If you think you’ve had a tough week, just think what celebrity chef Pete Evans has gone through. Almost every one of a long list of his commercial partners dropped him like a gratin straight out of the oven amid claims of his support for neo-Nazism.
Even Pete Evans’ branded pet food was flicked, leading to the amusing alliterative, Pete’s paleo Pal prohibition.
Top of the list was the Channel 10 network who punted Evans from filming of I’m A celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
The question for them and the producers of the show is why sign him up in the first place? It comes after convicted drug trafficker, Schapelle Corby, appeared as a contestant on SAS Australia. The short answer is it gives these programs a PR hit via a degree of notoriety.
I remember the days when celebrity chefs were fun, mucking about in the kitchen with a bit of light patter — Peter Russell-Clarke juggling eggs for a frittata, the avuncular Iain Hewitson smashing out a stew or Gabriel Gatè haw-hawing his way through a cross-cultural yabby bisque. The approach was not to take cooking or themselves too seriously.
My best guess is that it all took a turn for the worse when the celeb chefs started masticating their own publicity and assumed roles as guardians of good living.
Olive oil-doused slippery slope
It was a slope doused with virgin olive oil and not long afterwards, many of these gourmets on the idiot box commenced banging out a lot of product with labels that featured their names and faces.
Some took it further, offering life advice to anyone who listened and unfortunately there are always many that will.
I’ve mocked Evans in columns before due to his advocacy of what is called the Paleo diet, free of dairy, grains, anything that was knocked out when humanity began engaging in agriculture. It is a diet designed to make you live longer based on what humans ate back when they had a life expectancy of 27.
Keto with a side of fried chicken
As anyone who has taken a squizz at my waistline will tell you, I’m no expert on diets but if I have it right the Paleo has been junked in favour of the Keto diet, a low carb high fat diet which I hope is rich in bacon and fried chicken. Hey, if you want to go down that path, knock yourself out, but it might be sensible to have a chat with your GP first.
Evans who has almost 1.5 million followers on Facebook, 279,000 on Instagram and a smaller following on Telegram (imagine What’s App and Facebook had an illegitimate child), has always sailed close to where faddism turns into something a lot uglier. He has posted or reposted messages that hint at support for the anti-vaccination movement, the various nonsense conspiracies that would have us believe the Covid pandemic is fake, cooked up by a shadowy one world order and more recently a spate of posts indicating Donald Trump was dudded in the presidential election, presumably by the same one world order.
Earlier this year, Evans took to the socials to knock out a bio-charger, a lamp with some pretty colours which he claimed emitted “light, frequencies and harmonics, pulsed electromagnetic fields, and voltage” all for the modest price of $14,900. That might sound a little expensive for a table lamp, but Evans went on to claim it could cure a suite of maladies including “Wuhan Coronavirus.”
The Therapeutic Goods Administration who take a dim view of snake oil merchants especially during a pandemic, issued Evans with fines totalling $25,200.
Through it all, Evans’ commercial partners stuck with him until this week when he finally flew too close to the sun wheel and what shreds of credibility remained melted away.
The post in question was a repost that depicted a MAGA hat wearing caterpillar chatting with a butterfly. The larval lepidoptera tells the winged adult, “You’ve changed.” The butterfly replies, “We’re supposed to.”
Um... pic.twitter.com/liNIjFMK8q
— Byron Kaye (@byronkaye) November 15, 2020
One of the first commenters on the post wrote, “The symbol on the butterfly is a representation of the black sun lol.”
“I was waiting for someone to see that,” Chef Pete Evans replied.
Harmless red cap tomfoolery? Well, no because on the butterfly’s wings is what the first commenter had correctly identified as the Black Sun, a sun wheel or Sonnenrad which is a symbol of neo-Nazism. Nazi occultism is arcane and the symbol does have different meanings to different groups including Satanists but for those on the extreme Right it basically means, “We will rise again.”
The symbol which is believed to have been appropriated by the SS under Heinrich Himmel from a Frankish tribe in the early Medieval period, is inlaid on the floors of the Schutzstaffel’s spiritual headquarters, Wewelsburg Castle and remains so to this day.
Evans issued an apology of a kind, saying in future he would research any symbol he posted on his socials. The following day he posted a video on Instagram claiming the mainstream media had labelled him a racist and a neo-Nazi and that it was “utterly false, unfactual and a load of garbage.”
“The fact that I actually had to google what neo-Nazi meant is pretty telling,” Evans said.
At face value that seems disingenuous and even more so because there are earlier posts — since removed — where Evans offered some hints at a knowledge of German history or a version of it.
In one of his Telegram posts deriding harsh pandemic lockdowns in Australia, a commenter replied that Nazi Germany was infiltrating Australia and we should all “wake up and look at history.”
“You may wish to have another look about the true history about (sic) Germany,” Chef Pete Evans replied.
— Pan Macmillan Aus (@MacmillanAus) November 16, 2020
What could Evans possibly mean? Perhaps he was referring to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Maybe he meant the German invention of the home pregnancy test kit in 1927. It’s hard to know. What else happened in Germany in the 20th Century? Hmm.
Whether Evans likes it or not his post with obvious neo-Nazi references led to his cancellation on so many fronts. Some might call it cancel culture at work. Me, I think it’s just a cultural element and a good one at that in Australia that won’t hold any truck with Nazism.
Real problem isn’t Pete
But the problem is not Evans or indeed any celebrity chefs on the make.
The real question is why do social media companies continue to promote conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies?
A young mother of two sitting down in front of her computer in the innocent search for home remedies for childhood illnesses is easily steered into anti-vaccination territory.
Do a search on Google. Type in vaccinations. The first few pages come from legitimate sites that provide important facts on the necessity to vaccinate children and adults.
But do the same on YouTube, wholly owned by Google, and right up on the front page are vids that question the efficacy of vaccinations. Our concerned young mother might click on any one of them and at that point is about five clicks away from some very dark, very dangerous conspiracist garbage.
Similar journeys on YouTube with subject searches like immigration or nationalism are likely to lead the viewer down some sinister Swastika-emblazoned rabbit holes.
Evans is merely one expression of a much larger problem. His cancellation may or may not see him fall mute. Either way it won’t matter while the big social media companies continue to legitimise extremism.
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