Latest news with #Sarsgaard
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.
Courier-Mail
10-05-2025
- Courier-Mail
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard's daughter arrested during Columbia University protests
Don't miss out on the headlines from Celebrity Life. Followed categories will be added to My News. American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal's daughter Ramona Sarsgaard was arrested during the chaotic anti-Israel protests at Columbia University on Wednesday, police sources said. Ms Sarsgaard, 18, who attends Columbia College, was slapped with a desk appearance ticket for criminal trespassing, the sources told New York Post. The actress' daughter — who Gyllenhaal shares with actor 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 Ms Sarsgaard was one of those suspended. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ramona Sarsgaard on September 27, 2022. Picture: Matteo Prandoni/ / Shutterstock 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 coloured 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 Ms 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. Protesters take over the Columbia University library. Picture: Obtained by NY Post Ms 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 2250 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. Gyllenhaal shares her daughter with husband Peter Sarsgaard. Picture: Jason Crowley/ / Shutterstock 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, October 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 Ms Sarsgaard's role in the protest and whether she faced disciplinary action, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This article originally appeared on New York Post and was reproduced with permission Originally published as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard's daughter arrested during Columbia University protests
