In today’s segment of “insane people who are taken seriously,” I give you Carol J. Adams, a vegan activist, author, and independent scholar who has an impressive collection of publications that have been translated into numerous languages. She is prominent enough to be a featured debater at the Oxford Union. Countless UK and world leaders have spoken there, as well as major literary, religious, and entertainment figures. Sharing the same stage that Winston Churchill once occupied is pretty impressive.

Her books, too, are well reviewed, not just by other activists, but in mainstream publications. She is a thinker of note and influential in intellectual circles.

So with that in mind, I give you Carol J. Adams, explaining the problems with eating meat.

This is actually hilarious. Truly beyond parody. https://t.co/8yMxUZigq7

— Boston Mom (@iphigeniamama) January 31, 2023

Ms. Adams’ presentation did not set the Oxford Union ablaze with a shared newfound passion for veganism, as she expected. She wrote about her experience at the Union, and it was as you would expect given Great Britain’s reputation for raucous disagreement.

The minute I began, there was a voluble reaction—gasps, laughter, heckling. I was startled. I thought I would at least get into the talk a little before there would be such a reaction. But as Sebastian said later, you could bury your expectations in a grave in a cemetery and you still wouldn’t have lowered them enough. Helen described the reaction over the 9 minute time period during which I talked as “heckling and ridicule and Bullingdon Club nastiness.”

As an American, Adams is likely unfamiliar with the British debating style. Here in the US we tend to listen respectfully when people spout nonsense, perhaps resorting to checking our phones to pass the time. Not so across the pond, where they catcall people for being idiots, or even just for being on the other side of an issue.

I prefer the British style, frankly. It’s also why their politicians, even when ridiculous, are articulate. They have to be. Soundbites don’t win arguments there.

The clips above give you a flavor of her arguments, but don’t quite capture the bizarre quality of her thought. And that bizarreness is hardly unique to her; it is in fact simply one manifestation of the mindset that shoehorns every conceivable human behavior into the categories of race and sex.

White men, literally, created everything in the world. And that is why everything is evil.

21st century animal eating requires our complicity in a new colonialism. We know how settler colonization worked— “an erase and replace” system that forced Indigenous people off the land, replacing them with cattle and white settlers.

One of the defining aspects of the colonial legacy is an ongoing white supremacist belief system and an ownership paradigm.  When you own land, you get the title to it. Entitlement and ownership are linked.

All the justifications for taking of the land by white colonial authorities included the claim, “well the Indians can’t prove they own the land.”

Hunting exists within this colonial ownership paradigm. It presumes that animals don’t have title to their own lives; once dispossessed of their lives, the hunted animal can become your property.

Approximately 90% of Native Americans were killed off by erase and replace settler colonialism.

It’s the new colonialism that boasts, “I’ll hunt for myself and be grateful like the Native Americans” as well as “I thank the animals for their sacrifice.” To which I have been known to respond, “how do you know the animal would have picked you to feed off their corpse?” The argument that hunting is ethical presumes that some primeval form of eating exists unmediated by the corrupting influences of society. There’s no room in the new colonialism for an Indigenous world view to exist, instead it collapses more than 100 Native American nations into one amalgam, and attributes a static indigenous worldview that erases those nations that were predominantly vegetarian and lived in urban areas. The new colonialists see nothing wrong with a pick-and-choose approach to Indigenous thought that never engages with the survival issues Indigenous peoples are facing.

Wowza. Where to begin?

Certainly, there are the buzzwords, which I bolded just to show how necessary they are to her thinking. The argument itself isn’t that interesting because it is pure BS–basically saying that Indigenous people were actually vegetarians before the evil White man came and killed them off, leaving hunter/gatherers to eek a living off the land.

Yeah, right. That is why the megafauna of the continent was wiped out long before the white man showed up.

No, what is interesting is how in the woke paradigm everything neatly fits together into a coherent whole. Once you assign everything one dislikes to the white devil, everything follows. It’s the same sort of thinking that blames white supremacy for the killing of one black man by 5 other black men.

