Watch: 'Yellowstone' Creator Taylor Sheridan Has Major Bone to Pick with 'Absurd' Vegans
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
Imagine a movie where a group of psychopathic venture capitalists create social trends and then invest in companies that seek to nurture and grow those trends through peddling expensive merchandise.
Though amoral themselves, the venture capitalists would naturally target progressives by creating vapid morality narratives and attaching them to latent human fears. The Green New Deal and veganism come to mind. Narratives like this could produce billions, even trillions, of dollars for the psychopath investors.
Taylor Sheridan — the massively successful screenwriter for show series such as “Yellowstone” and “The Tulsa King,” as well as movies such as “Sicario” and “Windriver” — could write such a script. He might choose to start with veganism. He’s already done a good bit of the research.
Sheridan recently made an appearance on the intensely popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” where, oddly enough, veganism took center stage. Sheridan didn’t mince any words when cutting to the chase.
“I think one of the most absurd positions anyone can take is they’re a vegan for an ethical reason,” Sheridan said, “It’s preposterous. You can do it for a medical reason, even though I don’t know what that reason would be — maybe you can’t process meat and can’t process proteins like that. But to do it for an ethical reason is absurd.”
I can imagine an uptight progressive vegan who looks down on customers in the local health food store because they happen to be wearing leather boots overhearing the interview at his hippie-redneck — yes they exist — uncle’s house. His face would turn white and his head would reel.
Sheridan’s not trying to offend vegans, per se. He just has a bone to pick, so to speak, and is telling it like it is.
“And the reason I say that is I have plowed a field. It is carnage. It is 12 feet of carnage. And every single plant that you eat is going to be tilled into the ground at some capacity. So you’re gonna kill everything … People have to understand, you have to take ownership.”
WARNING: The following video contains language that some may find offensive.
Rogan was on board.
“Ted Nugent said this on this podcast,” he told his guest. “He said, if you want to kill the most things, become a vegan,” Rogan said. “If you’re thinking about individual life. If you don’t think that one life equals one life, if you think that small things aren’t as valuable as large things, that’s a totally different discussion, and that’s a weird discussion.”
“But if you think that all life is sacred, well, what about the life of ground-nesting birds, fawns, what about the lives of rodents, insects — all those things are getting demolished.”
How many high-minded vegans — not even Jesus was a vegan, mind you, so I mean really high-minded — would dream that farming could turn out to be such a holocaust placed on their altar?
Sheridan wrote a scene in the hit series “Yellowstone” in which Kevin Costner’s character John Dutton lambasts a would-be do-gooder vegan called Summer. Dutton concludes with, “I guess the only real question is: How cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?”
Don’t get me wrong. We all eat crops. Corn, beans and squash, it’s all good. And, frankly, they’re good for you. Sheridan and Rogan seem to be aiming at holier-than-thou vegans who claim a false moral high ground by suggesting they are kinder to the planet and, therefore, better than everyone else.
“If you look anywhere in the ecosystem, take man out of it,” Sheridan continued. “Virtually everything is living at the expense of another organism, to the degree that if a certain weed grows up over the grass, it’s killing the grass.”
It’s the cycle of life. There’s a balance that must be maintained, or all hell will break loose. If, for whatever ungodly reason — say a Bill Gates-like character became dictator of the world and ordered all people to become vegans or die (another movie idea?) — everybody was suddenly turned vegan, the natural world would be so off-balance there’s a good chance it would twirl off its axis and drift into the sun due to mankind’s stupid-induced hubris.
“This little sapling grows up over the grass, it’s killing the grass. If the grass grows up before the weeds, it kills the weeds… everything is in competition with everything else. There is not a vegan fish, there’s not a vegetarian fish,” Sheridan said. “Every single fish, every frog, they’re eating another organism to survive — every one of them.”
And so do humans. It’s the way of the world. It may not be pretty but, hey, this isn’t heaven, where the lion lies down with the lamb. It’s a fallen world, and the balance of nature, though red in tooth and claw, is oddly beautiful because, after all, it’s still God’s creation. The natural balance is beautiful. Don’t mess with nature, or God will get angry.
Bottom line: Veganism isn’t natural, and that’s what Sheridan and Rogan seem to be emphasizing.
And yet, according to a 2021 Bloomberg Intelligence prediction, “The plant-based foods market could make up to 7.7% of the global protein market by 2030, with a value of over $162 billion, up from $29.4 billion in 2020.”
The global vegan fast-food market — (Have you tried the plant-based tacos at Del Taco lately? I don’t advise it) — “will grow to $28 billion by 2033,” according to VegNews.
In the interview, Rogan tells Sheridan he watched a David Attenborough documentary called “Chimpanzee”. He learned that monkeys are one of the chimps’ favorite foods, “and they eat them alive.”
At least the chimpanzees are up-front about their eating habits. Vegans hide in their vegan kitchens and vegan restaurants so they don’t have to see all the creatures that die to sustain an inflated sense of ego-driven morality.
Sheridan and Rogan set them straight. I wonder if they’ll listen.
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