One of the problems about being a conservative is that if a wackjob goes off anywhere who's happened to watch 15 minutes of Fox News at sometime in his life, it's an indication of a vast boiling pit of seething fascist rage that is just WAITING to spill over and destroy America. When Timothy Macviegh committed his act of outrage after being inspired by white supremacist literature, it was open season on anyone to the right of Bob Dole, never mind a majority of conservatives have never even HEARD of the "The Turner Diaries", much less support the ideals within the book.
Now we have a nutjob in the D.C. area with a manifesto drawn from "My Ishmael", the sequel to the novel "Ishmael", which Wikipedia says "uses a style of Socratic dialogue to deconstruct the notion that humans are the end product, the pinnacle of biological evolution. It posits that human supremacy is a cultural myth, and asserts that modern civilization is enacting that myth."
"Human supremacy is a cultural myth". Got it?
And it only gets better from there:
"Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the Semitic belief that once mankind usurps this responsibility - historically decided through natural ecology (i.e. food chains) - that mankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses."
So essentially, everything that's happened throughout the entire course of human civilization has been a mistake. Everything we as humans have done since we left the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and/or The Garden Of Eden has been a mistake, and the only way we can rectify this mistake in the eyes of the Gods/Gaia is to return to our pre-civilized roots, rejecting such modern advances as medicine, agriculture, and everything that can't be built by banging two rocks together.
You'd think that such a radical, nihilist, misanthropic, extremely Luddite philosophy would be rejected by today's "Progressives".
Right?
Wrong.
"The film Instinct directed by Jon Turteltaub, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Anthony Hopkins is inspired by Ishmael as indicated in the end credits...Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam has cited the book as an influence on their album, Yield...New tribalists believe in a New Tribal Revolution outlined in the Ishmael series by Daniel Quinn...Ecoregional Democracy and peace movement advocates are also often new tribalists as well, as the groups share common ideals."
The ideas inside "Ishmael" don't belong to the fringes of the radical environmentalist movement in the same way that the ideas of the "Turner Diaries" belong on the extreme end of conservatism. What's inside "Ishmael" is right smack dab in the middle of modern "progressive" thought.