Did you know that you can be vegan as a personal lifestyle choice without being a total ecofascist.

I actually do think that "vegan to eco fascist pipeline" post is a strawman. Not saying some extreme assholes don't exist but eco fascism is generally not caused by changing your alimentation. I also personally have never met an ecofascist vegan and I know like. A good bunch actually! But I have met a lot of people bordering the ecofascist ideology who as a consequence made no effort whatsoever to change their consumption habit because they were also accelerationists.

Actually let's talk a bit more about that vegan to eco-fascist pipeline post and how it doesn't make any sense. Firstly it's a pipeline that I've personally never seen any real life examples of, like what is this weird leap from "if I can go vegan so can you" to "humans are responsible for climate change we need to decrease the population" like am I missing something here? People who believe in population reduction as a solution to climate change tends to be people who believe that humans are inherently detrimental to the environment and can't actually live on the earth without damaging it, which is why it turns into a number's game rather than a question of changing societal structures. But this hypothetical vegan apparently believes that anyone can go vegan so clearly they believe that humans are capable of changing their relationship to the land and that there therefore are other ways than decreasing the population. So what's up with that? Many vegans specifically argue that veganism is what we need to transition into in order to have a growing population, because it's way less land and resource-intensive, so to argue that there is any threat inherent to veganism related to population culling is nonsensical. In fact, anarchists like Peter Gelderloos criticize veganism exactly because capitalism wants a growing population, just like it wants everything else to constantly grow, so veganism is easily co-opted for that purpose (this is not supposed to be a universal criticism of veganism btw, this is just one of the many ways it can be co-opted, not something inherent to the ideology). Besides all that I also find it a little bit worrying that people on this website seems to think that the definition of eco-fascism is just believing that overpopulation is the source of climate change? Of course that's a big part of it and of course eco-fascism isn't really a coherent ideology, but there's just so much more to fascism in general than that? Other elements you often find in eco-fascism are pastoral romanticism, notions of a ethnic groups having a mystical connection with the land that makes up their nation, the introduction of any other ethnic group to that land as some sort of pollution in itself (like an invasive species), a general connection between racial purity and environmental purity. If you wanna talk about veganism and vegetarianism's role in this I think you'll get further in examining diet culture and diet woo, looking at the people who make connections between bodily purity and keeping out "toxins" and not consuming meat. There's of course also completely bonkers Hindu neo-nazi Savitri Devi who was an actual animal rights activist and vegetarian, and her ideology (while terrible) is extremely interesting (and is almost a complete religion of its own, give "Hitler's Priestess" a read if you wanna learn more) but still very much quite far from the ideology of modern veganism. Eco-fascism is a really important subject to learn about especially now as we'll probably be seeing more and more of it the coming years and it's good to be able to recognize patterns. That's why I think it really sucks that the conversation about it has to be watered down just to alleviate people's feelings of guilt about their own consumption habits as if the worst thing fascism could do is to tell you not to eat whatever you want when you want it.

tumblrs rapid hatred of vegans/vegetarians etc is so interesting to me because yeah there ARE people who lean on ecofascism and are very preachy about their diet but like ….. no offense ive seen a shit ton of people buy into ecofascism that aren’t vegan/vegetarian . it just feels weird to say veganism is a direct funnel to fascism like its some sort of alt right pipeline to not eat meat

between the disability twitter chili discourse and this one post on here claiming there’s a special vegan to fascism pipeline…i feel like people will do anything to justify why they’re not doing something they see other people are doing to make themselves feel good instead of just moving on or examining why they feel so much cognitive dissonance lol.

without a doubt. i think what's especially interesting about the chili discourse is that, unlike the claims of anti-vegan detractors, making a neighbor chili when they can't cook for themselves makes a measurable material difference in others' lives, immediately. easy dismissals of "this one personal change won't change anything systemic" –– one whose premises i object to, but that's another story –– can't possibly apply here, because making and delivering someone food is a direct and clear form of community care. it's one of the most ancient and time-honored forms of community care in existence.

all these are discourses of defensive projection and (understandable! shared!) despair at the magnitude of social crises neoliberal colonial capitalism is wreaking on the earth. we're all constantly trying to navigate and (hopefully) mitigate the degree to which we're complicit in these systems, and no one is immune. with our collective coerced participation in these systems becoming clearer, questions of agency and responsibility are ongoing and there aren't any clear answers. what is clear, however, is the volume of people reacting violently to alternative ways of living & relating to the world, even on the most micro-levels, because these modes threaten commonsensical notions of hierarchy (between humans and across different species), in/appropriate sacrifice, and social responsibility and care-work. among many others.

Trying to convince people that your ideas are correct is not "fascism" but rather is a core part of democracy. Vegans trying to convince other people to become vegans are not on an "ecofascist pipeline".

