EDITORIAL

Don’t Blame Trump
for El Paso Shootings

by Doug Mallouk

[Print version of this editorial]

The following letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun was published prominently on its website on August 8, 2019. Mallouk has been a long-time organizer with the LaRouche movement.

The Baltimore Sun editorial (“Is President Trump Serious about Bipartisan Solutions to Hate-Driven Shootings?” Aug. 5) stops just short of directly accusing the President of inciting the horrific mass shooting in El Paso. But you lob in the verbal hand grenade that he and the assailant are “kindred spirits.” There is no polite way to put it—this is flat out disinformation.

A simple reading of the entire “manifesto” put out by the alleged shooter reveals a very different picture than the narrative created by the mainstream press based on a selective sample of sound bite snippets of his ravings. Certainly, he is a disgusting anti-Hispanic bigot, but his racism is predicated on a more general hatred he spews out for humankind as a whole. And this is a worldview he shares, not at all with Donald Trump, but rather with the extreme, ultra-Malthusian wing of the environmentalist movement, the folks who despise the President with a bright green passion.

Please don’t take my word on this. Let him speak for himself. Here are some excerpts from his screed that the press has chosen to omit:

The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to slow this down is almost non-existent. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just to wipe water off our hands (and) most of ya’ll are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable. (Emphasis added.)

The above worldview bears no resemblance at all to anything ever uttered by President Trump, either before or after becoming President. But on the other hand, there exists a veritable trove of public domain citations from the green proponents of global depopulation—everyone from “philosopher” Bertrand Russell to the eco-terrorists of Earth First, to today’s Extinction Rebellion—that completely cohere with the previous paragraph. Do tell me again, just who are the kindred spirits?

Humankind Creates Resources

Of course, it must be said in fairness, that the outpourings of a clearly demented individual should not be taken at face value. Nor should any political figure be held liable for the destructive actions of some self-proclaimed supporter. The Dayton shooter was a Trump-hating leftist supporter of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but I certainly would not try to score cheap political points by blaming her for his rampage, despite massive political differences I have with her.

Nonetheless, ideas do matter. If one believes that humankind is some polluting cancer on the planet Earth, that we live in a world of scarce, dwindling resources, or that economic growth only accelerates the depletion of the biosphere, as do many green radicals, then it is really a very short hop to advocating various anti-human “solutions,” emphatically including racialist genocide. The alleged El Paso shooter, as ugly as his actions may have been, is guilty of relentlessly, logically pursuing his axiomatic premises to their sickening conclusion.

Here’s the good news. His axioms—and those of the green movement—are all wrong. As anti-Malthusian thinkers like economist Lyndon LaRouche and space scientist Krafft Ehricke have repeatedly noted, the human species, unlike any other, actually creates resources. Through scientific progress, we redefine previously useless materials as valuable new assets to production. Oil was just black goop in the ground until the development of the internal combustion engine. With the harnessing of thermonuclear fusion, ordinary seawater becomes the fuel for a far greater power over nature than ever before existed. And, for those concerned about these things, it emits zero radioactive by-products, and not one molecule of the so-called pollutant, CO₂.

So the upshot should be clear. You don’t have to kill innumerable innocent people in El Paso, Dayton, or anyplace else, to “save the Earth.” And you don’t have to falsely link President Trump to a murderous outlook that is diametrically opposed to what he, or any sane American, actually believes.