Latest news with #RamonaSarsgaard
New York Post
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Climate extremists make our kids despair — and groom them to join the left's crusades
Extreme privilege and fame have never been a recipe for emotional stability, but today's Hollywood offspring seem especially unequipped to face reality. Case in point: Ramona Sarsgaard, the 18-year-old daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, who was arrested this month for criminal trespass during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University's Butler Library. This wasn't her first foray into activism. Sarsgaard has been a committed climate crusader since childhood. At just 13, she gave a speech at Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience award ceremony in honor of Greta Thunberg. Like Thunberg, Ramona has built her identity around the belief that climate catastrophe is not only inevitable but imminent. Sarsgaard marched in the Youth Climate Strike in New York and, according to her mother, is among the many children who 'aren't able to push out of their minds the dire situation that we're in.' She's not alone: An entire generation has been raised to believe they are living through the end of the world — and their mental health reflects it. Just this week Violet Affleck, 19, daughter of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, published an essay in Yale University's 'Global Health Review' describing a heated conflict with her mother earlier this year. 'I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,' she wrote — in fights triggered by Garner's shock at the devastation. 'As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of Generation Z,' Violet explained, 'my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.' She went on to call climate change an 'existential and accelerating' crisis. It's clear she wasn't just debating a hot topic with her mother — she was evangelizing a worldview that sees environmental collapse as a given. If that mindset sounds extreme, that's because it's being carefully cultivated. Affleck's worldview was deliberately drilled into her by climate activists, who have groomed an entire generation to join their crusade. At institutions like Yale, climate anxiety is treated as a developmental inevitability. An advice column in a Yale newsletter a few years ago instructed parents and caregivers to lead even the youngest children through therapeutic climate exercises, like imagining their favorite animal being impacted by climate change and speaking from its perspective. Just imagine launching that conversation with your 4-year-old: 'Think of Peter Rabbit. Now imagine Peter has run out of food and dies because he's too thirsty, has no grass to eat, and no shade to take refuge in as temperatures soar.' You couldn't come up with a more traumatic lesson for a young child to engage in if you tried —yet the 'experts' at Yale recommend it as a therapeutic template to explain to children that the world is ending. The consequences of this approach are measurable. A global 2021 study on climate anxiety found that in 31 of 32 countries, distress about climate change was linked to poorer mental health. In another survey of 10,000 young people across 10 nations, three-quarters said 'the future is frightening,' and more than half believed that 'humanity is doomed.' And yet the same activists, media outlets and global institutions that amplify climate alarmism are now wringing their hands over the youth mental-health crisis. A pair of Stanford University psychiatrists, discussing the 2021 anxiety study on the World Economic Forum website, sought to normalize what they called 'climate distress' — defining it as a troubling blend of dread, sadness, powerlessness and anger. It's 'a normal and appropriate thing to feel,' they claimed, in the face of 'hurricanes, droughts and floods, and clear evidence that our planetary boundaries are being overshot.' But let's be honest: These experts are reporting on the very fire they helped start. And they need that fire to keep the recruits engaged and energized to stay in the fight. Sarsgaard, Thunberg and Affleck are the natural products of a culture that's fed kids a steady diet of existential panic. Raised in privilege, surrounded by wealth and educated at elite institutions, these young women nonetheless see themselves as doomed. The first two already boast criminal records — and Affleck, by her own account, has become so unbearable a scold that her family may opt to shelter in place next time disaster threatens, rather than crowd into a cramped hotel room with her truculent presence. They're fighting an existential battle to save the planet — one they've been convinced is rapidly coming to an end. And as Sarsgaard demonstrates, they're easy prey for those pushing the next leftist cause du jour. They represent an entire generation driven off the deep end by their own manufactured anxiety. We told kids the world was ending. They listened. Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Maggie Gyllenhaal's daughter Ramona Sarsgaard arrested during Columbia protests