Although some of my beloved mutuals have been able to point me towards some environmentalist activists and scholars who could legitimately be called ecofascist, it's clear from popular anti-vegan posts on here that what a lot of people mean when they call someone "ecofascist" is that they critique consumption choices -- which, for the thoroughly atomised neoliberal subject who defines his identity primarily though consumption choices, seems like a vicious personal attack.

We Don’t Forget: Support Joseph Dibee, Environmentalist Accused of Sabotage

After 12 years of fruitless searching, federal agents have captured Joseph Dibee, accused participant in the Earth Liberation Front. Dibee is charged with arson and conspiracy. The following statement from our collective, It’s Going Down, and a network of anti-fascist groups explores why his case matters today.

In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior. Across the world, informally organized groups claimed anonymous actions in the names of the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts.

International networks grew out of these movements. Struggles emerged against superhighways, gold mines, luxury ski resorts, old-growth logging, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and animal testing facilities on several continents. For years, corporate profiteers had cause to fear that they would face consequences when they perpetrated ecological harm. At that time, it was still possible to imagine that humanity could avert the catastrophe that is unfolding today in the form of ever-rising temperatures, hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and mass extinctions.

At the turn of the century, federal authorities counterattacked, launching a campaign of repression to crush the Earth Liberation Front and subdue environmental movements of all kinds. Their goal was to protect business interests at any expense—even if that meant making the world uninhabitable. At the same time, increasing attention on climate change from the likes of Al Gore served to professionalize environmental activism, imposing the logic of the non-profit industry and bribing activists to moderate their tactics and targets in return for salaries. This two-pronged assault set back environmental movements a full generation or more.

The cataclysm that is unfolding today can be laid at the doorstep of the law enforcement agencies that have paved the way for it by making it so difficult for ordinary people to defend themselves against ecological devastation. If we don’t stop them, they will frogmarch us directly into the apocalypse, profiting all the way—and when the last well is poisoned and the last forest burns up, they will be the last to die.

The remains of the Cavel West horse meat packing plant after it burned down in 1997, allegedly with the assistance of Joseph Dibee. The plant never reopened.

The Green Scare

At the end of 2005, the FBI escalated its assault on earth and animal liberation movements with a new wave of indictments. This offensive, dubbed Operation Backfire, was intended to obtain convictions for many of the unsolved Earth Liberation Front arsons of the preceding ten years.

Of those arrested in Operation Backfire, 12 of the accused became federal informants, collaborating with the authorities against their former comrades and the struggle against catastrophic climate change. The collaborators arrested include Stanislas Meyerhoff, Kevin Tubbs, Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, Suzanne Savoie, Kendall Tankersley, Jennifer Kolar, Lacey Phillabaum, Darren Thurston, and, much later, Briana Waters. Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, Nathan Block, Joyanna Zacher, Justin Solondz, and Rebecca Rubin all refused to collaborate. William “Avalon” Rodgers passed away in an apparent suicide following his arrest.

This case took place alongside a variety of similar operations, including the proseuctions of Marius Mason, who is still serving a 22-year sentence for environmental sabotage of a GMO facility, Eric McDavid, who served 9 years of a two-decade sentence before a judge threw out his conviction because the prosecution had withheld thousands of pages of exonerating evidence, and other earth and animal liberation prisoners, including Rod Coronado, Jeff “Free” Luers, and Chrisopher McIntosh. The campaign “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” faced multiple waves of repression, including the infamous SHAC 7 case, in which all six of the accused served up to six years in prison for maintaining a website. Other people refused to testify before grand juries, a commonly used tool for repressing autonomous movements, and served time for resisting FBI fishing expeditions against environmental activists.

For many years, federal authorities ranked anarchist environmental activism over white supremacist mass shootings and abortion clinic bombings as the number one domestic threat—even though it involved no injuries to human beings whatsoever. Yet despite all the resources they invested in this witch hunt, it took the FBI decades to capture some of their targets. Operation Backfire target Joseph Dibee remained free until August 9, 2018. As of this writing, one of the accused remains at liberty. Our thoughts are with them, wherever they are.

Operation Backfire Defendant Joseph Dibee Arrested in Joint Cuban-US Operation

At 4:53 pm, on August 9, 2018, Joseph Dibee, 50, was booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center by federal agents. Detained by authorities at an airport in Cuba, he was brought to Oregon via a secretive international policing operation. The next day, Billy J. Williams, US Attorney for Oregon, announced his arrest. Williams received Donald Trump’s support in 2017 and advocates for even more aggressive repression of undocumented immigrants.

