Al Gore Lied, James J. Lee Died.
That’s the premise of this piece at Big Hollywood (warning: language). Author John Nolte writes:
[M]ost environmentalists are lying liars who know they’re lying. Because if you honestly believe man is destroying the planet, that the apocalypse is nigh, you prepare for it. Most coastal elites are Global Warming believers and yet Global Warming, we’re told, will make the oceans rise to the point that will someday put much of the coast, especially Manhattan underwater. So why aren’t coastal elites moving inland? Why aren’t they pulling a Lex Luthor and buying up all that cheap property that will someday be the new coast?
Strongly worded! And you gotta give him points for the Superman: The Movie reference (it is Big Hollywood), but he goes on to juxtapose Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth with the recent hostage situation at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland.
In that event, gunman James J. Lee (pictured) took several people hostage and, while they made it out alive, he didn’t. Police shot him and later safely detonated several explosive devices that he had strapped to his body.
Thing is, Lee was an environmental extremist who claimed on his MySpace page to have been “awakened” by watching Gore’s movie.
It’s easy, then, to do a variant of the “Bush lied, people died” mantra, as Nolte did in his post at Big Hollywood. But like the anti-Bush mantra, the anti-Gore one is problematic.
In both cases it is doubtful whether any actual lying occurred. For all I know, Bush believed what he told the American public regarding the state of affairs in Iraq before the war. Similarly, for all I know Gore believed everything he said in his movie.
His monster house and jet-setting lifestyle may make Gore a hypocrite, but hypocrisy and lying are two different (if related) moral faults. Nolte takes the edge off this a bit by only accusing Gore and most other environmentalists of lying “at a gut level” and saying that they intellectually believe their rhetoric. That’s a pretty big caveat in my book, and while there may still be an element of truth there, it makes it hard to call anybody who intellectually believes what they are saying a “liar.” Some other moral fault they may be charged with (not taking seriously their own rhetoric? being hypocrites?) but not lying.
Another problem is the insinuation that Gore is somehow responsible for Lee’s violent acts, which led to his death.
Toward the bottom of the post Nolte tries to take the edge of that insinuation by writing
Not for a second do I believe that Al Gore or anyone involved in the creation of “An Inconvenient Truth” wanted or even imagined that someday someone would strap on explosives, walk into a building with a daycare center, and take hostages in the hopes of terrorizing a cable outlet into creating more programming similar to “An Inconvenient Truth.” Nor do I believe that they — or anyone — is responsible for lunatics who take political messaging to a violent extreme.
Well then why did he do a variant of the “Bush lied, people died” mantra, which implies exactly that.
Perhaps because it looked like an easy way to make a point about the unjustness of the anti-Bush mantra. Or perhaps because the situation mirrors something that’s been bubbling through the media and blogosphere a lot in the last year: public worrying and hand-wringing about the possibility that pundits and other figures on the political right will get people so riled up that they turn to violence and “right-wing nut-jobs” start attacking people on the left or institutions of various kinds.
This kind of public non-accusation accusation is shameful. To blame people who are not (explicitly or implicitly) advocating violence for the violent acts of others is problematic on all kinds of fronts, not the least of which is that the accusation can be turned against anybody who advocates an opinion in public. You can always say, “Aren’t you worried that your advocacy of this issue will cause someone to go off the deep end in fashion X, Y, or Z, leading to tragedy?”
The fact is that there are always people who are going to go off the deep end. There are a certain number of people out there who are broken enough that they find something to obsess about and then use that to vent their destructive impulses. If it isn’t one thing, it’s going to be another, and you can’t blame public figures for it when that happens.
This does not let public figures off the hook. It does not allow them to rashly say anything under the sun. Ideas really do have consequences, and bad ideas can have very bad consequences indeed (cf. Communism, National Socialism, Eugenicism).
But it does mean that one should avoid the kind of cheap smears and insinuations that we’ve been seeing where speech not advocating violence is alleged to trigger violence.
In fact, James J. Lee has provided a good counter example. The next time someone someone says, “[Conservative figure of the day] is inciting violence by his speech that doesn’t advocate violence,” one can point to Lee and say, “So was Gore’s non-violence-advocating speech responsible for what happened at the Discovery Channel?”
