Illustrating the dangers of the federal government's war on "domestic extremists," animal rights activists are being prosecuted under a capacious definition of "terrorism."
I'm the investigator named in this story, who led the collaboration with Mr. Walker to expose and ultimately end this atrocity, and now face a felony and "ag-gag" prosecution, and FBI investigation, as a result.
Animal ag is perhaps the most devastating invention in human history, and this situation lays bare the depravity of this system for the world to see. Exposing the most egregious animal torture imaginable has resulted in all manner of repression against those who speak up, while it's the powerful entities inflicting the abuse that call the shots.
Please support our work by spreading the word about DxE's Whistleblower Helpline program, where industry workers (or anybody at all) can anonymously submit information about abuses to workers, animals and the environment, which we will consider for further investigation and publication via press and social media.
Thank you. I know how difficult this work is, even when people are not facing prosecution and the FBI. I know that I can't truly even imagine the agony of that experience, has never even happened to the activists that I know and have known (who are legion). I'm sorry you're having to go through this; I admire the hell out if you. Really appreciate the Whistleblower Helpline link, and will pass it around. But please let us know if there is anything that we can do to help in your personal fight against Johnny Law. I think I'm not the only one who'd like to help.
Please keep up your work in making sure that these animals, bred by us for slaughter, at least live decent lives for the brutally short time they have on this earth.
An excellent, well-researched report, and unfortunately the analogy with the PATRIOT act is less a prediction and more a statement that night follows day. Unfortunately, both the left *and* the right mainstreams are enamored of these laws. And the bodies that traditionally prized liberties, such as the ACLU, are now largely focused on other things.
The free speech, free journalism current in the West is as small as it's been in my time on this earth, and it's shrinking fast. Dark days are ahead and I'm not sure what can be done.
Articles like this, at least, give us a fighting chance of knowing what we're up against.
Wonder if Upton Sinclair would be called a Domestic Terrorist by the current administration, not just a “muckraker.” Would Ida Tarbell make the DT list?
"...there is no reason to believe it, and every reason to believe the hunt for 'domestic terrorists' could eventually be turned against anyone with the will and the means to effectively confront those who hold concentrated political and corporate power — including through strictly non-violent means."
Any organization attracting enough attention to itself by even non-violently opposing the powers that be will find itself targeted and infiltrated with agents provocateur who'll find some fool in the mix, and convince the half-wit violence is the only solution. A provocateur will create a plot, then charismatically convince the "pepega" to agree to it. Once the target raises a finger to initiate action in furtherance of the plot, the early morning arrest and government dog and pony media show ensue. It doesn't matter the government formed the plot, conspiracy law doesn't care. This is highly effective at taking down entire organizations through defamation and fear.
Ignoring the moral issues around animal euthanasia, the major problem is the use of highly contentious subject matter to justify government overreach. The outrage factory we call the media is working hand in hand with the government to expand their powers in return for access.
That any reasonable number of people unreasonably believe new domestic “anti-terrorism” laws aren’t sought to suppress threats to the ruling class is testament to the public’s ignorance.
Not that it’s entirely the public’s fault, given the pitch and volume of the propaganda.
But it is still striking that so many expect anything out of our current system that is what it’s sold to be, after so much out-in-the-open evidence to the contrary.
A carnist insinuating that veganism is like a religion? Good one.
Almost all vegans were once members of the most destructive and murderous religion the world has ever seen—a religion called carnism. Unlike most carnists, vegans have earnestly questioned and then discarded, with uncommon intellectual and social courage, the carnist religion into which they were born.
And some former vegans are now non-vegans. Veganism is an extreme. Non-veganism is simply a rejection of the extreme not "carnism". People who are not vegan do not have some fanatical belief in eating exclusively meat, they simply lack the fanatical belief in not doing so and reject both the oral sadism and alleged moral superiority of being vegan which, ironically, does not gurantee the non-killing of animals for food, it merely guarantees that any animals killed as a consequence of agriculture (directly and indirectly) are never eaten.
Ah yes, the old 'it's actually the atheists who rely on faith!' canard.
In fact, veganism is built on reason, while carnism is built on faith. That's why, like virtually all religions, carnism harbors such extreme and yet unacknowledged absurdities, including the contradictory carnist dogma that humanity's moral superiority justifies being incredibly immoral toward other animals.
Another of carnism's many absurdities—one you've dutifully voiced—is the belief that veganism is "extreme," when, in fact, veganism is a rejection of carnism's extreme violence. Likewise, carnism's basis in faith leads to other absurd contortions, like decrying supposed "oral sadism" in defense of literal sadism.
Rejecting carnism's absurd articles of faith isn't religious. Rejecting carnism's infinitely immoral extremism isn't extreme. Just the opposite.
By the way, eating animals raised on plants requires far more plant farming—and commensurately more animal deaths caused by plant farming—than simply eating plants directly. This is an empirical necessity, given the caloric inefficiency of adding an extra trophic level to the energy exchange. But of course, I'm not surprised that a carnist zealot would embrace some simplistic, reductive falsehood as though it were a coup de grace.
Non-veganism doesn't have to be "built on" anything because it is not the aberration. People have been omnivorous through all of recorded history, which makes sense, because it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a true vegan diet to be sustained long term without synthetic vitamins. Humans are among a very small number of animals that are not capable of producing our own B12 which is a required nutrient not found in plant sources. Therefore, we are objectively fundamentally designed to be omnivorous. The very few groups of people who have been found who appear to have had a traditional plant-based diet appear to have done so because their soil was routinely contaminated with animal fecal matter. Otherwise, vegan diets and vegetarian diets have largely existed prior to the modern age in the context of religious observance, just like fasting (and I have ZERO problem with either), or because of privation.
