How Red Meat Became the Red Pill for the Alt-Right

"Contemporary right-wing politics survives on a diet of grievance, persecution, and misdirection. In the right-wing mind, feminists and social justice warriors have been joined by the CEOs of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, creator of the Beyond Burger (the demand for alternative meat has skyrocketed but has not surpassed the demand for beef during the pandemic), Bill Gates, animal rights activists, Greta Thunberg, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to carry water for the vegan agenda. “Modern society has created the least masculine men in history,” reads one tweet by the Internet’s mysterious self-described “meat philosopher” Carnivore Aurelius. Another proclaims, “The Carnivore Diet is the red pill that wakes you up to reality.” In these circles, the war on meat is a war on men. Red meat is the red pill.

“In this philosophy of the past, Americans must rediscover a ‘primitive’ instinct from a time when women did more work within the home, immigrants and indigenous people were even more marginalized, and fewer people saw culture and tradition as the product of specific human decisions,” Kideckel wrote. For Durant, our collective health went to shit when women left the kitchen, outsourcing the cooking to corporations. “Their traditional role was always an important one and shouldn’t be trivialized,” he said in a 2017 interview. Yet there remains the fact that humans must change our relationship to meat, especially beef, if we are to avoid ecological catastrophe, let alone improve the lives of meatpacking workers or help the animals themselves. But if meat is of essential value to human health, we seem to be in an existential bind, trapped between our perceived nutritional needs and the capacity of our ecosystem and labor force to meet them. In “Can Seven Billion Humans Go Paleo?” the writer Erica Etelson wondered, “If there’s not enough animal protein to go around without cooking the planet, who should be first in line?” That’s the mostly unasked question at the heart of the meat debate: one of power and ethics, not fat and protein.

“What I can tell you is that there’s too many of us. Do we want lots of people fed like crap, or do we want healthy people? Our current system is completely failing and producing sick people and killing our environment. So regenerative agriculture is actually the only solution we have moving forward. And, you know, there’s too many people.”

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How Red Meat Became the Red Pill for the Alt-Right | The Nation