The secret is out. It’s not like it took a lot of sleuthing, and the Left is wise not to chuck a legislative hail mary on this one. They start slow at the municipal or local level to gain precedent in the courts, giving them time to work on statewide and later national edicts. We’re talking about the war on gas stoves, which the Left dismissed as a conservative myth until Berkeley tried to do it, only to get shot down by the courts.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision to overturn Berkeley's ban on natural gas stoves could threaten dozens of similar restrictions nationwide.https://t.co/GgXnqBuC05
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 19, 2023
This war isn’t over, but one related issue is the war on meat. Yes, the hamburger is a culture war issue, thanks to the environmental Left. We cannot forget that, and it’s also not a figment of our imagination (via National Review):
Treating yourself to a hamburger this weekend? If it's a meat-based one, you are contributing to climate change, deforestation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and more. 😳
— Meat-Free Plate (@meatfreeplate) December 16, 2022
Why not tuck into a plant-based hamburger instead? 🌱#ClimateCrisis #deforestation #burgers #vegan pic.twitter.com/HhZBS9Icak
“All food is not created equal,” New York City mayor Eric Adams inscrutably intoned this week. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crisis lies in meat and dairy products.” This indictment accompanied the mayor’s efforts to extirpate animal proteins from city-run facilities, where “meat is increasingly missing from the menu,” according to the New York Times.
[…]
A recent essay in the New Republic by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg presents a perfect illustration of the backward causality typical of activists who insist that the only way to arrest catastrophic climate change is to limit the public’s protein intake but also insist that it’s madness to believe anyone wants to limit your protein intake. They decry the “insipid” and “ridiculous” accusations from conservatives who assume that policies designed to limit the public’s consumption of meat represent an effort to reduce the public’s meat consumption.
Your steak has been turned into a “culture-war issue” by the people who notice and, most importantly, resent this effort to impose new cultural standards on the public from above. The prosecutors of the culture war are the conservatives, whose “darker fantasies aren’t just about threats to a dietary staple but about threats to the liberty, bodily integrity, and masculinity of American men,” they write. Remember, it’s the conservatives here who have lost touch with reality.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg’s condescension isn’t innovative. Activists for whom meat consumption represents an assault on the Eden into which we were conceived often insist that the logical conclusions of their theology are fantastical inventions of their opponents. “Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joked in a 2019 conversation with the New Yorker’s David Remnick. Her flippancy was occasioned by the revelations contained in the literature around the Green New Deal, upon which literate Republicans “pounced.” Those reactionaries on the right had egregiously interpreted the resolution’s language around collapsing the American agricultural system down to “local scale” to limit emissions from livestock production to mean what it says.
They’re coming for our meat, which we must protect at all costs. It goes beyond principle. It’s a great way to redirect the ‘busybody’ critique often applied to conservatives, especially on abortion. I’m not saying that’s a pivot that should be used in that debate, but while the Left is willy-nilly regarding legalized infanticide, they want to regulate everything else, including what we put on our grills. But we’re the intrusive agents in American society. Even some self-identified liberals have noticed how annoying the Left has become on some cultural matters, highlighting the burger as an example. Most people want to have a beer, eat a burger or steak, and enjoy the fireworks on the Fourth of July. The average liberal today would dole out a lecture not on just how bad meat is for the Earth but also how Independence Day is a racist holiday.
For now, the kill shot seems to be a good old-fashioned observation. As NRO senior writer Noah Rothman wrote, “We’re confronted with the curious condition in which these activists evince a religious conviction in the righteousness of their crusade against meat, but those convictions dissolve into cowardice whenever their advocacy makes contact with a skeptical audience.”
So, stay alert and know that when these meat Nazis try and mock you, it’s because you exposed their absurdity.