Cable news recap: Climate activists’ ‘toddler’ behavior and the problem with calling mass shooters ‘lone wolves’

On Monday night, Laura Ingraham touched on how climate activists are carrying out their protests and Rachel Maddow discussed the potential danger of referring to a mass shooter as a “lone wolf.”

Fox News — Climate activists are ‘behaving like toddlers’

On the “Ingraham Angle” Monday night, Laura Ingraham spoke to journalist Michael Shellenberger on how climate change activists are “behaving like toddlers.”

As thousands were traveling through Nevada to attend the Burning Man Festival, festivalgoers were halted by a trailer blocking the two-lane road with climate activists chained to it and linking their arms together with PVC pipes, causing traffic to be backed up, all in the name of climate change.

“Clearly, the Nevada Rangers were very moved by the impassioned protesters,” Ingraham said. “All the tolerance of fanatics and all the peace, love and understanding folks, I think they were really appreciative of the Nevada Rangers clearing those protesters out.”

Shellenberger, whose writing focuses on topics such as the intersection of politics, climate change and the environment, said, “What we’ve seen is climate protesters becoming more infantile in their protest over the last year. ... These are behaviors of toddlers, of people who were not raised right, and now it’s been up to law enforcement to deal with their tantrums.”

Shellenberger also claimed that, more often than not, fanatics have nothing else going on in their lives and are usually failed artists themselves.

“Burning Man is a big hippie gathering,” he said. “I will say there’s some really great art there, and these are people that are probably not capable of doing anything really creative or beneficial to society, so they find themselves just engaging in destructive behavior.”

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MSNBC — ‘Lone wolf’ mass shooters

On the “Rachel Maddow Show,” Maddow spoke to Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, about Jacksonville’s official plan to release the shooter’s manifesto in the interest of transparency.

“A gunman shot and killed three people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday afternoon before killing himself,” Deseret News previously reported. “The shooter, identified by authorities as 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, came armed with a handgun, AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a bullet-resistant vest, officials said.”

“We see these manifestos ending up in the hands of future attackers,” Belew said. “That is a huge problem, and authorities are absolutely right to be cautious in how they circulate.”

However, Belew said that those who study violence acted out in this way are limited to their research without having the manifesto. “Without the manifesto, we’re just working with a lot less information,” she said.

Maddow mentioned that the Jacksonville sheriff has said that he doesn't believe the shooter was part of a larger organized group and that he acted alone. Maddow asked Belew why it would be wrong to dismiss the shooter's crimes as a “lone wolf event” just because he acted out his crimes alone.

“This is why we need the manifesto,” Belew said. “When we consume stories about white power violence as single events as a lone wolf attack, we are consuming them as if they are existing without connection to each other, without an ideological basis. So this is how we get stories about Jacksonville as something separate” from other mass shootings.

She added that these types of attackers are “united through social ties, they’re united ideologically, they share information about weapons and tactics and strategies and they are all working for the same purpose.”