"...commensurately more animal deaths..."
Nonsense. I spent a good bit of yesterday preparing a 3-sisters garden (corn, squash, beans). One of the first things I did was fence animals out of it. Where do those animals go? What do they eat? What do I do with nuisance animals that get through? Pushing animals out to where they overcompete and starve tortures and kills them just as much. Habitat destruction causes more damage than all the frying pans in the world.
At the same time I fenced other animals out, I fenced the weeder geese IN. The alternative there (short of peasant labor) is to use a great deal of herbicide to keep down weeds the geese gather and eat naturally. Routine herbicide use is obviously destructive. The geese take care of that problem. But as a consequence, I have to manage the flock. I have "taken care of" excess males from the flocks of many vegans and vegetarians along with people who eat meat but are not willing to deal with where it comes from. And this is just the beginning of the hypocrisy.
Next I hoed the mounds, mixing in manure from my sheep barn. The sheep are raised for wool, but they are also a flock that has to be managed and culled and they produce the fertilizer this soil desperately needs (on top of the nitrogen-fixing beans). I mixed in wood ash to alkalize the soil. Harvesting wood kills insects by the millions. I know I killed worms during the process, despite making an effort to relocate them as I worked (as they are rather important to soil health!) The larva of a number of insect pests went into the chicken run so that their energy could be reclaimed. What do you suppose I do with the roosters? What synthetic processes would I need to use otherwise and what harm do those industrial practices cause?
The vegan cult (the advocacy and moral superiority beyond personal observance, the veganISM) at best results in a world run by and for fossil-fuel-guzzling, little fuzzy animal grinding tractors with a generous helping of herbicides, pesticides, and genetically-modified crops because animals are part of the natural life cycles of practically all plants and predation is part of the natural cycle of herbivores. In that mythical vegan world, no animal has a place. It is a sterile world and in no way superior.
You've put your mind to the task of crafting a logical, factual defense of your faith—and instead produced the intellectual equivalent of one of those massive shit, piss and blood lagoons outside the carnist temples known as factory farms.
You haven't even attempted to rebut or reconcile any of the faithful carnist contradictions I listed in my last comment. You've just doubled down on the transparently silly and fallacious argument that veganism is a religion because, hur hur, it's different.
You've also accidentally admitted—via a diatribe you believe is a defense but is actually a confession—that you're actually more than a mere adherent of the carnist religion; you're also one of its blood priests.
As the faithful tend to do, in defense of your literally murderous activities, you have also murdered the facts. You've arbitrarily denied the inconvenient fact that eating animals raised on plants requires far more plant farming—and commensurately more animal deaths caused by plant farming—than simply eating plants directly. Relatedly, you've failed to grasp that, compared to simply eating plants directly, eating animals requires the conversion of far more natural habitat into farmland—whether as pasture for farmed animals or as cropland to feed farmed animals—which is why animal agriculture is the world's top driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. Your claim that "Habitat destruction causes more damage than all the frying pans in the world" is particularly oblivious, given that those frying pans are causing not just the direct torture and murder of tens of billions of animals ever year but also the very habitat destruction you only claim to care about. Even your long, non sequtur-filled apologia about your own carnist farming practices accidentally demonstrates how impactful even a comparatively small animal farming operation is on the surrounding ecosystem.
As for B12, it's not produced by animals at all, but rather by microorganisms, which used to be prevalent in both the water humans drank and the soil in which plants grew, which is why it was easily attainable within the plant-dominated diet most prehistoric humans ate (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/). Now it's not very prevalent in the plants we eat and not at all in the water we drink, thanks to contemporary sanitization practices.
But this does not at all challenge the contemporary merits of veganism. The ability to supplement with vitamins—or, alternatively, with foods fortified with vitamins including B12, which are widespread—means it's quite easy to avoid B12-deficiency as a vegan. Never mind the simple mathematical fact that the overwhelming majority of the suspected 40% of Americans who don't get enough B12 are carnists.
The ignorance and incompetence your carnist faith requires have led you to the transparently faith-based conclusion that humans "are objectively fundamentally designed to be omnivorous"—never mind that most ancient humans rarely ate meat, and never mind that, if you really believed that ancient human practices should dictate how humans behave today, then of course you'd have to reject carnism as well as all the modern practices, technologies, etc. that you do in fact embrace.
Your final paragraph is a fever dream of ignorance and delusionality. Veganism carries a far smaller footprint than carnism, which has literally produced the "world run by and for fossil-fuel-guzzling, little fuzzy animal grinding tractors with a generous helping of herbicides, pesticides, and genetically-modified crops" that you claim to oppose. Eating plants requires far less land, far less energy and far less farming than eating animals and causes far fewer emissions while keeping far more of nature intact. It also doesn't require the direct torture and murder of *tens of billions* of sensitive, innocent creatures *every year.*
Congratulations, you have done an extremely effective job of proving my point and underscoring exactly why-- despite being vegetarian and vegan for a number of years-- I gave it up: the complete impossibility of making any of your blather actually work in the real world on a real farm with real people. Your wonderful and simplistic energy pyramid only works if you willfully ignore most of the input energy inputs of an +actual+ system (most of those inputs at the moment being provided by fossil fuels).
Your diatribes are also among the reasons many common folk (mistakenly to a degree) support protections which end up helping factory farms. Small farmers and plain rural folk know quite well that people like you would just as happily turn on us as on the factory farms. Big ag has money and lawyers the rest of us do not. So, you naively make enemies of people who might otherwise be allies against Big Ag-- just as you have here-- in support of your silly cult. I could NEVER be as good an advocate for your enemies than you yourself manage to be. So, by all means... keep going.
