Sanity vs. Insanity: Veganism vs. Animal Liberation.

hi i'm orlando i've been an
animal rights activist with direct action everywhere for the past four years i am no longer vegan and a lot of people have been asking me why so i decided to make this video to try to summarize why i think veganism has actually become counterproductive to animal liberation and i hope that by the end of this video you'll be convinced to stop using this identity to describe yourself [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] veganism is only a strategy it seems to me that the animal rights movement got confused and started thinking that veganism was the goal i think it's really significant both for our own sanity as vegans and in accurately and honestly representing what's happening within veganism to the outside world that we recognize the aspects of the movement that are perceived as insane and cult-like within the movement like some of this stuff is crazy to vegans themselves ourselves right um and again it's important just in maintaining our own sanity it's interesting too that this particular cult like bait and switch game that direct action ever has been playing for approximately five years now it's interesting that it has endured so long within direct action everywhere that they continue to play to this day even though they've been challenged on it publicly many times it's been debated many times been pointed out to them many times just how incoherent and indeed crazy it is the game in brief is this they at first attract followers into their movement with the kind of promise that all they're doing is promoting veganism and veganism is something we understand and it's safe i mean it's challenging but it won't put you in prison and then they invert the ethical claim and tell you that veganism is totally inadequate or even that it's immoral and wrong that you're somehow betraying or letting down the agenda of animal rights of so-called animal liberation come back to the significance of that term in just a moment if you merely support and propound veganism that in fact veganism is this terrible corrupting influence on the animal rights movement that ought to be more strident more violent more interventionists that ought to get involved with burning down slaughter houses and this kind of thing so you can see this is not so much a recruitment tool it's a method of radicalization the first step is to recruit someone and then to radicalize them and the very reasonableness of veganism makes the term the ideology the methodology of veganism and unwanted encumbrance to the fundamentally violent radical revolutionary methods and agenda of dxe veganism is only a strategy it seems to me that the animal rights movement got confused and started thinking that veganism was the goal you hear things like we're fighting for a vegan world or the vegan movement but again veganism is only a strategy to achieve animal liberation so in a simple non-confrontational factual way i hear i have to say he's wrong the objective of the vegan movement is veganism i mean the idealistic impossible to achieve objective would indeed be a vegan world not animal liberation so what we're describing here really are two separate movements both of which make use of the same key term the same crucial piece of jargon in different ways it may be that for him veganism is just one strategy employed in what he calls animal liberation and they are employing it as i've just explained in a somewhat cynical way to at first attract people recruit people and then radicalize them to twist them to the purpose that dxe is pursuing okay but that's not what i'm doing that's not what the vegan movement is doing the vegan movement is instead doing exactly what he decries and deplores as somehow immoral inadequate and wrong right we just want to promote this moral code called veganism and i mean if we could even get five percent of people to adhere to our moral code that can bring about a big profound meaningful change in the world i do not imagine a world where even 50 percent of people are vegan within my lifetime or within 200 years went 300 years but if we can get 5 or 10 we can start making really meaningful changes in the world made a million videos talking about this it's not the case that even five percent of people wanted seat belts installed in cars there wasn't the case that even five percent of people wanted to make alcohol illegal when the united states of america embarked on their campaign uh so-called temperance to eliminate the alcohol during the united states all kinds of political movements good and bad successful and failures have come about with less than 10 of people supporting them the single most important in my lifetime has been the triumph of gay rights all right so you can have a well-organized discipline movement of five percent of people or less that makes meaningful difference in the world and of course we are making a meaningful difference for ourselves and in our own lives if only one percent of people are vegan i still want to be part of that one percent i want to be part of that movement i want to be part of that community and i want you to join me and that can be a meaningful and positive thing in your life joining this other movement this evil twisted violent anti-social movement that dxe is propounding a movement i don't even have a name for right joining their so-called animal liberation movement and getting yourself put in prison now that's not positive in your life in my life at all point in my channel one of the major points was to denounce and decry what that movement really is and they may also use this term veganism as explained in a very different way so what he's doing from his perspective is sincere enough here where he says oh for him veganism is merely a means to an end it's merely a tactic it's not the real goal it's not the real value it's not the real movement but for me the exact opposite is true you hear things like we're fighting for a vegan world or the vegan movement but again veganism is only a strategy to achieve animal liberation the issue about this term animal liberation is i think covered well enough in an earlier video that i'll provide the link to in the description but actually i've had many many videos discussing this from many many angles what this has to do with is the intellectual legacy of peter singer and the strange thing is that dxe wants to identify themselves with this intellectual and political legacy of peter singer even though it is one not vegan and two it is now largely discredited not just then the vegan so this may not be a big deal to some of you in the