CALIFORNIA VEGANS ASSEMBLE THE CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD: Top L.A. Vegan Restaurant Owners Receiving Death Threats for Slaughtering Animals:
“People have taken up the mob mentality,” says Matthew. “It saddens me that the choices we made in the privacy of our home would lead people to feel so betrayed that it’s elevated to threats on our lives. I’m very discouraged.”
The trouble began last week when animal rights activists discovered and then widely circulated a 14-month-old blog post written by Terces on the Engelharts’ Be Love Farm website, which mixed an announcement of their transition back into a meat diet again after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism (they had been vegan since 2003) with posted pictures of strained beef broth and a freezer full of pastured beef from their own dairy cows. Matthew tells THR they have kept chickens on the farm for seven years “for eggs only,” along with the cows for five years for milk, cheese and butter that’s for sale. (He claims they’ve “harvested,” or slaughtered, several cows in total and never sold the meat, only shared it with “our friends, neighbors and community.”)
The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system,” says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. “You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn’t. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals.”
That’s the key line in this article: “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system” — in other words, like radical environmentalism and radical feminism, veganism is one of many alternate religions that are subsets of the holistic New Age Left. (Nietzsche killed God, but man is hardwired to believe in a cause higher than himself. When traditional religion is rejected, the odds are pretty good that something cultish will be chosen to replace it.) The restaurant owners chose to cater to them, apparently without pondering the jihad they would face if and when they were discovered to be apostates by their core customers. Or as a wise social critic once described the nihilistic alternative lifestyles of California, “You can checkout anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
Related: Speaking of alternate religions, as Ace writes, “I am indebted to Christina Hoff Sommers for pointing out that every identity politics cult is just a conspiracy theory with a racial (or gender) edge.”
(Via Mickey Kaus.)