"...thanks to contemporary sanitation practices..." ;-) Yes, exactly as I said, because one source of B12 in the past was contamination with "animal fecal matter". Color me an advocate for removing that from the water supply. As for you, nothing would be more appropriate than you drinking it to your heart's content...
I promise you I'm not trolling. I'm intrigued by your arguments. Had a few thoughts:
1. If it is immoral for humans to eat animals, is it also immoral for animals to eat other animals? Why or why not?
2. If animals not being morally capable excuses their alleged immorality, why doesn't human lack of acknowledgement of such alleged immorality also excuse humans? Is it because we are capable of learning acts can be immoral?
2a. If we excuse animals from the moral prohibition because they are not aware they should not eat other animals, do we conclude that they are, in fact, behaving immorally?
3. Fundamentally, why is it immoral for humans to eat animals?
4. What difference between plants and animals exists that make eating plants ok, but not animals? I assume sentience?
4a. Is sentience "all or nothing" or are there degrees of such awareness? Are there some lesser degrees of sentience that would allow, per you, the moral consumption of animals?
5. If sentience is important, can we eat 'lower on the food chain' animals with out moral objection? I dunno...scallops? Is there a bright line?
All animals—human animals included—have the right to take actions that maintain their own existence. If an animal must kill or eat another animal to ensure his own survival, as routinely occurs among nonhuman animals living in nature, then it is morally permissible.
But when an animal has the option to do otherwise, as virtually every human animal today does, then it is not permissible. Humans have the option to do otherwise because (a) we have the ability to adjust our actions and habits based on moral reasoning and (b) we have access to a huge array of edible plants year-round, thanks to an extranatural system of food cultivation, distribution and storage known as civilization.
Discretionarily murdering nonhuman animals is wrong for countless reasons, but perhaps the quickest way to put it is that it's wrong for the same reasons it's wrong to discretionarily murder human animals. If human animals have a moral right to live free from unjustified oppression and violence, then so do other nonhuman animals. If a human animal's body is fundamentally their own and is therefore not anyone else's to damage or destroy, then a nonhuman animal's is fundamentally their own and not anyone else's to damage or destroy.
Eating animals is also wrong because, as I've elucidated elsewhere, it's incredibly inefficient and destructive compared to the readily available alternative: eating plants.
The primary moral difference between all plants and almost all the animals we eat is indeed sentience—or, if you prefer, consciousness. These animals think. They feel pain and pleasure. They have a literal desire to live. They have additional interests and, indeed, personalities. 100% of plants do not, on all counts.
That doesn't mean it's morally permissible to arbitrarily or whimsically harm plant life. It simply means that it's morally permissible to do so in service to one's own survival.
This also goes for the animals—e.g. jellyfish or oysters—that purportedly lack sentience, with a caveat. It is still better to eat plants, because there is epistemic uncertainly about whether or not such animals really don't feel pain. These animals certainly have more rudimentary nervous systems than humans or cows or chickens, but they also have infinitely more sophisticated nervous systems than plants do (in virtue of having any nervous system at all).
OK, it sounds like the keys are consciousness and feeling pain (presence of nervous system). If I have time and you'll indulge, I might have some follow-ups.
“But in the wake of the January 6 MAGA Capitol Riot, progressives, in particular, have gained an appetite for more.”
Well, I tried to prove you wrong and instead found a bunch of videos of AOC calling for more censoring of independent journalists so they can stop nagging her about her poor decisions and the lies she’s told. So, right you are mister! 🥵
Thank you for reporting on the this topic. I am so grateful to the whistleblowers who put themselves at great risk to do the right thing. I've long wondered where civil libertarians were on ag-gag laws.
These lawmakers know that the more people see the truth behind factory farming, the more disgusted they will be with the current state of affairs. And many people are happy being lied to so they don't have to face the truth. They can just keep eating cheap bacon burgers.
I can't wait until lab-grown meat puts these merchants of misery out of business.
The State has no right to stifle speech. It does have the right to protect residents' property and privacy. We need some balance here. I run a business out of my home. Should a whistleblower have the right to enter my home without my permission and put up video cameras in bedrooms, bathrooms, living room?
I've dealt with whistleblowers in various roles; I've been a whistleblower, going to my employer's Board of Directors to call out the CEO for deceptive accounting and advertising. I resigned as I left the Boardroom, knowing my time was over. I didn't trespass, set up electronic surveillance without the consent of those being recorded. Whistleblowing is an honored act; breaking laws designed to protect property and privacy is not. Report what you wish, just get your information without trampling on my rights in the process.
"Should a whistleblower have the right to enter my home without my permission and put up video cameras in bedrooms, bathrooms, living room?" If you were in the business of torturing and murdering people or some other protected class, then of course law enforcement would be empowered to surveil your ostensibly private activities and build their case.
But when the law fails to protect beings who deserve its protection, it's up to regular people to expose the moral failures of both the perpetrators of immoral acts and the legal system itself. These activists engaged in a particularly selfless and righteous form of civil disobedience, and yes, it was morally correct of them to do so.
Maybe. If I were inconvenient to the state because I worked to expose its authoritarian activities, and the state was on a fishing expedition to find some crime with which to charge me, that changes the narrative.
I'm not claiming that roasting animals alive because that's convenient is a good thing, nor that exposing it is a bad thing. I am saying that the methods used to gather the information, no matter how good the intentions, were the same methods that the surveillance state uses to limit freedom of speech. The Ag Gag laws are portrayed as sloppily written; it seems that a good starting point for overturning them is to avoid repeating the sloppiness. That's called balance.
The scenario in your first paragraph isn't analogous to this documentation of grave misdeeds on a factory farm.
Of course it's immoral in many and probably most cases—including the hypothetical one you've concocted—for the state (or, in its absence, concerned citizens) to intrude on and surveil private spaces. But it certainly isn't wrong for the state to clandestinely surveil a person or entity who they have good reason to believe is engaged in torture and murder.
