Last year saw the release of the book "How to Blow up a Pipeline."
The book's title wasn't really a cute stunt or a metaphor. The author, Swedish extremist Andreas Malm, was openly advocating the destruction of critical lifesaving infrastructure in order to fight "climate change."
A director decided to make a movie out of the book's premise. In the film, a group of environmentalist terrorists look to blow up a Texas oil pipeline as an act of eco-sabotage.
A multilateral intelligence agency in Kansas, meanwhile, is warning that the film might have, you know, exactly the effect its creators doubtlessly intended it to have:
In a report disseminated last week, [the Kansas City Regional Fusion Center] quietly warned of a "developing threat" related to the movie.
(Just as an aside, a "fusion center" is "a collaborative effort between law enforcement agencies to share resources, expertise, and information in order to detect criminal and terrorist activity.")
Now, it's worth pointing out that KCRFC did not identify a specific threat regarding the movie. Rather, they appeared to merely speculate on the possibility it presented for radicalizing activists into violent action:
The movie could potentially inspire similar attacks on critical infrastructure as shown in the film and further encourage environmental activists to engage in increasingly violent action.
Which, I mean, yeah. Obviously. Does anyone doubt that?
I mean, the fanatical climate zeitgeist is obviously a powderkeg. We have a generation of young people convinced that the Earth is about to become a baking hot wasteland that will kill six billion people.
These low-information, high-energy activists are absolutely primed for something like a movie telling them to go blow up a pipeline.
As if that weren't enough, the director himself is really making no meaningful attempt to dissuade them from that fanaticism:
"We didn't necessarily want the movie to be directing the audience to go out and take a particular action," said [director Daniel] Goldhaber.
"We didn't necessarily..." Uh huh. Okay buddy. It's not hard to spot weasely, equivocal language when it's this obvious.