Maggie Gyllenhaal's daughter Ramona Sarsgaard was arrested during the chaotic anti-Israel protests at Columbia University on Wednesday, police sources said. Sarsgaard, 18, who attends Columbia College, was slapped with a desk appearance ticket for criminal trespassing, the sources said. The actress's daughter — who Gyllenhaal shares with husband Peter Sarsgaard — was one of nearly 80 agitators arrested while storming the university's Butler Library on Wednesday evening as students prepared for final exams. At least two school safety officers were injured in the melee, officials said. As of Thursday, the elite Morningside Heights school had handed down at least 65 interim suspensions to students who were part of the chaos, pending further investigation, a school official said. It's unclear if Sarsgaard was one of those suspended. Video obtained by The Post showed a line of protesters led out in zip ties by NYPD officers and onto waiting police buses following the ruckus, which started when demonstrators shoved past a security guard at the library's front entrance, disrupting focused students. Once inside, they draped large signs over bookshelves, scrawled 'Columbia Will Burn' on a glass case inside the library, and marked tables with colored tape. Another 33 individuals, including those from affiliated institutions, and an unspecified number of alumni, were also barred from campus, the official said — as Columbia faced public pressure to take strong action against the rabble-rousers. Little is known about Sarsgaard's personal life and she doesn't appear to have ever publicly spoken out about the Israel-Gaza war or the ensuing protests that have roiled college campuses nationwide. It's also not known what she is studying at Columbia, but she follows in the footsteps of her famous mother, who graduated from the Ivy League school with a bachelor's degree in English literature before appearing in dozens of films including the 2008 blockbuster 'The Dark Knight.' Her uncle, Jake Gyllenhaal, attended the prestigious university for two years before dropping out to concentrate on his acting career. And her grandmother, Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, is also a Columbia alum, according to reports. Naomi's first husband, American history expert Eric Foner, is currently listed as a professor within Columbia's Department of History. Her second husband, Stephen Gyllenhaal, is Maggie and Jake's dad. Sarsgaard's parents have had roles in films that explore parts of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Gyllenhaal, 47, starred as a British-Israeli billionaire who uses her family business to promote peace and resolution between Israel and Palestine in Sundance TV's spy thriller miniseries 'The Honorable Woman.' The series was released in July 2014, in the midst of a bloody, 50-day long battle launched by Israel in the Gaza Strip that left over 2,250 people killed on both sides. At the show's premiere in the Big Apple on July 23, 2014, Peter Sarsgaard wore a peace sign T-shirt and told his two daughters – who were seven and two years old at the time – that there was 'a lot of war going on,' Variety reported. In an interview about the series with the Hollywood Reporter, Gyllenhaal said the war 'feels like an impossible situation.' 'I just mean it can be so difficult to have a conversation about what is happening in Israel and Palestine right now. [The show] very consciously does not take a side; it doesn't say, 'We believe this, and we don't believe that.' We lay out aspects of the conflict, and we ask the audience to think and feel for themselves. I'm really hungry for that, and I bet a lot of other people are too,' she told the outlet. Just last year, Peter Sarsgaard, 54, starred in 'September 5,' a movie based on the true story of the 1972 Munich Massacre, in which a group of Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Games, taking Israeli athletes hostage. While filming the movie in 2024 – just months after Hamas's vicious, Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel – onlookers would yell 'Zionist propaganda' in the film crew's direction, the Irish Times reported in February. The film 'has a Swiss director. We have German producers and we have American producers, but I don't think any of them are Zionists so far as I know,' Peter Sarsgaard told the outlet. 'My position has always been that what was true in 1971 is still true today – about the Palestinians and the Israelis,' he said. Reps for Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard did not immediately respond to requests for comment. When The Post paid a visit to Sarsgaard's ritzy Cobble Hill townhouse on Friday, an unidentified woman swiftly shut the front door after a reporter identified herself and asked for Ramona. A Columbia spokesperson declined to answer questions about Sarsgaard's role in the protest and whether she faced disciplinary action, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. — Additional reporting by Khristina Narizhnaya
New York Post
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Ivy Nepo Baby' grandmother Naomi Gyllenhaal is woke and Jewish — and was a campus radical herself
