Climate change is turning Republicans into extremists due to discontent sparked by water scarcity, heat and related government policies, according to two Los Angeles Times columnists.
Wildfires, droughts and worsening heat, which the authors link to climate change, are contributing to “extremism” among supporters of former President Donald Trump in California, columnists Anita Chabria and Erika Smith argued.
“There’s no denying that the extremist turn of MAGA Republicanism is flourishing throughout the state’s pastoral parts,” the authors wrote.
“As climate change worsens, water gets more scarce and the land becomes hotter, drier and harder to live upon, this discontent could very well metastasize into violence.”
California’s environmental policies — such as orders to stop using river water to irrigate fields — tend to have an outsized impact on rural residents, who are generally more conservative than city-dwellers, according to the columnists.
As California struggles with water scarcity and wildfires, some worry that the state could force the relocation of its rural residents by blocking rebuilding efforts in fire-prone areas.
“Floods, fires and hurricanes cause tens of thousands of temporary evacuations every year, displacing people from homes, jobs and schools and making them more susceptible to — or victims of — extremist propaganda,” the piece reads.
One source stated without evidence that anti-government sentiments in the Western U.S. are linked to anti-Semitism.
“They all believe that the U.S. government has been captured by Jews,” said Alexander Reid Ross, an “extremism expert” at Portland State University. He told the Times that the relationship between the Western anti-government cowboy ethos and anti-Semitism was “supercharged” by the MAGA movement.
Chabria and Smith did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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A version of this article appeared on the Daily Caller News Foundation website.