Lee also revealed something else, and Nolte almost puts his finger on it in his Big Hollywood post. While charges of lying may not stick for “most environmentalists,” it is clear that much of the environmental movement is driven by an ideology that distorts the science in the area and that is treated almost like a religion at times. Nolte identifies it alternately as Marxism and Socialism, and there are certainly elements of those philosophies in environmental circles, but there is another and even more sinister ideology at work in the environmental movement: misanthropy—hostility towards mankind.
James J. Lee provided us with a clear illustration of this in the Manifesto he left behind (excerpts):
Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!
2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.
3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization. . . .
8. Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You’re the media, you can reach enough people. It’s your resposibility because you reach so many minds!!!
10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. . . .
Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.
For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!
It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES!
Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.
The humans? The planet does not need humans.
These are the demands and sayings of Lee.
It’s no surprise that Lee didn’t get along with the pro-life community in Washington.
Oh, and there’s this from his MySpace page:
12/13/06
Category: BloggingI finished reading Al Gore’s book, and inconvenient truth a few days ago. It was very enlightening. However, at the end he didn’t offer any real solutions, as if changing a lightbulb would even put a scratch in the global warming epidemic. The book was half good, which means the part about science was good. The rest seemed like a commercial for sainthood.
I re-read Genesis the first chapter. It was obviously written by a totalitarian farmer.
Let’s pray for Lee’s soul. . . . And let’s remember the lessons his example provides.
What are your thoughts?
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Madman + gun + mixed bag of ideas.
Ideas include:
“stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that”
“fraudulent peace movements”
Not sure what conclusions we can draw except keep guns from nutters.
If reducing the population is the big thing, surely we should encourage as many wars as possible? Why wait for natural attrition, especially when you’re not waiting as long as they are young?
I wonder if his rants will really get anyone talking about population and looking at the facts. I doubt it. If they did, they would realize Malthus and Paul Ehrlich (Population Bomb) were and are wrong and none of their dire predictions have ever come true. But, they don’t want the facts. They just want to blame having children on environmental problems that are caused by adults making poor decisions (and boy, we can make some really dumb decisions).
I’m almost eager to see if any zpg’ers (zero population control) can ramp up any energy off of Mr. Lee. I’d like to use their rhetoric against them. After years of hearing the abort crowd chant “Keep Your Laws Off my Uterus”, I’ll happily shout it back should they really push for the ‘one couple, one child’ policy Mr. Lee (and like minded people commenting on his death) would like to see as law. Irony, isn’t it beautiful sometimes?
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Lee’s words as insanity. They are actually quite logical, if you first accept his premise that humanity is destroying the Earth and that humans are “filth”. Everything else he has said fits with that evil philosophy.
-He condemns what he calls “anchor baby filth”. Why? Because he also says that Americans use far more of the planet’s resources than the people of any other nation. Thus “anchor babies”, meaning babies born in the United States of illegal immigrants, are going to use far more resources, and thus destroy the planet by Lee’s measure, far worse than if they were born in their parents’ native country.
-He condemns “fraudulent peace movements”. Why does he call them fraudulent? Because they do not demand a drastic reduction in the number of humans on the planet. By Lee’s reckoning, the more humans there are on the planet, the more wars there are. Therefore, unless you support a massive decrease in the number of people in the world, you cannot be anti-war. You are, as he says, a fraud.
-He hates war, but only because war hurts the planet. He would be very happy if every human being were to commit suicide, as long as in doing so we didn’t harm any plants or animals.
It seems to me that leftists and radical environmentalists are trying to convince us that Lee was nothing but a madman so that we won’t notice that all of his demands were actually perfectly logical, flowing precisely from his belief system that humans beings are evil creatures which should not exist in this world. And his belief system is not that much of a stretch from what a lot of these leftists and radical environmentalists preach. Just as Lee did, Al Gore and his acolytes preach that humanity is destroying the planet and that the human population needs to be severely reduced through birth control and abortion. The only difference between them and Lee is that Lee resorted to violence.
