The Atlantic

White Nationalists Discover the Environment

Instead of denying threats to the planet, far-right propagandists seize on them as another means of sowing racial panic.
Source: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Reuters

On Saturday, a gunman killed 21 people at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, Texas. Minutes before the shooting, a four-page rant seeming to justify the attack appeared online. It includes white-nationalist diatribes about “cultural and ethnic replacement” and an immigrant “invasion.” Horrific and familiar.

But the so-called manifesto includes another theme, which fits less obviously into the white-nationalist script: environmentalism. The American lifestyle is destroying the environment, the author declares. But the answer is not to ask native-born white Americans to change their ways. It is to rid the country of Latinos.

The manifesto references an earlier document written by the gunman who killed more than 50 Muslims this spring in Christchurch, New

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