Posted on August 2, 2023

NPR Ridiculed for Regurgitating Claim That the Movement to Push Bug Food on the Masses Is a ‘Racist’ Conspiracy Theory

Joseph MacKinnon, The Blaze, July 25, 2023

NPR’s race-obsessed and taxpayer-subsidized show “Code Switch” recently peddled the notion that it is conspiratorial thinking to take proponents of the bug-food movement at their word.

What’s more, host Gene Demby’s guest on the July 19 episode, entitled “This right wing conspiracy theory about eating bugs is about as racist as you think,” has intimated that criticism both of bug food and of those technocrats who seek to alter consumer behavior may be racist.

NPR has since been met with ridicule by those aware that the desire to supplement or replace normal food with bugs is not a conspiracy theory but rather a real initiative with substantial momentum, which has been long detailed and defended in academic journals, trusted publications, and even on NPR.

‘An emerging, but still marginal, idea’

NPR reporter Huo Jingnan joined “Code Switch” host Gene Demby on last week’s episode to regurgitate talking points from his April NPR article, wherein he simultaneously held that the claim that “elites want people to eat bugs” was a right-wing conspiracy theory while also acknowledging the inclusion of bugs in human food was “an emerging, but still marginal, idea among climate scientists and food security experts.”

“For those who espouse the theory, eating bugs isn’t just a matter of disgust, or questioning the impacts of climate change,” wrote Jingnan, an admitted fan of eating silkworms. “It’s framed as a matter of individual freedom and government control.”

Jingnan hinted both in his article and on Demby’s show there must also be a racial component to the growing concerns about the bug-food movement and the motivations driving it.

After tying bug-food aversion to right-wing resistance to the Great Reset, the NPR reporter suggested that possible “anti-Semitic tropes” might be at play. Allowing himself “a little bit of a stretch,” he argued by way of broken syllogism that bug-food critics might also share something in common with identitarian exponents of the Great Replacement theory.

In case those smears might not stick, Jingnan indicated that an aversion to bugs might also be demonstrative of a through-line between conservatives and “colonizers” who allegedly took pause at tribal people’s consumption of creepy crawlers.

The NPR reporter further claimed that Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, Alex Jones, and others have been trafficking in such “dog whistle[s]” when discussing their opposition to the prospect of eating bugs and that those with whom this so-called conspiracy theory resonates are likely “unvaccinated, male, conservative, Trump-voting, Republican and also not college-educated.”

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