A few minutes before 22 people were murdered in a Walmart in El Paso on 3 August, in a now-familiar ritual of American gun violence, a manifesto was uploaded to the fringe online forum 8chan (tagline: ‘Embrace infamy’). For the most part, the four-page screed parroted standard white supremacist themes, warning of a ‘Hispanic invasion’ while fretting that the 8chan community might find its contents a little ‘meh’. Yet the manifesto’s title, ‘The Inconvenient Truth’, suggested a second fixation. Its opening lines praised the lengthy statement published on the same forum five months earlier by the New Zealand mosque attacker – a self-proclaimed ‘eco-fascist’ – and it name-checked an unexpected source: Dr Seuss’s 1971 environmentalist children’s fable The Lorax.
