I wrote the article for three main reasons:
1. I wanted to show how Vegans disagree with each other all the time, and that we should be calling out fellow vegans when they do something bad.
2. To get a lot of my frustrations off my chest, and Gary's views provide a succinct array of a lot of views that are present in the animal rights movement I find to be harmful.
3. It was very entertaining to do.
I wasn't expecting too many people to read it since Gary's almost completely obsolete now, and has been since shortly after his retirement (aside from a brief youtube stint when COVID started). That was, until about a year go when someone on the Anti-Vegan subreddit came across it...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AntiVegan/comm ... _activist/
While it's nice to have the Wiki be shared, it in a way feels like being an anti-racist writer and having one of your works being promoted on Stormfront. Regardless, while the OP was overall positive there are some contentious points made in the post I want to address.
I wouldn't really call him dangerous in the sense that he's causing mayhem (no one listens to him on that front), he's more dangerous in that he harms the movement by advocating fringe positions. And most Vegans try to distance themselves from him and positions he espouses (although to clarify he was never the biggest figure in the movement in terms of name recognition, and he's almost completely unheard of outside of Vegan circles, especially now after years of being in retirement with only a quick bout of videos in between).While reading up on the notorious zealot vegan preacher Gary Yourofsky, I came across this article, which (despite being on a vegan wiki) completely trashes him. Turns out even I sorely underestimated just how idiotic, dangerous, and toxic the guy is – to the extent that it seems a decent subset of vegans want nothing to do with him.
While our views on Gary are made pretty explicit in this article, we're not quite sure what is about him that gives this user the impression that he's a charlatan. He explicitly never did any of what he did for money, and becoming well known was pretty much just circumstance (He's certainly kind of weird, we're not going to argue that). After he became a rather big name in vegan circles it probably all did go to his head, but if he really wanted to lead a cult he probably wouldn't have retired, and would've kept all his social media sites up so he can be sucked off by his sycophants. He certainly did like the praise, but didn't think it was worth keeping his sites (aside from his official website, which has no method of interaction), and he's even deactivated his email so the only way to contact him is through the ancient technology of REGULAR MAIL.A couple of my vegan friends have said they enjoyed his speeches (several of which are available on YouTube, if you have a few hours of your life to waste on the Kent Hovind of veganism). I personally could never stand him; I immediately saw him as a crackpot charlatan, and he gave me creepy cult-leader vibes. Turns out even plenty of other vegans seem not to like him – at least, those with enough self-awareness to realize how toxic his behaviour is and how badly it reflects on their movement.
Also calling him the Kent Hovind of Veganism is a low-blow, Hovind has done nothing of value for this world other than spread misinformation and harm public education, while Yourofsky helped save animals from lifetimes of suffering (though you guys might view this as a negative in which case fair enough).
Oh fuck here we go...There is a bit of cognitive dissonance at play here, however –
Newsflash, that's pretty much every social and political movement.I find it a bit odd that they so readily acknowledge that their movement has extensively platformed a dangerous quack like Yourofsky, but don't want to do too much introspection about why it might be that a wannabe cult leader gained so much traction in their movement (and I don't think it's a completely isolated incident).
It's sort of strange how OP is acknowledging that many Vegans distance themselves (and in fact most do, because of his extreme behavior and viewpoints) from Yourofsky yet is making it out as if the movement as a whole was fine with making out as if he was some God-like figure, when in fact it was just a very small group of his biggest admirers.
He was only platformed by the movement when his speeches got popular and were produced into videos for the internet (including his most viewed one at Georgia Tech, which included little mention of his more extreme viewpoints) because he was actually getting results. Once he became well known and started to express his other extreme views (and his other views became more well-known), that's when more members started to distance themselves from him.
And as if antivegans don't platform their own cultish figures. The term 'cult of personality' might be a bit overused, but there are cults of personality for pretty much any significant movement, whether it'd be for Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand, and yes, even Gary Yourofsky. The antivegan movement is rather notorious for promoting mongerers of pseudoscience, such as Taubes, Bakker, and of course Ted Nugent, who we argue are far more dangerous than Yourofsky could ever be (even though Yourofsky says a lot of shit like calling for violence, no one really listens to him, but people ARE listening to the harmful science denialism spread by the aforementioned figures).
If a person gains a little attention for his or her beliefs and accomplishments, even if they're just a Youtuber with ten thousand subscribers, the possibility of a cult of personality is much higher. There will always be obsequious people sucking up to people they like. Even musicians and actors have their own cults to worry about.
In short, it's just human nature. I'm not trying to say "You do it too so it's fine when we do it" we're saying that every side is prone to having figures that are elevated to this sort of thing, so why are you making it like Veganism is more prone to this than any other movement? Seems like OP is just trying to find something to find whatever he can to shit on Vegans for. Of course it's a problem, we're not saying it isn't, but it's one of human nature, not of the animal rights movement.
Of course he begins his sentence with "Indeed" in an attempt to sound sophisticated Yes, it is possible to do this. It takes very little effort to say "Yeah, he's done so much for the movement, but at the same time he's kind of an idiot who says a lot of dumb crap so don't listen to stuff like his misanthropic and violence crap, most Vegans oppose his more radical views."Indeed, they even go out of their way to stress how important his contributions to the movement have been, and try a bit too hard to separate the man from the ideology...
Were there any mental gymnastics required for that?
Oh shut the fuck up dude. All of this has been addressed earlier. Don't be calling the Vegans the ones who are struggling cognitively when you literally have yourself labeled as an [wiki/index.php/Types_of_Anti-Vegan#The_Ex-Vegan "Ex-Vegan"] on the subreddit. And yes I am saying "no u" because this whole thing seems to be an attempt to project OP's own internal struggle onto Vegans (so u did the no u first).I guess it's fundamentally a cognitively difficult thing to do, to admit to yourself that a movement you've been heavily invested in might have some seriously problematic cult tendencies, and you might (even inadvertently) have amplified the voices of some thoroughly toxic and deeply unpleasant people with seriously creepy ulterior motives.
But thanks r/AntiVegan, it's good to know this article that was written to pretty much get a bunch of stuff off of my chest wasn't in vain and people actually are reading this stuff.