Of course, in this case, it is not just a matter of reasonable belief; it's 100% certainty. That's what this business is set up to do. Which is one reason why these activists' actions are not at all analogous to a fishing expedition.
Just keep telling yourself that. You can argue the specifics of the case or the principles, but I hope you have the same stand for both the specific and the general.
For the state to clandestinely surveil a person or entity who have good reason to believe etc requires a warrant approved by a judge. That's not what happened here. Private citizens broke laws designed to protect private citizens. The whistleblower swearing out an affidavit for the state to present to a judge to approve, followed by the state executing the warrant, meets the standards of black letter law. That route was available but bypassed.
An argument that "everybody knows" is irrelevant. An argument that bypassing constitutional protections is OK in this case because of ABC is what got us into the mess we are in today. Perjury and falsifying evidence were OK because Trump. That sets the precedent that it's OK because Mims.
Needless to say, there is no process by which an agent of the law could or would warrant surveillance (a) by non-law enforcement agents or (b) when the law itself fails to define as a crime the acts which that surveillance is intended to expose. But there is of course a process by which *morality*—the much more fundamental thing the law is built upon, and which it egregiously fails to embody when it comes to protecting nonhuman animals—can warrant direct action by private citizens. It's called reasoning, and there is no question that these activists have reason on their side. Contrary to the butthurt conclusion in your last comment, this and other statements aren't true "because Mims"; it's true because logic and facts produce it.
Abuse of power—of the worst kind imaginable—was exposed by these activists. Your doublethinking attempt to equate the exposure of abusive power with abusive power itself is not only nonsensical but morally depraved.
And this is now my third obliteration of the terrible analogy you can't bear to abandon—and I have a theory as to why. Obviously, like most everyone, you want to believe you're a good and principled person. But you know you can't square that conceit with the material support you provide, as an eater of tortured and murdered animals, to the kinds of torturers and murderers this story exposes—the kind of people you finance and otherwise support with your own actions. And yet you'd rather maintain a fictional belief in your own goodness than commit to what you know, on some level, is the right course of action.
So this story has triggered in you a kind of desperation to carve out some specious, rationalized middle ground that lets you keep thinking you're a good person without having to change what you do or how you think—a position such as, "I'm not claiming that roasting animals alive because that's convenient is a good thing, nor that exposing it is a bad thing. I am saying that the methods used to gather the information, no matter how good the intentions, were the same methods that the surveillance state uses to limit freedom of speech."
Got it. It's time to haul out the attack on motivation. I doubt you'll go to the next level, calling me a racist; you're already hinting that I'm a speciesist, and you're right. I find sentient life significantly more valuable than non-sentient life.
You still haven't grasped that this isn't about the specific case, it's about the general principles. If we want laws changed we have messy and inconvenient approaches available, such as testifying, bringing suit, argument (in the classic sense) and ultimately the ballot box. It's slow, it's messy, it's inconvenient, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
There is only one federal law protecting animals, and that law specifically exempts farmed animals. Even under the most advanced states' laws, legal protections carry minimal penalties and are unlikely to be enforced, since animals can't file police reports or testify on their own behalf. Even when a human has witnessed something and is willing to testify, police will refuse to act unless you have hard evidence, e.g. video catching the abuser in the act. Even in the rare cases when they do act, it will almost always be at the bottom of the priority list.
The sum total of these realities is that animals receive virtually no protection from America's legal system—and farmed animals receive even less.
It's a big jump from infringing on your rights where you have legal recourse in the civil courts to that person(s) labeled a Domestic Terrorist and prosecuted Federally.
The article GG himself did for the Intercept last year says the following:
“ The whistleblower recounted how their pre-Covid-19 anguish escalated significantly over the last several months, and how they were pushed over the limits of their conscience by witnessing the unparalleled horrors of their employer’s use of ventilation shutdowns.”
Perhaps the appropriate divide here can be defined between those activities that are routinely considered private and those that are done in the pursuit of money or in the course of "business".
Why is a divide needed? My only activity today in pursuit of money is writing, some of which I do for private purposes as well. Pointing out that laws were violated that protect property and privacy in pursuit of information about a company doing something the poster considers heinous doesn't make the privacy and property protection laws wrong. Divide legal activity along lines of justifiable and unjustifiable, and you'll find that many of the activities you deem justifiable are deemed unjustifiable by an equal number of people. It becomes shades of gray.
I like the idea of "Outside Voices". This proposed legislation is reprehensible, and I'm wondering when the general public will finally understand that "for your protection" means "capricious government control over individuals". And what that pork producer did was sadistic. I understand the problem they had, but their solution was, possibly, the most inhumane solution conceivable.
Thank you Leighton (and Glenn). If anyone is interested in this topic (animal enterprise terrorism etc), Will Potter has a great book dedicated to it: Green is the New Red.
Great work Leighton, thank you.
I'm the investigator named in this story, who led the collaboration with Mr. Walker to expose and ultimately end this atrocity, and now face a felony and "ag-gag" prosecution, and FBI investigation, as a result.
Animal ag is perhaps the most devastating invention in human history, and this situation lays bare the depravity of this system for the world to see. Exposing the most egregious animal torture imaginable has resulted in all manner of repression against those who speak up, while it's the powerful entities inflicting the abuse that call the shots.
Please support our work by spreading the word about DxE's Whistleblower Helpline program, where industry workers (or anybody at all) can anonymously submit information about abuses to workers, animals and the environment, which we will consider for further investigation and publication via press and social media.
The URL for our Whistleblower Helpline is DxE.io/Whistleblower
As they say "Thank you for your service!"
