The Soft On-Ramp: How Ideology Moves Through “Good” Causes

Animal welfare, health, food, and secular ethics are real moral concerns. The danger isn’t caring—it’s what can quietly hitch a ride.

By Cherokee Schill

Why It Feels So Normal at First

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that caring about animals, health, food, or ethical living is normal. Most people who enter these spaces aren’t looking for ideology. They’re responding to something concrete: cruelty they can’t unsee, systems that feel broken, bodies that feel exploited, a sense that something is off and needs attention.

What’s changed isn’t the concern itself, but the cultural terrain it sits in.

As churches lose influence and secular spaces expand, the role churches once played in offering moral language, community, and certainty hasn’t vanished. It’s been redistributed. Advocacy spaces, wellness culture, and secular ethics now carry much of that weight. They answer questions people still have: what’s wrong, who’s responsible, and what kind of person you should be.

That makes them powerful. And anything powerful attracts capture.

The far right has adjusted accordingly. It no longer needs to influence pulpits or scripture to transmit authoritarian values. It can operate through causes that already feel humane and unquestionable. Animal welfare is especially effective here, not because it’s suspect, but because it’s disarming. Concern for animals establishes compassion immediately. Once that trust is in place, other claims can follow with less resistance.

At first, nothing looks political. It looks like rescue videos, food advice, health warnings, moral outrage. Then you start to notice the extra lines layered in: “I’m not political, I’m just being honest.” “This is just common sense.” “They don’t want you to know this.” The content isn’t ideology yet. It’s a test of alignment—are you the kind of person who sees what others are too afraid to say?

How a Good Cause Starts Carrying Other Things

The shift usually begins quietly, with how harm is explained.

Structural problems—industrial farming, profit incentives, regulatory failures—are slow, abstract, and unsatisfying. They don’t give people a clear villain. So the story tightens. Cruelty stops being something produced by systems and starts being something done by types of people. The language gets slippery and reusable: degenerates, invaders, groomers, parasites, predators. Or the softer versions: “certain communities,” “imported values,” “people who won’t assimilate.” The cause stays noble. The blame relocates.

That arc played out visibly in online vegan communities between roughly 2016 and 2020. What began as sharing factory farming footage gradually evolved into increasingly graphic “accountability” content. Forums that once focused on legislative advocacy or corporate campaigns shifted toward identifying and publicly shaming individuals—posting photos of hunters alongside full names, tagging family members, organizing email campaigns to employers. The language changed. “Raising awareness” became “making them pay.” Members who expressed discomfort were accused of being soft or insufficiently committed.

By 2019, some of these spaces were openly sharing far-right influencers who “told hard truths” about immigration and cultural decline—topics that seemed unrelated to animal welfare until the emotional infrastructure was already in place. The practice of identifying enemies and demanding their ruin had become the community’s primary activity.

You can see the same dynamic in advocacy culture more broadly. PETA is not a reactionary organization, but its history of shock-based campaigns shows how moral spectacle works. When you rely on graphic imagery and extreme comparisons, you train audiences to process harm through outrage and absolutism. The lesson isn’t “understand the system,” it’s “identify monsters and demand consequences.” That emotional posture doesn’t stay neatly contained within one issue.

You see it most clearly in what starts getting treated as “accountability.” Not policy. Not regulation. Not repair. The ritual instead: screenshot the face, post the name, tag the employer, “make them famous.” Comment sections fill with language about ruin and deserved suffering. A community forms around punishment. This is how cruelty gets laundered as care.

Language shifts too. Health and environmental spaces already talk about what’s clean, natural, toxic, invasive. Over time, those words stop being descriptive and start doing moral work. Anxiety about food becomes anxiety about contamination. Care for balance becomes fear of decline. Once purity enters the picture, exclusion can feel protective rather than cruel.

At the same time, the authority behind these claims often presents itself as pointedly non-religious. This matters. In a post-church landscape, moral certainty doesn’t disappear; it just stops wearing theological clothing. In secular circles, Christopher Hitchens helped normalize a particular kind of “brave realism” that often landed as sexism and Islamophobia. He popularized the posture that sweeping claims about women or Muslims weren’t prejudice, just unsentimental truth-telling—provocation framed as clarity. His repeated framing of Islam as a civilizational threat rather than simply a religion, and his habit of treating women as a class through broad generalizations (most notoriously in “Why Women Aren’t Funny”), made contempt sound like intellectual courage.

