Ecofascism: Where the Far Left and Far Right Kiss

Hey Hot Cakes,

We’re gonna take next week off the newsletter, so we’re making this week’s edition FREE! So please share with impunity! Also, in some good climate news: Scott Morrison lost the Australia election. You might remember him from the 2020 Australia fires when he tried to normalize it all to children. Fuck that guy. Good riddance.

Ecofascism: Where the Far Left and Far Right Kiss

By Amy Westervelt

There’s always been the potential for far-leftists to go so far left they end up shaking hands with the far right, and we’re seeing a real uptick of it lately. The biggest defender of Tucker Carlson in the wake of the Buffalo shooting wasn’t Ben Shapiro or Laura Ingraham, for example. It was self-professed leftist Glen Greenwald, and a whole tribe of other supposedly far-left folks who seem to share the anti-establishment but pro-fascist tendencies of the far-right. Almost as soon as the Republican party tried to refashion itself into the party of working-class people, a small but growing group of leftists was like “these guys are alright actually.” So far, I’m mostly (thought not exclusively) seeing white men do this, and when they do they often embrace the "freedom" provided by racism, transphobia, and misogyny and complain about the constraints of “wokism." There are, of course, valid arguments to be made about how Democrats handle race and identity, but what I’m talking about here is self-proclaimed far-left folks finding leftist cover for white supremacist or fascist ideas. It’s showing up big time amongst ecofascists, many of whom, like the Buffalo shooter, do not identify as Republicans (too corporate), or even conservative, but as anarchists or socialists.

Why does this matter? Well, because assuming ecofascists only come in one flavor of Fox News-watching, MAGA-hat-wearing, gun-toting militiamen means you might miss one coming at you. In the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto, not only does he identify as an ecofascist and an environmentalist, he also declares himself against corporate control, then launches into rants about overpopulation that are frankly pretty similar to what I see some climate people say on Twitter (remember that Michael Moore movie anyone?)

This thin veil of leftism covering fascist tendencies is nothing new, of course. As we mentioned on the podcast this week, ecofascism is relatively old. Most of the modern ecofascists point to the Nazis as their forefathers, but that’s more of a stylistic choice than a historically accurate one. The Nazi party did have a “green wing,” and they embraced the “blood and soil” idea, where preserving the purity of bloodlines was connected to preserving pristine nature. But those ideas trace back hundreds of years in German history, with multiple waves of public intellectuals who combined a love of nature with a hatred of immigrants and race mixing, and used science both to understand nature and to categorize and "other" humans.

Over in the U.S., the likes of John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Madison Grant—the fathers of the conservation movement— frequently combined the ideas of conservation and white supremacy too, of course. Fast forward to the 1970s in the U.S. when the conservation movement gave way to the environmental movement, and things start to get a bit blurrier. While good white liberals in California were far too polite and educated to espouse eugenics, they absolutely began using the idea of overpopulation as a threat to the Earth to justify some very eugenicist leanings. Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb—which warned that at their current rate, humans would exhaust Earth’s resources in just a few decades—was intended to be a wakeup call about consumption and the myth of endless growth, but provided all the evidence that folks like John Tanton— “father of the modern anti-immigration movement.” and a hardcore environmentalist— needed. Armed with the overpopulation argument, Tanton began to speak more and more openly about the dangers of immigration. And if you think all that died with Muir, or even Tanton, think again. A few years back when I was working on a story about the population argument for The Guardian, a very high-level professor at Stanford said to me without an ounce of hesitation: “Well if I have more kids they’re more likely to actually do something about climate, so it’s not really fair to compare me with some woman in Africa who’s having eight kids.” That lady was a Democrat and ran a center studying energy efficiency, folks, not a MAGA hat in sight. What a nice white liberal.

Ecofascist groups dabble in woke-washing too. Remember the QAnon Shaman? He is a self professed ecofascist too, and his way into it all was an obsession with healthy living and wellness, an “organic lifestyle.” The mashup of wellness and ecofascism is sadly nothing new either, there are major strains of it throughout Nazi history and it’s currently making a comeback in Germany. Here, too, one of the groups Tanton inspired, Progressives for Immigration Reform, is alive and well and making videos like this one called “Let’s Make America Green Again,”which starts by waxing poetic about Rachel Carson and conservation and ends up arguing for applying environmental laws that require environmental impact reports to population growth. But its chairman, Frank L. Morris, is a one-time civil rights leader, former Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a Black man who regularly makes the argument that being anti-immigration doesn’t make you racist. (It just makes you pro nature, I guess?)

