Is there anything sadder than a Kneecap fan? Privileged kids in tricolour balaclavas leaping around like demented wombats. Bourgeois radicals donning IRA fancy dress in a desperate bid to annoy daddy. And the music! Perhaps those Provo tea cosies are designed to block out the tuneless warbling of this theatre-kid trio who larp as dangerous hoodlums.

The amazing lameness of Kneecap’s fanbase is summed up in new photos of Greta Thunberg at their Belfast gig on Thursday. She cuts a lonely, tragic figure in the swell of faux-punks. She’s wearing not only the tricolour balaclava but also that holiest garment of the smug set: the keffiyeh. All she needed was a Pride flag over her shoulders to perfect the trifecta of virtuous garb.

Thunberg embodies the Fisher-Price radicalism of the modern middle class. She is almost weighed down by her own virtue, no doubt struggling in the muggy heat under that woollen mask and Gaza pashmina

Thunberg embodies the Fisher-Price radicalism of the modern middle class. She is almost weighed down by her own virtue, no doubt struggling in the muggy heat under that woollen mask and Gaza pashmina. Still, what’s a little physical discomfort so long as you get to advertise your righteousness?

Greta and Kneecap might seem worlds apart, she is the daughter of an opera singer, they are the trackie-wearing tearaways of rap who chant ‘Get your Brits out’ for the titillation of Trinity kids and the English middle class. But in truth they’re a match made in heaven. Both do smug chic. Both hate Israel. And both pose as fearless speakers of truth to power and yet are fawned over by virtually the entire cultural establishment. How curious.

It is almost impossible to convey Kneecap’s staggering levels of cringe. But I’ll give it a whirl. ‘I’m a H.O.O.D / Low-life scum that’s what they say about me’, they rap on one of their audio atrocities. If you have to tell people you’re a ‘hood’, you probably aren’t. ‘Fuck the RUC!’, they rap about a police force that hasn’t existed since 2001. ‘I’m k-holed out my head / This shit puts rhinos to bed’, they yelp on ‘Rhino Ket’. Just FYI, one of them is in his thirties and is a former schoolteacher.

The funniest thing about Kneecap, the thing that definitely keeps them awake at night, is that the liberal elite loves them. ‘We’re mad rebels’, they rap on pretty much all the derivative slop they churn out. ‘Wow! Amazing!’, gushes every straight, prim self-styled guardian of culture. I bet it kills them.

The literal Guardian worships them like some exotic foreign tribe. It once published a fawning tribute on how these ‘bad boys’, wearing a ‘grin like a smiley shark’, chant ‘revolutionary slogans’ and mock ‘every old authority figure without fear’. Ireland’s state broadcaster – RTE – pants over their ‘gangster rap menace’ and ‘Beastie Boy gobbiness’. If that didn’t make you cringe, you might want to check your pulse.

Their gigs are thick with trust-fund radicals. I still chuckle at an Irish Times headline from a couple of years ago: ‘A middle-class millennial at a Kneecap gig – am I just cosplaying at republicanism?’ They flatter the punk pretensions of a gilded avant garde. They offer up a highly sanitised pantomime of ‘resistance’ that rich kids love and their parents write effusive newspaper columns about.

No wonder Greta is drawn to them. She, too, embodies a moral conformism that has the gall to wear the mask of radicalism. From her teenage climate-change alarmism to her more recent conversion to the cult of Israelophobia, she’s never once expressed an opinion that wouldn’t win giddy applause at a well-heeled soiree.

Thunberg went from crying over an eco-apocalypse that never came to raging against a genocide that never happened. As did the entire left. The moral thrill they once derived from pontificating about the heat-death of our planet they have more recently milked from what they grossly refer to as Israel’s holocaust in Gaza. The common factor is their own luxury apocalypticism, where they’re always seeking out the next world-ending calamity in an attempt to furnish their own dull, cushy lives with some semblance of purpose and urgency.

There’s hypocrisy here. There always is. Kneecap are alleged to have shouted ‘Up Hamas’ at one of their gigs. They are alleged to have waved the Hezbollah flag too. These are neo-fascist armies singularly devoted to the slaughter of Jewish people and the destruction of the Jewish state. Would Greta sway and sing to a band that had allegedly said ‘Up the KKK’ or waved a neo-Nazi flag? I doubt it.

She needn’t worry, though. She’s not going to get any flak. As a noisy devotee of the two main Kool-Aid cults of silver-spoon radicalism – climate doom and Israel hate – she’s a moral untouchable. I hope she and Kneecap are very happy together.