Killing is bad. This is bad. White people are responsible because they are bad people. Only white people actually have agency.

If you eat animals, you take up more climate space—requiring more water, more land, more forest deforestation, contributing more greenhouse gases. This is felt disproportionately by countries in the Global South. Their carbon footprint is smaller but they experience more frequent and intense climate-change-caused weather events; hese events especially affect girls and young women, so you get some misogyny along with your hamburger. The Western world colonized their space without sending a single beefeater.  

Through colonial power the diet of beef-loving English people became normative. The food heritage of pre-Conquest peoples, like the land itself, was overrun. It was the colonizers, especially the British, who declared that the virility of the meat eating nations explained their success over the supposed feminine and weak “rice-eating” countries they defeated.  

Historically, the vast majority of the world lived without animal protein as a central part of their diet.  The assumption that the “best protein” is from corpses is a racist belief as it erases and replaces indigenous, African, Asian, Meso-American cultural food practices. 

Factually, of course, this is BS. But as with Prince Harry and all the woke these days, this is her truth. And the only real truth is what we feel.

The fact that cave drawings from millennia ago depict hunters going after wild game is irrelevant. Either they were white, or suffered false consciousness. Again, they have no agency themselves, because anything anyone does that doesn’t fit the moral universe of the woke is the result of White supremacy. That is the one guiding principle upon which the entire moral universe is built.

Meat eating is one of the ways gender-based structures of oppression are perpetuated. Men are taunted to renew their man card by eating meat because that’s what real men do—that’s the sexual politics of meat and it reveals how unsettled masculinity really is. Back home my library card is good for seven years, but a man card can expire between breakfast and lunch if someone eats a veggie burger? Masculinity—a construct of the gender binary facing constant destabilization—feels always under threat and eating animals is its protection racket.

That’s why, after 9/11, a focus on men as heroes and on meat eating became part of the reclamation of a wounded masculinity. When a Black man was elected as U.S. President, we saw how white this wounded-masculinity was. White supremacists weaponized eating meat, eggs, and dairy. Images of milk-drinking white men, of platters groaning with meat, and the baiting of liberal men as “soy boys” are all a part of neo-Nazi messaging.  This is their right; this is their identity.

Was there actually an increase in meat eating after Obama was elected? Maybe the popularity of bacon spiked or something. I see a lot of references to bacon these days.

Who cares? She is on a roll.

...popular culture is flooded with references to sexy cows, sexy pigs, sexy chickens, sexy fishes who all just want to have fun. They wantto be pregnant. And they want to be killed. Because this feminized sexuality wants to be eaten. The only desire animals are credited with possessing is the desire to be consumed, which strangely can only be expressed after their death. 

You get the idea. It is, as the British would say, bollocks. Not a word of it is remotely true.

I have yet to fantasize about having sex with a chicken or a fish. Not even cows and pigs appeal much to me, although I am quite certain that a lot of people who reject the gender binary do indeed fantasize or act out their disgusting bestial fantasies. You can probably find a video on TikTok about it, should you feel inclined to look.

There’s more, but Carol Adams’ argument isn’t worthy of refutation or even consideration. What is worthy of consideration is that she is taken seriously by many important people in our intellectual class. Being reviewed in the Washington Post and Kirkus is a big deal, coveted by thousands of authors who would give their own legs to be consumed for the honor.

Occupying a place of honor at the Oxford Union is, perhaps, a bigger deal, given how few people are afforded the opportunity, and how important those people are. Prime Ministers, Nobel Prize-winners. Great artists. And Carol J. Adams.

I don’t take Adams seriously. But very important people do. People who have a big influence on our public policy, directly are through the culture.

Adams’ factual claims are no more correct or persuasive than a flat-earther’s, yet she is put on a platform and treated seriously by serious people.

Why? That is a very important question.