It’s a lot of the same tactics that we see oil companies using, and of course fascism is no more a cure for the climate crisis than fossil fuels. For the millionth time, if we want climate solutions that deliver a better world, we have to do the work of envisioning and building that world. The alternative is a fascist, feudal hellscape no one wants to live in.

When “Believing the Science” Goes Wrong

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

As you’ve all heard by now, last weekend, a self-avowed eco-fascist committed mass murder in a predominantly Black grocery store in Buffalo, New York. He planned the attack for months, picked his prey with precision, wrote a manifesto (180 pages!), and live-streamed the whole thing on Twitch. For those of you who’ve been paying attention to climate for a while now, this brings back not-yet-faded memories of the 2019 shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, targeting refugees, and the El Paso shooting, targeting immigrants.

In all three of these cases, the shooters were inspired by a strain of the Great Replacement Theory that has morphed to include the climate crisis. This subtheory eschews the traditional right wing talking point that climate change is merely a hoax. Instead, it takes the climate crisis deadly seriously. They believe that climate change is already putting dire constraints on our resources: water, land, food. They believe that accelerating chaos will lead to greater violence and greater instability.

Now, let’s be clear: the people they’re scapegoating for the crisis are the exact opposite of the people who caused it. Immigrants and refugees and people of color by and large have the smallest contributions to the climate crisis, and if you really want to blame someone, grab a pitchfork and let’s go eat the rich. I’ll bring the hot sauce.

The truly scary thing is: they’re not wrong. At least not about the problem. They’re deeply wrong about the causes, and about the solutions. But not about the problem. (This is why Amy and I are so committed to using our platform to talk about the causes of climate change just as much as anything else. It’s important!) In other words, ecofascists believe the science. And they’re willing to kill because of it.

I want to go back to a once-popular assumption on the left that once folks on the right realized that climate change was real, they’d come around to working on common sense solutions right alongside the leftists. I’m old enough to remember when we celebrated the rising numbers of young Republicans who believed in climate science. But, now we know what they are willing to do with that knowledge. The shooters in Buffalo, El Paso, and Christchurch were all young white men who have been exposed to a heavy diet of misinformation in the form of message boards and the rightwing media ecosystem. (Keep in mind the Christchurch shooter was Australian, and that’s where Rupert Murdoch rests his head.) All three of them realized no one was doing anything about this crisis and, instead of turning on their own political leaders, decided that they had to take matters into their own hands to protect them and theirs.

It reminds me of something Naomi Klein said in 2020, as Australia burned and the coronavirus had not yet infected the globe:

If you convince those people climate change really is real, or if it just becomes so obvious that they can no longer deny it, they don’t suddenly want to sign onto the Paris Agreement. What actually happens is they apply that intensely hierarchical supremacist worldview to the reality that what climate change means is that the space for people to live well on this planet is contracting. More and more of us are going to have to live on less and less land, even if we do everything right. It’s already happening. So if you have that worldview, then you will apply it to people who are migrating to your country and to those who want to migrate to your country. We will harden the narratives that say those people deserve what they get because they’re inferior and we deserve what we have because we’re superior. In other words, the racism will get worse.

As far as I am concerned, this is the real terror of climate change. Not the storms, not the fires. It’s the hatred, and how far people are willing to take it. White supremacy has always been a zero sum game that operates on the assumption of scarcity. Well, climate change makes that scarcity real. So now what?

As Klein argues, there’s no way out of this without confronting white supremacy, but it would help if there actually was some climate action to speak of. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is carrying on with the status quo—losing voters on the left and inspiring manifestos on the right. I do not like these odds.

P.S. If you want more reading about the ecofascist undertones of this shooting, here’s a handful of articles:

The Buffalo Shooter and the Rise of Ecofascist Extremists

Buffalo suspect may be latest mass shooter motivated by 'eco-fascism'

Eco-fascism: The greenwashing of the far right

Suspect in Buffalo rampage cited 'ecofascism' to justify actions

The Rebecca Solnit Redux

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

In this week’s podcast episode, Amy and I got to talk to one of our favorite writers on earth: Rebecca Solnit. We got to ask her our burning questions about the leaked opinion on Roe vs. Wade and about mansplaining. (If you’re wondering, YES, men have explained Men Explain Things to her.) We also talked about the crisis of imagination and the danger of thinking that you, alone, can fix anything.

