A professor who advocates the sabotage of oil and gas pipelines admitted recently he committed crimes to fight what he calls the “climate crisis.”
Andreas Malm, a Swedish academic, made this admission to the New York Times during a recent interview. Malm wrote the book How to Blow Up A Pipeline, which argues for a militant climate change movement.
He also appeared to suggest during the interview that violence could be justified in the United States should President Donald Trump win the presidency and presumably pursue a friendlier agenda toward the oil and gas industry than President Joe Biden.
“I have engaged in as much militant climate activism as I have had access to in my activist communities and contexts,” Malm told the New York Times. “I’ve done things that I can’t tell you or that I wouldn’t tell others publicly.”
He said this after being asked why he had not actually “blown up a pipeline” if he thought it was “necessary,” in the words of the New York Times reporter.
“Let’s put it this way: If I were part of a group where something like blowing up a pipeline was perceived as a tactic that could be useful for our struggle, then I would gladly participate,” Malm also said. “But this is not where I am in my life.”
New York Times reporter David Marchese, while making it clear he did not want Malm to commit violence, challenged him on that reason.
“Like I said, I’ve participated in things that I can’t tell you about because they’ve been illegal and they’ve been militant,” Malm said. “I’ve done it recently. But I can do that only as part of a collective of people who do something that they have decided on together.”
“I can’t tell you what things I have done, but the things that I do and that any other climate activist should be doing cannot be an individual project,” he also said.
Malm also believes that violence against property can be justified when someone’s favored political candidate does not win. Marchese, the New York Times reporter asked Malm to “rationalize advocacy for violence” in the context of a “liberal democracy.”
“What should the climate movement do,” Malm asked, if Trump wins? “Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction?”
Though he said it is “a difficult question,” Malm said a “measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States.” Furthermore, the response should consider “whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.”
To be clear, Malm is saying “property destruction” could be justified. And while it would be easy to dismiss Malm as the stereotypical Marxist European professor, his calls for violence to achieve political means have been adopted in America already.
After all, pro-abortion activists undertook a reign of terror against pro-life pregnancy resource centers, groups, and churches following the leaked, and then official, reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Liberal activists attacked a new police training center in Atlanta with Molotov cocktails, bricks, and fireworks in May 2023, as previously reported by the Washington Examiner, leading to domestic terrorism charges against dozens of protesters.
And who can forget the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020? Violence against people and property in the name of achieving political means already has supporters in the U.S. The question is: What excuse for violence will these ideologues use next?
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Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner. He is an associate editor for The College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.