I have a theory I’ve been working on for a while now, ever since this “milkshaking” fad began in Britain.

I have gone through a few fad diets in recent years (as an aside, the most success I’ve had dieting is through intermittent fasting because, as a teacher, not eating during the day is really easy when you’ve locked yourself in your classroom, hiding from paperwork, administrators, and students wanting to know if there is any work they can do to make up for a bad grade they earned by not doing work in the first place), and some of the ones that focus on lifestyle change do so through the stigmatization of certain macronutrients in order to convince you that if you just cut them out, you’ll melt the fat away.

Of the popular ones today, keto is at the top of the list.

Keto works by limiting your intake of carbohydrates and focusing on essentially training your body to burn fat as its primary source of fuel. See, the body burns carbs first, so if you cut off its access to carbs, it will start burning the stored fat for energy. However, we as a society love carbs. Especially when it comes to sugar.

So, we have to tell ourselves that carbs are bad. Most variations of keto want you to consume 20 or less net carbs (some carbohydrates, like fiber, don’t get broken down by the body, so you subtract those carbs from your total carbs), but just one small vanilla shake can often run you upwards of 50 net carbs.

So clearly milkshakes are bad.

Apparently, people who hold conservative values aren’t fit for public office or society in general. Much like carbs, conservatives are seen as something that should be completely cut out of society. They don’t have a place in our nation.

We used to throw over-ripened fruits and vegetables at people we didn’t like. Now, it’s milkshakes. Kind of feels like a step backward, right?

More importantly than that, though, is that instead of  debating ideas, we’re gonna douse people we don’t like with milkshakes and laugh at them. That’s the mature way to handle disagreement, right?

This isn’t just something happening in Britain. Matt Gaetz was hit with one in the U.S. recently. We’re seeing people who don’t want to debate ideas, but instead decide to fling milkshakes at their opponents. Like a lot of political discourse in recently years, it’s all about dehumanizing your opponents rather than winning based on the strength of your argument.

I blame keto.