Devastation hits America once again—
another mass shooting.
Shoppers running for their lives.
An active shooter killing at least 18 people and injuring others.
Video posted on Twitter showing the chaos
as customers started being evacuated with their hands up.
In August 2019,
a 21-year-old man walked into a shopping mall in Texas
with an AK-47 and opened fire.
Police say 1,000 to 3,000 people were likely inside of the Walmart
at the time of the shooting.
They’re busting guns...
in Walmart right now.
AK. Somebody’s got shot.
I just want to know where my mom is.
Twenty-three people died,
making it one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history.
Right now, we have a manifesto from this individual
that indicates potential hate crime.
Shortly before the killing spree,
the shooter published a four-page declaration on 8chan
detailing his motivation.
“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,”
the author writes.
“If we can get rid of enough people,” he wrote,
“then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
This attack was motivated by an extremist ideology
known as eco-fascism,
the meeting point of environmentalism and far-right conspiracism.
Eco-fascism blames the environmental crisis
on overpopulation and migration,
often idealizing a supposedly racially pure past.
At its most violent extreme,
these ideas drive people to attack and kill,
and they carry a growing influence in far-right circles.
[DECADE OF HATE]
In March 2020, as the world went into lockdown,
videos began emerging on social media
of dolphins swimming through the canals of Venice
and elephants drunk on corn wine on Chinese tea plantations.
These images were shared and liked by millions of people on social media,
providing a brief dopamine hit as the pandemic raged.
But it turned out the videos were fake,
and they were being weaponized by far-right groups
to spread their dangerous ideology.
The texts that started going around were,
“Oh look, when humans take a step back
we see that nature and non-humans quickly flourish,
and isn’t that wonderful?”
The eco-fascist message that was being weaponized was:
humans are the virus on the planet
and we need to stop being so over-populated.
In order to do that,
it should be non-white people
who remove themselves from the European continent
and perhaps remove themselves entirely from this planet.
I believe the worst enemy of life is too much life—
the excess of human life.
Eco-fascism dates back to the early 20th century
and the man behind the creation of the Bronx Zoo in New York
and Glacier National Park in Montana.
Madison Grant was a conservationist
credited with saving many species of animals.
However, he was also a raging eugenicist
who wrote a book about racial purity called
a doctrine which Hitler later described as his Bible.
Today, eco-fascist rhetoric
has been adopted by far-right groups around the world,
who are now co-opting concerns around overpopulation,
globalization, and the climate crisis
to spread their own xenophobic messages.
We are being replaced by the mass of immigrants coming from Africa.
In Italy, a green branch of the neo-fascist party CasaPound
has taken a break from their usual anti-migrant propaganda
to launch a tree planting initiative.
Over in Sweden, the Green Brigade,
an eco-terrorist branch of The Base,
burnt down a mink skinning factory in 2019.
And in the UK,
the far-right group Patriotic Alternative
has used litter picking drives to greenwash white nationalism
as well as flying banners on British mountaintops
and at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.
To date, there hasn’t been a central figurehead or organization
for eco-fascists to rally around,
but that may be changing.
Over the past five years,
the so-called Pine Tree Gang has emerged on social media.
They’ve used this pine tree emoji,
which to 99 percent of the population is just a pine tree emoji,
it says, “Oh, I’m thinking about the trees and the environment.”
But to the 1 percent who have attributed that as meaning
“I am part of this deeper far-right ideology,”
the Pine Tree Gang are basically neo-Nazis,
people who feel maligned and forgotten about,
and maybe they use the environment to justify their feelings.
The group are believed to have formed
around the time of this Netflix series back in 2017
about a man who inspired the longest FBI manhunt in history.
The terrorist called Unabomber is planning to blow up an airliner
sometime during the next six days.
[THE HUNT FOR THE UNABOMBER]
Although he didn’t call himself an eco-fascist,
Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber,
orchestrated a 17-year bombing campaign
from his cabin in the woods of Montana
to fight industrialization and the destruction of nature.
The bomb on the Yale campus today
blew up in the computer sciences building.
A small bomb exploded in a mail pouch in the cargo hold.
Federal agents have taken into custody
a man they suspect as the Unabomber.
He was a hermit-type fellow.
He liked to read.
Stuff that you and I never even heard of.
I guess he’s idealized because he’s portrayed as
this misunderstood white man who’s too smart for his own good
and couldn’t fit in with society
because he knew better than other people.
And that’s how a lot of eco-fascists would see themselves
because they are marrying far-right ideology with far-left,
so there’s already not really a place for them in society.
And you therefore see these violent responses
like the mass shooting.
Many far-right news outlets and politicians
have capitalized on the climate debate
to peddle their anti-immigrant agenda,
and the message is breaking through into the mainstream.
Thanks to illegal immigration,
huge swathes of the region are covered with garbage and waste
that degrade the soil and kill wildlife.
If you claim to care about the environment,
you’d think that the little piece of America you’re responsible for,
that you represent in the Congress, would be clean.
But hers isn’t. Why?
Well, part of the reason is because
her district is actually one of the least American districts.
Tucker Carlson is using these kinds of tropes
that evoke an eco-fascist ethos.
For example, saying that immigrants coming over
are outbreeding white people.
The Democratic Party
is trying to replace the current electorate with new people,
more obedient voters from the third world.
This goes all the way back to
these ideas of
You have Tucker,
you have people in political office
pass these kinds of conservationist bills
that restrict immigration on the basis of environmental damage.
Despite President Biden’s purported commitment
to protecting our environment,
his immigration policies will lead to the degradation of our borderlands,
including federally protected areas.
In this lawsuit, we allege the Biden administration
is violating the National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA,
so we are saying that by stopping the wall construction,
they’re violating NEPA because
it’s allowing more and more people come into this country, migrants,
and that’s having a devastating impact on our environment.
Trying to utilize an environmental issue
in order to spread what is really a xenophobic agenda.
Meanwhile, in France, far-right presidential contender Marine Le Pen
has reversed her party's traditional climate science skepticism
and now poses as an environmental champion,
proposing to make Europe the world’s leading ecological civilization
by strengthening borders and restricting the flow of migrants.
I’m taking the opportunity to present my ecological vision
to protect our shared home.
A vision based on a “local” model,
protected by borders and shared harmoniously.
The right wing is really drawing heavily on
ecological anti-immigration claims,
and that’s just going to get more and more significant
as we get more climate refugees as conditions worsen
and people look for somebody to blame.
And this far-right co-opting of environmental concerns
has a seriously dark history,
going all the way back to the Nazis.
Blood and soil, which is a term that has sort of resurfaced
since the Charlottesville riots in the United States.
Blood and soil.
And what this term blood and soil was referring to
is this ecological unity between the German people,
the German culture, and the German land.
We will not be replaced.
Blood and soil.
And this notion that corruption of just one of those things
leads to the deterioration of all of those things.
California is burning.
Today, there are 16 active fires.
It is the worst flooding Venice has seen in more than 50 years.
What can be one of the coldest places on Earth
is on fire.
Eco-fascism is an insidious ideology
that has the potential to tap into
some of the most festering anxieties of a younger population.
If that inability to address the climate crisis
persists among the mainstream political actors,
I think we’re going to see an increased shift towards
the polar extremes of the environmental movement.