Eco-Fascism Online: Conceptualizing Far-Right Actors’ Response to Climate Change on Stormfront

Abstract

Expressions of ‘eco-fascism’ are said to entail ethnonationalist actors advocating extreme population control measures, and accelerationists hastening the collapse of societies worldwide. These expressions emerge from political-ideological environments in which Global North actors have erroneously assigned blame for climate change with the Global South, through rhetoric about migration, population control and fossil fuel usage. To assess the influence of these themes in the development of eco-fascist ideologies online, this paper presents insights from a mixed-methods analysis of climate change discussions on Stormfront; the first dedicated online white nationalist media platform still drawing cross-national participation and viewership from generalized public audiences.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Hans-O. Pörtner, Debra C. Roberts, Melinda. Tignor, Elvira Poloczanska, Katja Mintenbeck, Andrés Alegría, Marlies Craig, Stefanie Langsdorf, Sina Löschke, Vincent Möller, Andrew Okem, Bardhyl Rama (eds.), “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022).

2 Migration Data Portal, “Environmental Migration”, last modified June 21, 2022, https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/environmental_migration_and_statistics, (accessed November 21, 2021).

3 Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience, (Norway: New Compass Press, 2011); Cassidy Thomas and Elhom Gosink, “At the Intersection of Eco-Crises, Eco-Anxiety, and Political Turbulence: A Primer on Twenty-First Century Ecofascism,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 20, no. 1–2 (2021), 30–54.

4 Eszter Szenes, “Neo-Nazi Environmentalism: The Linguistic Construction of Ecofascism in a Nordic Resistance Movement Manifesto,” Journal for Deradicalization 27 (2021): 146–192.

5 See e.g. commentary in Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2022).

6 Bernhard Forchtner, “Eco-Fascism: Justifications of Terrorist Violence in the Christchurch Mosque Shooting and the El Paso Shooting,” OpenDemocracy, last modified August 13, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/eco-fascism-justifications-terrorist-violence-christchurch-mosque-shooting-and-el-paso-shooting/ (accessed November 1, 2019).

7 Michael Minkenberg, The Radical Right in Eastern Europe: Democracy Under Siege? (New York: Springer, 2017).

8 Elisabeth Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe: Success or Failure? (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013).

9 Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2019).

10 Michael E. Zimmerman, “The Threat of Ecofascism,” Social Theory and Practice 21, no. 2 (1995): 207–238.

11 Blair Taylor, “Alt-Right Ecology: Ecofascism and Far-Right Environmentalism in the United States,” in The Far Right and the Environment, ed. Bernhard Forchtner, (London: Routledge, 2019), 275–292; Marcia Allison, “‘So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish!’: Urban Dolphins as Ecofascist Fake News During COVID-19,” Journal of Environmental Media 1, no. 1 (2020): 4.

12 Andy Fleming, “The Meanings of Eco-Fasicsm”, Overland, last updated June 9, 2021, https://overland.org.au/2021/06/the-meanings-of-eco-fascism/ (accessed October 10, 2021).

13 Imogen Richards and Mark Wood. “Legal and Security Frameworks for Responding to Online Violent Extremism: A Comparison of Far-Right and Jihadist Contexts,” in The Handbook of Collective Violence: Current Developments and Understanding, ed. Carol A. Ireland, Michael Lewis, Anthony Lopez, and Jane L. Ireland (London: Routledge, 2020), 112–124.

14 See Balša Lubarda, “Beyond Ecofascism? Far-Right Ecologism (FRE) as a Framework for Future Inquiries,” Environmental Values 29, no. 6 (2020): 713–732.

15 Cassidy Thomas and Elhom Gosink, “At the Intersection of Eco-Crises, Eco-Anxiety, and Political Turbulence: A Primer on Twenty-First Century Ecofascism,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 20, no. 1–2 (2021): 30–54.

16 Graham Macklin, “The Extreme Right, Climate Change and Terrorism”, Terrorism and Political Violence (2022): 1–18, doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2022.2069928.

