The New Yorker has been accused of “endorsing terror acts” after giving a platform to an environmentalist who called for listeners to engage in civil disobedience and destroy property in order to fight climate change.
In the paper’s radio hour, which was advertised under the title ‘Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?’, activist and Lund University ecology professor Andreas Malm said that he was “all in favour” of blowing up pipelines. The guest seemingly endorsed the recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which in May severely disrupted gasoline supplies on the US East Coast.
“I don’t see how that property damage could be considered morally illegitimate, given what we know of the consequences of such projects,” Malm said during the podcast.
The climate change activist released a book earlier this year titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire”.
"I am recommending that the movement continues with mass action and civil disobedience, but also opens up for property destruction," Malm added.
The professor also praised violence during the Black Lives Matter protests last year that had led to “tremendous property destructions”, in his own words.
The interview, which was described by the magazine as discussing “intelligent sabotage” immediately drew an avalanche of comments from shocked Twitter users.
“The @NewYorker is now encouraging and training radical leftists how to blow up pipelines,” Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec commented on the piece.
A number of other Twitter pundits expressed similar sentiments.
In July, a New York Times columnist wrote a piece supporting Malm’s book while saying that violence by the green movement was “far less consequential than the climate crisis”.
“So scepticism of the practical benefits of violence does not fully explain its absence in a movement this vast and with consequences this grave," columnist Ezra Klein said back then.
The Colonial Pipeline system, which has its roots in Houston, Texas, witnessed a cyberattack on 7 May 2021, prompting its head company to stop all of its operations until a ransom of some $4.4 million had been paid to perpetrators in bitcoin. The attack was described as one of the largest assaults on America’s oil infrastructure in history over the major shortages and disruptions it caused in Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and other southeastern states.