Joseph Dibee is accused of participating in environmental direct action in the 1990s with the Earth/Animal Liberation Front. Specifically, he is accused of participating in the sabotage of a horse slaughtering facility that resulted in the permanent closure of the company. His charges include arson, conspiracy to commit arson, and destruction of an energy facility.

He has been wanted by federal authorities for 12 years, during which he is alleged to have traveled in Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, and Russia.

Defend Joseph Dibee—Defend Autonomous Movements

Why is the state still persecuting environmentalists nearly twenty years after actions that never injured anyone? Because as the consequences of resource accumulation and ecological collapse intensify, cracking down on resistance is becoming an ever more urgent priority for the authorities. In The Dawn, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that you can measure the health of a society according to the number of parasites it can tolerate; today, the custodians of order know that they cannot tolerate any resistance whatsoever, on pain of insurrection.

As prisoners across the country prepare for a nationwide strike against forced labor and undignified conditions, the authorities are preemptively cracking down on organizers. Many rebellious black protesters are imprisoned for attempting to engage in proportionate response to racist extrajudicial police murders in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, Milwaukee, and elsewhere around the US. Indigenous and non-native water protectors faced unprecedented violence from state counterinsurgency forces and private security firms during the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota. Over 200 anarchists and other anti-fascists faced eight or more felony charges apiece in one of the largest conspiracy cases in US history on account of participating in protests against the inauguration of President Donald Trump, during which anarchists smashed the windows of corporate storefronts, clashed with police, and burned a limousine. Those charges were finally dropped in July after a year and a half of punitive mass intimidation directed at the arrestees.

The state is pouring all its resources into repression at a time when self-organized revolt and mutual aid are needed more than ever. Fascists and neo-Nazis are targeting hurricane relief organizers while Facebook and Google censor radical content online. Tech giants like Amazon and Palantir are working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to capture undocumented people while landlords and developers collaborate with IBM and finance capitalists to reimagine cities emptied of the working class, transforming vibrant and rebellious communities into enclaves for the wealthy.

Joseph Dibee was arrested with the collaboration of Cuban authorities in a coordination between rival authoritarian powers that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. As climate chaos, popular uprisings, and economic uncertainty continue to shake the globe, we are witnessing unprecedented collaboration between states in policing and extradition. It remains to be seen what this means for other rebels from previous eras—such as Assata Shakur, who has lived in Cuba for many decades despite being at the top of the FBI’s “most wanted” list. What is clear is that all who oppose the coordinated international suppression of resistance must organize now to defend those who are currently being targeted, lest the authorities be emboldened to expand their scope still further.

Imagining a New Horizon of Struggle

The resurgence of street-level fascism in the US on the coattails of the Trump campaign is merely the tip of the iceberg. Worldwide, we have seen a wave of reactionary populism that will continue to circumscribe the popular imagination for a number of years. As sea levels rise and natural disasters continue to displace poor and working class people in Latin America, the Middle East, Indochina, and Oceania, warlords, right-wing gangs, xenophobic governments, and broad sections of the wealthy and ruling classes will collaborate to produce fanatical nationalist and life-denying discourses. Refugees from across the world are already being denied safe passage into the gated communities of the global north.

It is no longer realistic to imagine that climate change and ecological chaos can be prevented. But this only makes it more paramount to defend what wildness remains, impose consequences for the most environmentally destructive activity, and defend those who take risks to make the world hospitable for both human and nonhuman life. If we do not want to spend the next century locked in ethno-nationalist, religious, and racial warfare, we have to foster new struggles against climate change and ecological destruction, we have to build mutual aid networks capable of surviving in disaster zones, and we have to resolutely defend everyone who fights for a world without cages. Free Joseph Dibee.

You can send letters of care and encouragement to Joseph. DO NOT write about his case or reference anything illegal. Write him here:

Joseph Dibee #812133 Multnomah County Detention Center 11540 NE Inverness Drive Portland, Oregon 97220

We don’t forget those who fight.

Further Reading

“Green Scare Defendant Apprehended in Cuba After 12 Years“—statement from Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center

The SHAC Campaign

Green Scared?—A comprehensive overview of the Green Scare and the lessons it holds for today’s activists.

Desert: Reflections on the implications of unstoppable global climate change for ecologist strategy.

We borrowed the header image from Steve Cup, a radical artist based in New York City.

Left-Libertarian Weekly Podcast Roundup (1/19/18)

Against the Grain - Prisoner Reentry Under Neoliberalism

Anews Podcast - Episode 46: anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week.

