When your ideological commitment is the real root cause

A fascinatingly incoherent piece. From Two mass murders a world apart share a common theme: 'ecofascism' by Joel Achenbach. In the recent El Paso shooting, the press instantly tried to make this the act of a white supremacist. Of course that is a possibility. But as the shooter's manifesto has come out, that effort to impose a white supremacist narrative has become much more difficult. It appears to me that his justification (which might not be the same as his motivation) is some toxic mix of eco-extremism, xenophobia, and possibly nationalism.

Achenbach points out that this seems similar to the Christchurch, New Zealand shooter earlier this year, his manifesto also emphasizing immigration, overpopulation, environmental catastrophe and threat to the nation. The New Zealand shooter in turn took inspiration from the Norwegian shooter of 2011, also a xenophobic nationalist.

The chain goes on back from there. One enraged psychopath inspiring another, each being repurposed for the political debate of the moment. In Norway, when the mainstream media were pushing the notion that there was a Western anti-Muslim movement, the emphasis was on his hatred of Muslim immigrants when his actual words were about immigration in general. With the El Paso shooter, the mainstream media, with the collapse of their Russia-Trump Collusion Hoax and its replacement with the Rising White Supremacy Hoax, are all in on the shooter being a white supremacist when his own words say eco-terrorist xenophobe.

Achenbach acknowledges the eco-terrorism element but wants to salvage the white supremacy aspect. He also appears to want to segregate the apocalyptic existential extremism of the AGW movement from the clear impact of their messaging on these violent unsettled individuals.

Many white supremacists have latched onto environmental themes, drawing connections between the protection of nature and racial exclusion. These ideas have shown themselves to be particularly dangerous when adopted by unstable individuals prone to violence and convinced they must take drastic actions to stave off catastrophe.

So is the problem to do with extremist white supremacist language or is the problem to do with environmental extremism and totalitarian thinking.

Or maybe neither. These mass killers do not seem crazy in our vernacular way of thinking about it. The tragedy is that they show too much calm planning and self-control, not too little.

I reject the proposition that specific words, dog whistles, engender specific responses. Palin did not cause Gifford being shot.

Words are consequential but not in that fashion. We know that people are far less susceptible to reasoned argument than we might wish. We also know, as did the ancients, that the power of rhetoric is through getting people to change their minds based on emotion rather than evidence, reason, and logic. We all of us communicate through the energy of rhetoric.

We also know that our psychiatric and psychological knowledge is still too rudimentary to forecast which individuals are likely to be mere cranks and which are likely to turn violent.

If there is a single paragraph in Achenbach's piece which seems to most demonstrate incoherence, it is:

In recent years, the mainstream environmental movement has moved strongly in the direction of social justice - the very opposite of what hate groups seek. Now the leaders of those organizations fear white nationalists are using green messages to lure young people to embrace racist and nativist agendas.

Yes, much of the environmental movement has adopted the totalitarian socialist ideology of social justice and been coopted by statism. But it does not follow that that is the "very opposite of what hate groups seek." Totalitarian systems, social justice or otherwise, are always violent suppressors of human rights. The entire AGW movement is profoundly statist and anti-human. Eliminationist rhetoric is rife as is disdain for those who insist on reasoned argument and evidence. Hate groups and social justice groups may have different goals but they are both powered by hatred of the other.

And both reject the humanitarianism, reason, and respect which are the bedrock of Classical Liberalism.

"Now the leaders of those organizations fear white nationalists are using green messages to lure young people to embrace racist and nativist agendas" - what poppycock. All those trying to create a white nationalist movement or white supremacist movement out of whole cloth cannot even define what those terms mean, much less identify individuals. Who are these white nationalists trying to lure young people into racist agendas. And notice how they are now conflating racist with nativist. They are rhetorically attempting to redefine terms so that looking out for your own national interests is inherently racist. A clever trick if you can pull it off. But the logical and evidentiary incoherence tend to stop this nonsense from taking root to broadly.

There is more such desperate pleading.

Michelle Chan, vice president of programs for Friends of the Earth, said, "The key thing to understand here is that ecofascism is more an expression of white supremacy than it is an expression of environmentalism."

A claim not made decades ago when the Rainbow Warrior, for example, was in its prime, taking direct action against those whose actions it condemned. Even then, apocalyptic violent rhetoric was the norm.

The world is sick and dying, the people will rise up like Warriors of the Rainbow.

The actions looked similar, the language was similar, but no one claimed then that it was an expression of white supremacy.

There is no escaping that when you use apocalyptic language and encourage physical confrontations, others may respond in kind.

Environmental activists want to create a sense of urgency about climate change, the loss of biodiversity and other insults to the natural world, but they don't want their messages to drive people into deranged ideologies.

Well, yes. But when you propagate 30 years of hysterical ten-years-till-doom forecasts, that is the risk you run. And whether that hysteria is picked up by the all-to-plentiful social justice warriors, or the vanishingly rare white supremacists, it is the fanned fanaticism which is the problem.

There is plenty more refutable nonsense in the piece.