Fighting ecoterrorism or fighting dissent: are state and corporate actors perpetrators of hate crimes?

This chapter examines so-called “eco-terrorism” in the United States in pursuit of two main goals: (1) to articulate the distinctions between domestic terrorism and hate crimes, and (2) to highlight how political ideology influences the resources given to combating certain types of terror and/or hate. I show how federal law enforcement and corporate actors grossly inflated the threat posed by radical environmentalists to the level of moral panic in order to justify repression of the movement for its anti-capitalist and anarchist views. Conversely, hate crimes tend not to directly challenge the major structures of society, often promoting and protecting underlying cultural ideologies; as such they receive less law enforcement resources. In short, attention and energy that could be wielded to stymy the significant and serious threats posed by hate crimes and hate groups are misdirected because state and corporate actors are consumed with protecting the status quo, not people.