audience but let me tell you if you're in the tiny minority of vegans who actually read um the philosophy and political theory attached to the movement this would be a big deal to you then peter singer very casually talks about eating meat in his own life when he's in a particular situation at a restaurant other people order meat and he'll eat meat too for no reason and he has his moral philosophical justification that he has his so-called cognitivist argument where he basically argues completely unscientifically that animals are so stupid that as long as you kill them suddenly enough they don't suffer in dying and there's no um loss of utility in their loss of life it's completely insane and surreal based on his pseudo-utilitarian philosophy and then uh thirdly he has this this notion of substitutability not just of animals but of human beings and this argument is it is genuinely this absurd he he believes that a parent has the right to murder their own child so long as they're going to replace that child with one that is um equivalent is going to live as good a life or better and obviously this has much more applicability to animals where he thinks it's fine to kill a particular pig a particular dog a particular horse as long as you're going to replace it so this is an ethic of replaceability and interchangeability of one life we're not is totally bizarre and again um as long as the animals he said this many many times i've had many videos directly quoting his exact wording and the exact source he has said many many times that as long as the animals live decently and are killed decently on farms in factory farms in slaughterhouses and afterwards then he's fine with it and he's fine with people eating their flesh and with the animals being born and created so look if you like peter singer's philosophy of so-called animal liberation you're not vegan and in what sense you are even an animal rights activist is difficult for me to imagine you can imagine why there would be a lot of so-called reducetarians or kind of meat-eating left-of-center hippies who would prefer the philosophy of of peter singer but the use of this term animal liberation and this revival of of peter singer's approach is not even compatible with this more radical violent interventionist philosophy and method proposed by dxe but for whatever reason that is the philosophical path they've taken i just want to close this part of the video by saying i don't recommend anyone read peter singer's books in general i don't recommend anyone do the reading that i've done about the philosophical and kind of political theory side of veganism i think your time could be better spent reading plato or aristotle or reading about the political history of modern china or the collapse of the soviet union there are all kinds of books you can read on politics you can learn a lot from and that could kind of indirectly inspire your activism you can read about the history of the success of the gay rights movement or how did alexandria ocasio-cortez become so successful in a short you could learn something from that you could apply to veganism usefully however if you do that more technical reading within the vegan movement it's true that then you'll understand why certain pieces of jargon are used um what's attached to those pieces of jargon so for this this particular kind of puzzle it gives you more of the puzzle pieces to work with veganism is only a strategy to achieve animal liberation there are many other strategies like rescuing animals by going into farms changing the laws to give animals personhood if you just stop and think about those few examples he's given you you'll realize that he is treating veganism as an inadequate and insincere root to the objectives that he is proposing that he is espousing whereas for us for people like me we really are sincerely espousing veganism that really is the destination we're going towards i don't want animals to have the legal rights of personhood i don't want that if you have a rat infestation in the basement of a museum where those rats will chew up books and manuscripts and paintings where they will damage ancient artifacts i don't want the museum to say well what are we supposed to do we can't exterminate rats we can't exterminate cockroaches we can't exterminate termites they all have the rights of personhood and this is a dead serious debate that goes on within veganism there's the so-called citizenship approach there's the so-called denizen approach i'm i'm not joking it is really seriously proposed and debated within the movement to what extent cockroaches and rats should have human rights and the rights of citizenship and like to what extent the government even should be obliged to pay for rats to have access to veterinary care like with taxpayers it gets crazy and this is one of many reasons why i don't identify myself as an animal rights activist i identify myself as a vegan activist and a vegan activist only yes i would like to achieve a vegan world even if that's impossible is i would like to reach out to every rational reasonable person and say hey why are you making these excuses for eating milk and eating eggs be rational be reasonable be vegan do your part to make the world a better place think about the positive difference you can make i am not reaching out to anybody saying what we really should achieve is giving rats cockroaches wild bears the rights of human beings wild wolves feral pigs no that's not my objective and therefore it's false to criticize me as if i'm using veganism as an insincere or inadequate means to that objective and conversely i don't see this legal personhood argument as a meaningful or useful means to achieving veganism so there you go one of the massive fissures within the vegan movement invisible to many insiders invisible to many outsiders take this distinction do with it what you will and you can click on the link below this video to see more discussion explaining i don't know some of the inside baseball some of the secret coded language um that lies beneath these fissures go to the direct action everywhere website and search the word vegan up pops intrinsically moved the main reason uh consumerist advocacy is the wrong approach you see it stop talking about veganism then it also says veganism is not cruelty free and then it says how the go vegan message perpetuates the objectification of non-humans so i'm i'm really not finding anything positive about going vegan from dxe wayne um and i i think that before the break gary was was saying like well what is somebody supposed to do i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you