Thank you. I know how difficult this work is, even when people are not facing prosecution and the FBI. I know that I can't truly even imagine the agony of that experience, has never even happened to the activists that I know and have known (who are legion). I'm sorry you're having to go through this; I admire the hell out if you. Really appreciate the Whistleblower Helpline link, and will pass it around. But please let us know if there is anything that we can do to help in your personal fight against Johnny Law. I think I'm not the only one who'd like to help.
Done! ...
Done! ...
Please keep up your work in making sure that these animals, bred by us for slaughter, at least live decent lives for the brutally short time they have on this earth.
An excellent, well-researched report, and unfortunately the analogy with the PATRIOT act is less a prediction and more a statement that night follows day. Unfortunately, both the left *and* the right mainstreams are enamored of these laws. And the bodies that traditionally prized liberties, such as the ACLU, are now largely focused on other things.
The free speech, free journalism current in the West is as small as it's been in my time on this earth, and it's shrinking fast. Dark days are ahead and I'm not sure what can be done.
Articles like this, at least, give us a fighting chance of knowing what we're up against.
The ACLU has sold out.
Wonder if Upton Sinclair would be called a Domestic Terrorist by the current administration, not just a “muckraker.” Would Ida Tarbell make the DT list?
That was my point. Ditto Tarbell. TR, a Progressive-Republican did not label them threats to the country.
Such laws are intentionally open-ended so that they may be used to target anyone that the establishment of the day doesn't like for whatever reason.
Only a terrorist could be against this, right? You're not one of them, are you?
"...there is no reason to believe it, and every reason to believe the hunt for 'domestic terrorists' could eventually be turned against anyone with the will and the means to effectively confront those who hold concentrated political and corporate power — including through strictly non-violent means."
Any organization attracting enough attention to itself by even non-violently opposing the powers that be will find itself targeted and infiltrated with agents provocateur who'll find some fool in the mix, and convince the half-wit violence is the only solution. A provocateur will create a plot, then charismatically convince the "pepega" to agree to it. Once the target raises a finger to initiate action in furtherance of the plot, the early morning arrest and government dog and pony media show ensue. It doesn't matter the government formed the plot, conspiracy law doesn't care. This is highly effective at taking down entire organizations through defamation and fear.
Ignoring the moral issues around animal euthanasia, the major problem is the use of highly contentious subject matter to justify government overreach. The outrage factory we call the media is working hand in hand with the government to expand their powers in return for access.
That any reasonable number of people unreasonably believe new domestic “anti-terrorism” laws aren’t sought to suppress threats to the ruling class is testament to the public’s ignorance.
Not that it’s entirely the public’s fault, given the pitch and volume of the propaganda.
But it is still striking that so many expect anything out of our current system that is what it’s sold to be, after so much out-in-the-open evidence to the contrary.
I relate it to religion. People are terrified to leave even though history shows they should.
Bingo!!
Like a Catholic writing about the Pope, there should probably be a disclaimer that the author is a hardline vegan given the context.
That aside, it is an interesting article. Appreciated the details on following the money/influence trail.
A carnist insinuating that veganism is like a religion? Good one.
Almost all vegans were once members of the most destructive and murderous religion the world has ever seen—a religion called carnism. Unlike most carnists, vegans have earnestly questioned and then discarded, with uncommon intellectual and social courage, the carnist religion into which they were born.
"Almost all vegans were once..."
And some former vegans are now non-vegans. Veganism is an extreme. Non-veganism is simply a rejection of the extreme not "carnism". People who are not vegan do not have some fanatical belief in eating exclusively meat, they simply lack the fanatical belief in not doing so and reject both the oral sadism and alleged moral superiority of being vegan which, ironically, does not gurantee the non-killing of animals for food, it merely guarantees that any animals killed as a consequence of agriculture (directly and indirectly) are never eaten.
Ah yes, the old 'it's actually the atheists who rely on faith!' canard.
In fact, veganism is built on reason, while carnism is built on faith. That's why, like virtually all religions, carnism harbors such extreme and yet unacknowledged absurdities, including the contradictory carnist dogma that humanity's moral superiority justifies being incredibly immoral toward other animals.
Another of carnism's many absurdities—one you've dutifully voiced—is the belief that veganism is "extreme," when, in fact, veganism is a rejection of carnism's extreme violence. Likewise, carnism's basis in faith leads to other absurd contortions, like decrying supposed "oral sadism" in defense of literal sadism.
Rejecting carnism's absurd articles of faith isn't religious. Rejecting carnism's infinitely immoral extremism isn't extreme. Just the opposite.
By the way, eating animals raised on plants requires far more plant farming—and commensurately more animal deaths caused by plant farming—than simply eating plants directly. This is an empirical necessity, given the caloric inefficiency of adding an extra trophic level to the energy exchange. But of course, I'm not surprised that a carnist zealot would embrace some simplistic, reductive falsehood as though it were a coup de grace.
"Carnism is built on faith."
Non-veganism doesn't have to be "built on" anything because it is not the aberration. People have been omnivorous through all of recorded history, which makes sense, because it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a true vegan diet to be sustained long term without synthetic vitamins. Humans are among a very small number of animals that are not capable of producing our own B12 which is a required nutrient not found in plant sources. Therefore, we are objectively fundamentally designed to be omnivorous. The very few groups of people who have been found who appear to have had a traditional plant-based diet appear to have done so because their soil was routinely contaminated with animal fecal matter. Otherwise, vegan diets and vegetarian diets have largely existed prior to the modern age in the context of religious observance, just like fasting (and I have ZERO problem with either), or because of privation.
"...commensurately more animal deaths..."
