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There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly Black, brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at all. We’ve seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill immigrants whom he falsely blamed for putting strain on the environment. And we saw it in the white vigilante violence in the vacuum after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so frequently, it even has a name: ecofascism.
After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When climate change upends communities with far fewer defenses—communities that hate groups already scapegoat—the results will be catastrophic.
It’s never been clearer that a large chunk of the nation’s top Republican leaders will embrace and even fuel this extremism and hate. The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate denial has near-perfect overlap, but even if these figures deny the climate crisis, they’ll still look to exploit it. At the end of the day, their goal is to use easy-to-disprove lies to build and consolidate power.
Fixing a mess like this absolutely has to be part of the process of addressing climate change. Accountability for those who incited extremists is a good place to start. […]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES • THE BRIEF
QUOTATION
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.” ~~Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orations, The fourteen orations against Marcus Antonius (63 BCE)
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2007—The Uniter Divides: Bush plan fractures the DLC:
Well, the reviews are in. Bush’s 11% doctrine speech was a
bombIED.So now, the scramble is on for politicians of all stripes to distance themselves from his idiotic “plan.” Of course, that surge was well underway even before the teleprompter was even hooked up, and Democratic presidential candidates were among the first to find their way to the microphones.
I’d round ’em up for you, but that’s not actually what this post is about. This post is about the few “Democrats” who didn’t distance themselves. No Democratic presidential candidate was that stupid, of course. And no, I’m not even talking about Lieberman.
I’m talking about the DLC wonks.
In yesterday’s LA Times, Will Marshall stunk up the joint on behalf of the DLC, from his perch at the “Progressive Policy Institute,” the DLC’s “think” tank:
“Conventional wisdom says that presidential candidates who want to be responsible on this are going to hurt themselves with the angry, impassioned activist left,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “But the activist left is out of sync with the American public. Americans don’t want to concede this is a total debacle.”
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