The kids aren’t just all right — they’re scrambling the brains of their political enemies.

Last Friday, millions of people, many of them children and teenagers, took to the streets during the Global Climate Strike, a protest inspired by Fridays for Future, the international youth effort started by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The protesters’ call for broad action to combat global warming was powerful, as was the message sent by their numbers: Dynamic, frustrated young people are instilling in the climate movement a new urgency.

Online, the climate kids’ impact can be measured in a different way — by how they’re short-circuiting the right-wing media ecosystem that’s partly responsible for the spread of climate skepticism. Since Friday’s strike, pro-Trump media and conservative cable news pundits have devoted significant resources to turning the children of the climate movement into Public Enemy No. 1.

Over the weekend, Alan Jones, an Australian broadcaster for Sky News, delivered a monologue calling the climate-striking youth “selfish, badly educated, virtue-signaling little turds.” Mr. Jones finished by reading a letter arguing that children concerned about climate change should “wake up, grow up and shut up until you’re sure of the facts before protesting.” The rant echoed other criticisms of the protest from the right. “I wish I could inject that letter into my veins,” a blogger for the conservative site RedState wrote.

Ms. Thunberg has been the primary target of this vitriol. On Saturday, the pro-Trump media figure Dinesh D’Souza likened Ms. Thunberg to models in Nazi propaganda. Videos of her speeches have been edited to replace her voice with Adolf Hitler’s. On Fox News on Monday evening, the Daily Wire pundit Michael Knowles called Ms. Thunberg — who is open about being on the autism spectrum — “a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents.” (Fox News issued an apology and called the comment “disgraceful.”)