James Lee Is The Environmentalist Movement’s Scott Roeder

by John Hawkins | September 2, 2010 5:23 pm

Unfortunately, there are dangerous kooks, trigger-happy wackos, and lone gunmen out there. Bad people exist. Crazy people exist — and every so often, one of them snaps and there’s a resulting body count. To most people, this is just a tragic fact of life.

However, to liberals in the media who are forever baffled by events that the average person has grasped since he was a child, these killers tend to break down into three groups. If they’re devout Muslims and are connected to terrorists, then they must have killed for some reason OTHER than their religion. If they’re conservative murderers, then they must have killed because of Glenn Beck, talk radio, the Tea Party movement, or whoever the hot conservative villain of the moment is and they’re obviously part of a wider trend. On the other hand, if they’re liberal, well then, at best the killer in question must be some random wacko who should immediately be forgotten. At worst, liberals try to paint leftward leaning killers as conservatives. They did this with Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell, who was a registered Democrat and the Holocaust museum shooter, James Von Brunn, who was an “anti-Christian, 9/11 ‘truther’ who hated the Bushes and ‘the neo-cons'”. — John Hawkins, “Liberal Violence: Five Names You Should Know”[1]

Yesterday, a surprisingly run-of-mill, left-wing enviro-wacko named James Lee took people hostage at the Discovery Channel headquarters[2].

Lee, who was inspired by Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ (The Turner Diaries of the wacky left, apparently) showed up at the building with guns, explosives, and a wacky manifesto[3] demanding that we reduce the human population. Happily, only one member of the human population, James Lee, was reduced during the stand-off. Granted, it might have been amusing to hear him rave about how inspirational Al Gore was when he was on trial, but the fact that he’s dead means that there’s no chance that some sympathetic left-wing judge might only give him a slap on the wrist.

Now, some people have latched on to the fact that Lee railed against “anchor babies” to try to portray him as an anti-immigration right-winger, but this is ignorance at best and disingenuousness at worst.

Many hard core environmentalists ARE anti-illegal immigration for a very obvious reason: People in poor countries have smaller carbon footprints than people in prosperous nations. In other words, the poorer people are, the less greenhouse gasses they pump out, and the happier the Al Gore crowd is. Granted, they don’t apply these rules to themselves, just as James Lee didn’t choose to lower the load on the planet by shooting himself in the head instead of taking hostages, but nevertheless, this is what they believe.

When I interviewed Roy Beck of NumbersUSA[4], the premier anti-illegal organization in America, he explained why the environmental aspect of the issue appeals to the LEft:

Right. NumbersUSA is a bit unusual in that you make a strong case that environmentalists should oppose illegal immigration. Talk about that argument for a minute.

Well, I mean especially with you writing for the Right Wing — we’re very clear that we are a non-ideological organization. We only deal with immigration, unlike an awful lot of groups that do deal with immigration and that are conservative, because they deal with a lot of conservative issues.

We deal just with immigration and we try to pull together people from the entire political spectrum. So we do. We attract a lot of environmentalists. We’ve got about 36 people who are either contractors or employees — and on that staff we have people across the political structure. We’ve got Republicans and Independents and Democrats and environmentalists and people who are pro-business and national sovereignty.

Except for a very small percentage of Americans, being for protecting the environmental resources of this country and the natural beauty and clean air is not something people disagree about.

The disagreement comes in how that’s done, how fast it’s done. Who pays for it? The regulations. You know that’s where the disagreements come from.

I actually covered environmental issues in the 1960s. I was one of the first reporters in the country that did that and what most people don’t know and the rest don’t remember — is the environmental movement in the 60s was actually about even Republicans and Democrats — but what’s happened over the last 20 years is that most of the really big groups, especially like the Sierra Club, have become pretty much wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party — and not just the subsidiaries, but the very left wing. That wing was there in the 60s, but it wasn’t the predominant wing. That wing of the environmental movement (wants) to change the whole structure of society and government, kind of the Green Party in Europe.

What we try to do on the environmental side is to say regardless of where you are on the environment, on what your solutions are, the fact is you will be unsuccessful in the long-term if you continue to fill the United States with massive population growth from immigration.

Immigration and the fertility of immigrants is the only long-term cause of the population growth in this country. …The fact is we have this ramp in population growth here which makes……. which constantly puts pressure on more regulation, more regimentation. So, at least for conservatives we’re saying the faster this population grows from immigration, the more pressure there is for bigger government, more regulation which you hate. If you’re a liberal, we say the more population growth from immigration we have, the less likely it is that we are to actually meet these environmental goals.

…Most people could understand that if you add three million people a year to your country, that’s going to have a lot of inter-environmental impact. And of that three million, about two and a half million of that three million can be accounted for from new immigrants, legal and illegal, and from the births of immigrants. That’s two and a half million a year. Again, it’s just like with the jobs. Why are we doing it to ourselves? We have all these falling apart roads and bridge infrastructure in this country that we can’t maintain because we’re so busy having to build the additional infrastructure to handle the immigrants.

If you read his manifesto, what Lee said is perfectly consistent with the environmental thinking there,

Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

Conservative objections to illegal immigration and anchor babies have nothing to do with “pollution babies.”

So, let’s cut to it: Should we blame Al Gore for this? How about James Hansen? What about James Cameron[5] who said, and I quote, “I believe in ecoterrorism.”

Well, in James Cameron’s case, yeah, he does deserve some of the blame. When you encourage ecoterrorism in the name of saving the environment, you’re advocating exactly the sort of thing that James Lee did.

As to the rest of the environmental movement that doesn’t go to that extreme, there’s a very strong comparison that can be made between James Lee and Scott Roeder, the man who killed George Tiller. Both the anti-abortion movement and the environmentalist movement are large, strident about what they believe, and for the most part, reject violence. In fact, given the way that so many liberals have winked at groups like ELF, I would say that the anti-abortion movement takes a much tougher line on violence than the environmental movement.

Yet, liberals tried to use Scott Roeder to smear the entire anti-abortion movement. I didn’t agree with that when it was done and I won’t use James Lee to smear the entire environmental movement. But, I will say that Lee is very comparable to Roeder and if you thought Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Christians across the country had a responsibility to apologize and speak out after Tiller was murdered, then unless you’re an incredible hypocrite, you should be demanding that Al Gore, Daniel Quinn and environmentalists across the country apologize and speak out. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.