was in a country where Sharia was present, I know that I would not be able to speak as freely as in Western countries. … It’s not that we are better in any way in Western countries. We still have freedom of speech and I’m very happy that’s the case.”
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