THE MEAT WAR

Last Friday night, which turned out to be the last show he did, Phucker Carlson teased his viewers that on Monday night he’d be dealing with the topic “Bugs: it’s what’s for dinner!”

Had I been doing what I never did before, and been watching his show, I would have been sitting here thinking “What the fuck?”

When I heard about that over the weekend, I went and did some research, since the topic of how much the Right hates people who don’t eat meat has been of interest to me these past 20 years.

Note: while I have been vegetarian leaning into vegan for those 20 years, I have recently been eating a limited amount of meat on doctor’s orders because I am anemic; it’s one of those problems a vegetarian runs into. I’d now say that I am eating a real “Paleo Diet” - mostly plant-based with some opportunistic meat - which is far more likely to be the diet of our distant ancestors, who didn’t have the technology to dine on Mastodon and Sabretooth Tiger every meal. The “Paleo Diet” acclaimed by the Right is like everything else they love - complete bullshit. The real paleo diet has been confirmed in every study ever done about modern gatherer-hunter societies.

So, what the fuck is what about this eating bugs fixation the droolers are now off on?

Last month, “Pizzagate” inventor and general sludgehead Mike Cernovich (a guy who is the living embodiment of every ethnic slur ever uttered against Slavic eastern Europeans by any western European) tweeted, “‘Eat bugs, live in a pod,’ is not a meme. It’s their real agenda,” to the 1.1 million droolers who follow him. It was in response to an otherwise-harmless article in the Economist about the role of meat consumption in global climate emissions.

Like pretty much everything else said by the Bubble World Boys, unless you’re deep into online culture, the tweet is incomprehensible.

It took some searching in places where you’d best carry a flashlight in your left hand and a lead-tipped baseball bat in your right if you expect to return in the condition you left, but I was able to discover that Cernovich’s tweet refers to a theory that now fills the pea brains of the keyboard kultur warriors.

And that is this: a shady cabal of elite globalists is now conspiring to make everyone on earth eat bugs instead of burgers.

This was certainly news to this veteran of the Meat Wars. I mean, what the actual fuck???

Why elite globalists would choose this particular plot makes less sense than the crap these morons usually deal in. I mean, of all the “alternative proteins” on the list to replace meat in the American diet, insects are the one least likely to replace pork, chicken, and beef among affluent First Worlders. That’s even despite the fact that when you get out of the First World, you will find that bugs really are on the diet of many residents of the developing world.

If replacing a nice barbecued brisket with roach bricks were part of the Secret Globalist Plot, I am pretty sure that even the most ardent vegetarians I know would rank the idea somewhere way down on the list of feasibility - certainly below eliminating electoral democracy, implanting everyone with microchips, and replacing football with fútbol. (Yes, these really are Discovered Plots By Globalists to turn Real Amurrikins into weenies)

This newfound obsession with bugs, perfectly describes the battlefield that eating meat now represents in America’s perpetual culture war. From references to effeminate left-wing “soy-boys,” to the embrace of hypermasculine “carnivore” diets, it’s clear that the Right’s darker fantasies aren’t really about threats to a dietary staple.

As witheverything else they worry about, since these are the people most likely to wake up at 3am in a cold sweat as they realize what an incel weenie they really are, these Guys Most Likely To Have Never Been On A Date are worrying about threats to the liberty, bodily integrity, and masculinity of American men.

And since the craziest bullshit one can find on 8chan will inevitably be spoken about by one of the Taliban 20 in Congress, varieties of such an extreme vision are increasingly turning up in policy debates.

In recent months, actual members of Congress (refer to The 1873 Twain Rule when trying to figure out how they got there) now regularly accuse any policy that might reduce meat consumption, and even policies that simply touch on greenhouse emissions, of being part of the plan to rip meat from Americans’ very mouths.

Yes, this is all ridiculous. It’s also a tragedy: making meat a culture-war issue creates new, tribal ideals of consumption and at the same time undermines the political and systemic change needed to create a healthier and more sustainable food system.

The current food system, based on corporate “farming” and mass exploitation of everything, has created a food system in which most Americans cannot afford to eat well, and the food that is available is actively bad for them. The other week, while rearranging things here at the house, I came across a collection of photos taken at air shows 40 years ago. Interestingly enough, in all the crowd shots from back then, thin people are the majority. I compare that to a photo I took out at Planes of Fame’s airshow back in 2015, and the majority of the people in the shot are pretty chunky, if not out and out fat. This is not entirely due to everyone being a couch potato.

Yes, most of us could do with more walking regularly, but even people I know who do exercise complain about having to watch what they eat since prepared foods - the diet of most people now in an era when no one has time to actually cook - pack on pounds due to the amount of corn starch and corn syrup put in the food for preservation and sweetening. Then there’s all the antibiotics and other things given to cattle so they can spend more time in a feedlot putting on fat (which makes your steak both tastier and more likely to pack on pounds).

Our food is literally killing us, the food creation and production industry is completely industrialized and set up to maximize production and profit and to hell with anything else, and these idiots want us to think nothing has changed since the 1950s.

There is no place in American food production now where waterways don’t get poisoned by runoff, where antibiotic-resistant superbugs aren’t bred in feedlots, where food workers aren’t routinely exploited and maimed - to the point the industry now wants to bring back child labor because they can’t attract a workforce with their minimum wages and working conditions originally described over a century ago in “The Jungle.”

