What is Greta up to at the French school riots?

The ‘omnicause’ is often loosely defined as the animating spirit of woke activism. It is ‘Free Palestine’, the ‘climate emergency’, ‘trans rights’ and Black Lives Matter rolled into a single, unified moral crusade. If it has a face, then it’s surely that of the perennial protester Greta Thunberg, who has now lent her star power to the student rioters in France. In recent days, videos have emerged of her mingling with students in the Parisian neighbourhood of Seine-Saint-Denis.

This probably shouldn’t surprise us. From the outset, the fingerprints of the omnicause have been all over the riots. What began in September with high-school students rebelling against dilapidated classrooms and crammed schedules quickly morphed into a general, blazing anarchy. More than 6,800 people have been arrested and there have been at least 1,000 reported injuries, the vast majority suffered by police. Amid the carnage, Palestine flags, keffiyehs and graffiti of the BLM-era motto, ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), have been ubiquitous. And now the presence of Thunberg, the patron saint of the omnicause, has confirmed that whatever prompted the riots doesn’t matter anymore. It’s about everything and nothing.

Victimhood, narcissism and a conspiratorial railing against ‘The System’ are defining traits of the omnicause. Thunberg, a 23-year-old Swedish national with no ‘lived experience’ of French high schools, has invoked all three in order to ‘identify’ with the enragés. ‘Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or the social-injustice crises… Our future is being robbed from us’, Thunberg told reporters outside the Paul-Éluard lycée. ‘The system that we have is not benefiting us… where police are willing to actively harm children… it just shows what they are protecting.’

Thunberg’s self-pity and vanity have been on show in the various prequels to Greta in Paris. Last October, she led the Global Salmud Flotilla from Europe to Palestine, in what she claimed to be an attempt to deliver aid to Gazans. Yet when her woke armada was intercepted by the Israeli navy, the authorities claimed there was no food or medical supplies on any of the ships. And when Thunberg and her fellow activists were detained and swiftly deported, they accused the Israelis of ‘kidnapping’ them. Speaking at a press conference in Athens, Greta told reporters, ‘I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses, trust me’, although she refused to elaborate on any specifics. It was hard to discern whose alleged suffering she was most perturbed by – that of the Gazans or her own.

Indeed, a sense of her personal suffering has been front and centre of the Thunberg cult from the very beginning. When Greta began skipping school to protest against climate change (remember that?) in late 2018, her own feelings were front and centre: ‘I want to feel safe. How can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in human history?’ Then came the apocalyptic deluge she dumped on the UN in 2019: ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood… How dare you!’ She didn’t quite stamp her feet, although the then 16-year-old did let the audience know that she was ‘sad and angry’ with them. ‘I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean.’

And yet here Greta is, all grown up, from skipping school over wildfires to fanning the flames of a protest movement that’s burning schools to the ground. The omnicause has truly come full circle.