Teen Vogue removes readers’ responsibility for environment and their lives
May 31, 2023
Teen Vogue infantilizes its impressionable young audience in a new piece by insisting there’s nothing they can do to stem the tide of the “climate crisis.”
Readers are thus led to believe that they are powerless to help the environment by making eco-friendly lifestyle choices. Teen Vogue disempowers its readers to prime them for its panacea: a paternalistic nanny state chock-full of “broad policy changes that mandate individual lifestyle changes.”
Personal liberty, it claims, “runs contrary to acting on climate at all.” That is, a fundamental American value is terrible for the environment. In fact, it is an existential threat to Earth itself because of those who exercise their personal liberties.
“We live on a planet that needs saving from the very beings who inhabit it,” the author warns.
Manufactured crises – like the “climate crisis” the author references six times – call for drastic measures. These include “systemic change and government intervention” whose scope and depth befit authoritarianism.
“The solution likely encompasses broad policy changes that mandate individual lifestyle changes,” the author writes.
This kind of “compelled acceptance of personal inconvenience” would be forced on the same population that was conditioned to accept governmental overreach during the COVID era’s lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
That population includes Teen Vogue’s readers. As impressionable as they are now, they were even younger and thus more impressionable when authoritarian rule was normalized during the COVID era. A docile citizenry is easily controlled by the whims of tyrants and an authoritarian left hellbent on what the article admits would be “radical changes in behavior.”
A government’s powers should be limited precisely because they are ripe for the abuses it commits under the false pretenses of looking out for your best interests. To advocate expanding its powers is at best naïve and at worst, maleficent. Teen Vogue promotes a nanny state that would infantilize teens and adults alike by making lifestyle decisions on their behalf.
Worse yet, the author knows she has the rapt attention of a demographic eager to make a difference but increasingly lacking the religious and familial authority figures who could show them how to do so. In effect, she both disempowers these girls and propagandizes them so they advocate a similar ethos of personal disempowerment in society at large.