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Amanda Radke apparently makes a good living “Fighting for Faith, Family, Freedom, & Farming,” which is code for cranking out pro-corporate Big Ag propaganda Writing Speak and selling cutesy pitches for beefy rural MAGAism.
But this week, she lets her ag-industrial complex get the best of her, as she generates this absurd screed against innovation in the food industry that aims to reduce the impact of climate change. “The Real Climate Change Agenda Targets Human Life,” reads Radke’s March 28 headline. What follows is a stream of wild baseless claims invoking Bill Gates and conspiracy-theory bogeymen intended to reinforce the rural mindset that, if you aren’t beef, you’re some sissy elitist traitor to humanity.
Radke opens her anticlimate change screed using corporate Newspeak that portrays farmers as the practical environmental saints.
Climate change is the topic of our time. As children, we were taught to reduce, reuse, and recycle. It was also our job as citizens of the planet to take care of our natural resources.
This is what it was like to grow up on a farm or ranch. This is our way of living, and it has been our way of life for generations. Our pastures and fields are healthier and more productive today than they were when my grandparents and great-grandparents were farming, and to me, that is the true definition of “sustainability” [Amanda Radke, “The Real Climate Change Agenda Targets Human Life,” amandaradke.com: The Radke Report, 2022.03.28 ].
Notice Radke’s word game: she tries to co-opt the language of the environmental movement, redefining “sustainability” in terms of ag-industrial productivity. Governor Kristi Noem Played the same gameWhen she placed environmental protection in the probusiness Department of Agriculture. But the fact that we are squeezing more corn beans out of our fields and more milk and beef and pork out of our CAFOs does not mean our land is “healthier.” Look at all the topsoil and nutrientsWet our fields. Polluting our watersheds, and clogging The execution of a murderThe Gulf of Mexico at its mouth. If we look at the land from the perspective of a parasite that pumps its host with chemicals to keep it alive, the only way we can say it’s healthier than it was generations before is to say it’s healthier.
Radke quickly switches from agindustrial propaganda to wild conspiracy. And conspiracy, thy Name is Bill Gates
The global elite have hijacked that word to control the population.
Do you find this extreme? It’s shocking, but the evidence is quite strong that this is the plan.
Bill Gates has once again spoken out about how rich nations should switch to synthetic meat. In an interview with CBS Evening News, he told viewers, “Unless we can make the cow zero emission, which I’m not sure we can, we do need to get rid of those emissions. It’s not going to happen over night — to scale up and innovate [synthentic {sic} beef]” [Radke, 2022.03.28].
Land grab by the elites, Bill Gates, synthetic beef—do pause a moment to catch your breath from those logical leaps.
Echoing the reverse propaganda of the cleverest Trumpists, Radke takes what she is doing—hijacking language of opponents to recast it in her special interest’s favor—and accuses her opponents of that duplicitous action. To give her position traction with her very select audience, she brands those who disagree with her not just “elite”—a word that stirs loads of rural resentment—but “global”, invoking of our rural xenophobia and bunker mentality, our core fear that faraway forces beyond our small towns’ control are conspiring to do us in. (Wendell Berry can provide some real meat to this fear-mongering by his long-standing critique about the modern economy. Treats all of rural America like a colony, with devastating economic and cultural impacts, but I doubt Radke reads, let alone understands, Berry, as his pro-rural philosophy would never fit with her ag-industrial productivity-über-alles agenda.)
Radke mentions a land grab—is she talking about the factory feedlot owners who try Land grabs for their poop pipes? The cheese makers who try Public right of way to wastewater pipelines? The Iowa Republicans Ethanol plantsWho Will use the eminent domainto seize land in order to build their carbon dioxide pipeline In the name and honor of saving corn farmers even though they’re just trying to Make a buck on climate change?
Oh no no no no no—pay no attention to the elites right on your doorstep grabbing your land. Fear Bill Gates! Never mind that the Gates quote Radke gives doesn’t say anything about a land grab or controlling any population. Gates only states simple agricultural facts: cows fet, that contributes to climate change. Mitigating climate change requires reducing those farts or containing them. Other methods of producing food might release less methane, other climate-changing gasses.
Don’t bother tying any knots on the argument—Bill Gates! BILL GATES!
Radke now has the Bill Gates scarecrow. Radke is free to continue to criticize people trying to make money.
While we can all do more to help the environment, it seems to me that investors are using the climate change debate to line their own pockets.
Get a load of this — a company called MeliBio has raised $5.7 million to scale and commercialize bee-free honey aimed at disrupting the $10 billion dollar honey industry [Radke, 2022.03.28].
So Radke and her sponsors can promote eating beef so they can make money, but other entrepreneurs can’t promote alternative means of producing honey that might help us survive collapses in bee populations to make money? And one company’s $5.7-million investment is really going to cause that much disruption in a $10-billion industry? And wait—isn’t disruption through innovation how capitalism works? Isn’t that disruption and innovation and capitalism tucked in between the Guns and Freedom on Radke’s shirt?
According to the Business Wire, “MeliBio’s first product was indistinguishable to traditional honey in an industry blind taste test and over 30 companies around the world signed up to be among the first to use the products. Bee-free honey addresses the looming impact of the climate crisis on the honey industry, including biodiversity loss and supply chain issues” [Radke, 2022.03.28].
