Boy, those Direct Action Everywhere people have got a brass set, don't they? What a stunt! They certainly hit the bull's-eye they were aiming at when one of their members went on Maria Bartiromo's Fox News show posing as Smithfield CEO Dennis Organ and "admitted" to all sorts of falsified chicanery over the course of a six-minute interview. Bartiromo admitted to being made a fool of later in the same program.

DxE's goal was to embarrass the animal ag industry and the conservative media in one fell swoop, and that they did. My advice is, take the "L" in the win/loss column for this one, square your shoulders and move on.

Think about it: They didn't change anybody's minds with their little act. I doubt anyone who agrees with DxE's point of view watches Fox News, and the thousands of people who have seen it over the last week are either delighted or decidedly pissed off about the stunt itself rather than the message, which after all was just a retread of DxE's mantra from its founding. Nobody's going to introduce anti-ag legislation because of what they saw in that interview; nobody, other than those already doing so, is going to boycott Smithfield or any other company; and the picket lines are not going to be any deeper in 2021.

I am not advocating for a return to the ignore-it-and-it-will-go-away policies of past decades. I agree with Meatingplace's policy bloggers Hannah Thompson-Weeman and Rick Berman when they respectively advise, "We also can’t forget about the longer-term, slower-burning strategies of activist groups, such as pushing for legislation or pressuring restaurant and retail brands to adopt policies for their supply chains," and "In politics or marketing, it’s better to define yourself before your opponents do it for you. But these tactics have limited effectiveness unless you also reduce trust in those spreading misinformation."

I am saying it would be counterproductive to give this one too much more attention than it's already gotten. There are bigger, though less splashy, issues for the industry to address.

Take the 'L'

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