In a recent audio essay for The New York Times, Paul Krugman reveals he doesn’t understand MAGA movement populism, lab-grown meat, and why so many are opposed to it. The piece, entitled, “What MAGA’s Beef with Lab-Grown Meat Says About the GOP,” sees Krugman bemoaning the recent Florida and Alabama fake meat bans, which he claims is “a kind of window into the mindset of a lot of today’s right.”
‘A BUNCH OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES.’
That mindset, Krugman says, is “this belief that elites are out there to force you to stop living the American lifestyle.”
“They want you to stop using your gas stove, they want you to stop driving your big SUV, and that environmental policies in general are somehow about restricting Americans’ freedom,” Krugman opines derisively. “That’s the ideological basis for it that then turns into a bunch of conspiracy theories.”
But the so-called war on climate change is, in practice, a war against freedom and reflects the greatest subversion of living standards in several generations. One only need look to Europe, where aggressive green policies have pushed farmers across the continent to open revolt and made heating one’s home in the UK practically unaffordable for most.
EAT THE BUGS, EAT THE FAKE MEAT.
Krugman claims that “a few scientists have said hey, insects are a pretty good source of protein that we don’t use, so that becomes there’s a secret conspiracy to force you to eat bugs. And somehow all of this turns into we’re going to pass a law that prevents the production of something that’s an alternative to traditional beef.”
Ironically, he suggests that “greenhouse gas emissions” is a valid argument in favor of lab-grown meat. But a study released last year revealed that creating lab-grown meat produces up to 25 times more CO2 than ranching the real thing.
There is also nothing secret nor conspiratorial about the elites’ drive to promote “alternative protein sources.” It’s happening and it’s happening in the open.
But according to Krugman, the post-Trump GOP “is devoting a lot of time and effort to symbolic gestures against something that [they] think is woke” and has adopted “the attitude which is that politics is about displaying what kind of person you are and what your allegiance is as opposed to about actually getting policies that work in place.”
‘SYMBOLIC GESTURES’?
American populists aren’t tilting at windmills. They’re opposed to very real threats to their way of life. Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila observed, “What the reactionary says never interests anybody. Neither at the time he says it, because it seems absurd, nor after a few years, because it seems obvious.”
To Krugman, the populist right’s opposition to lab-grown meat and insect protein may seem “absurd” and rooted in “conspiracy theories,” but the right’s present warnings about the left’s preferred future have repeatedly been prescient or even prophetic.
The populist right was seen as absurd when it warned that changes to immigration laws in the 20th century would result in a migrant influx that would leave the West unrecognizable. But such has come to pass. The populist right was also seen as absurd in the 1990s when it warned that the acceptance of so-called “gay rights” would lead to deviancy being pushed onto children. But such has come to pass. It was ridiculed when it suggested the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce laws would result in widespread family breakdown, and that globalization and free trade agreements would destroy the American middle class. But such has come to pass.
The MAGA movement isn’t opposed to lab-grown meat because of a belief that there’s a secret conspiracy to force us to eat it. It is opposed to lab-grown meat, so a coordinated effort to force us to eat it in the future cannot come to pass.