So MeliBio makes a product that tastes good and has lots of positive environmental impacts; why shouldn’t they make money?
That’s just one of hundreds of examples I could find where slick investors are playing God with our natural resources and trying to “disrupt” the market on traditional food items and replace it with their new and trendy imitation products [Radke, 2022.03.28].
Every day, there are many people out trying to convince people to switch their shopping habits and purchase new goods and services. Sometimes the new goods or services are a temporary trend, other times they are long-lasting successes and brilliant, and sometimes they fail to be remembered. That’s capitalism. Is Radke afraid that beef makers and her other favored Big Ag producers can’t survive healthy capitalist competition?
These investors are trying eliminate naturally-occurring food like meat, eggs, and honey. It is important to ask what the climate impact of these synthetic imitation products. How will these products affect human health and wellbeing over time? [Radke, 2022.03.28]
Yes, one does have to wonder, and we should study new products to make sure they aren’t harming human healthThe environment. But we know the harms that Radke’s favored products cause to human health and the environment. So why can’t we look for healthier alternatives? Radke is welcome to provide evidence of the health harms of new food products, but she doesn’t do so in this essay. This essay is about emotion, and not evidence.
Now, you might be thinking — well, I will never buy these products, I want the real deal!
You and I would both agree on this sentiment. However, it’s all about coercing and changing consumer habits. How does the elite achieve this? Sin taxes, social credits scores, increased burden regulations, bad press and celebrity campaigns are just a few of the many ways that the elite can achieve this. [Radke, 2022.03.28].
Just like they’re coming to grab your guns Ballots, the “elite” are coming to grab your groceries. Radke will tell lies to protect their agenda, and that is the only list that exists.
Are you Alternative food businessesDo you want to change consumer behaviours? Sure. And that’s no more nefarious than Radke’s effort to prevent consumers from changing their habits in the interest of her favored market players.
But everyone else’s efforts to promote change Radke and her industry don’t like is a plot:
It’s all about conditioning people and changing human habits overtime. It’s why we’ve seen newspapers warn us that one day beef would be a “luxury” only enjoyed by the elite, or why the push for electric cars is so great right now as fuel prices are skyrocketing. And if monopolizing on a crisis doesn’t do the trick, they can always condition us to change our habits through social credit scores.
Mastercard recently introduced a new carbon calculator tool which tracks your carbon footprint for each of your transactions. Mastercard’s Carbon Calculator will provide information to consumers about their carbon footprint and offer tips for living more sustainably.
The website reads like a snapshot of the Green New Deal, and I believe programs of this ilk will first be sold to us as voluntary programs before it’s determined that they should be mandatory.
If it is determined that our climate impact has been too great, will our credit card be cut? What if I had to limit the fuel I can buy, the meat that I can eat, or the activities that I enjoy? In a free society, is that acceptable? [Radke, 2022.03.28].
Good grief—extrapolating a private company’s response to customer desires to Reduce their climate impact by taking actionRadke’s transformation into a global social-control plot makes me wonder. Mitchell’s other great conspiracy writer, Steve Sibson.
Having properly stoked her faithful readers’ misdirected fears, Radke rallies them to join her in propagandizing for Big Ag:
If you’re alarmed as I am, it’s time to take action. To combat this trend, let’s begin by shouting from the rooftops what farmers and ranchers do really well in regards to conservation, stewardship, improving our soil health, and providing the essentials to enrich human life We have an amazing success story to tell, but if we sit silent on the sidelines, the narrative against us is strong and relentless. Let’s get to work! [Radke, 2022.03.28]
Iowa has been impacted by industrial farming More than half of the topsoil is recycled. The soil erosion that industrial farming has caused has been South Dakota’s lower crop yields were the result. Farmers are required to replace soil nutrients lost due to industrial agriculture Their land is sprayed with expensive chemicals (“synthetic, imitation” fertilizers, Radke should seethe as she does about alternative meat and honey) To maintain yields. Radke and her beef producers use all the antibiotics necessary to prevent their cattle from dying before they are slaughtered. This is a serious threat to public health. Superbugs and antibiotic resistance can be promoted. Meatpacking puts exploitedWorkers at risk illness injuryThey don’t face in synthetic protein factories. None of that sounds like “an amazing success story,” and Radke and the ag-industrial complex aren’t shouting that story from the rooftops.
Radke’s headline indicated she would tell us how people fighting climate change are targeting human life. She never ties the bow. She never shows us that Bill Gates or other companies that are fighting climate change are putting lives in danger. Companies fighting climate change are certainly trying to make money, just like Radke’s favored farmers and ranchers do, and they are targeting human life… but it seems they are targeting human life and all life with a life preserver, with products that will do less harm and help humanity and the planet live longer.
See through the baloney (perhaps I should say the “synthetic, imitation” arguments), and Radke’s essay boils down to Bill Gates is evil. Buy more beef! Radke offers no logic or evidence, because she’s not speaking to an audience looking for logic or evidence. She’s speaking to interested producers locked into industrial agriculture who want to be told that they possess flawless virtue and that anyone who questions their business practices, not to mention challenges them in fair free-market competition, is part of a conspiracy of global elites out to destroy freedom and human life itself.
Radke is doing for her industry exactly what she accuses her targets of doing: “using the climate change discussion as a way to line their pocketbooks.”
