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Imagine a world in which one in every 20 of us, approximately 6% of the population, owns not just a gun but a military-style assault rifle. We're talking about a weapon like the one that killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, less than a year ago, or that just recently slaughtered five people and wounded eight at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. Mind you, close to 30% of American adults evidently own at least one gun of some sort (48% of White men). When it's a matter of arming civilians, no other country comes close, not even Yemen, a land in a devastating civil war.
So, who could be surprised that, by mid-April of this year, there had already been at least 160 mass killings (in which four or more people die or are injured) at places ranging from that bank to a birthday party, from a private Christian elementary school to a university campus, from a farm to a Metro station in Washington? And that's just to begin an endless and fast-growing list. In this country, you can no longer take a chance on being a Black teenager who ends up at the wrong door looking for his younger brothers or a 20-year-old White woman (who dreams of being a Marine biologist) in a car that accidentally turns into the wrong driveway.
Now, if that isn't bad enough, imagine an ever-more-armed country in which the right wing "" those TomDispatch regular Stan Cox refers to today as ecofascists "" have begun turning the green crisis on this planet into an excuse to kill anyone they dislike. It's a scary prospect in a nation that simply can't seem to imagine putting meaningful limits on our weaponry from hell. Tom
Not a Green Bone in Their White Bodies
How Ecofascists Are Fueling Racism and Deadly Violence
By Stan Cox
It's not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that's what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy.
In a press release, the group laid out its reasoning: "Clearly, DHS desperately wants to avoid the impossible task of explaining, in detail, why adding millions of illegal aliens to our population does not harm the environment, or why the harm it does cause is somehow 'worth it.'"
Ostensibly green rationales for ever harsher immigration policies are hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. and European anti-immigrant movements have long used the real need for environmental protection as an excuse for demanding ever harsher treatment of immigrants. Now, with drought, flooding, storms, and other manifestations of climate disruption swelling the ranks of people seeking refuge outside their home countries, far-rightists are dialing up their evocations of nature to push ever greater cruelty toward immigrants.
The pervasive theme in such circles is that, in an already overpopulated America, more millions of dark-skinned immigrants, having supposedly wreaked ecological destruction in their own countries in the Global South, are now crossing our borders in ever larger numbers. They will, so the thinking goes, despoil this country's environment, too "" and the only way to stop them is by using ever more violent means. The extremists peddling such propaganda are coming to be known these days as "ecofascists." Above all else, they insist, the United States must maintain white control over "our" country "" you know, the lands that our ancestors stole from Native peoples who actually knew how to live in harmony with nature.
In the process, such white supremacists are, without the slightest sense of irony, increasingly adopting the language of environmentalism to push both grotesque anti-immigrant bigotry and a broader, genuinely unnerving far-right agenda.
A Crueler Shade of Green
In the past few years, ecofascism has broken into the mainstream news cycle several times, most notably in connection with a grim set of mass shootings.
Nineteen-year-old Payton Gendron, who pled guilty to murdering 10 Blacks in a Buffalo grocery store last year, explicitly called himself an ecofascist. In the manifesto he left behind, he wrote,
"For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization."
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