Monday was the culmination of a year’s worth of programmatic, propagandistic proselytization, as a 16-year-old Swedish child with a developmental disability took to a podium at the United Nations to harangue and insult the leaders of the free world over the supposed “mass extinction” that is coming as a result of global warming.

Sorry. “Climate change,” as though that is somehow a tragic event; never mind the fact that the climate changes four times per year in something we call “seasons.”

The 16-year-old, whose name is Greta Thunberg, suffers from Asperger Syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum. One wouldn’t normally expect someone with Asperger’s to be chosen as the spokesperson for a global movement, given that sufferers from that condition are characteristically lacking in nonverbal communication, struggle with empathy, are typically very uncomfortable around large crowds, obsess pathologically about subjects not under their control, and often engage in long rants without consideration for how they will be received. Thunberg appears to be a more serious case, suffering from depression so severe she once went two months without eating and had to be pulled out of school.

And yet that’s precisely what the global warming cultists did, plucking this highly susceptible child, juicing her up with all of the bleak Malthusian auguries of an apocalypse less than two decades in the offing, and then featuring her at protest events across Europe before taking the Angry Cassandra Revue transatlantic. Congress was subjected to Thunberg’s scowling, then she addressed the idiotic Climate Strike demonstration late last week before Monday’s tour de gripe.

And what a show!

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” she said, in the part of her speech that was actually true. “Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.

“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you. For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away.”

There was more. “But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.”

This apparently was an admonition that resonated, as at the UN meeting German chancellor Angela Merkel, who can’t seem to slow down her own catastrophic policymaking mistakes, pledged to increase that country’s climate-change spending from two billion euros to four as a response to a “wake-up call” from The Young.

As though The Young have any thoughts on this or any other political issue in their minds that are not planted there by adults. What we know about this And A Child Shall Lead Them fraud is that it’s the product of a widespread, persistent, and highly destructive indoctrination effort by the global Left in our schools and pop culture, so much so that it has caused mass hysteria among kids. A Rasmussen poll recently found that half of Americans under 35 believe the “mass extinction” Thunberg prattled on about is coming within 10 or 15 years, despite zero evidence anything like it is coming. And what do you get when you’re that successful in selling the (Earth’s) sizzle? Jon Gabriel at Ricochet delivers the bill:

According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one-third of all 13- to 18-year olds will experience an anxiety disorder. The numbers continue to go up; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety in children and teens rose 20 percent. The suicide rate for young Americans is now the highest ever recorded. Between 2000 and 2017, the number of suicides has doubled for females aged 15 to 24. Males between 15 and 19 killed themselves at a rate of 17.9 per 100,000, up from 13 per 100,000 in 2000.

Is that all from global warming hysteria? No, but it’s part of an abusive environment created within education and pop culture — worse in Europe than here, to be sure — that is targeted, relentlessly, toward wearing down to the nub the people who should be grateful for the bounty a market economy has delivered, and thus making them, in the words of Ming the Merciless, “satisfied with less.”

Dr. Michael Hurd, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in private practice for over 25 years and an author and columnist, identified Monday’s antics for what they really were: “Mental illness — defined as delusions, hallucinations and massively distorted cognitions,” he noted, “should not be celebrated at the United Nations in this way. Is there any doubt left that it’s time to defund this pretentious freak show and shut it down for good?”

And it is time, particularly considering that a generation or two before, these same people were offering up the same cataclysmic prophecies arising from global cooling and the coming of a new Ice Age and attempting to inflict them on schoolchildren. There are real villains out there … and they aren’t oil companies.

That this was a thorough and complete put-up job, the precise opposite of an organic grass-roots movement, can’t be emphasized enough. As the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe recognized, Thunberg “has stage-parents, literally. Her mother sang opera internationally until the teenager convinced her to quit due to greenhouse gas emissions from flying, and her father and grandfather both gained fame through acting and directing.”

Question: were Daddy or Grampy part of the crew of Tommy? Just thought I’d ask, seeing as though it feels like I’ve seen this movie before — but the music was a lot better the first time.

If you believe mère Thunberg gave up an operatic career because of global warming concerns rather than recognizing she was washed up and there was a better gig waiting in the propping up of that otherwise-problematic kid as the High Priestess of the Global Warming Cult, you are not paying attention. In fact, as the Daily Beast recounts, the genesis of Monday’s spectacle came when Greta stopped having nightmares about other topics and instead started having them, obsessively, about the coming climate change apocalypse, and wouldn’t be dissuaded. It’s pretty clear that the parents decided to go with the flow and found a way to monetize the crazy. Hooking up with the well-funded and not overly scrupled environmentalist Left, which is more than happy to prostitute other people’s children for their cause, was just a spark of opportunistic genius one can’t find on an opera stage or a Swedish movie set.

So the rest of us will just have to pick up the pieces from The Traveling Thunberg Show. And that won’t be easy. Exactly how are you going to have a reasoned discussion with someone who believes that cow farts and Ford Explorers are going to kill the planet in 15 years?

“There will now be two kinds of people,” observed a horrified Robert P. George of Princeton University after enduring Monday’s adolescent UN rant. “Those who find what they watch on this video deeply moving and who regard Greta Thunberg as a prophet and perhaps a saint, and those who are outraged by what they regard as the indoctrination, manipulation, and exploitation of a child.”

The latter is clearly the correct reaction. Greta Thunberg has no idea what she’s talking about, as Monday’s spectacle clearly demonstrated. She’s talking about how the leaders of the free world have stolen her future when it’s fairly obvious she’s carved herself a position of fame and, likely, fortune on the rubber chicken circuit from Trondheim to Telluride lecturing insipid leftists like her parents on the evils of capitalism and prosperity, complete with foundation cash, ghostwritten environmentalist screeds, and Al Gore horror movie sequels as far as the eye can see.

At least until the climate apocalypse comes. Or until the money to fuel this fraud runs out.

Scott McKay is publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics. He’s also a novelist: check out his first book Animus: A Tale of Ardenia, available in Kindle and paperback.