James Jay Lee, the Discovery Channel would-be bomber who was shot and killed by police yesterday, left behind an online trail of radical environmentalist and outright anti-human propaganda. He had been yelling at the Discovery Channel for years to stop doing Shark Week and start doing Put Sterilizing Agents in the Drinking Water Week. He wanted us to stop having “filthy babies” and killing the planet. He claimed to have been educated by, among other things, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Does that mean Al Gore made him do it? Does it mean that the scare tactics employed by global warming believers caused him to flip out? No, it does not. The guy was nuts. If he hadn’t latched onto global warming and The Population Bomb and so forth, he would’ve latched onto something else. Plenty of people believe the same things James Jay Lee believed without resorting to violence. He alone was responsible for his own actions.
You may recall that this is the same attitude I had toward Michael Enright, the drunken art-school student who stabbed a cabbie in midtown Manhattan after asking if he was a Muslim. Except in that case, a mere week ago, we were told Enright was driven to it by “the climate of anti-Muslim bigotry in America.” And then the news got out that Enright volunteered for an organization that supported the Ground Zero Mosque, and everybody cleared their throats and shuffled their feet and tried to forget about the whole thing.
Do those same people believe that the climate of global warming alarmism in America drove James Jay Lee to commit such a terrible act? I’m not saying they should be yelling about that. I’m saying that if they don’t, if they only apply that standard when it suits them, they’re either unthinking demagogues or unprincipled hacks.
In sum: If you lamented how “the climate of hate in America” drove Michael Enright to violence, but now insist that James Jay Lee was acting alone and how dare anyone say otherwise, you are not to be trusted.
P.S. Lee thought of himself as a filmmaker. Judge for yourself (courtesy of Tim Blair):
P.P.S. We really suffered a loss to humanity yesterday:
P.P.P.S. This guy just keeps getting better and better…