Thread by @doctorow

Remember the "urban farming" wave, whose most prominent proponent was the youtuber Curtis Stone, author of "The Urban Farmer?"

Stone is now a covid-denying trumpist who believes in impending civilizational collapse and rails against SJWs.

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Writing about Stone's transformation for his Farm Worker Bulletin, Luke Carneal explores the connections between heterodox food-movements (especially organicism) and far-right ideology.

lukecarneal.substack.com/p/why-are-some…

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In Carneal's telling, Stone's turn AGAINST urban farming (lest you find yourself in proximity to antifa supersoldiers and BLM mobs) does not represent a conflict with Stone's ideology - rather, it's always been a tendency in pastoralist movements.

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There's a zone where preppers and back-to-the-landers cross over, where suspicion of capitalism and elites can be part of a yearning towards a fair and humane future or a reactionary turn back to some imaginary state of human grace.

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It's an idea I first encountered in @Leigh_Phillips's "Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts," which described how the German Agrarian Conservativism movement became a critical part of the Nazi vision.

memex.craphound.com/2016/01/12/kee…

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It's a vision of pastoral extermination that sees off teeming millions to make room for a kind of Shire living, where we are all returned to a mythological state of leather-apron-clad bourgeois shopkeeping and smallhold farming.

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That tendency lurks in the history of environmentalism in the form of "ecofascism," which marries eugenics to ecology, insisting that Earth has exceeded its "capacity" and balance can only be restored by despatching billions of unnecessary people.

memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the…

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Ecofascism is on a spectrum with Pastel Q, the name for the intersection of the "wellness" movement and far-right conspiratorialism.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhy…

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Pastel Q is a cross between the true understanding that health science has been corrupted by monied interests (see, e.g. the food pyramid's emphasis on industrial carbs) and false claims that the corruption extends to vaccines, elections, and pedophile rings.

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In other words, Pastel Q and other right wing movements have some sound epistemology - an understanding that expert truth-seeking enterprises are actually an auction that sells the official truth to the highest bidder.

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But this isn't so much an epistemology as the ABSENCE of an epistemology. If expert truth-seeking exercises can't be trusted, then how can we know what's true? The epistemological void created by corruption is fertile soil for the ravings of paranoid, right-wing huxters.

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This is how you find yourself at the organic farmer's market chatting with a lovely person who turns out to be armed to the teeth and prepping for the end-times, who shelves their Whole Earth Catalogs next to their copy of the Turner Diaries.

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I remember being in a hipster coffee shop in east London while reading @bengoldacre's indispensable "Bad Pharma," a brutal indictment of the scientific fraud and profiteering of the pharmacy industry.

memex.craphound.com/2012/11/06/bad…

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The barista asked me about the book and when I described it to him, he voiced his complete agreement and explained that this was why he wouldn't get vaccinated and practiced only homeopathic medicine.

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He really needed to read Goldacre's followup, Bad Science, which gave the same treatment to the "alternative medicine" movement, exposing the lethal quackery behind the Paltrow-Industrial complex.

memex.craphound.com/2010/10/19/bad…

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Those two books - Bad Pharma and Bad Science - reveal such an important tension, the idea that corrupted science doesn't militate against science itself - rather, it demands an anticorruption movement.

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But a superficial reading of critiques of science leads people badly astray (and given how busy people are and how impossible it would be to acquire fluency in all the implicated disciplines, these readings will inevitably be superficial.

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It's not ridiculous to read critiques of industrial agriculture and food processing and conclude that "adulterants" are the problem - that "natural" processes are superior but are hamstrung because they're universal, non-proprietary, and impossible to monopolize.

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Not least because adulterants and admixture can trigger an instinctive, toddler's revulsion - the "my carrots are touching my peas, UGGGGGH" instinct - the same infantile revulsion behind Lovecraftian white supremacy:

pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the…

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As Carneal says, "The worldview of the reactionary small farmer/homesteader places him squarely within the long history of self-victimization found commonly amongst conservatives."

eof/