“It’s not just individuals fucking with their bodies. It’s industries fucking with the planet.”
Some watch-alongs are a snack. This one is a whole pantry. The Leftist Cooks spent seven months and made a video essay nearly six hours long, and we’re going to sit with all of it in one long, gentle marathon. Bring your samefoods and your safe foods, settle your bodymind in, and let a pair of Irish vegans walk us through the current state of our cultural politics — from carnivore-diet influencers to the meat-industry lobbying machine to the quiet mutual-aid networks trying to feed everyone anyway.
We’ll take a bodymind break every 30 minutes. Drop in and out at will. Nobody has to watch the whole thing to belong here.
Date and start time: July 19 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK
Table of Contents
- Videos
- A Very Long Way Around the Table
- The Grift Wears Gym Shorts
- When Medicine Fails You, the Grifters Are Waiting
- Conspirituality and the Diagonal
- It’s Industries, Not Individuals
- Epistemic Vandalism
- The Turn Toward the Table We Actually Want
- The Stimpunks Synthesis
- Join Us
- Main Takeaways
- Related Glossary Entries
- Reflection Questions
- Resources
Videos
A Very Long Way Around the Table
The essay opens with a joke about a professor who only eats beef and ends, almost six hours later, with a couple describing why they had to leave a town that turned on their family. In between, it maps how a plate of food gets recruited into an ideology.
The Leftist Cooks are not subtle about their politics — they’re vegans, and they’ll tell you so. But this is not really a video about what you should put in your mouth. It’s a video about power: who gets to define “healthy,” who gets believed when they say they’re sick, and how a grift about raw liver becomes a pipeline toward something much darker. We’re watching it together not to police anyone’s plate, but to understand the machinery.
The Grift Wears Gym Shorts
The tour starts with the familiar faces of the carnivore internet. Jordan Peterson, who by the essay’s account went from respected psychology professor to a man eating only beef, salt, and water and flying to Moscow for an induced coma to kick a benzodiazepine dependency. His daughter Mikhaila, a wellness influencer selling the same all-beef gospel and a line of supplements. And the Liver King, the raw-organ-eating “ancestral lifestyle” salesman who eventually admitted the physique was built on steroids, not liver.
“He’s a grifter. Peterson’s a grifter, too.”
The essay’s sharpest point about the Liver King isn’t the steroids — it’s the ideology underneath the bullying story he tells. He got big so no one could mess with him. But as the video observes, getting big doesn’t stop the bullying; it just hands it to the next small kid and blames them for not hitting the gym. That’s the whole engine of deficit ideology: the problem is always your own body, your own discipline, your own failure to try hard enough — never the world that’s built to exclude you. The social model would fix the bullies. The grift tells you to fix yourself, forever, and buy the supplements on the way.
There’s a gendered engine here too. Meat gets sold as masculinity itself — a social construct localized, absurdly, in the digestive tract — and the essay lingers on how much of this is men grifting on other men’s insecurities.
When Medicine Fails You, the Grifters Are Waiting
This is the section that lands hardest for a disabled and neurodivergent community, and it’s the reason this six hours belongs at a Campfire.
The video is clear-eyed about why wellness grifts work. People in minority communities are more likely to be sick, more likely to live with autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue — and more likely to spend years on the diagnostic odyssey, ruled out condition by condition, sometimes with no established treatment at the end of it.
“It can take years of visiting doctors… before we’re properly diagnosed.”
That gap — between a real suffering bodymind and a medical system that shrugs — is exactly where the grift moves in. When diagnosis is withheld and pain is disbelieved, someone offering a total explanation and a total cure feels like rescue. This is epistemic injustice doing its quiet work: the pathology paradigm decides whose reports of their own body count as knowledge, and the people it discounts are precisely the ones the wellness-to-fascism pipeline is built to catch.
We know this pattern. We’ve lived the disbelief. The answer Stimpunks offers to that gap isn’t a proprietary supplement — it’s mutual aid, access intimacy, and a competency network that takes your account of your own body as the starting point rather than the thing to be corrected.
Conspirituality and the Diagonal
From individual grifters, the essay zooms out to the worldview that connects them. It borrows two terms worth carrying home.
Conspirituality — the blend of optimistic wellness woo with paranoid conspiracy thinking, the Goop-and-Illuminati smoothie that curdled during the pandemic.