17 Marco Armiero, “Introduction: Fascism and nature,” Modern Italy 19, no. 3 (2014): 241–245.

18 Kristy Campion, “Defining Ecofascism: Historical Foundations and Contemporary Interpretations in the Extreme Right,” Terrorism and Political Violence (2021): 1–19, doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2021.1987895

19 Brian Hughes, Dave Jones and Amarnath Amarasingam, “Ecofascism: An Examination of the Far-Right/Ecology Nexus in the Online Space,” Terrorism and Political Violence 34, no. 5 (2022): 1–27, doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2022.2069932; Moore and Alex, The Rise of Ecofascism.

20 See Jordan Dyett and Cassidy Thomas, “Overpopulation Discourse: Patriarchy, Racism, and the Specter of Ecofascism,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 18, no. 1–2 (2019): 205–224.

21 See also Alexander Reid Ross and Emmi Bevensee, “Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism Means Grappling with Complex Systems,” CARR Research Insight 2020.3 (2020), 1–31.

22 Bernhard Forchtner, ed., The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication (London: Routledge, 2019).

23 Graham Macklin, “The Extreme Right, Climate Change and Terrorism”; Daniel Rueda, “Neoecofascism: the Example of the United States,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 14, no. 2 (2020): 95–126.

24 Macklin, “The Extreme Right, Climate Change and Terrorism”; see also Joshua Farrell-Molloy and Graham Macklin, “Ted Kaczynski, Anti-Technology Radicalism and Eco-Fascism,” last modified June 15, 2022, https://icct.nl/publication/ted-kaczynski-anti-technology-radicalism-and-eco-fascism/

25 Moore and Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism.

26 Ross and Bevensee, “Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism”; Spencer Sunshine, “Rebranding Fascism: National-anarchists,” The Public Eye Magazine 23, no. 4 (2008).

27 Eric Neumayer, “The Environment: One More Reason to Keep Immigrants Out?” Ecological Economics 59, no. 2 (2006): 204–207.

28 For a rejoinder see Jason Hickel, Paul Brockway, Giorgos Kallis, Lorenz Keyßer, Manfred Lenzen, Aljoša Slameršak, Julia Steinberger, and Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, “Urgent Need for Post-Growth Climate Mitigation Scenarios,” Nature Energy 6, no. 8 (2021): 766–768; Hendrixson, Anne, and Betsy Hartmann, “Threats and Burdens: Challenging Scarcity-Driven Narratives of ‘Overpopulation’,” Geoforum 101 (2019): 250–259.

29 Hughes, Jones and Amaransingam, “Ecofascism”.

30 Elisabeth Jeffries, “Nationalist Advance,” Nature Climate Change 7, no. 7 (2017): 469–471.

31 Ross and Bevensee, “Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism”, 27.

32 Mark A. Wood, Imogen Richards and Mary Iliadis. Criminologists in the Media: A Study of Newsmaking (London: Routledge, 2022), 33, 34; see also Paolo Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas, eds, Why Philosophy? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2019).

33 See Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018); Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (Phildelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

34 Michael Loadenthal, “Feral Fascists and Deep Green Guerrillas: Infrastructural Attack and Accelerationist Terror,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 15, no. 1 (2022): 169–208.

35 Macklin, “The Extreme Right, Climate Change and Terrorism”.

36 Jacob Kenton Smith, “The (Re) emergence of Eco-Fascism: White-Nationalism, Sacrifice, and Proto-Fascism in the Circulation of Digital Rhetoric in the Ecological Far-Right” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2021), https://hdl.handle.net/2104/11491.

37 Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Washington: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009).

38 Neal Caren, Kay Jowers and Sarah Gaby, “A Social Movement Online Community: Stormfront and the White Nationalist Movement,” in Media, Movements, and Political Change, ed. Jennifer S. Earl and Deana A. Rohlinger (West Yorkshire: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2012), 163–193.

39 See Roger Griffin, “Notes on the Definition of Fascist Culture: the Prospects for Synergy between Liberal and Marxist Heuristics,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 42 (2001): 95–115.

40 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1990).

41 SPLC, “Stormfront,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/stormfront, (accessed June 1, 2022).

42 Aaron Winter, “Online Hate: from the Far-Right to the ‘Alt-Right’ and from the Margins to the Mainstream,” in Online Othering, ed. Emily Harner and Karen Lumsden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019), 39–63.

43 Stormfront.org, https://www.stormfront.org/forum/ (accessed June 1, 2022).

44 Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism.

45 Ibid.

46 SPLC, “Stormfront”.

47 Cloudflare is an American web infrastructure and website security company that provides protection against cyberattacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).