Rebecca has spent a lot of time in New Orleans around both Katrina and the BP Oil Spill, so we wrapped up by talking about the importance of community and all the things that can be learned from a city that has been on the frontlines of the crisis for so long. Many of you might know Rebecca for her book Hope in the Dark, so it shouldn’t surprise you that she’s launching a new project to do even more to keep hope alive in the climate movement.

It was a big, beautiful spiral of a conversation that displayed the hopes and frustrations and fears of doing climate work long term. I really encourage you to listen to it when you have a moment—I know I’ll be listening to it over and over again. But if you’re more of a reader than a listener, here’s a list of the resources that came up in our conversation for you to peruse at your leisure. (Note all the bookstores are either local New Orleans bookstores or Rebecca’s own favorite bookstore in San Francisco.)

Books

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedekar

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

Essays

The Wheel of First Time Climate Dudes by Emily Atkin

Jonathan Safran Foer and the Limits of Liberal Climate Politics by Kate Aronoff

Rebecca Solnit: When the Hero is the Problem

All Organizing is Science Fiction by Adrienne Maree-Brown

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/

How Texas Became the Blueprint for the Right’s Capture-the-Courts Plan

By Amy Westervelt

More trash from the Supreme Court this week: Now, thanks to Ted Cruz, you can give a personal loan to your campaign that you can then recoup. As if it weren’t easy enough to contribute dark money to a campaign, now you can disguise it as a personal loan. Can we say money laundering anyone? Bribes? Good stuff. It also serves as a really good reminder that before he was the most annoying senator or the most likely Zodiac killer suspect, Cruz was a lawyer. And a good one too, because he’s completely lacking in any motivating force other than self interest.

Of course, we can’t talk about how politically captured the Supreme Court is, or what a piece of shit Ted Cruz is, without talking about Texas, and specifically about how Texas was the testing ground for the rightwing takeover of the judicial system.

It all began with the tobacco litigation in the 1990s. Several Democratic attorneys general filed suits against the tobacco companies for suppressing information about the health effects of smoking and knowingly putting citizens at an enormous risk. A whole bunch of cases eventually got lumped together into the Tobacco Master Settlement, the biggest loss ever (and probably still) for a major industry in the U.S. Obviously, Republicans couldn’t just let that stand. John Cornyn, as attorney general of Texas at the time, teamed up with a couple other attorneys general to form the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA, I wrote about them last week). But he also started thinking seriously about how to use his office to make constitutional changes, and his right-hand man in that endeavor was Ted Cruz, who Cornyn tapped as solicitor general of Texas in 2003. Cruz was just 31 at the time and he set about not just making the office ideological, but also putting both Texas and himself on the map, judicially speaking. Cruz was hell-bent on arguing as many cases in front of the Supreme Court as possible. He inserted himself, and therefore Texas, into any case with a constitutional bent. Death penalty cases, abortion, freedom of religion, gun control, you name it.

At the same time, Cruz and Cornyn began building a judicial machine in Texas. Cornyn formed a panel for picking judges back in the 80s that the two still run to this day. They claim it is bi-partisan although it rarely appoints a judge that’s not conservative. Members of the panel were selected from the most prestigious corporate law firms in town, all picking the judges they’d like to appear in front of. Many of the lawyers on the panel were eventually appointed to judgeships themselves. With judges strategically placed, the attorney general could file a case in a particular district, knowing more or less what the outcome would be, get it kicked up to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (where most of the judges are also beholden to Cruz, Cornyn, and their panel), and then argue it in such a way that it’s almost certain the Supreme Court will take up the case.

So what? Who cares? What does that all even mean? Well, Cornyn set up the infrastructure for Texas to file constitutional complaints over everything from gun laws to gay marriage to abortion to Obamacare. And to file those along with other Republican states. So now, any time Texas wants a law changed, all they have to do is file a complaint in the Rube Goldberg machine they’ve made out of the state’s court system, and watch the ball roll all the way to the Supreme Court, where they now also have a bunch of pals. It’s an end-run around democracy, pure and simple, and it’s completely radical. As long-time court watcher and investigative researcher Lisa Graves put it to me: “They may dress in suits and ties, but they are extremists who represent a radical ideology.”

P.S. Highly recommend This Land S2 for an example of this Texas legal approach in action. Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, put it through the machine and lo and behold it will be heard by the Supreme Court this session. It could potentially unravel tribal sovereignty, and lots of other civil rights.

Also, Mary will not let me talk about Ted Cruz without mention of her conspiracy theory.