They don’t actually care about the oppression, they just see it as a shortcut to being a “good person”. Like; “I want to be ethical. Animal products are unethical, therefore I will not consume them. Now I am ethical.” Without actually understanding the reasoning behind it. They may pay lip service to it, but they really see it as a set of steps you take, rather than a thought process.

Fascism had always had a thing for expressing compassion towards good causes unrelated to their supremacism. It serves unconsciously as a way of buying indulgence for the evil they do and more consciously it is used cynically to soften their public image by layering their hate in softer messages to make it more palatable to the general public.

There’s a reason why fascists love to protect the welfare of cute animals. They don’t really give a shit about factory farming, doing so would inconvenience the people who fund them, but if a video of someone being mean to a dog or a horse goes viral they go ballistic and are screaming for blood. These are the same people who have just the minute before talked in favour of drowning refugees in the Mediterranean.

Animal welfare aesthetics can also be used as a way to shoehorn their racism. The Nazis claimed to be horrified about Jewish ritual methods of butchering just as modern fascists claim to be horrified about Muslim ritual methods of butchering. In that way it their concern for animal welfare is similar to their claimed concern for women’s and LGBTQ rights, it is primarily seen as a cudgel to beat the people they hate over the head with.

Veganism might go hand in hand with fascism in the same way that is fundamentally alien from the ways veganism can go hand in hand with leftism.

Finally one should also not be blind to the fact that to many people, fascist or not, veganism is more of a health and diet fad than a consistent moral position. It is a consumer choice for them and nothing else.

This is all too confusing for me. How do you get conscious to a point of saying “Oppression towards non-human animals is fucked up,” but still keep a disturbing tendency to support oppression of certain humans simply on the basis of who they are?

There’s a few avenues here.

Same mechanism as “Animal abusers should be shot, which is why my dog is fed exclusively on meat”, just sort of cranked to 11. The dragnet-approach to political positions; I saw Dominion (or anything similar once) and that got me really angry so I turned vegan (good so far) but I have 0 idedological basis to look at the world and / or am a reactionary so I’m also against gay people. I’d argue these are often “the good ones” of the vegan community that will gladly join in on any and all omnivore circlejerks around how annoying vegans are.

Alternatively many people don’t seem to come into it from any sort of opposition to animal oppression but rather some woo-woo-bullshit about health benefits, often tending towards the real esoteric shit, that doesn’t really require you to think about any oppression.

Guessing a lot of it is people who think their personal disgust by something is a good political argument. Factory farms and killing animals is gross, so they think its bad. I assume they think the same about LGBT+ people…

There’s also some people who believe in religions that they believe encourages or requires veganism, but the religion generally seems like an excuse to justify beliefs rather than the source of the beliefs in the first place for most people.

aside from the autotherapeutic, vibes-based and reactionary ‘veganism’ mentioned here, i’ve often encountered the misanthropic ‘vegan’.

they’ve typically experienced chronic complex interpersonal trauma and have arrived at some quasiconsequentialist position that animals — as a category representing the ‘opposite’ of humans, and lacking the same capacity for evil — represents the apex of innocence and morality. they assume anything bad brought upon a human is brought upon themselves, and would see humans collectively punished(/ put into collective suffering) for [insert list of examples of decadence] or as repentance for animal cruelty. it doesn’t matter how humans suffer, or that they all suffer the exact same way. it only matters that everyone everywhere is feeling like shit. even better if the suffering is caused by another human, which they warpedly see as some kind of ‘irony’, so it makes sense they’d promote hateful ideology. at the far end of the spectrum: they dip into ecofascist accelerationism territory.

the reality is that this is an outlet for their hatred for their own (varied) abusers, and their hopes that a ubiquitous suffering will extend far enough to reach even these abusers and bring everyone down to their level.

(i speak a tiny bit from my own past experience)

I had a conversation with a person who was… vegan when they felt like it… whose decision making “came more from the heart.” It was funny because they made an argument to the effect of meat processing plants being so grizzly. This, to me, rang the bell that they were talking about animal liberation. So when I asked them about pets, I get this contradictory answer about how “of course pets are okay because it’s mutual love and affection.” Comrade, their livelihood comes from helping people with their pets. So, I, being the argumentative type who wants to pick apart belief systems into their constituent parts (because in my past I believed the pain in my life came from shitty first principals) asked about beekeeping (and fathers that are of beekeeping age). I got some “hmmmmm, I don’t really know.” I then, promptly, got shoved out of the conversation by my friend whose enlightened centrism came to save the day as he explained how meat is… le good!

Probably the same reason how folks call themselves leftist and but aren’t vegan.

Late here but I think a couple of things are at play.

Lots of morality is mediated by disgust. People with strange/uncomfortable -> disgust on a hair trigger are probs more likely to end up racist/queerphobic/generally reactionary as well as being disgusted at things which are actually bad.

Second thing: Right wing nutjobs are fucking obsessed with purity/back to the landness. “clean” purity diets and rejection of modern “degenerate” farming/diets is absolutely on track for the sort of weirdos kept up at night by skull shape and genetic purity.

They don’t make the connection between “animals deserve rights” and “humans are animals.”

The unfortunate reality is that the vegan community writ large is riddled w/ freaks and weirdos

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