What’s Bugging Ron DeSantis

The governor’s fake meat ban embodies a longstanding paranoia on the right.

(Photo by Nick Ansell/PA Images via Getty Images.)

The latest front in the culture wars? Meat. Earlier this month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 1084, a bill “prohibiting the manufacture for sale, sale, holding or offering for sale, or distribution of cultivated meat in this state.” By cultivated meat, the bill means the sort of artificially produced “beef” or “chicken” that is grown in a petri dish rather than coming from a dead animal—the sort that is popular with people wanting to reduce their fat intake or manage their carbon footprint.

I enjoy a good burger as much as the next person and I won’t be expunging beef from my diet any time soon. I can also at least conceive of reasons why a ban on fake meat might be defensible, such as to boost the interests of farmers, a form of protectionism that is common (if often detrimental) in democratic politics all over the world. I wouldn’t agree with banning meat for this reason, but at least it would make some kind of sense.

The problem is, this is nothing like the justification DeSantis gave for banning fake meat in Florida. Rather, according to an infographic posted on social media, SB 1084 is necessary to counter the “globalist agenda” through which the World Economic Forum intends to “force the world to eat fake meat and bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” As evidence for this extraordinary claim, it cites WEF statements to the effect that the global meat industry contributes to harmful CO2 emissions (true) and that fake meat and insects are an “overlooked” alternative (debatable, but probably true). In order to hammer home the feeling that Floridians are up against sinister enemies, the infographic references other steps the state has taken to “protect our farmlands from being bought by the Chinese Communist Party” and “prevent a Central Bank Digital Currency from being recognized in Florida.”

Of course, if transnational institutions were planning to force national governments to ban meat, DeSantis would be right to worry. But there is no such plan. DeSantis appears to be referencing an op-ed written by two academics in 2022 and published on the WEF website with the intention of being discussed at that year’s Davos conference. Aside from the fact that the article makes many reasonable points, there is no suggestion that it led to any plan being developed by world leaders to force anyone to stop selling meat, or to consume bugs. The idea that there is such a plan is redolent of similar conspiracy theories spread by politicians on the European far right, especially in the Netherlands.

SB 1084 is the political equivalent of jumping the shark. It takes a dubious policy and, in order to sell it to voters, packages it within a crackpot conspiracy theory about the globalist left, making sure to implicitly associate the issue of a meat ban with a number of other themes that the governor has been peddling for a while. In this case, the evidence of conspiracy is even more threadbare than that usually offered by the populist right. It’s almost a parody of what the Republican Party has become.

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Commentators seeking to explain our current moment frequently turn to a specific 1964 essay: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by the historian Richard Hofstadter, which appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Hofstadter discussed the right’s penchant for conspiracy theories, its persecution complex, its tendency to describe in grand (almost cosmic) terms the ongoing struggle between nefarious global elites and everyone else.

DeSantis’s fake meat ban is a classic example of Hofstadtian politics. The governor is not content to simply point out that, actually, in a free society people should be allowed to eat meat, and isn’t it great that they still can? Instead, he says something like the following: Not only does the WEF think meat is a source of CO2, but they are also in cahoots with nefarious institutions to forcefully take it from you in the very near future. And that justifies an equal and opposite reaction. It’s the same playbook he used when he signed the “Stop WOKE Act” in 2022 to ban critical race theory—broadly defined—in schools. Decrying politicization of education by the left, the right responded by… politicizing education.

This highlights a novel feature about the current wave of paranoid politics: its proponents actually hold positions of power. Hofstadter wrote that paranoiacs generally have “no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions,” which only serves to feed their persecution complex. But today, conspiracy theorists do make the decisions. They inhabit the governor’s mansion in Florida. Between 2017 and 2021 they inhabited the White House, and may do so again if Donald Trump is re-elected this year. They even own the digital public square—Elon Musk uses X to routinely peddle conspiracy theories about the political left.

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Dark Times for Academic Freedom in the Sunshine State

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And as paranoid actors continue to flex their muscles, they will end up, invariably, creating exactly the sort of monoculture they claim to be fighting against. By reducing the diversity of goods sold in the free market, Floridians will be made just a little bit more dependent on edicts from on high.

I love steak, but would I eat a lab-grown alternative that tastes as good as the real thing? I think I would. And that’s something people should be allowed to decide for themselves. It’s a right that Governor DeSantis just denied them.

Luke Hallam is the senior editor at Persuasion.

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