This is for Len who wrote: “Not sure what conclusions we can draw except keep guns from nutters.”
Might be a good idea to start by keeping explosives, like this chap had strapped to himself, away from “nutters” first. But, of course, explosives are already completely illegal (ACE hardware discintinued its line of C-4 just recently). My question, if a “nutter” can get explosives, which are completely illegal, how can one keep sociatally legal firearms out of the hands of the same “nutter”? In other words, you have a nice catch line for the issue but no solution. I suggest the “nutter” and the society that caused him/them is/are the problem, not the firearm or the explosives.
How do the editors of NCR turn the views of one crazed individual into a generalized and highly partisan attack on environmentalists? When did Catholic institutions like the NCR become such staunch backers of conservative politics that they flaunt the Church’s social teaching, which includes our obligation to be good stewards of the environment, to score low-minded partisan political points
This article is so far outside the Catholic tradition of basic decency and concern for social justice that one wonders what the editors see as their role within the Catholic community.
This is a bit of a side note, but as a whildbirth instructor, I think that many of the shows depicting birth on TLC actually do scare people away form birth. They depict it as an emergency and make natural childbirth look terrifying. If anything, our media has succeeded in making birth seem terrifying, which is quite far from the truth.
While I think there are many practical things environmentalists promote that help to make us good stewards of our earth, I have always been aware and suspicious that their ideology is about population control.
-I was working with a budding non-profit organization one time to help people remain in their homes as they age. The leadership started to get our organization involved with a non-denominational religious environmental group to partner with. On the front page of the environmentalist web-site they had a prayer for people to say. Within the prayer it stated something like, Lord, you have asked us to be fruitful and multiply, but we have sinned and over-populated our earth… I brought this to the attention of the leaders of my budding organization letting them know I completely disapproved of this, and that prayer was removed from the environmentalists web-site within a week. But I don’t doubt they still believed the statement because as I’ve researched other web sites I can usually find the population control issue somewhere within their information. I soon resigned my position on the board of directors of the budding organization as they remained partners with the environmentalist group.
-They really do believe humans are the cause, therefore humans need to be controlled. Until that thinking is eliminated I will steer clear of groups like that.
I wonder if this is somehow related to the several attacks by “madmen” to kindergartens in China. One there is one attack one can easily think: “well, this guy was nuts”. But when many similar attacks happen, one begins thinking of a conspiracy. Could it be that the kindergarten attackers had similar motivations as those of James J. Lee?
Frank,
There’s a difference between being a good steward of the environment (essentially the conservationist message) and being a kook-fringe population control advocate like so many in the modern environmentalist movement have become. Lee was just an extreme example of this.
Al Gore, James Lee, and Obama’s Czar John Holdren were/are all pushing population control for the sake of the environment and use the fake science of global warming to control societies and population. Yes they are LIARS.
(Don’t forget that AL Gore also “invented the internet” according to him.)
http://www.realcatholictv.com/cia/04GlobalWarming/ RealcatholicTV CIA on Global Warming
and
http://www.realcatholictv.com/cia/04GlobalWarming/advert.pdfon Global Warming. List of Scientists who disagree with Obama Administration.
The biggest hypocrite is Lee, since he still had a pulse when he advocated no more humans.
May he find rest for his soul in God.
As an environmental chemist, I have had the opportunity to speak to a great many persons of the Hollywood mentality, who have watched, “an inconvenient truth” and actually believed it! I have lost friendships because of this “tripe” and when I tell them that there is little scientific basis for the Gore propaganda and that a course or two in Math, Science, and Ethics would stand them in good stead, their eyes glaze over and roll back into their heads. When the science of the preceeding Ice ages and successive warming (solar) cycles are studied one begins to take a more rational view.
Man is to be the “good steward” of all that God has provided in the world and in this we can always do a better job. When we begin to think, act, and love sacrificially instead of selfishly, the world will be a much better place.
If we all took responsibility
Will you all please distinguish “Global Warming” and “Man made global warming” or “Climate change” and “man made climate change”. Climate change or global warming and cooling has been going on on this planet long before recorded history. i.e. Hot planet then Ice age then warming then mini ice age then warming etc. Those were the big effects. Science is/has discovered many smaller effects.
