Eco-fascists' rise adds a hateful twist to the realities of climate change
newsdepo.com
Fascists and their enablers never miss a trick. They have displayed a remarkable knack for worming their way into virtually every corner of modern life, from our video games to our scientific pursuits. They seek out fresh recruits in every potential corner—Eco-fascists' rise adds a hateful twist to the realities of climate change
Fascists and their enablers never miss a trick. They have displayed a remarkable knack for worming their way into virtually every corner of modern life, from our video games to our scientific pursuits. They seek out fresh recruits in every potential corner—including among radicalized and disgruntled leftists, where they often form so-called “red-brown” alliances. The environment and its associated issues, in fact, have proven to be a fertile entry point for white supremacists over many years. Remember when white nationalists attempted to take over the Sierra Club, only to be rejected by a national campaign that exposed their surreptitious plan? That was 15 years ago. It hasn’t stopped. If anything, it has stepped up. These alliances are reaching a kind of zenith right now, largely thanks to the general surge in white-nationalist radicalization that’s been occurring online, inspiring multiple acts of domestic terrorism. Both the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooter and the zealot who murdered 21 in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart described environmental issues as components of their hateful, eliminationist racism in their respective manifestos. Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo just published a solid in-depth look at how eco-fascism is becoming the new entry point for white nationalist bigotry. As he explains, climate change is being accompanied by an apocalyptic discourse that reaches a fever pitch when white nationalists begin circulating claims of a “Great Replacement” of white people by hordes of brown-skinned invaders. What’s noteworthy is how cleverly white nationalists have positioned the outcomes of climate change—depicting them as so catastrophic that mass death is inevitable, with hordes of fleeing immigrants arriving on shores of majority-white nations. Two leading voices on the white nationalist right—41-year-old Richard Spencer and 68-year-old Jared Taylor—have staked out positions on the issue in ways that highlight the distinction between younger racists, who eagerly incorporate climate catastrophe into their worldview, and an older generation of white nationalists who remain skeptical. When asked by TPM about his views, Spencer described a vision of the future in which global populations began to move en masse, doubting that “everyone” would be able “to come north, in the sense that everyone is going to live in Western and central Europe and North America.” Read more