Ron Desantis's New Lab Meat Ban: Evil and Stupid

The right's brain has been eaten by the culture war.

In a display of breathtaking malevolence and stupidity, Desantis has banned lab meat in Florida. John Fetterman also jumped on the bandwagon, and described his support for this law, so as to dispel myths that the republicans had a monopoly on stupidity. “Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” Desantis explained. No evidence was provided for such a claim, nor did it need to be. For Desantis fans—people who spend their time on Twitter reading nonsense fearmongering about global elites—such a claim is simply known, despite the evidence for it being nonexistent. The irony of banning new technology in the name of fighting authoritarianism was apparently lost on supporters of the bill.

I’ve elsewhere debunked the various claims made by critics of lab meat, ranging in quality from lousy to worse. There’s nothing approaching a good objection to it. Critics intone vaguely in the direction of a global conspiracy to feed lab meat to people, without providing anything like evidence for it. Critics cite one fringe study predicting negative environmental impact that, among other things, assumed that there wouldn’t be any new technology that improves lab meat’s environmental impact by the time it goes to market.

Contrary to the claims of its critics, lab meat is a truly extraordinary opportunity invention, which may be the only way to end factory farming. Billions of animals spend their lives in cages and barns, unable to turn around, in feces and ammonia. Are Desantis’s paranoid delusional fantasies about a global conspiracy worth preserving the ghastly structure of factory farms?

Are they worth pigs being roasted to death at 150-degree temperatures, that simultaneously cause them to die from suffocation and overheating? Are they worth pigs, quite a bit smarter than dogs, giving birth in tiny crates where they can’t move, and must strain against the size of the cage? Are they worth pigs being castrated and having their tails ripped off with no anesthetic? Pigs live in so much shit that various studies have reported that up to 80% of them have pneumonia. Blood and pus-filled injuries are rampant in the injury. This is the status quo that Desantis carries water for.

Are they worth chickens being transported in cruel conditions that kill about a quarter of them, breaking bones, causing heart attacks, and causing animals to literally be crushed to death? Are they worth chickens being genetically modified to grow extremely rapidly, leading to them living their entire lives in constant agony, unable to move properly? Are they worth them sitting in filth and shit, where disease spreads rapidly and the acidic feces surrounding them burns their legs? And one could go on and on through the deplorable conditions across the industries—something I’ve documented here.

Even if one didn’t care about animals in the slightest, they should support lab meat. They should support it because it prevents one of the greatest pandemic risks and reduces a major cause of environmental degradation. Even if one is supportive of the systematic brutalization and torture—and yes, it is torture, as no one would deny if the victims were dogs—supporting lab meat is a no-brainer. Factory farming is a major driver of antibiotic resistance, predicted to kill 10 million people a year by 2050—it already kills nearly a million people a year. And yet the one thing that might put an end to it, Desantis and Fetterman support ending (in Desantis’s case, while surrounded by cattle ranchers, in a dramatic display of cronyism). Fetterman explains his support, saying:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this. As a member of@SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.

Lab meat brings out the most idiotic and authoritarian impulses imaginable, causing people to support things that they wouldn’t support in any other context. For instance, we generally don’t take the fact that one wouldn’t give things to their kids to be sufficient reason to make them illegal—cigarettes and Mein Kampf are both legal. For another, we generally take it to be indicative of quite extreme corruption when people oppose a budding, innovative industry because they’re paid by its competitors and want to shield them from competition. Overwhelmingly, the competitors of lab meat companies are huge factory farms, which house about 99% of the total animals killed for meat each year.

Fetterman, in his support for this, demonstrates not merely foolishness but hypocrisy. He criticized his political opponent for killing dogs in medical research. Surely, if one is opposed to medical testing that kills dogs, they should be opposed to the systematic murder of billions of animals, particularly when the alternative would produce even better-tasting and healthier meat.

The Fetterman-Desantis alliance shows that evil and stupidity is bipartisan, and that often luddism is one of the major forces locking in place vile and ignoble institutions. Crushing a budding industry because one finds the thing it’s selling gross is idiotic and evil, particularly when the thing it hopes to put out of business involves systematic torture and slaughter of billions of beings. Supporting this is a good litmus test for political sense: those who support the Desantis bill are wrong about one of the world’s greatest no-brainers. History will not look kindly on those who fought tooth and nail to eliminate the competitors of the deplorable torture chambers known as factory farms.