Brendan O’ Neill Out-Trolls Himself

It may have occurred to Brendan O’Neill, chief contrarian of Spiked, so called because it should have been long ago, that his automatic gainsaying of informed opinion about any news event may have caused his audience to turn off, so predictable was the low moaning noise emanating from his general direction. The dial had to be turned up in order to really shock the easily persuaded to once more worship at his feet.

And so it came to pass that after the recent mass shooting at a Walmart near the southern US city of El Paso, Bren decided to cast caution to the winds and blame the actions of a white supremacist obsessed with the Great Replacement Idiocy on … green campaigners. So the far-right, validated by Combover Crybaby Donald Trump, are in fact not validated by him at all, but by the rotten lefty Greens. I kid you not.

Under the heading “El Paso was a vile act of eco-terrorism”, he asserts “In his alleged manifesto, the killer, alongside his racist rants about Hispanic people and the ‘replacement’ of whites, attacks modern society for being eco-unfriendly. Westerners’ lifestyles are ‘destroying the environment’ and ‘creating a massive burden for future generations’, he says. He seems obsessed with the core element of green thinking”.  Seems obsessed.

The word “seems” is doing a heroic amount of heavy lifting. And there is more. “As with green ideology in general, there is a strong streak of anti-humanism in his eco-obsessions. He attacks ‘urban sprawl’ - also known as human habitation - and the way it ‘destroys millions of acres of land’. As for ‘consumer culture’ with its production of ‘thousands of tonnes of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste’ - he slams that as another part of humankind’s ‘decimation of our environment’”. Do go on.

“His targeting of a Walmart makes more sense in the context of his eco-Malthusianism”. ULTIMATE BRENDAN O’NEILL BULLSHIT KLAXON: “Eco-Malthusianism”. Carry on. “Alongside clearly setting out to kill Latinos, whom he claims are ‘invading’ the US, perhaps he also wanted to attack supermarket-users”. Ey up, “Perhaps” is also in the Olympic-standard freestyle weightlifting league here. And perhaps he didn’t.

Perhaps Brendan O’Neill is so full of crap it’s coming out of his ears. Oh look out, here’s another alleged killer fact: “The Christchurch killer explicitly said he is not a Nazi but an ‘eco-fascist’”. No Bren, he was a bigot tooled up with sufficient firepower to kill dozens of innocent people. And there is a whopping false equivalence in the Spiked drivel.

That is putting the supposed “eco-terrorism” ALONGSIDE anti-Latino racism and peddling the Great Replacement Idiocy. And then lobbing in “seems” and “perhaps”, when the assertion has already been made that “El Paso was a vile act of eco-terrorism”.

Zubaida Haque has put it concisely: “Brendan O’Neill’s piece is utterly dishonest. I’ve seen the manifesto thru a journalist. It’s almost entirely focused on immigrants and barely mentions environmentalists. And there’s a whole section on guns, how it’s great that US have them and how the killer needed to adapt his”. For some reason, Spiked’s chief contrarian managed not to let his readers know about that.

Brendan O’Neill is a dishonest charlatan. No change there, then.

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