Beltway Banthas - Wealth, War and Canto Bight

Bi Any Means - Atheism and Asexuality with Emily Karp

By Any Means Necessary - Chelsea Manning to Run for US Senate; Hawaiians Run for Cover

Cato Daily - The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Cato Events - Your Next Government?: From the Nation State to Stateless Nations

The Chauncey DeVega Show - George Ciccariello-Maher Told the Truth About Toxic White Masculinity and Mass Shootings and Lost His Job

Citizen Radio - ICE deports man who has lived in the U.S. for 30 years; Trump admin waives punishment for convicted banks, including Deutsche, which Trump owes millions

Conversations with Tyler - Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion

The Corbett Report - The Bitcoin Psyop

Dangerous History - A Modern-Day Grunt’s Perspective, Part 1

Delete Your Account - Burning Out

The Dig - A New Poor People’s Campaign with Nijmie Dzurinko

Discourse Collective - Godwin (Theory) Pt2

Economic Rockstar - Emily Oster on Diabetes and Diet, Disease and Vaccinations and Debunking Pregnancy Myths

Economics Detective - Migration and Fertility with Lyman Stone

EconTalk - Bill James on Baseball, Facts, and the Rules of the Game

The Ex-Worker - The Olympia Train Blockade: A look at the Olympia blockade that stopped a train carrying fracking supplies

Everyday Ethics - Welfare State and Witch Burning with John Compton and Peter Leeson

The Final Straw - No Bayou Bridge Pipeline! An interview from L’eu Est La Vie camp

Foreign Policy Focus - Syria & a False Alarm

Free Thoughts - Trump’s Assault on America’s Institutions

Friendly Anarchism - Conflict Resolution, Dance, And True Prosperity with Sophia

Future Fossils - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)

The Gaytheist Manifesto - Not Queer Enough, Not Trans Enough

The Guillotine - MLK, Iran Protests, Offshore Drilling, and OperationPUSH

Hayek Program - "Austrian Epistemics" with Roger Koppl and Solomon Stein

Historical Contraversies - Filibuster in Cuba, Part 1

IGDCAST - “We All Need It To Survive”: Fighting the Bayou Bridge Pipeline

Intercepted - White Mirror feat. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Marxist scholar David Harvey

Isaac Morehouse - How Cryptocurrency Can Improve Content, with Ryan X. Charles

Kite Line - Inside the Local Jail

Knowing Animals - The Political Turn with Robert Garner

Last Born In The Wilderness - Dr. Bones: Stirner, Egoism, & Overthrowing The Ideas That Rule Us

Lead Singer Syndrome - Justin Sane (Anti-Flag)

Liberty Chronicles - The Whigs

Macro Musings - Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel on Fed History and the Myth of Its Independence

The Magnificast - New Year New Left

MilLiberty - Nullification and the Path to Liberty

Mises Weekends - Michael Boldin: How Decentralization Could Work

Neighbor Science - Jack Benzos, Boy Genius: what's up with that crazy guy that owns Online WalMart™

Part Of The Problem - Bob Murphy on inflation, boom + bust cycle, zero interest rates, the great depression

The Point - Steps to Ending Homelessness

Punk Rock and Politics - Interview with American Standards’ vocalist Brandon

Radio Dispatch - Shane Burley on “Fascism Today”

Reason - Why This Is TV's Golden Age!: How streaming video has blown apart, and improved, television as we know it

Revolutionary Left Radio - Rebel Music, Communal Dancing, and the Class Politics of Movement

The Scott Horton Show - Dan Gifford on the truth and lies of Waco

Secret Feminist Agenda -  White Feminists & Listening to Criticism

Short Circuit (IJ) - 085: Wasteful requirements for hair braiders, restrictions on free newspapers, and the ban on gun ownership for domestic violence misdemeanants.

Skullduggery - Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on 'The Post,' President Trump and North Korea

Solecast - Dr. Bones on Insurrection, Egoism, & Taking Back The World

Speaking of Psychology - How women become leaders

Srsly Wrong - Diversity of Tactics

TechFreedom - Department of Labor Saves Gig Economy

The Tom Woods Show - Libertarian Class Theory (Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition) with Gary Chartier

This Is Hell! - State / Farm: On labor and freedom in humanity's deep history, the right's hold on power in Honduras, the self-destructive left, the big business of small-sum loans, Flint in slow motion, and a fever dream of the last President of the United States of America.

The Vegan Vanguard - Body Image, Eating Disorders, and the Gendered Politics of Food

WhoWhatWhy - Voter Suppression May Be the Most Important Issue of 2018

Who Shaves the Barber? - Amie Thomasson: Ontology Made Easy 

You, Me, and BTC - The 3 Biggest Struggles Bitcoin (and Bitcoiners) Face Today

Isn't it just another day when white gentile vegans are not only calling indigenous people savages but also comparing Jewish people to animals.

Ecofascist white vegans fuck off challenge. Y'all are racist as shit white supremacist trash.