Participants in that conversation do not, however, evince the courage of the convictions they present only in the company of like minds. If you disagree with the premise that limiting your meat consumption is the only way to save the world, advocates of a meatless future insist that no one is arguing for that sort of thing. That’s just rank paranoia.

A recent essay in the New Republic by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg presents a perfect illustration of the backward causality typical of activists who insist that the only way to arrest catastrophic climate change is to limit the public’s protein intake but also insist that it’s madness to believe anyone wants to limit your protein intake. They decry the “insipid” and “ridiculous” accusations from conservatives who assume that policies designed to limit the public’s consumption of meat represent an effort to reduce the public’s meat consumption.

Your steak has been turned into a “culture-war issue” by the people who notice and, most importantly, resent this effort to impose new cultural standards on the public from above. The prosecutors of the culture war are the conservatives, whose “darker fantasies aren’t just about threats to a dietary staple but about threats to the liberty, bodily integrity, and masculinity of American men,” they write. Remember, it’s the conservatives here who have lost touch with reality.

[Just like the Left claimed that they weren’t really coming after your gas stove … your transportation … your choice of beverages … your expectations of bathroom privacy and safety … etc etc etc. — Ed]