Diagonalism — the more dangerous one. Coined from the German Querdenken (“lateral thinkers”), it names the way right-wing figures appropriate genuinely left-wing concerns (distrust of Big Pharma, of corporate food, of an indifferent medical system) while claiming to be “beyond politics.” As the essay puts it, borrowing Naomi Klein, they build a mirror world — your real grievances reflected back as their evil twins, pulling you rightward the whole time.
This matters to us because the queer, disabled, and alternative-minded are in close quarters with these currents. Our legitimate anger at how medicine treats us can be harvested. The defense the essay proposes is not cynicism but better epistemology: ask for sources, ask where the knowledge comes from, ask why someone believes what they believe — including the people on your own side.
It’s Industries, Not Individuals
Around the four-hour mark the essay reveals its real target, and it isn’t a single influencer eating testicles on camera. It’s the machinery behind them: front groups like CLEAR that dress up as environmental institutes while lobbying for animal agriculture, coordinated attacks on the EAT–Lancet Commission’s dietary science, and the EU “Save Our Supplements” campaign that markets deregulation as consumer freedom.
“It’s connected to climate change denial and… unfathomable amounts of animal suffering.”
You don’t have to arrive at the video’s vegan conclusion to see the structure it’s describing: bad science manufactured at scale, aimed at what you believe is normal and healthy, funded by industries with a great deal to lose if you think too carefully about your food. This is the same Solarpunk fight we care about — the insistence that a livable future requires changing systems, not just personal willpower.
Epistemic Vandalism
The essay hands us the precise word for what all of this is doing, and it’s worth carrying home. The epistemic part is about the production of knowledge. Epistemic vandalism is the deliberate corruption of that production — not being wrong, but poisoning the well on purpose. The video’s own illustration: mathematics says pi is 3.14159…, and to vandalize that knowledge you’d simply tweet that “pi is exactly three.” Loud, confident, and engineered to stick.
Its worst form, the essay argues, is the kind that fabricates its own miniature consensus inside a rigged sphere. That’s the whole function of the machinery behind the influencers: a shady academic at a California institute and a professional public-relations liar in Washington don’t need to be in literal cahoots to build a mutually reinforcing network of alternative-fact sites, infographics, radio hits, and astroturfed hashtags. The knowledge commons gets flooded until the woo looks normal and the science looks fringe.
“They are epistemic vandals… they have reactionary values.”
That line is the key that turns the whole lock. The carnivore ideologue isn’t saying I eat this way because of the evidence. He’s saying I eat this way because you’re being lied to. The claim was never about truth; it’s a posture of grievance wearing truth’s clothes. This is exactly where epistemic vandalism interlocks with epistemic injustice: the same disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people who were disbelieved by the legitimate institutions are then handed a poisoned well to drink from, because the clean well was denied them first. Vandalism supplies the counterfeit; injustice makes sure the people most failed are the ones who need it.
The essay’s answer is not despair but construction — pausing mid-argument to say, in effect, this is not epistemic vandalism; this is constructing an episteme. That’s our answer too. Against a manufactured consensus you build a real one, in the open, together: ask for sources, ask where the knowledge comes from, ask why someone believes what they believe — including your own side. It’s the difference between a grift and a library economy, between being sold a conclusion and doing the slow, shared, omni-directional work of knowing something honestly.
The Turn Toward the Table We Actually Want
After nearly six hours of grift and menace, the essay does something we love: it turns toward mutual aid.
It ends with the creators’ own story — moving to Ireland, watching a town ice out their family after one of them came out as a trans woman, living alongside a community steeped in the diagonalist nonsense the video spent hours dissecting. And then it names the way out. Not another supplement. Groups like Food Not Bombs, cooking surplus into free meals; Turtle Island Indigenous-led mutual-aid work feeding hundreds. The reminder that figuring out what to do next is, in their words, a group project.
“Group projects are what we need here.”
That’s a sentence that could hang over the whole Stimpunks Cavendish Space. The counter to the meat-to-fascist pipeline isn’t a better influencer. It’s interdependence, support swapping, and the stubborn practice of feeding each other.
The Stimpunks Synthesis
Here is the tension we’re deliberately sitting inside: we are hosting a samefood mukbang — a room full of people eating their same safe foods — while watching a six-hour essay about how restrictive eating gets weaponized into supremacy. That is not a contradiction. It’s the whole point.
The essay is not indicting restriction. It’s indicting control and domination — eating as a way to impose order on a world you’ve decided is chaotic, to perform dominance over other people, to grift the insecure, and to shame everyone whose body works differently. “No excuses.” “You should have hit the gym, too, bro.” Fix your body, never the world.
