Posted on September 17, 2010

by

Daniel Clark

News accounts described James Lee, the man who stormed the offices of Discovery Communications, as an isolated extremist, and his online manifesto as rambling and incoherent. Neither of these is true.

Far from being an indecipherable jumble of crazed musings, Lee's manifesto is a thematically consistent expression of environmentalist dogma. It rails against civilization, capitalism, the United States, religion, and the human race. If not for his shrill tone, he might be mistaken for the "science czar," or perhaps a certain former vice president of ours.

Lee apparently singled out Discovery because it operates TLC, the channel that airs reality shows featuring large families, and programs about unexpected pregnancies that view them in a positive light. It's no wonder that Lee would obsess over Discovery for this reason, because few other media outlets would so offend him. In particular, he must have been thrilled with a National Geographic special called Aftermath: Population Zero, which fantasized about the elimination of the world's population by a catastrophic event, and concluded that the earth would be far better off.

Lee's descriptions of human beings as "pollution," and his condemnation of "parasitic human infants" may be rhetoric from the fringes of the environmentalist and population control movements, but the underlying philosophy has permeated the mainstream of our educational system and pop culture. The liberals who are educating and entertaining America's children may not explicitly endorse Lee's desire to "disassemble civilization," but they are undoubtedly getting that message across through their promotion of global warming alarmism.

The disassembly of civilization is the sum total of all the prescribed solutions to global warming. In order to "save the planet," all we have to do is stop consuming fossil fuels, put an end to industry and farming, rescind property rights, and take care of a few other minor details like that. If the earth can withstand us at all, it won't be until we're all living in grass huts, beating our clothes against the rocks, and eating locusts. Our natural human freedom, ambition and ingenuity -- if not humanity itself -- must be destroyed.

Those harsh "solutions" may not be in your children's lesson plans, or in their favorite TV shows and animated features, but the alleged problems that necessitate them certainly are. For at least a decade now, children's minds have been relentlessly carpet-bombed with assertions that the earth and all its innocent creatures are threatened by humanity in general, and Western civilization in particular.

There can be no disputing that our educational system shares Lee's enthusiasm for "Malthus-Darwin science." Many public schools now teach Darwinism not as theory, but as the unassailable truth. Students may not be as directly familiar with Malthus, but his influence can be seen in the modern environmentalist concept of "sustainability." Malthus' theory, that the population must be controlled due to nature's limited ability to sustain it, combined with the Darwinian belief that life was created by accident, and therefore has no design or purpose, leads inescapably to the conclusion that there are a lot of expendable people in the world. That does not differ substantially from Lee's characterization of people as pollution.

One might wonder why any human being would care to embrace an anti-human philosophy. Like many expressions of self-loathing, it is a perverse appeal to the liberal ego. An individual, by criticizing an entire group to which he belongs, thereby makes himself the exception, and elevates himself above the rest of the group. When Michael Moore condemns rich, white American men, he perceives himself as the "good" rich, white American man, who does not share in their collective guilt.

Well, why settle for being superior to one segment of the population, when you could instead be superior to the whole human race? When Lee wrote, "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," he was not including himself. He, like everyone in the anti-human movement, was one of the exceptional humans, who did not wallow in the same filth as the rest of us.

A whole generation of children have been immersed in this anti-human doctrine, before they've had a chance to develop the intellectual capacity to accept or reject its tenets based on their merits. At the same time, they're being taught to value self-esteem above all else. We'd be gullible not to expect that many of them will choose to flatter themselves, through hatred of the rest of humanity.

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