A rhetorical blame-shifting tactic that consists in attributing the direct effects of one's behavior to the alleged indirect reason that triggered it.
In cases when an incompetent and/or malicious actor "A" intends to exploit some (real or imagined) external factor "F" in order to justify potentially harmful behavior, all responsibility for any subsequent harm will be implicitly attributed to the indirect factor F, rather the directly responsible party A; but more importantly, the latter won't even get mentioned, as if it was completely unrelated to the issue at hand.
Similar to the wifebeater argument ("look what you forced me to do!"), but even worse than the latter, in our case the culprit doesn't even need to excuse himself, as he's been entirely removed from the equation.
This causes a perceptive inversion where inanimated factors are personalized as evil forces, while actual human culprits get completely ignored, affording them the chance not only to reinforce the alleged danger represented by the F, but also to completely dodge any form of responsibility and ultimately get away with everything.
This tactic has been used in the most systematic and pervasive way during the Covid Psyop of the early 2020s, where all mainstream media outlets were instructed to blame all disastrous social/economic/sanitary effects of the lockdowns to Covid itself rather than the directly responsible parties (i.e.: institutions and governments); even years later, this kind of rhetoric still persists in public discourse around Covid.