Nonsense. I spent a good bit of yesterday preparing a 3-sisters garden (corn, squash, beans). One of the first things I did was fence animals out of it. Where do those animals go? What do they eat? What do I do with nuisance animals that get through? Pushing animals out to where they overcompete and starve tortures and kills them just as much. Habitat destruction causes more damage than all the frying pans in the world.
At the same time I fenced other animals out, I fenced the weeder geese IN. The alternative there (short of peasant labor) is to use a great deal of herbicide to keep down weeds the geese gather and eat naturally. Routine herbicide use is obviously destructive. The geese take care of that problem. But as a consequence, I have to manage the flock. I have "taken care of" excess males from the flocks of many vegans and vegetarians along with people who eat meat but are not willing to deal with where it comes from. And this is just the beginning of the hypocrisy.
Next I hoed the mounds, mixing in manure from my sheep barn. The sheep are raised for wool, but they are also a flock that has to be managed and culled and they produce the fertilizer this soil desperately needs (on top of the nitrogen-fixing beans). I mixed in wood ash to alkalize the soil. Harvesting wood kills insects by the millions. I know I killed worms during the process, despite making an effort to relocate them as I worked (as they are rather important to soil health!) The larva of a number of insect pests went into the chicken run so that their energy could be reclaimed. What do you suppose I do with the roosters? What synthetic processes would I need to use otherwise and what harm do those industrial practices cause?
The vegan cult (the advocacy and moral superiority beyond personal observance, the veganISM) at best results in a world run by and for fossil-fuel-guzzling, little fuzzy animal grinding tractors with a generous helping of herbicides, pesticides, and genetically-modified crops because animals are part of the natural life cycles of practically all plants and predation is part of the natural cycle of herbivores. In that mythical vegan world, no animal has a place. It is a sterile world and in no way superior.
You've put your mind to the task of crafting a logical, factual defense of your faith—and instead produced the intellectual equivalent of one of those massive shit, piss and blood lagoons outside the carnist temples known as factory farms.
You haven't even attempted to rebut or reconcile any of the faithful carnist contradictions I listed in my last comment. You've just doubled down on the transparently silly and fallacious argument that veganism is a religion because, hur hur, it's different.
You've also accidentally admitted—via a diatribe you believe is a defense but is actually a confession—that you're actually more than a mere adherent of the carnist religion; you're also one of its blood priests.
As the faithful tend to do, in defense of your literally murderous activities, you have also murdered the facts. You've arbitrarily denied the inconvenient fact that eating animals raised on plants requires far more plant farming—and commensurately more animal deaths caused by plant farming—than simply eating plants directly. Relatedly, you've failed to grasp that, compared to simply eating plants directly, eating animals requires the conversion of far more natural habitat into farmland—whether as pasture for farmed animals or as cropland to feed farmed animals—which is why animal agriculture is the world's top driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. Your claim that "Habitat destruction causes more damage than all the frying pans in the world" is particularly oblivious, given that those frying pans are causing not just the direct torture and murder of tens of billions of animals ever year but also the very habitat destruction you only claim to care about. Even your long, non sequtur-filled apologia about your own carnist farming practices accidentally demonstrates how impactful even a comparatively small animal farming operation is on the surrounding ecosystem.
As for B12, it's not produced by animals at all, but rather by microorganisms, which used to be prevalent in both the water humans drank and the soil in which plants grew, which is why it was easily attainable within the plant-dominated diet most prehistoric humans ate (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/). Now it's not very prevalent in the plants we eat and not at all in the water we drink, thanks to contemporary sanitization practices.
But this does not at all challenge the contemporary merits of veganism. The ability to supplement with vitamins—or, alternatively, with foods fortified with vitamins including B12, which are widespread—means it's quite easy to avoid B12-deficiency as a vegan. Never mind the simple mathematical fact that the overwhelming majority of the suspected 40% of Americans who don't get enough B12 are carnists.
The ignorance and incompetence your carnist faith requires have led you to the transparently faith-based conclusion that humans "are objectively fundamentally designed to be omnivorous"—never mind that most ancient humans rarely ate meat, and never mind that, if you really believed that ancient human practices should dictate how humans behave today, then of course you'd have to reject carnism as well as all the modern practices, technologies, etc. that you do in fact embrace.
Your final paragraph is a fever dream of ignorance and delusionality. Veganism carries a far smaller footprint than carnism, which has literally produced the "world run by and for fossil-fuel-guzzling, little fuzzy animal grinding tractors with a generous helping of herbicides, pesticides, and genetically-modified crops" that you claim to oppose. Eating plants requires far less land, far less energy and far less farming than eating animals and causes far fewer emissions while keeping far more of nature intact. It also doesn't require the direct torture and murder of *tens of billions* of sensitive, innocent creatures *every year.*
You haven't got even a toe to stand on.
Congratulations, you have done an extremely effective job of proving my point and underscoring exactly why-- despite being vegetarian and vegan for a number of years-- I gave it up: the complete impossibility of making any of your blather actually work in the real world on a real farm with real people. Your wonderful and simplistic energy pyramid only works if you willfully ignore most of the input energy inputs of an +actual+ system (most of those inputs at the moment being provided by fossil fuels).
Your diatribes are also among the reasons many common folk (mistakenly to a degree) support protections which end up helping factory farms. Small farmers and plain rural folk know quite well that people like you would just as happily turn on us as on the factory farms. Big ag has money and lawyers the rest of us do not. So, you naively make enemies of people who might otherwise be allies against Big Ag-- just as you have here-- in support of your silly cult. I could NEVER be as good an advocate for your enemies than you yourself manage to be. So, by all means... keep going.
"...thanks to contemporary sanitation practices..." ;-) Yes, exactly as I said, because one source of B12 in the past was contamination with "animal fecal matter". Color me an advocate for removing that from the water supply. As for you, nothing would be more appropriate than you drinking it to your heart's content...
