vegan

I have a hard time generally trusting non-vegan leftists to authentically oppose oppression because I've gotten mask-off hatred from them simply because their "Veganism is just privileged and white!" card can't work against me.

The reason why non-vegan leftists love their arguments is that they all revolve around trying to paint veganism as reactionary. They feel as if they can reconcile the glaring inconsistency behind claiming to support justice while not being vegan if they argue their out-there talking points about how veganism is actually the bigoted, anti-justice tendency. In other words, they want to feel more "woke" by opposing veganism rather than less.

Non-vegan leftists would rather stop pretending to oppose human oppression so that their take on it clearly aligns with their support for animal oppression rather than stop supporting animal oppression for their take on it to align with their alleged opposition to human oppression. That's what I've come to notice. They'd rather roll with the shameful and hateful approach to being consistent than the one that is actually just and truly anti-oppression.

I've written about this before, so I may be working a little copy-and-paste magic here, but I find that this explains well why veganism intimidates non-vegan leftists who build their entire outlook on performativity and vibes:

There are several ways that veganism differs from other justice movements, and this is why non-vegan leftists drop the ball on it. Effectively, veganism's very existence calls out their performativity and exposes a LARP in their supposed "anti-oppression" outlook:

1. The injustice is normalized to an excessive degree: Though, especially in the past, other injustices have been far more normalized than they are now, the injustice of animal exploitation is ongoing en masse and is so normalized that it’s not even taken as an injustice by most people. Victim erasure is incredibly common from non-vegans.
2. The victims that this justice movement advocates for cannot speak for themselves: Of course, non-human animals can speak in a sense, but it is humans who must be their sole advocates. On that note…
3. It’s the only justice movement in which the oppressor class solely comprises its voice: This would be analogous to all feminists being men, all LGBTQ+ rights activists being cishet, and all racial justice activists being white. This makes support for this movement require a certain degree of selflessness that other justice movements do not, as no vegan activist is a pig, a horse, a dog, a cow, etc.
4. It generally entails actual changes to habit and lifestyle: Most people are not, at least in the most explicit ways, conditioned into engaging in daily habits of supporting things like sexism, racism, and homophobia directly, but most people are explicitly born into engaging in daily habits of supporting non-human animal exploitation directly, habits that those who possess a truly non-oppressive mind would find easy and obvious to forgo. This reminds me of how so many crackers seem to think that opposing racism means not saying slurs and putting "#blacklivesmatter ✊🏻" in their bio.

Your skepticism is wholly justified.

I myself do not trust non-vegans to actually respect me as a person. I don't trust non-vegans to respect consent. I don't trust non-vegans to not objectify me and not be bigoted or discriminatory against me. This is especially why this shit came off as incredibly tone deaf to me.

The only grace I can offer here is that not all non-vegans are necessarily anti-vegans at heart. Some non-vegans could easily go vegan with the proper information needed to remove the human supremacist conditioning. I call these people "pre-vegans," but I find that most non-vegan leftists (or non-vegans in general) I've interacted with are not in this category.