Social media users are saying The Simpsons predicted teen climate activist Greta Thurnbeg and honestly? It’s not all that crazy.
It’s been said before, but let’s just say it again for good measure: the creators behind The Simpsons are all psychic and use their animated television show to give us tiny peeks into the future — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And apparently their latest prediction has to do with the 16-year-old Swedish girl who’s incited a worldwide war on climate change.
Let’s back up for a second: what makes us so sure “The Simpsons” can predict the future?
Well, remember when that guy Donald Trump was inexplicably elected as the 45th president of the United States back in 2016? Yeah, same. But do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when the exact same thing happened, a whole 16 years earlier ?
In the 2000 episode, “Bart to the Future”, we see Lisa as the newly elected U.S. president sitting in the Oval Office where she remarks, “We’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”
Show writer Dan Greaney said they aren’t actually psychic, just awfully good at predicting worst-case-scenarios.
“It was a warning to America,” he told the Hollywood Reporter . “That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane.”
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Echoing this, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening told The Guardian , “We predicted that he would be president back in 2000 — but [Trump] was of course the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at that time, and that’s still true. It’s beyond satire.”
That’s not all “The Simpsons” has seemingly predicted during its 30-year run.
As reported by Time , they’ve actually been right about a shocking number of future events and products, including Smartwatches, the Ebola outbreak in America, and Disney’s takeover of Fox, just to name a few.
Spooked yet? Just wait, it gets weirder.
Now people are saying that the show has been predicting Greta Thunberg all along, ever since it first hit the air in 1989.
In fact, they think that we’ve been watching Thunberg on television without even realizing it, claiming that this passionate environmental activist bears a striking similarity to Lisa Simpson.
The perpetually eight-year-old Lisa has long delivered speeches to her family, friends, and fellow Springfield residents, imploring them to think about their planet and the crisis it faces. Sounds pretty similar to Ms. Thunberg, doesn’t she?
Just this week, Thunberg appeared at the UN Climate Action Summit where she scolded world leaders for neglecting to take action against climate change.
According to LadBible , many fans of The Simpsons thought her impassioned speech sounded quite similar to those Lisa has been making throughout her show’s 30-year run.
As seen in the clip below, in a 2009 episode of The Simpsons Lisa tells her class, “There is no Springfield 50 years in the future! With global warming trapping CO2 in our poisonous atmosphere, our superheated oceans will rise, drowning our lowlands, leveling what’s left of humanity baking in deserts that once fed the world! And in the new Nineveh, darkness falls.”
Whether you think “The Simpsons” predicted Thunberg or not, I think we can all agree she’s basically the real-life version of Lisa.
And the internet certainly thinks so, too. One Twitter user wrote, “Greta Thunberg is Lisa Simpson in real life if u think about it,” and another agreed, adding, “Greta Thunberg is a real life Lisa Simpson and I respect that.”
In the show, Lisa eventually succeeds Trump as president, and while it’s unlikely we’ll see her IRL counterpart do the same, we can only hope that someone with similar principles and a similar passion for the planet does.
