Can we all at least agree that any two people can agree on something?
Piers Morgan brought conservative firebrand Tomi Lahren on as a counter-guest Thursday to vegan firebrand activist Tash Peterson, and for the briefest of moments – blink and you’d miss it – the two found common ground.
“Piers Morgan Uncensored” kicked off with Peterson – aka “V-Gan Booty” – whose calling card is, among other provocative tactics, to walk into restaurants playing audio of animals screaming at slaughter. Morgan spent the first few minutes tearing into Peterson’s modus operandi, suggesting she was only “annoying” people and contributing to a global downward trend in adopting veganism.
“I know you get passionate about it, but I think it’s very off-putting – it’s a bit like the Just Stop Oil protesters,” Morgan said. “It has the opposite effect.”
Peterson, wearing a T-shirt that said “END THIS HOLOCAUST,” didn’t see it that way at all: “I think it brings more attention to the animal holocaust,” she said. “Animals are subjected to rape, torture, enslavement, abuse and murder – and I’m bringing light to that.”
She also defended her use of the term “holocaust” after Morgan pressed her on the use of such “emotive” language.
“Well, it’s just a factual statement if you look at the definition of a ‘holocaust’ – it is slaughter and destruction on a mass scale,” she said. “Multiple holocausts have occurred throughout human history, and non-human animals can be subjected to the same atrocities that humans can.”
That’s when Morgan threw to Lahren, the Outkick host and Fox News contributor presumably qualified to speak on the subject because she grew up on a ranch in South Dakota.
“It seems to me from all the sales in the UK and stuff, it’s kind of going out of fashion, like it was a fad,” Morgan said.
Lahren launched into a response denouncing meat substitutes as “full of fillers,” razed Peterson’s “holocaust” definition and reminded that “I’m from a ranching family and a ranching state. … there’s nobody who cares more for their animals than those in the ranching community.”
But it was the next thing out of her mouth that warped the fabric of outrage vilification culture-war space-time:
“Now I’m against factory farming as well, by the way,” she said. “I think that that’s atrocious. I’m an animal lover.”
Did you catch that? Against factory farming.
It got heated and contentious again after that rare moment of unity, of course, but it’s important to find common ground wherever one can.
Watch the entire exchange in the video clip above.