48 See Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today.

49 Neal Caren, Kay Jowers and Sarah Gaby, “A Social Movement Online Community: Stormfront and the White Nationalist Movement,” in Media, Movements, and Political Change, eds. Jennifer S. Earl and Deana A. Rohlinger (West Yorkshire: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2012), 163–193.

50 SPLC, “Stormfront”.

51 Ibid.

52 Joe Mulhall, “A Home for Hate”, Hope Not Hate, last modified February 10, 2018, https://hopenothate.org.uk/2018/02/10/a-home-for-hate/ (accessed June 1, 2022).

53 Gavan Titley, Racism and Media (London: Sage, 2019).

54 Sam Dickson is a white supremacist who has been associated with a range of extreme right groups in the US; Alexander Zaitchik, “From Atlanta to Asunción,” last modified October 19, 2006, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/atlanta-asunci%C3%B3n (accessed November 1, 2022).

55 Willis Carto was an American far-right political activist known for his pro-Nazi, antisemitism, anti-black racism and as the founder of the Institute for Historical Review - the first major American Holocaust-denial outfit; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Willis Carto”, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/willis-carto (accessed November 1, 2022).

56 Daniels, Cyber Racism; Winter, “Online hate”.

57 David Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (London: Verso Books, 2017), 111.

58 SPLC, “White Homicide Worldwide”, last modified April 1, 2014, https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/white-homicide-worldwide (accessed June 1, 2022).

59 Heidi Beirich, “20 Years of Hate,” SPLC, last modified June 10, 2015, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/20-years-hate (accessed June 1, 2022), Niewert, Alt-America.

60 April Glaser, ‘Major Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Website Stormfront Has Been Kicked Offline’, Slate, 27 August, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/stormfront-has-been-kicked-offline.html (accessed 1 June 2022).

61 Beirich, “20 Years of Hate”.

62 Glaser, “Major Ku Klux Klan”.

63 Beirich, “20 Years of Hate”.

64 Lorraine Bowman-Grieve, “Exploring ‘Stormfront’: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 11 (2009): 989–1007.

65 Ibid.

66 Michael Price, “‘It’s a Toxic Place.’ How the Online World of White Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics,” Science, last modified May 22, 2018, https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-toxic-place-how-online-world-white-nationalists-distorts-population-genetics (accessed 1 June 2022).

67 Ibid.

68 Assessed through a scoping exercise.

69 We do not link to this content.

70 Monika Pronczuk and Koba Ryckewaert, “A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting,” The New York Times, last modified June 9, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/world/europe/michael-woodley-buffalo-shooting.html?smid=tw-share (accessed 1 June, 2022).

71 Ibid.

72 Imogen Richards, “A Dialectical Approach to Online Propaganda: Australia’s United Patriots Front, Right-Wing Politics, and Islamic State,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1–2 (2019): 43–69.

73 Ana-Maria Bliuc, John Betts, Matteo Vergani, Muhammad Iqbal, and Kevin Dunn, “Collective Identity Changes in Far-Right Online Communities: The Role of Offline Intergroup Conflict,” New Media & Society 21, no. 8 (2019): 1770–1786.

74 Jenny Rowland-Shea and Sahir Doshi, ‘The Extremist Campaign to Blame Immigrants for U.S. Environmental Problems’, last modified February 1, 2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/extremist-campaign-blame-immigrants-u-s-environmental-problems/ (accessed 4 November 2022).

75 Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (London: Routledge, 2017).

76 See Loadenthal, “Feral Fascists”.

77 See Forchtner, The Far Right and the Environment.

78 Price, 2022, “It’s a toxic place”.

79 Graham D. Macklin, “Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 3 (2005): 301–326.

80 Daniela Pisoiu, “Subcultural Theory Applied to Jihadi and Right-Wing Radicalization in Germany,” Terrorism and Political Violence 27, no. 1 (2015): 9–28.

81 See Reuven. Y. Hazan, “Center Parties and Systemic Polarization: An Exploration of Recent Trends in Western Europe,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 7, no. 4 (1995), 421–445.

82 Griffin, “Notes on the definition of fascist culture”.

83 Daniels, Cyber Racism.

84 Beiner, Dangerous Minds.

85 Moore and Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism.