This started as a twitter rant, but I wanted to flesh things out a bit.

First, I saw a lot of people sharing the above tweet from Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer with comments ranging from "LOL!" to "That’s some fine trolling!" Which I had me scratching my head. Were there literally people who didn’t know that all beer is made from fermenting grains and hops — plant products?

To be fair, one of the ingredients in beer making is yeast, which is technically a fungus, and therefore no long considered part of the plant kingdom. But most people don’t understand the difference between a plant and a fungus, and usually retailers and food producers use the term "plant-based" to refer to any a meat substitute.

So for a second I thought this might be like the phenomenon I remember at the height of the gluten-free craze: where foods that have never contained glutens were labeled gluten free (corn ships, for instance) leading some people to think that any other brands of the same food contained gluten.

Nope. Turns out that a former Trump administratin member over the weekend started the lie that President Biden was going to outlaw meat (he can’t legally do that on his own, btw). And the specific lie that they ended with was a claim that because of this, come the Fourth of July "No burgers on July Fourth. No steaks on the barbecue. … So get ready. You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag." Source: Befuddled Larry Kudlow Rails That Biden Will Force Americans To Guzzle ‘Plant-Based Beer’ – So no more beer made of grains, yeast and hops? Oh, wait …

But the kicker is that Repubs (including Donald Jr) started repeating specifically that claim about plant-based beer, right?

Now I have to pause for a moment to point out that grilled Brussells sprouts are f-ing delicious, and go particularly well with a juicy rare New York steak. Most barbecues I have attended in my six decades of life, including those hosted by my much more conservative relatives, have usually included a number of grilled vegetables along with the typical burgers and hot dogs. I mean, in parts of midwest it is practically illegal to have an outdoor barbecue without grilled cobs of sweet corn as part of the menu!

But back to the beer: all beers are plant based. It doesn’t really surprise me that Donald Jr. has no clue what beer is made of, but surely at least some of the MAGA people who are seeing the claim being shared on social media have been home brewers! Why aren’t they speaking up?

For those who surprised to learn what beer is made from, I have a few other revelations that some may find shocking: All ciders are plant-based, as are all whiskeys, all rums, all tequilas, all gins, all vodkas — booze is basically fermented plant parts. Similarly it may surprise these people to find out that hamburger buns are plant-based and always have been. French fries? Plant-based. Ketchup? Plant-based. Mustard — yes, even the cheapest, yellowest, most generic mustard is made from ground mustard seeds, not just the fancy Grey Poupon. So that big burger you assemble with the extra tomatoes (plant), sliced onions (plant), lettuce (plant), et cetera, has a whole lot of plant-based stuff as part of the package.

Unless you’re making a burger out of three hamburger patties and a couple of slices of cheese and just holding the greasy thing in your fingers (yes, I’m looking at you, Uncle Gerry), you’ve eaten a lot of plant-based stuff at your previous Fourth of July barbecues.

This whole lie springs from conflating a few studies out there that have shown how reducing how much of our agricultural activity goes to raising various sources of meat could reduce carbon emissions and help mitigate some of the problems of climate changes. These are mostly private studies. The only one I could find (in what was admittedly only a few minutes of Google searching) that was published by a government agency was commissioned by the Trump Administration.

There is nothing in the Green New Deal that bans meat.

But for many years now neither facts, truth, nor logic have been exactly the strong points of Republicans.