Tucker Carlson is not an ecofascist

He's just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill fascist. And by the way, there is no need for the word ecofascism.

Fox News booted Tucker Carlson from his television show on August 24. Apparently, evidence dug up during the Dominion lawsuit—text messages, emails, off-air videos—revealed Carlson to be just as odious in real life as he is on TV, and the Fox folks didn’t want him around anymore.

Fox should not have been surprised by the revelations. For years, critics have called out Carlson’s sexism and his extremist and dangerous views on race, including his promulgation of what is known as “the great replacement theory,” the idea that black and brown immigrants are intentionally brought to the U.S. to replace white Christians. Further developments reveal the extent of his foulness.

During the week after Fox cancelled Carlson’s show, I read a couple of columns that had a new (at least to me) criticism of Carlson as an ecofascist. I hadn’t been aware of this accusation or the term ecofascism, but that label has been applied to Carlson for a few years. David Neiwert, writing in The Daily Kos, called Carlson an ecofascist in March of 2021. Kristoffer Tigue associated Carlson with ecofascism when he wrote for Inside Climate News in May of last year.

I have a problem with this, and it’s not because I think Carlson is a good person. It’s probably correct to call him a fascist. Philosopher Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works labels Carlson a fascist, and I pretty much accept his judgment. But I have trouble with folks calling Carlson or anybody else an ecofascist, because there is no reason for the words ecofascist or ecofascism to exist, with or without Tucker Carlson.

Etymology, or where the word ecofascism comes from

The root of the term ecofascism is the word fascism, which predates Mussolini, who led the fascist movement in Italy before and during World War II. As Merriam-Webster explains, the meaning of fascism has developed over the last hundred years, but the essential definition is as follows:

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

After WWII, trying to understand how millions of people could fall under the spell of brutal dictators and be swayed to commit atrocities such as the Nazi Holocaust, philosopher and sociologist Theodore Adorno and others developed the F-Scale (F for fascist, later changed to the Authoritarian Scale), which measured a person’s willingness to submit to authority. The scale also measured other traits of this type of personality, such as conventionality, lack of introspection, and hostility to those of lesser status. This bundle of traits associated with this scale or test led to our idea of fascism today.

Tucker Carlson, nothing “eco” about the former Fox TV host, not even his fascism. Photo: Fox News foxnews.com

The first use of the word ecofascist that I found goes back to 2007 in a New York Times article on carbon credits. A man who was very environmentally conscious, buying carbon credits for his girlfriend and himself, used the term in a somewhat humorous way to describe his over-the-top commitment to the environment, in the same way that a person who compulsively sees all the sites on a European tour might be described as a tourist nazi¹ The term was used similarly eight years later in a profile of Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City transportation commissioner at the time.² And by the year 2000, the word had retained this meaning, although it had lost its ironic sense and was now being used as an epithet.³ The general meaning, however—that an ecofascist had an oversized concern for the environment—remained.

The word nonetheless remained relatively unused. Starting in 2019, however, folks started to use the word in a new way. Alexander Menrisky, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, says the following about the new meaning of ecofascism:

Broadly defined, ecofascism is any environmentalism that advocates or accepts violence and does so in a way that reinforces existing systems of inequality or targets certain people while leaving others untouched. It is basically environmentalism that suggests that certain people are naturally and exclusively entitled to control and enjoy environmental resources. Some types of people, in other words, are “native species” and others are “invasive.”

Why we don’t need the term ecofascism

OK, so how does reinforcing existing systems of inequality or being entitled to environmental resources differ from what we know of fascism historically? Weren’t existing systems of inequality enforced when southerners restricted black people from drinking at “whites only” water fountains? How about when blacks were not allowed to sit where they please on public buses?