Cafe Gratitude

None other than The Hollywood Reporter tells us about a popular restaurant in LA:

The owners of the most prominent vegan restaurant chain in Los Angeles were found to be raising and "harvesting" animals at their Northern California farm. Now Hollywood's vegan community is angry, and death threats have been made. "People have taken up the mob mentality," says Cafe Gratitude owner Matthew Engelhart ...

The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. "The reason we're so upset is that veganism is a belief system," says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. "You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn't. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals ..."

The Engelharts frame their return to "sustainable, regenerative" animal consumption as the mindful culmination of years spent laboring on their upstate farm. "We started to observe nature, and what we saw is that nature doesn't exist without animals," says Matthew. "Neither does natural farming. You know, you can't buy organic vegetables that aren't fertilized with animal residue. So that was our discovery. We aren't on a soapbox ..."

Glen Reynolds (of Instapundit) comments:

That’s the key line in this article: “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system” — in other words, like radical environmentalism and radical feminism, veganism is one of many alternate religions that are subsets of the holistic New Age Left. (Nietzsche killed God, but man is hardwired to believe in a cause higher than himself. When traditional religion is rejected, the odds are pretty good that something cultish will be chosen to replace it.) The restaurant owners chose to cater to them, apparently without pondering the jihad they would face if and when they were discovered to be apostates by their core customers. Or as a wise social critic once described the nihilistic alternative lifestyles of California, “You can checkout anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

Some pseudo-religions adopted by the Left are harmless—Veganism is one of those. It's perfectly okay for an individual to eat the way he or she chooses. But other pseudo-religions adopted by the Left do far more damage, simply because those of us who are apostates (relative to any one of the Left's religions) would be forced to participate, if the Left attains all of the levers of power.

Socialism is, of course, the Left's dominant pseudo-religion. As I mentioned in my last post, it has done awful damage to countries, groups, and individuals over the past century, yet true believers refuse to see the damage and continue their fantasy journey toward a utopia that cannot be achieved.

That's the reason supporters of Bernie Sanders are so fervid and also the reason they are so upset that their guy won't become president. After all, "The reason [they’re] so upset is that [socialism] is a belief system," and raw "belief" means you can reject reality in favor of fantasy and feel good about yourself along the way.