Veganism, Year Eighteen: Disinformation and the Malign Motives of the Meat Men

Eighteen years ago tomorrow, I published a Dorf on Law column announcing that I had become a vegan.  Since that day, I have faithfully published yearly veganniversary columns -- 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 plus followup, 2019 plus followup, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, as well as the original column in 2008 plus followup.  What to say this year?

I continue to be amazed by how much invective is thrown at vegans.  I have of course highlighted examples of such bile over the years, largely to point out that (as Professor Colb used to remind me) such attacks would not be happening if we vegans were having no impact.  Usually, the invective comes from obviously ignorant sources, as I will discuss at length below, but sometimes it amounts to something akin to "friendly fire."

Because Stephen Colbert's show was yanked off the air by the Trumpists running CBS, I am hesitant to point out that Colbert was sometimes one of the more annoying people on the left who simply could not resist mocking vegans.  One example of that nervous tic showed up in my 2017 veganniversary column, and he unfortunately could not stop himself from going out on a sour note.  A few weeks before his final show (on April 15 of this year), his monologue included this (starting at about the 2:14 mark, transcript from YouTube):

Ooh, there's uh there's more uh tough news to chew on. Beef is getting harder for Americans to afford ... .  Prices prices are rising just as summer barbecue season is heating up. To which your vegan cousin said, "Well, well, well, I guess these tofu ribs don't look so bad after all." What's that? They still look bad and also weird because they are shaped like ribs even though they're made out of coagulated soy. Oh, fine. Be that way. Nut-based cheese, anyone?  Cashew cheddar. [applause and cheering]  It doesn't melt.

Talk about punching down!  And of course, the audience's "applause and cheering" at his half-witticisms are exactly what motivates even smart comics like Colbert to be so lazy.

To be clear, Colbert in general was still very much at the top of his game before his firing, which differentiates him from his former boss Jon Stewart, whose retirement in 2015 was long overdue and whose 2024 return to "The Daily Show" to host on Mondays has merely made it all the more obvious that he is well beyond his best-by date.  I mean, how much mugging and self-satisfied giggling is one poorly informed (albeit more often than not well-meaning) man allowed to smugly inflict on the world?  (See especially my comments here and here about some of his recent worse-than-useless takes.)

So to be very, very clear, Colbert is/was not bad at all.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Even so, take another look at what he said in his monologue above, which at least one of his writers came up with and which Colbert approved and delivered.  What is the joke, exactly?  That vegan food is "weird," apparently, because it is sometimes formed to look like something else but is "coagulated" and sometimes has a higher melting point.

Devastating.  Yet as we all know, people will eat hot dogs, chicken "nuggets," "cheese product," "buttery popcorn topping" -- sometimes even making grim jokes about how they have no idea what is actually in any of those things -- but when anyone dares to suggest that maybe they should eat something that is not a part of an animal that was tortured and then killed, they get their backs up and say, "Hey, I care about what I put in my body!"

Of course, the truly bad faith arguments come from people who are lazy in a different way.  That is, while Colbert would occasionally go for a cheap laugh from the "Hey, look at those freaks!" school of comedy, many malevolent people think that they have super-clever responses to veganism, only to come up with nothing.  Even so, they somehow feel good about their failed efforts.

As an example, I happened upon a column on a pro-vegan website a few years ago that responded to a scene from the show "Yellowstone," about which I knew nothing at the time.  I soon learned that that show and its creator have become popular on the American right for fighting the culture wars through gauzy (to say nothing of dishonest) depictions of American mythology.  There was apparently an episode of the show in which a character is confronted by anti-meat protesters, and his version of a zinger was this:

You ever plow a field? To plant quinoa or sorghum or whatever the hell it is you eat? You kill everything on the ground and under it. You kill every snake, every frog, every mouse, mole, vole, worm, quail…you kill them all. So I guess the only real question is: how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?