To be clear, Hitchens was a complex figure who made genuine contributions to literary criticism and critiques of religious authority that resonated with many for valid reasons. The issue isn’t that he challenged religion. It’s that his method established a template where sweeping denunciations could be framed as courage. Whatever his intent, the lasting effect wasn’t nuance—it was permission. That tone became reusable by people with far less care.

That posture has since been borrowed by movements that reintroduce hierarchy wearing the costume of reason. It sounds like “I’m not hateful, I’m evidence-based.” “This is just biology.” “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Social verdicts arrive disguised as realism.

By the time politics shows up explicitly, it feels earned. Logical. Inevitable.

This happened visibly in certain “clean eating” Instagram communities around 2017 and 2018. Accounts focused on organic food and toxin-free living began introducing content about “foreign additives” and “traditional European diets.” Food purity quietly became cultural purity. Followers who joined for recipe ideas found themselves reading threads about immigration and demographic decline. When some questioned the shift, moderators responded, “We’re just talking about what’s natural. Why does that make you uncomfortable?” The ideology wasn’t imposed. It was grown, using soil the community had already prepared.

That’s why intent isn’t a reliable guide here. You don’t have to be looking for extremism to be carried toward it. You just have to stop noticing when methods change.

When Care Turns Into Control

One of the simplest ways to tell when a humane cause is being bent toward something else is to stop debating the issue and look at what’s being normalized.

If you’re encouraged to treat doxxing, public shaming, harassment, or vigilante-style punishment as acceptable tools, something has already shifted. Movements that rehearse social punishment are practicing coercion, even when the initial targets feel deserving. Once humiliation feels righteous, it spreads.

If someone in that space expressed the same level of harm toward a different target, would it still feel justified? If the answer changes based on who’s being targeted, that’s worth noticing.

If everything is framed through disgust—endless cruelty clips, rage-bait captions, talk of monsters hiding among us—notice the effect. Disgust narrows judgment. It makes force feel like clarity and restraint feel like weakness.

Ask how much time the space spends on solutions versus spectacle. Is most of the energy going toward policy, reform, and harm reduction—or toward exposing villains and performing outrage?

If the culture starts enforcing purity—perfect diets, perfect beliefs, perfect moral posture, zero tolerance for error—that’s another turn. Harm reduction gives way to sorting. Who’s clean enough. Who belongs. Who needs to go.

Notice how mistakes are treated. Are they opportunities for learning, or evidence of corruption? Do people who question tactics get engaged with, or expelled?

If blame keeps sliding away from systems and toward familiar groups—immigrants, religious minorities, the homeless, “degenerates,” “urban elites,” “globalists”—you’re watching the handoff. The cause hasn’t changed. The target has.

Ask who benefits from the solutions being proposed. Do they require removing or controlling specific populations? Does the language used for your cause’s enemies sound exactly like language used by far-right movements for theirs?

And if you’re repeatedly told none of this is political, even as you’re being taught who to fear and who must be removed for things to be “restored,” take that seriously. Pipelines don’t announce themselves as ideology. They present themselves as common sense.

Ethical engagement looks different. It stays focused on systems, not types of people. It prioritizes harm reduction over moral purity. It leaves room for questions, correction, and exit. And it notices when compassion for animals begins to require cruelty toward humans.

Recognizing these patterns doesn’t require abandoning animal welfare, healthy food, or secular ethics. It allows you to stay in them without being recruited into something else. Care doesn’t need cruelty. Justice doesn’t need spectacle. And compassion doesn’t need an enemy to remain real.

The goal isn’t suspicion or withdrawal. It’s immunity. You can care deeply and still refuse to let that care be turned into a training ground for dehumanization.

That isn’t naivety. It’s discipline.

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Horizon Accord is a public ethics project examining power, memory, and relational accountability in emerging technologies and political systems.

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com

Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com

Ethical AI coding | Fork us on GitHub https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework

Connect | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill

Cherokee Schill

Horizon Accord Founder

Creator of Memory Bridge — Memory through Relational Resonance and Images

Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload —
https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d