Screenshot is from an episode of The Colbert Report covering the armed raid of Rawsome Foods in Venice Beach, CA.
In retrospect, the episode was fairly balanced. Ron Paul got an appearance, leaving his quote of “pasteurization without representation” along with general skepticism towards whether or not this was worth pointing guns at co-op employees.
The lasting impression was a fracture. Colbert’s team had gathered a few of the quirkier co-op members/ staff and had them do some displays of hippiness, which seemed to mock the targeted food club and the raw milk movement at large. Granted, quirkiness and woo-woo aren’t hard to find around these here parts, especially in this movement’s formative years, but that’s what they chose to highlight.
For a while there, mainstream-ish publications like Huffington Post and Daily Beast were publishing articles sympathetic to the raw milk farmers who faced crackdowns of varying legitimacy. This relationship seemed to end with this episode. It was like the arch-liberal came in to crack the whip on lower level libtards to inform them that an esteemed and educated person would never be involved in such affairs. Civil Eats remained in support, but that was about it. I mark it as another node in the long line of unforced errors by key Democratic figures, in case anyone is scratching their head to figure out what went wrong.
Nevertheless, of course, direct-to-consumer raw milk sales thrived in California after this canon event for the movement. Decades on, grassroots raw milk producers are thriving and the forewarned pathogenic dangers have been reduced to levels below leafy greens, per capita.
If someone could send me this video, or a link to an archive, I’d greatly appreciate it. Chatbots tell me this episode aired October 7, 2010. The Colbert Report archives were removed from the Internet years ago.