A samefood is the opposite of all that. It’s not domination; it’s self-knowledge. It’s a bodymind that knows what it needs for sensory certainty, for comfort, for the executive relief of not deciding again today. It’s monotropism at the table. It asks nothing of anyone else’s plate and demands no supplements. Where the carnivore grift says everyone must eat as I do or they are weak, the samefood says this is what keeps me regulated, and your plate is yours.
So we don’t do food shame here, and we’re not screening this to prescribe your diet — ours is a community that includes people with ARFID, sensory-based eating, and every kind of relationship with food. Honoring samefoods and safe foods is itself the refusal the essay is reaching for. The line that separates a neuroqueer act of self-care from a fascist act of control is the same line that runs through this entire video: consent, care, and self-determination on one side; grift, shame, and domination on the other. We’re watching six hours to learn to see that line clearly — with our safe foods in hand, believing each other, in a room with no boss.
Join Us
This is a special marathon edition of Campfire Learn Together, online via Discord. Because the essay runs nearly six hours, this session is built for endurance and for coming and going:
- We take a bodymind break every 30 minutes — stand, stim, snack, step away, come back.
- Drop in and out at will. No one is expected to watch all six hours. Arrive at hour four if that’s what today allows.
- Bring your samefoods and safe foods. This is a mukbang — eat your comfort food in good company. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.
- We’ll pause between the major movements of the essay to talk, then pick the reflection questions back up as a community conversation.
Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are. Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space.
Date and start time: July 19 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK
Main Takeaways
- The grift is never really about the diet. Carnivore influencers sell control, masculinity, and supplements — the beef is just the delivery vehicle.
- Wellness woo thrives in the gap medicine leaves. Chronically ill and neurodivergent people, disbelieved and undiagnosed for years, are exactly who the pipeline is built to catch.
- Diagonalism harvests real grievances. Legitimate distrust of corporate medicine and food gets mirrored back as reactionary politics — “beyond left and right” is the tell.
- It’s industries, not individuals. Front groups, manufactured science, and lobbying campaigns shape what you think is “normal” food.
- The answer is mutual aid. The essay ends where we live: feeding each other, as a group project, without a boss.
- Samefoods are not the enemy the video describes. Self-knowledge and access are the opposite of control and domination.
Related Glossary Entries
- Samefood
- Bodymind
- Pathology Paradigm
- Epistemic Injustice
- Diagnosis
- Deficit Ideology
- Social Model
- Wellness
- Mutual Aid
- Access Intimacy
- Competency Network
- Interdependence
- Support Swapping
- Monotropism
- Solarpunk
- Neuroqueer
Reflection Questions
Six hours is a lot to metabolize. These are an invitation to bring your own bodymind to the table — no right answers, no homework.
On the gap. The essay argues grifts move in wherever medicine leaves a hole. Where has your own suffering been disbelieved or left undiagnosed? What filled that gap for you — and was it care, or was it a sales pitch?
On control versus care. The video separates restriction-as-domination from restriction-as-need without ever naming samefoods. Where in your own life is the line between a practice that regulates you and a rule that’s controlling you? How do you tell the difference?
On the mirror world. Diagonalism takes a real grievance and reflects it back as its evil twin. Have you ever caught a legitimate frustration of yours being steered somewhere ugly? What helped you notice?
On the group project. The essay ends on mutual aid — Food Not Bombs, feeding each other as a shared task. What does feeding your people look like in practice for you? What’s one small thing your competency network already does that the metrics never see?
On the table. We’re eating our safe foods while watching a film about food and power. What does your samefood give you that no diet plan ever could? What would it mean to let everyone’s plate simply be their own?
Resources
- Why Don’t Fascists Eat Vegetables? – The Leftist Cooks (YouTube)
- Samefood – Stimpunks Foundation
- Pathology Paradigm – Stimpunks Foundation
- Epistemic Injustice – Stimpunks Foundation
- Mutual Aid – Stimpunks Foundation
- Cavendish Space – Stimpunks Foundation
- Food Not Bombs — international mutual-aid collectives cooking surplus food into free community meals (cited by the essay)
- Seventh Generation mutual aid — Turtle Island Indigenous-led community food work (cited by the essay)
We are living in the shadow of the stupidest moral panics.
Justice for the Global South means survival for us all.
Naturalness is silly.
Food is just shy of a synonym for culture.
Food is a primary way that we do culture.
Diagonalism is really, really dangerous. It’s in the real world, dangerous and destructive. It’s insidious.
Diagonalism is everywhere.
For the love of God, stop asking us where we get our fucking protein.