CNN’s Daniel Dale debunks the latest right wing culture war nonsense. It’s just so, so dumb. But this crap seems to thrill the Trump cult more than anything else so they’re gleefully running with it:
Republican members of Congress, Fox News personalities and other prominent right-wing figures are falsely claiming that President Joe Biden is trying to force Americans to eat far less red meat.”Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
No fewer than five Fox News or Fox Business personalities told versions of the scare story on the air since Friday morning. For example, Fox News host Jesse Watters said Saturday that “Americans are going to have to cut their red meat consumption by 90% in order to reduce emissions to hit Biden’s target. That means you’re only allowed to eat four pounds of red meat a year. That adds up to a burger a month. That’s it.”
In a particularly odd moment on Twitter on Sunday, two Republican governors, Greg Abbott of Texas and Brad Little of Idaho, tweeted their opposition to the Biden red meat policy that doesn’t exist — and cited a Fox News graphic that listed the supposed elements of the nonexistent policy.
Here’s the truth.
Facts First: Biden has not proposed any limit on Americans’ red meat consumption. In fact, he has not proposed any limit on Americans’ consumption of any food. The false claim about Biden trying to restrict people to four pounds of red meat per year appears to have originated with a deceptive Thursday article by the British tabloid The Daily Mail. The article baselessly connected Biden’s climate proposals to an academic paper from 2020 that is not about Biden and says nothing about the government imposing dietary limits.
The paper, by scholars at the University of Michigan and Tulane University, estimates how greenhouse gas emissions would be affected if Americans hypothetically decided to change their diets in various ways, such as cutting their consumption of beef to four pounds per year. The paper does not suggest a mandatory four-pound beef limit — and, more importantly for the purposes of this fact check, the paper is just not related to Biden’s plans.The paper was published before Biden had won the Democratic presidential nomination. The paper does not even mention Biden’s name. And Biden has never publicly mentioned the paper.So…frankly, you can stop reading here if you just wanted to know if it’s true that Biden is trying to take away your sacred right to a rib eye. That claim is complete nonsense.But if you’re interested in how right-wing media figures and elected officials turned a little-known academic analysis into a scary presidential plot to limit Americans’ hard-earned cookout freedoms, read on.
Their most potent culture war weapon is the one that insults our intelligence so often that we end up just giving up in despair because our heads hurt so badly.
BTW: Apparently, “meat-trolling” (which had a slightly different definition when I was young) has been a thing in right wing circles for decades. Rick Perlstein explains.