-By Warner Todd Huston
This James Jay Lee that was shot down by police in Maryland after taking hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel cable station has followed the typical environmental extremist’s path to insanity.
If you are unaware, James Jay Lee was an enviro-extremist. He was so extreme that he felt that people should not be allowed to have any more children because it was “killing” the planet.
In his rambling manifesto he implored the Discovery Channel to change its programming. “Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution,” Lee wrote. (See .pdf of his manifesto)
Sadly, his psychotic devotion to global warming left him dead. But, as I said he’s followed the normal path to complete radicalism, a path we see with animal rights nuts, other enviro wackos… in fact it is the path that all extremists take.
Here is how it goes:
1). Come to truly believe, religious-like, in a new idea
2). Proselytize for it among your friends and family
3). Join other like-minded folks
4). Begin to lose friends and family for your insistence on your new faith
5). Begin to discount other people for not believing
6). Become too radical even for your early new, like-minded friends
7). Begin to believe that people are expendable and secondary to your new religion
8). Join other radicals that feel the same
9). Engage in or start claiming that property damage is right to push your religion
10). Last step: Commit violence for your religion
Sometimes one or two of the steps are skipped, but this is the general path to radicalism.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.