They’re not your children anymore. They’re a “treatment group.”

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

#C02Kult.

That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.

The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.

“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”

Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.

The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.

As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.

Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.

There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.

A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.

Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.

What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”

That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.

The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”

They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.

Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.

Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.

"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.

This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”

"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.

Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.

The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.

Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.

The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.

“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."

Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".

A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."

One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."

Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.

Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.

An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".

The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.

The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.

Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.

Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.

Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.

A child soldier.

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Photo by Anders Hellberg at Wikimedia Commons