Here are two things that are true: Meat is delicious. Humans need to massively reduce their consumption of meat if we want to avert the climate catastrophe that we are alarmingly quickly hurtling towards.
I think I speak for us all when I say: Well, shit.
While a diet that’s less heavy on meat might seem unfathomable to some people, it’s a future that we are staring down the barrel of until we find a way to grow a rack of short ribs in a lab. To vegans, this is not a particularly confronting idea. To some people, the existence of vegans is a tremendously confronting idea — enough that a traffic-stopping protest on Monday has caused Australia’s usually quite sensible (lol) gaggle of right-wing media figures to completely snap.
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Like some sort of self-loathing Willy Wonka, allow me to give you a tour of some of the most ridiculous reactions to come out of corners of the internet usually reserved for racist uncles and paralegals doing research for defamation claims.
Greg Sheridan, whose job at The Australian seems from the outside to be sharting out an article and a half a week, claimed that as a result of the protest his “productivity was diminished” as he “couldn’t get past vegan militants” at Flinders Street. He went on to imagine the vegans as some sort of Frankensteinian monster that represents every progressive issue he is scared of:
Here’s the rub: if we followed their self-righteous diktats and banned all the industries they have declared immoral, unethical, polluting, carbon-emitting, gender-offensive, identity unsatisfactory or whatever, how on earth would we earn a living?
I don’t recall the protestors bringing up gender but, then again, I was not there.
Andrew Bolt did his editorial as a lengthy video, which I will not subject you to, but his summary alone managed to imply climate change is fake and make an absurd claim about the protestor’s motives:
The protests yesterday by vegans, animal liberationists and global warmists hurt people, and didn’t persuade them. But that was the point: this was about the pleasure of bullying.
Herald Sun columnist Miranda Devine went on an absolutely bizarre tear. On Twitter, she waxed lyrical about how if vegans mourn for coal (?) they should also be again lighting dead wood on fire (?), in a response to a fabricated quote that she apparently believed to be real:
https://twitter.com/mirandadevine/status/1115221781327929350
The column she threw together was just as sensical, saying that because she was told as a child that plants feel pain no one should be vegan. You cannot make this up:
So, at the age of 8 or 9 I resolved not to eat meat. My mother, who grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in WA, pursed her lips but kept her thoughts to herself.
Some time later, I read an article which said that plants have feelings and object to being eaten alive. This was deeply troubling.
I asked my mother, “What can I eat?”
She replied dryly: “Salt”.
It didn’t take long to realise this was untenable. It was either me or the cucumber. So I gave up and became an omnivore again, as biology dictated.
It’s a pity the mothers of the vegan terrorists who have been invading farms across Australia this week didn’t have the wit of my mother to nip irrational sentimentality in the bud.
She finished on a high note, trying to compare the protestors to Nazis because Hitler was vegetarian for the last 6 or 7 years of his life:
Grim, pasty-faced vegans are not about saving animals from cruelty but about imposing a dehumanising ideology on the rest of us, an ideology linked to genocidal tyrants.
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, as was Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust who was renowned for having furniture made from the skin of his Jewish victims.
The Nazi Animal Protection Movement was big in the 1930s while Jews were being exterminated in gas chambers.
Hitler was also a Catholic, as was Himmler when he was a young man. Is that some reflection on Devine’s own Catholicism? Of course not. Pretty wild that she’d draw a line that tenuous but defend Fraser Anning at every turn. Weird!
Her colleague Rita Panahi executed a perfect 540 (I assume she completed one full spin just for fun), having just a few months ago praised vegan activists for actually doing something:
Vegans can be a terribly tiresome lot and you probably don’t want to be seated next to one at a dinner party but, on the whole, they are among the more principled activists in this
age of virtue-signalling clicktivism.They don’t just preach and hector, they actually do, and their objectives are usually good.
Most Australians care deeply about animal welfare whether it’s pets, wildlife or livestock but many of us would rather not think too much about where our meat comes from and how it is slaughtered.
We want to believe that livestock is well cared for and killed in the most humane way possible but the truth is many would rather turn a blind eye to the reality of factory farming and slaughterhouse practices.
What a wonderfully considered opinion for a News Corp columnist! Wow! Oh no, they went too far by doing stuff, apparently:
The actions of vegan activists who caused mayhem in Melbourne’s CBD on Monday morning can be summed up in two words; witless and counter-productive. And, that’s coming from someone who is passionate about animal welfare and has for years written and spoken in support of ending live exports, reforming factory farming practices and implementing stronger penalties for animal cruelty.
Ah well, one day.
The ever-reliable News.com.au almost instantly published an opinion piece whose sole argument was that because the writer was an asshole when they were a teen vegetarian, everyone is:
But by the time I was about 12 or 13, I had slowly come to realise what a pompous little twit I was — and just as importantly, how utterly futile my childish one-girl protest was when compared to the real, much larger issues that were plaguing the world — things like poverty, war, racial and religious division and general inequality. I began eating meat again and almost immediately became a more tolerable person.
An argument in which culminated in them eating two lunches, to spite, uh, someone I guess:
In fact I brought a vegetarian mushroom and edamame udon salad to lunch for work because I still quite enjoy eating meat-free every now and again, just because I like how vegies taste.
But now, in honour of every vegan still mutinously chained to a bollard in the middle of Flinders Street, I’m going to nip out to the shops and buy a nice fat chicken schnitty to eat with it.
Well played, vegans. Bon appetit!
Got ’em.
These intellectual heavyweights found themselves in wonderful company, with One Nation and Fraser Anning both taking a stance against these vegan thugs:
Pretty wild that they apparently know the date of the advent of agriculture but don’t know that growing plants also requires farming.
Anning’s tack was to scream “1,000,000 years dungeon!” like Lemongrab:
I’ve saved my personal favourite for last. This is either extraordinarily self-aware parody from The Australian, one of the most ridiculous things ever said earnestly, or a combination of both:
Good luck figuring that one out.