The real scientific question is NOT whether global warming exists NOR what the future effects will be but what are the causes. Many in the environmental movement as in Al Gore’s movie focus on proving that global warming exists and predicting the future consequences while accepting that the only or most significant cause is mankind due to CO2 emmissions. Then using the fallacious argument - Post hoc ergo propter hoc - because one thing comes after something else the former is the cause of the latter.
As James George explained in an earlier comment, there can be many things that man can do to to affect weather and climate. What is not yet known is the relative significance of each of these and whether all of these together are significant in relation to other natural causes such as changes in solar radiation. e.g Earth heating vs. other planets heating? Water vapor vs. CO2 in the atmosphere? Solar flares causing ionization of our atmosphere? Ozone effect? The mass of the earth is so large it is difficult to accept that these changes can have much of an effect overall except in the very long term. Local effects or short term effects are more likely.
While I would certainly agree that the science is settled that climate change and even specifically global warming is real the significant causes are in no way settled and aren’t likely to be settled without much more study.
The political issue is something else. It assumes without proof that CO2 emmissions are the ONLY or the most significant cause of the natural phenomenon of climate change. Conveniently, for the political supporters of redistribution of wealth, there is more energy use in the industrialized nations, read “rich” nations, which MAY (but they say does) lead to increased CO2 emmissions. Thus they promote a Cap and Trade solution which will have the effect of transferring cash to less industrialized nations. This will be paid for by a significant cost to the population of the industrialized world leading to a lower standard of living and presumably a higher standard of living for the previously poorer countries. We will then all have a mediocre standard of living but equally mediocre. By the way since these will be traded by brokers akin to a stock exchange I wonder who the brokers will be and what will be their commission? Al Gore?
Of course this is a long way from the beginning so everyone will just remember that Global warming is occurring so we must just accept cap and trade whatever the consequences to stop the climate from changing! When this is accomplished and the brokers are very rich and the rest of the world has an equally mediocre standard of living, what happens when the climate will still be changing?
Unfortunately some scientists are politicians. It is difficult for the non-scientists and non-politicians to understand whether their views are science or politics or is this modern political science?
I see this situation as a pefrect example for the re-examination of hate speech crimes - “obviously” Al Gore triggered this hateful response in another person. According to hate speech crime entusiasts, he should be held accountable!
With all due respect, Mr. Hewitt has expressed the situation best. Until we UNDERSTAND the science of Climate change without Man’s contribution AND until we understand the science of solar contribution over time. It is a fools errand to attempt to template mans contribution on top of the natural science. If we can understand the science behind the many previous ice ages before the emergence of man as an impact species, then we will be on the way toward understanding. The Gore types have been using microscopes with blinders attached. Good science involves both the micro and the macro consideration.
Mr. George also indicates those things that man is capable of doing and is doing currently to reduce our impact… and these are good things in them selves.
(Probably the two largest contributors to global climate have been the deforestion of Brazil and Africa)
For the USA - - -
We have no proof of global warming, and since it has been discredited proponents changed the name to “climate change”.
The USA does have a “Clean Air Act” and “Clean Water Act” that should always be enforced. - The Federal Government does not need to do any more.
Individual States can add laws for their own States based upon their particular problems and topography.
Let’s get back to “SUBSIDIARITY” in the USA. (CCC - 1883, 1885, 1894, 2209, 2211)
I agree with Sandy’s comment but add this caution. The Clean Air Act can be subverted as already proposed by bureaucrats by simply declaring illogically and without any scientific evidence that CO2 is a toxic substance. This would then have the force of law and allow the EPA to set any limit to CO2 emissions they choose. Of course the fact that humans exhale CO2 with every breath they take not only betrays their logic but adds to Mr. Lee’s warped notion that humans are responsible for all the planet’s so-called ills because they emit substances “legally” declared toxic.
My response to these loons is usually something along the lines of “be the change you want to see”—IOW, if you think there are too many people on the planet, if you think there should be less of them, begin with yourself.
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