Essentially, for Republicans, it seems like avoiding raw milk is the new masking — and they’re just not going to do it in order to prove a point.

For instance, in April, Infowars host Owen Shroyer called the Food and Drug Administration a “gangster mafia” who wanted to “make raw milk illegal.”

“So, now that more people are going to local farms and farmers markets and consuming raw milk, this angers the FDA,” Shroyer said. “This angers Big Milk. Say, ‘No, you need to pasteurize milk, it’s a lot less healthy for you.’ See, eventually, they’ll just make it illegal. They’ll just make raw milk illegal. That’s what this is all about.”

  • Billiam@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Once upon a time this was called “virtue signalling” but I think “vice-signalling” is better. A historian named David Perry defined it as such:

    a public display of immorality, intended to create a community based on cruelty and disregard for others, which is proud of it at the same time.

    In other words, being an asshole just to prove you belong with the other assholes in the rectum. And then you realize that everything the right does (and has been doing for decades) to “Own TEh LiBz!” can be ascribed to this:

    • Drinking raw milk
    • Anti-masking
    • Anti-vaxxing
    • Destroying their Dixie Chicks CDs
    • Not watching Disney
    • Destroying their Yetis
    • Tanning your Tucker Carlson
    • Claiming the Battle Flag of Virginia as their heritage
    • Etc.

    That’s why right-wing boycotts are usually ineffective- on the surface they might be mad about something, but since they’re only performative said boycotts don’t last long.

    On a deeper level, however, this is more disturbing as it’s another step on the road to fascism. Fascist groups are all about their purity and so members are driven to prove their inclusion in the in-group lest they be purged next. This creates a downward spiral of more and more extreme acts to maintain that facade of inclusion, which gets worse and worse for the people who have to exist with those assholes.

    • athairmor@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      | Tanning your Tucker Carlson

      This could also work as a euphemism for exposing yourself in public. As in, “Bobert’s husband went jail for tanning his Tucker Carlson in front of some teenage girls at bowling alley.”

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Someone needs to tell them that the libs are extremely owned when they not just tan their undercarriage, but when it gets a nice, red hue in the entire area. To the point where there is later peeling.

      The libs really, really, really hate this. Spread the word!