Runs in the family. The grandmother of 'Ivy Nepo Baby' Ramona Sarsgaard — the daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard who was arrested during an anti-Israel protest this week at Columbia University — was also a radical in college. 'I went wild,' screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal told The New York Times in 2004 of her time at Columbia's sister school, Barnard College, where her best friend was Eleanor Stein, who went on to become a fugitive leader of the terror group Weather Underground. Advertisement The radical leftist outfit undertook a number of attacks in the US, including the infamous March 1970 accidental bombing of a Greenwich Village townhouse. 'I still thought we could do it in the system,' recalled Naomi, now 79, who used Stein's time on the run as inspiration for her 1988 flick, 'Running on Empty,' about a family of fugitives on the run from the FBI after a bombing. A Brooklyn native who grew up in a family of 'high-achieving New York Jews,' the elder Gyllenhaal — mother to Maggie and her actor brother, Jake — also supported director and screenwriter Jonathan Glazer's controversial 2024 Oscars speech, in which he compared Nazi Germany to Israel's fight in Gaza. Advertisement 3 Director and screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal is a former campus radical herself, just like granddaughter Ramona Sarsgaard. Getty Images While more than 1,000 Jewish creatives slammed Glazer's speech, Gyllenhaal was among 300 people who signed a letter backing the director. 'We should be able to name Israel's apartheid and occupation — both recognized by leading human rights organizations as such — without being accused of rewriting history,' according to the letter Gyllenhaal signed. Maggie's father, director Stephen Gyllenhaal made it clear that he and Naomi are no longer together when reached by The Post Saturday. Advertisement 'We're divorced, you know,' Gyllenhaal, 75, said from his Los Angeles home. When asked about Ramona's arrest, he said only, 'they speak for themselves.' 3 Ramona Sarsgaard, the 18-year-old daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, was arrested at an anti-Israel protest at Columbia University last week. Matteo Prandoni/ / Shutterstock 3 Stephen and Naomi Gyllenhaal, who are now divorced, pose with their son Jake and Jeanne Cadieu last year in New York. Getty Images Naomi Gyllenhaal could not immediately be reached for comment. Advertisement Sarsgaard, 18, who attends Columbia College, was slapped with a desk appearance ticket for criminal trespassing Wednesday, the sources said. She could not be reached for comment. Her dad, Peter Sarsgaard, declined comment Saturday on his daughter's brush with the law. 'I don't have anything to say,' he said outside the family's Cobble Hill home.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Daughter of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard arrested at Columbia University protests
The daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard was among those arrested at the latest Columbia University protests, marking the latest development in the anti-war demonstrations that also led to the temporary suspension of student journalists. On Friday, the New York Post reported that 18-year-old Ramona Sarsgaard – a Columbia freshman – was arrested during Wednesday's campus protests where students demonstrated against Israel's deadly war in Gaza. Sarsgaard was given a desk appearance ticket for criminal trespassing, the outlet reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Post's report. Related: Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters arrested after Columbia calls in police The arrest of Sarsgaard, along with dozens of others, came after anti-war student activists occupied part of the main Butler library building on Columbia University for several hours in a show of solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Renaming the space the Basel al-Araj People's University, the students hung a sign that read 'Strike for Gaza' while others distributed pamphlets calling on the university to divest from funds and businesses involved in Israel's war there. Videos posted on social media showed students also locking arms and chanting: 'We have nothing to lose but our chains!' In response, university officials called in the police, leading to many students being forcefully arrested. A statement on Wednesday from the university's acting president, Claire Shipman, said: 'Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies; this is especially unacceptable while our students study and prepare for final exams.' Meanwhile, a separate statement on social media from student activists said: 'We are facing one of the largest militarized police forces in the world. Deputized public safety officers have choked and beaten us, but we have not wavered … We will not be useless intellectuals. Palestine is our compass, and we stand strong in the face of violent repression.' After the protests, Columbia University and its sister school Barnard College issued temporary suspensions to four student journalists who reported on the demonstrations at the library for Columbia Spectator and WKCR. The Columbia Spectator reported that the students identified themselves as press to public safety officers. According to the outlet, the students received email notices of their temporary suspensions on