I promise you I'm not trolling. I'm intrigued by your arguments. Had a few thoughts:
1. If it is immoral for humans to eat animals, is it also immoral for animals to eat other animals? Why or why not?
2. If animals not being morally capable excuses their alleged immorality, why doesn't human lack of acknowledgement of such alleged immorality also excuse humans? Is it because we are capable of learning acts can be immoral?
2a. If we excuse animals from the moral prohibition because they are not aware they should not eat other animals, do we conclude that they are, in fact, behaving immorally?
3. Fundamentally, why is it immoral for humans to eat animals?
4. What difference between plants and animals exists that make eating plants ok, but not animals? I assume sentience?
4a. Is sentience "all or nothing" or are there degrees of such awareness? Are there some lesser degrees of sentience that would allow, per you, the moral consumption of animals?
5. If sentience is important, can we eat 'lower on the food chain' animals with out moral objection? I dunno...scallops? Is there a bright line?
It's late and that's all I got for now.
I appreciate the earnest questions.
All animals—human animals included—have the right to take actions that maintain their own existence. If an animal must kill or eat another animal to ensure his own survival, as routinely occurs among nonhuman animals living in nature, then it is morally permissible.
But when an animal has the option to do otherwise, as virtually every human animal today does, then it is not permissible. Humans have the option to do otherwise because (a) we have the ability to adjust our actions and habits based on moral reasoning and (b) we have access to a huge array of edible plants year-round, thanks to an extranatural system of food cultivation, distribution and storage known as civilization.
Discretionarily murdering nonhuman animals is wrong for countless reasons, but perhaps the quickest way to put it is that it's wrong for the same reasons it's wrong to discretionarily murder human animals. If human animals have a moral right to live free from unjustified oppression and violence, then so do other nonhuman animals. If a human animal's body is fundamentally their own and is therefore not anyone else's to damage or destroy, then a nonhuman animal's is fundamentally their own and not anyone else's to damage or destroy.
Eating animals is also wrong because, as I've elucidated elsewhere, it's incredibly inefficient and destructive compared to the readily available alternative: eating plants.
The primary moral difference between all plants and almost all the animals we eat is indeed sentience—or, if you prefer, consciousness. These animals think. They feel pain and pleasure. They have a literal desire to live. They have additional interests and, indeed, personalities. 100% of plants do not, on all counts.
That doesn't mean it's morally permissible to arbitrarily or whimsically harm plant life. It simply means that it's morally permissible to do so in service to one's own survival.
This also goes for the animals—e.g. jellyfish or oysters—that purportedly lack sentience, with a caveat. It is still better to eat plants, because there is epistemic uncertainly about whether or not such animals really don't feel pain. These animals certainly have more rudimentary nervous systems than humans or cows or chickens, but they also have infinitely more sophisticated nervous systems than plants do (in virtue of having any nervous system at all).
OK, it sounds like the keys are consciousness and feeling pain (presence of nervous system). If I have time and you'll indulge, I might have some follow-ups.
I believe greenwald.substack.com is a vegan establishment.
"...the hardening of state power, made possible through organized collective hysteria." Now there's a phrase worthy of much plagiarism.
“But in the wake of the January 6 MAGA Capitol Riot, progressives, in particular, have gained an appetite for more.”
Well, I tried to prove you wrong and instead found a bunch of videos of AOC calling for more censoring of independent journalists so they can stop nagging her about her poor decisions and the lies she’s told. So, right you are mister! 🥵
this is the best of the comments.
Thank you for reporting on the this topic. I am so grateful to the whistleblowers who put themselves at great risk to do the right thing. I've long wondered where civil libertarians were on ag-gag laws.
These lawmakers know that the more people see the truth behind factory farming, the more disgusted they will be with the current state of affairs. And many people are happy being lied to so they don't have to face the truth. They can just keep eating cheap bacon burgers.
I can't wait until lab-grown meat puts these merchants of misery out of business.
Excellent journalism. Thank you all.
The State has no right to stifle speech. It does have the right to protect residents' property and privacy. We need some balance here. I run a business out of my home. Should a whistleblower have the right to enter my home without my permission and put up video cameras in bedrooms, bathrooms, living room?
I've dealt with whistleblowers in various roles; I've been a whistleblower, going to my employer's Board of Directors to call out the CEO for deceptive accounting and advertising. I resigned as I left the Boardroom, knowing my time was over. I didn't trespass, set up electronic surveillance without the consent of those being recorded. Whistleblowing is an honored act; breaking laws designed to protect property and privacy is not. Report what you wish, just get your information without trampling on my rights in the process.
"Should a whistleblower have the right to enter my home without my permission and put up video cameras in bedrooms, bathrooms, living room?" If you were in the business of torturing and murdering people or some other protected class, then of course law enforcement would be empowered to surveil your ostensibly private activities and build their case.
But when the law fails to protect beings who deserve its protection, it's up to regular people to expose the moral failures of both the perpetrators of immoral acts and the legal system itself. These activists engaged in a particularly selfless and righteous form of civil disobedience, and yes, it was morally correct of them to do so.
Maybe. If I were inconvenient to the state because I worked to expose its authoritarian activities, and the state was on a fishing expedition to find some crime with which to charge me, that changes the narrative.
I'm not claiming that roasting animals alive because that's convenient is a good thing, nor that exposing it is a bad thing. I am saying that the methods used to gather the information, no matter how good the intentions, were the same methods that the surveillance state uses to limit freedom of speech. The Ag Gag laws are portrayed as sloppily written; it seems that a good starting point for overturning them is to avoid repeating the sloppiness. That's called balance.
The scenario in your first paragraph isn't analogous to this documentation of grave misdeeds on a factory farm.