As the writer of the piece that responded to that comment noted: "The lead, Kevin Costner, gave a one-liner putdown of veganism that was presented as wise and grounded. The mostly-female protestors didn’t respond, weren’t given a response. It was a weak moment."  The authored added:

Costner's point: that vegans only care about "cute" animals, that farming "quinoa or whatever you all eat" kills animals, is easy to reply to. We aren't trying to be perfect. We're trying to care, do ... what we can. Farming vegan foods may kill animals, and displace jungle/forest (which it doesn't need to)—but 85% of farmland and say 100% of ranchland is dedicated to growing crops for animals to be tortured and murdered, or directly for animals to be tortured then murdered. So want to spare the lives of 85-100% of animals? Eat lower on the food chain. Care.

And vegans, last I checked, show up in caring for all animals, not just cuties. And, ranchers aren't our enemy. Industrial ag is, factory farming is, and ranchers and small farmers also find common cause against Big Ag.

Living on the land is beautiful. But if we're truly living on the land, we're living with the land, in harmony, not subjugating it and torturing and killing Nature as we see fit.

I would not necessarily endorse everything in that response, but no one should expect vegans to agree on everything.  It is reasonable, however, to expect that a big moment on a major TV show in which a character is given the opportunity to speak for the vegan-hating crowd might be ... persuasive, maybe, or somehow good, at least?  I mean, this was not an actual encounter between humans who are taken by surprise and say things that are incomplete, off the cuff, or even inadvertently wrong.  This is a scripted show with a large budget and months of lead time to get things right.  Right wing websites that linked to that clip inevitably claimed that Costner's character "destroyed" some hapless lefties.

But seriously?  "Everything you do has some negative side effect, so no one can oppose anything I do"?  As one commentator said after Trump's big speech last week about imaginary 2020 election interference: This is all you've got?!

Frequent readers of my columns here on Dorf on Law might recognize this broad phenomenon.  It is only the most recent example of my fascination with the idea that people who make embarrassing arguments are unintentionally showing that they simply do not care about being persuasive, because they are able to get away with making claims that they would never accept from an opponent.  For example, last week I ended my critique of John Roberts's opinion in the Slaughter case with this: "I often point out that one can easily sniff out the arrogance of power by paying attention to how weak an argument is. Roberts does not feel the need to defend his silly wordplay, because he has the votes."  The arrogance of power is easy to identify when those who are exploiting weaker beings cannot even be bothered to make an argument that passes the straight-face test.

But it does not end there.  The anti-vegan crowd, especially its most hostile members, does not limit itself to hippie-punching.  They want to take away your freedom!  Yes, I mean that seriously, but I will allow Paul Krugman to make the point.  In one of his NYT columns two years ago, he addressed an effort by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who, amusingly in this context, was once the recipient of a Trump insult: the nickname "Meatball Ron") to prevent a "cultured meat" industry from ever coming into being, an effort that I also discussed in my 2024 veganniversary column.  Krugman wrote:

But even if you're someone who insists that "real" Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?

And then there are the conspiracy theories. It's a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It's also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden's eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans' burger consumption.

And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?

By the way, I'm not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don't.

Is that not sad enough for you?  Unfortunately, there is more.  The anti-vegan movement is not something that simply popped into politicians' heads.  There are, as unbelievable as it might seem, "Big Meat Influencers" on the right, as the YouTuber Rebecca Watson explored in a video in 2023.  These are people who have spent the last few years spreading disinformation about how vegans are wimpy "soy boys" and all that nonsense.  They try every trick in the propaganda playbook, from spouting junk science to asking "What about the children?"

More to the point, that anti-vegan public relations effort is part of the same ecosystem (although they would surely reject any concern about ecosystems!) as RFKJr's raw milk (and roadkill) obsession, along with the full range of panic about a supposed lack of manliness in modern America.  Did you know that sperm counts are down by 50 percent?  That is another lie, but the people who failed to laugh when Tucker Carlson was pushing "testicle tanning" are convinced that spermageddon is upon us and can only be fought by Real Men being Really Manly.  Their arguments, however, are simply flaccid.

The overall point, then, is that the effort to discredit veganism is now part of the larger effort to suggest that only the most toxic, violent males deserve anyone's respect.  Yes, there is a blindingly obvious double entendre regarding "Big Meat" as referring both to eating animals and being procreative.  (But never use a French phrase with these dudes.)  Overcompensation is overcompensation, and these weak men are frantically hoping that they can prove their virility by shouting to the world, as one of Trump's sons once claimed, "I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday."

Nothing pathetic about that.

- Neil H. Buchanan