Blowing up energy pipelines is normally Unabomber or Earth Liberation Front territory.  It's the advocacy of nuts, environmental wackos, fringe players, and occasionally Russian agents of chaos.  Whatever it is, it's not people you want for next-door neighbors or babysitting your kids.

But the New York Times is special, so it's chosen to go Leonard Bernstein and roll with the Radical Chic.  But instead of handing out canapes, they're handing out their pricey column inches to an advocate of blowing up pipe bombs.  Seems these people just can't quit their Inner Lenny.

According to the Daily Wire:

On Jan. 24, [Kennedy scion Tatiana Schlossberg] reviewed three books on "environmental disaster" for The New York Times Book Review. One book had an especially provocative title: "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," by a far-left Swedish professor named Andreas Malm. It was published on Jan. 5 by Verso Books, which calls itself "the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world."

Her review was largely positive.

Tatiana, you recall, was the one who demanded that Americans give up their hamburgers and "cheap cashmere sweaters" (saving them just for the rich) because global warming.  I wrote about this charmer here.

For Tatiana and her ilk, it seems it's not enough that rich men's playthings such as the Tides Foundation have already served to funnel rich people's donations into radical environmental causes, while keeping their funders' names out of the news.

Now it's suddenly respectable to read the crazed gibberings of a Swedish extremist who advocates for blowing up energy pipelines and making it a sort of new mainstream.  The Times, remember, likes to advertise itself as the paper of record, all the news that's fit to print.  This is creepy stuff, indeed, considering that now an author seems to need to be a radical advocate of violence and job destruction, to get those column inches.  Given the competition out there for books seeking to be mentioned in the New York Review of Books, it's pretty amazing.  The Times after all can take only so many.  And somehow, this freak made the cut. 

What's vivid also is that Malm and his bottom-of-the-barrel ravings are somehow on Schlossberg's reading list.  Apparently, she frequents these fringe sources and knows every weirdo.  And she wanted to mainstream-ify one of them, the one who likes big fiery explosions.

Radical Chic is the only way to describe this sudden "respectabilization" of otherwise fringe advocates.  It's the term coined by Tom Wolfe, who wrote about New York's high society courting and cocktail-partying with the 1960s domestic terrorist group the Black Panthers.

Seems the rich just can't stop sucking up.  It makes them feel heroic, romantic, something they're unable to feel on the private carbon-spewing jets.

And it's part of a growing trend you would never have seen even five years ago — seriously, imagine this kind of stuff published in the Times Review of Books even in the early days of the Trump administration.  It wouldn't happen.  Yet this crazed review of a lunatic's ravings that doesn't merit the time of day and might just get the Times sued if someone follows up on the book's advice is far from the very first. 

Last September, another supposedly respectable media outlet with high pretensions, NPR, ran a gushy review by another extremist whose NPR bio claimed she had written for The Atlantic, and who then wrote a book called In Defense of Looting.  The tony literary-pretensioned New Yorker, with a suck-up interview, followed.

It seems that a bottom of sorts had dropped out when that crap ran, and then the Times had a need to top it.  Its review of this book with its naked call to destroy energy pipelines is every bit as bad as the looting manifesto.

What we are seeing here is Radical Chic and the normalization of property destruction and rule of law.  The Daily Wire notes that pipeline explosions, if carried through, could lead to tremendous economic loss of working-class jobs, as well as loss of human life.  Now with these book reviews coming from these house organs with nobody sanctioned or fired, it's as if the ruling class has it in for the ordinary guy who obeys the law.  They would instead seek to normalize the demons who would destroy them.  What's bad here is that this is not likely going to be the last of it.

Image: Pexels/Pixabay, Pixabay License.