Thursday afternoon from rules administrator Gregory Wawro and Barnard dean Leslie Grinage. In his email to one of the student reporters, Wawro said the student may have 'participated in a disruptive protest in 301 Butler Library'. Grinage wrote to the three other student reporters saying that their 'alleged actions at Butler Library pose an ongoing threat of disruption of, or interference with, normal operations at both Barnard and Columbia'. Columbia University lifted its temporary suspension of one of the student reporters approximately five hours after the initial notification, the Columbia Spectator reports. At about 9am on Friday, Barnard College lifted the suspensions of the three other student journalists. The latest wave of student-led anti-war demonstrations at Columbia University come amid the the Trump administration's sweeping crackdowns on student protests and free speech across US universities as Israel continues its deadly attacks on Gaza. In recent months, federal officials have detained numerous students for their anti-war activism, including Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and green-card holder who was recently released. Others detained include Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who remains in custody at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.
The Guardian
10-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Daughter of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard arrested at Columbia University protests
The daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard was among those arrested at the latest Columbia University protests, marking the latest development in the anti-war demonstrations that also led to the temporary suspension of student journalists. On Friday, the New York Post reported that 18-year-old Ramona Sarsgaard – a Columbia freshman – was arrested during Wednesday's campus protests where students demonstrated against Israel's deadly war in Gaza. Sarsgaard was given a desk appearance ticket for criminal trespassing, the outlet reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Post's report. The arrest of Sarsgaard, along with dozens of others, came after anti-war student activists occupied part of the main Butler library building on Columbia University for several hours in a show of solidarity with Palestinian liberation. Renaming the space the Basel al-Araj People's University, the students hung a sign that read 'Strike for Gaza' while others distributed pamphlets calling on the university to divest from funds and businesses involved in Israel's war there. Videos posted on social media showed students also locking arms and chanting: 'We have nothing to lose but our chains!' In response, university officials called in the police, leading to many students being forcefully arrested. A statement on Wednesday from the university's acting president, Claire Shipman, said: 'Disruptions to our academic activities will not be tolerated and are violations of our rules and policies; this is especially unacceptable while our students study and prepare for final exams.' Meanwhile, a separate statement on social media from student activists said: 'We are facing one of the largest militarized police forces in the world. Deputized public safety officers have choked and beaten us, but we have not wavered … We will not be useless intellectuals. Palestine is our compass, and we stand strong in the face of violent repression.' After the protests, Columbia University and its sister school Barnard College issued temporary suspensions to four student journalists who reported on the demonstrations at the library for Columbia Spectator and WKCR. The Columbia Spectator reported that the students identified themselves as press to public safety officers. According to the outlet, the students received email notices of their temporary suspensions on Thursday afternoon from rules administrator Gregory Wawro and Barnard dean Leslie Grinage. In his email to one of the student reporters, Wawro said the student may have 'participated in a disruptive protest in 301 Butler Library'. Grinage wrote to the three other student reporters saying that their 'alleged actions at Butler Library pose an ongoing threat of disruption of, or interference with, normal operations at both Barnard and Columbia'. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Columbia University lifted its temporary suspension of one of the student reporters approximately five hours after the initial notification, the Columbia Spectator reports. At about 9am on Friday, Barnard College lifted the suspensions of the three other student journalists. The latest wave of student-led anti-war demonstrations at Columbia University come amid the the Trump administration's sweeping crackdowns on student protests and free speech across US universities as Israel continues its deadly attacks on Gaza. In recent months, federal officials have detained numerous students for their anti-war activism, including Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and green-card holder who was recently released. Others detained include Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who remains in custody at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.
