Meat & You: Partners in Freedom
By 
What is a day without lab-grown meat? Incomplete.
Lab-grown meat, also known as cultured meat, is a long ways from being commercially viable, but Governor Freedom doesn’t want to take any chances:
Recently DeSantis, back to work as governor of Florida after the spectacular failure of his presidential campaign, signed a bill banning the production or sale of lab-grown meat in his state. Similar legislation is under consideration in several states.
On one level, this could be seen as a trivial story — a crackdown on an industry that doesn’t even exist yet. But the new Florida law is a perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.
The banal part of this story is that the beef industry doesn’t want any competition, and in good new Gilded Age style is buying protectionist legislation. The more interesting part is the right wing paranoia about how Joe Biden wants to take away your cheeseburger because he hates freedom and wants to force you into a trans gay marriage with a cultural Marxist lesbian folk singer:
It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.
And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?
By the way, I’m not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don’t.
And aside from demonstrating that many right-wingers are actually enemies, not defenders, of freedom, the lab-meat story is yet another indicator of the decline of American conservatism as a principled movement.
Look, I’m not an admirer of Ronald Reagan, who I believe did a lot of harm as president, but at least Reaganism was about real policy issues like tax rates and regulation. The people who cast themselves as Reagan’s successors, however, seem uninterested in serious policymaking. For a lot of them, politics is a form of live-action role play. It’s not even about “owning” those they term the elites; it’s about perpetually jousting with a fantasy version of what elites supposedly want.
Remember when this was a parody?