Of course it's immoral in many and probably most cases—including the hypothetical one you've concocted—for the state (or, in its absence, concerned citizens) to intrude on and surveil private spaces. But it certainly isn't wrong for the state to clandestinely surveil a person or entity who they have good reason to believe is engaged in torture and murder.
Of course, in this case, it is not just a matter of reasonable belief; it's 100% certainty. That's what this business is set up to do. Which is one reason why these activists' actions are not at all analogous to a fishing expedition.
Just keep telling yourself that. You can argue the specifics of the case or the principles, but I hope you have the same stand for both the specific and the general.
For the state to clandestinely surveil a person or entity who have good reason to believe etc requires a warrant approved by a judge. That's not what happened here. Private citizens broke laws designed to protect private citizens. The whistleblower swearing out an affidavit for the state to present to a judge to approve, followed by the state executing the warrant, meets the standards of black letter law. That route was available but bypassed.
An argument that "everybody knows" is irrelevant. An argument that bypassing constitutional protections is OK in this case because of ABC is what got us into the mess we are in today. Perjury and falsifying evidence were OK because Trump. That sets the precedent that it's OK because Mims.
Needless to say, there is no process by which an agent of the law could or would warrant surveillance (a) by non-law enforcement agents or (b) when the law itself fails to define as a crime the acts which that surveillance is intended to expose. But there is of course a process by which *morality*—the much more fundamental thing the law is built upon, and which it egregiously fails to embody when it comes to protecting nonhuman animals—can warrant direct action by private citizens. It's called reasoning, and there is no question that these activists have reason on their side. Contrary to the butthurt conclusion in your last comment, this and other statements aren't true "because Mims"; it's true because logic and facts produce it.
Abuse of power—of the worst kind imaginable—was exposed by these activists. Your doublethinking attempt to equate the exposure of abusive power with abusive power itself is not only nonsensical but morally depraved.
And this is now my third obliteration of the terrible analogy you can't bear to abandon—and I have a theory as to why. Obviously, like most everyone, you want to believe you're a good and principled person. But you know you can't square that conceit with the material support you provide, as an eater of tortured and murdered animals, to the kinds of torturers and murderers this story exposes—the kind of people you finance and otherwise support with your own actions. And yet you'd rather maintain a fictional belief in your own goodness than commit to what you know, on some level, is the right course of action.
So this story has triggered in you a kind of desperation to carve out some specious, rationalized middle ground that lets you keep thinking you're a good person without having to change what you do or how you think—a position such as, "I'm not claiming that roasting animals alive because that's convenient is a good thing, nor that exposing it is a bad thing. I am saying that the methods used to gather the information, no matter how good the intentions, were the same methods that the surveillance state uses to limit freedom of speech."
Got it. It's time to haul out the attack on motivation. I doubt you'll go to the next level, calling me a racist; you're already hinting that I'm a speciesist, and you're right. I find sentient life significantly more valuable than non-sentient life.
You still haven't grasped that this isn't about the specific case, it's about the general principles. If we want laws changed we have messy and inconvenient approaches available, such as testifying, bringing suit, argument (in the classic sense) and ultimately the ballot box. It's slow, it's messy, it's inconvenient, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Are there no animal cruelty laws there?
There is only one federal law protecting animals, and that law specifically exempts farmed animals. Even under the most advanced states' laws, legal protections carry minimal penalties and are unlikely to be enforced, since animals can't file police reports or testify on their own behalf. Even when a human has witnessed something and is willing to testify, police will refuse to act unless you have hard evidence, e.g. video catching the abuser in the act. Even in the rare cases when they do act, it will almost always be at the bottom of the priority list.
The sum total of these realities is that animals receive virtually no protection from America's legal system—and farmed animals receive even less.
It's a big jump from infringing on your rights where you have legal recourse in the civil courts to that person(s) labeled a Domestic Terrorist and prosecuted Federally.
I mean, I’m all for private property rights, but I think that causing needless intense suffering in living beings crosses a line.
Might be a little different ethically, if the whistle blower is hired on
The article GG himself did for the Intercept last year says the following:
“ The whistleblower recounted how their pre-Covid-19 anguish escalated significantly over the last several months, and how they were pushed over the limits of their conscience by witnessing the unparalleled horrors of their employer’s use of ventilation shutdowns.”
So yes, the whistleblower was an employee.
Agree, it changes the dynamic.
Perhaps the appropriate divide here can be defined between those activities that are routinely considered private and those that are done in the pursuit of money or in the course of "business".
Why is a divide needed? My only activity today in pursuit of money is writing, some of which I do for private purposes as well. Pointing out that laws were violated that protect property and privacy in pursuit of information about a company doing something the poster considers heinous doesn't make the privacy and property protection laws wrong. Divide legal activity along lines of justifiable and unjustifiable, and you'll find that many of the activities you deem justifiable are deemed unjustifiable by an equal number of people. It becomes shades of gray.
My God. Are we this depraved? There has to be a more humane way to solve this problem. Disgusting.
Yes there is, but not a more profitable one.
I like the idea of "Outside Voices". This proposed legislation is reprehensible, and I'm wondering when the general public will finally understand that "for your protection" means "capricious government control over individuals". And what that pork producer did was sadistic. I understand the problem they had, but their solution was, possibly, the most inhumane solution conceivable.
Wonder if Chuck Schumer is considered a domestic terrorist, along with Maxine.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/schumer-threatens-the-court-11583368462
Nothing like living in this brave new world where justice is blind and the rule of law applied equally to all. (That’s sarcasm, if you didn’t guess.)
Thank you Leighton (and Glenn). If anyone is interested in this topic (animal enterprise terrorism etc), Will Potter has a great book dedicated to it: Green is the New Red.