A Dutch version of this post has been published on doorbraak.eu.

On 4 November 2025, Science Guide reported on the decision by the rector of University Utrecht, Wilco Hazeleger, to allow the founder of the FvD - Thierry Baudet - to speak at a debate night at the university.

This is simultaneously shocking, and completely unsurprising. It is shocking because the academic community has apparently still - after everything that is happening in the world - not built up the necessary immune response to keep out the fascist virus. It is unsurprising because this moral failure of university management has been with us for many years.

Simpson, S., & Cheever, K. (2025). It Was Always Blood and Soil: Ecofascism and the Racial Capitalocene. Antipode, 57(3), 1126-1147. Link

Césaire’s account of fascism in the context of the racial capitalocene thus guides our recontextualisation of ecofascism: what is today being called ecofascism is no new phenomenon but rather the culmination of the colonial logics of extractivism dehumanisation and racialised violence finally made legible to and felt by the colonial core.