The website ExVegans.com recently posted what it called The Vegan Sellout List, describing it as "an online directory of those who have regressed from moral consistency to moral depravity." In other words, it's a blacklist of former vegans, some famous some not.
It singled out the famous (including Houston Texans running back Arian Foster who went vegan and back last season) as well as everyday, unknown people (you could report your vegan waffling buddy for example and let the world know). Once media outlets started covering the website and noting how much anger and vitriol was directed at people whose biggest "crime" was going back to eating some meat, ExVegans.com suddenly took those posts down.
The entry read, "Tall, red hair, built like a truck. Used to be vegan, but since his girlfriend broke up with him he now mostly walks around downtown ATX eating turkey legs."
The website now redirects to "Meet Your Meat," a graphic 2002 PETA documentary about factory farming narrated by Alec Baldwin. The video originally appeared on the site with the caption, "If that fails to stir your conscience, we ask that you go here and follow the directions closely" — "here" being a Wikipedia page listing various methods of committing suicide.
The site's mission statement condemned "those who are aware of suffering caused by meat, dairy, egg, fur, and leather production, yet choose to look away while the animals suffer," and blamed these individuals for the growing trend of "haughty, nose-turning carnists uttering nonsensical buzzwords" and "critiquing themselves into ethical degeneracy and paleo-terrorism." While the site's seitan-worshipping creators have nothing against burning former herbivores at the steak, they do offer a glimmer of hope: "To those who have regressed from veganism, yet display symptoms of a soul not fully blackened to its core, we ask you to remind yourself why you were what you were."
Visitors to the website were asked to submit names of onetime vegans who have since gotten back in the meat game and rant about their beef with said individuals. Users could then search these traitors geographically. The entry for an Austin man read, "Tall, red hair, built like a truck. Used to be vegan, but since his girlfriend broke up with him he now mostly walks around downtown ATX eating turkey legs and weeping openly."
Celebs, including Texas native Eva Longoria, weren't immune to the the wrath of the vigilante vegan police either.
Some news outlets took the site at face value while others were a bit more skeptical, citing self-aware features like the "Send Hate Mail" button as evidence that the website's creators weren't really talking tofurkey. Animal activist and famed mink-liberator Peter Young has come out and admitted he was behind the site and now claims it was always merely designed to draw attention to the factory videos.
ExVegans.com featured real people though, directing plenty of anger at them, and some of those folks aren't convinced Young and his group had any pure intentions from the beginning.
The Vegan Sellout List, now taken down