As with everything else the American Right promotes, despite the kultur warriors’ anti-elite posturing, the truth is that the biggest beneficiaries of the meat culture war are the major corporations and their dependent political interests that already play an outsize role in setting the menu of the American diet.

And as with everything else these people promote, the biggest losers are ordinary consumers - the people they claim to represent, care about and support.

Meat holds a central place in American national mythology; advertising has made it the thing that connects urban life with the frontier, the cowboy, and the ranch - real Americans eat red meat, and real American men grill it. Red meat is so central to this mythology that an imagined threat to it becomes a totalitarian threat to fundamental liberty.

Yes, vegans and vegetarians skew left and you’re more likely to hear a Democrat claim he or she wants to reduce meat consumption than a Republican; 90 percent of Americans eat meat and 66 percent of them agree that “eating red meat is part of the American way of life.” If there’s a left wing plot out there to get rid of burgers, they’d better amp up production of Impossible Burgers pretty quickly and get that Lab-grown meat into production before it’s too late.

Republicans use meat to bash Democratic climate initiatives; hamberder fan Donald Trump warns the result of the Green New Deal would be a ban on cows. Republican politicians use red meat as a symbol of conservatism. Ryan Zinke (proof that SEALs should be permanently “retired” when they retire) branded a calf ahead of his run for a Montana House seat, tweeting a photo with the caption “Let’s Go Branding!” (another not-so-subtle nod to “Let’s Go Brandon!”)

Iowa farmgirl Senator Joni Ernst has proposed banning “Meatless Monday.” Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts declared “Meat on the Menu” day.

The Republicans have positioned themselves as the political and cultural champions of meat eating. They refused to shut down slaughterhouses as the first wave of Covid-19 infection swept through them.

As the Economist article Cernovich went after reported, shifting away from meat - especially beef - in high-consuming countries, would go a long way in reducing the ecological hoofprint of our food system. Current methods of meat production are contributing directly to the western water shortage, to the detriment of Republican-voting states in the Colorado River system, which runs through both red states and blue states. The river has dropped to historic lows not just due to drought but also the water being used to irrigate high water-use feed crops like alfalfa that is fed to cattle. Like nearly everything else advocated by Republicans, animal agriculture is most harmful to the very rural constituencies that elect conservative politicians.

For the most strident culture warriors, meat is not simply a food; it’s a critical part of an existential conflict.

The fundamental premise of culture-war framing is that the existing problem be seen as a surrogate for a larger clash between two irreconcilable worldviews held by two irreconcilable groups. Us vs Them; Elites vs The People; Woke vs MAGA; Globalist vs The Folk.

The Covid mRNA vaccines, once doused in culture-war accelerant and lit with political matches, went from being the signature accomplishment of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to something Trump can’t mention in his rallies.

Because the larger struggle is vague and incapable of resolution, “culture wars” are less about addressing the problem than about shoring up the adherents’ opposition to whatever the other side is doing.

“We should eat less meat” is real. “The elites are going to make cows illegal” is not.

Most potential commercial uses for insect meal are as livestock feed.

In culture wars, feelings don’t care about facts. They are an explicit message about how to align personal behavior with your ideological grievances: Eat meat to own the libs.

The result of all this reinforces a status quo dominated by unaccountable global multinational corporations. Empowering average people to eat “real” meat, reinforces the companies pumping the nuggets full of exotic additives, while celebrating common dietary choices as edgy iconoclasm. “I’m going to eat meat, like 95 percent of my countrymen, Democrats and Republicans, in the country that already eats the most meat per capita in the world, most of it produced and processed by huge agribusiness conglomerates, because I am a rebellious, independent freethinker who rejects globalist dogma and control,” is not a coherent statement.

Ratchet up the combative victimhood narrative and somehow this takes on a life of its own.

It can even go further than yelling at rallies. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism recently issued a report that the mainstreaming of right-wing racial “gastropolitics,” when linked with conspiracy theories about post-Covid food supply sabotage by globalist elites, “may present the potential for violent consequences.”

Think about Marjorie Traitor Goon’s conspiratorial pronouncements against “fake meat” being grown in “peach tree dishes.” It’s easy to laugh at her boneheaded ignorance, but it’s an indication of an even greater unwillingness of elected conservatives to take environmental and agricultural policy seriously.

As with every other culture war the Right chooses, they want to fight about diets because otherwise they would have a losing hand. Letting the Colorado River run dry to own the libs is not an appealing proposition for anyone. Committing to only eating meat or stoking fears of bug-peddling billionaires, attracts radical followers and angry recriminations from their opponents. This allows the laundering of what would be otherwise unpopular policies into the conservative mainstream.

So, while Phucker Carlson may not be able to peddle “Bugs: It’s What’s For Dinner” this week, the essence of the right’s culture-wars is the transformation of the energy of grievance into the substance of reactionary policy. They win when they scuttle any possibility of solving actual problems. They want to destroy the capacity of the administrative state to regulate the food supply with fairness, safety, and sustainability.

The result is that the absence of government regulation produces a dystopia in which most food comes from a handful of shady megacorporations that sell chemical-laden flesh of mysterious provenance. It already exists.

It’s what you buy in the meat case in every grocery store in America.

Every time you wonder why the Right has their hair on fire over this issue or that, all you have to do is Follow. The. Money. Look at see what corporate interest is being supported by these “people’s warriors.”

It turns out it’s always the same old story.

It’s how fascism works.

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