Authored by Matt Lamb via The College Fix,
When President Donald Trump signed a law that allowed for the National School Lunch Program to distribute whole milk again, he was actually sending out a signal to neo-Nazis, so says a New York University professor.
In January, President Trump celebrated the bipartisan “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act of 2025,” which will allow the federally subsidized school lunch program to offer the higher-fat content dairy once against.
President Obama removed the option in 2010 over fears it was contributing to childhood obesity.
The legislation passed by a voice vote in the U.S. House and unanimously in the U.S. Senate, according to Roll Call.
While many would see this as a triumph of partisan gridlock, Professor Arthur Caplan sees something much darker.
“As a student of and writer on the history of science and public health under fascist regimes, I am suspicious,” he said.
“Milk drinking is political. Drinking whole white milk has played a big role in racist and far-right thinking.”
Here we go.
“Fascists have used the beverage as a rallying cry for white supremacy since the days of Il Duce’s (Benito Mussolini’s) public health campaigns in Italy,” Caplan wrote in The American Journal of Bioethics.
“The Nazis were enamored of whole milk as well…In America, drinking whole milk has for years been a part of alt-right, white nationalist messaging in tweets, memes, and videos.”
“Alt-right?” 2018 called, it wants its boogeyman back.
(Also, whenever Caplan accuses someone else of being authoritarian, remember he supported barring individuals from flying on planes and eating in restaurants unless they showed their vaccine papers).
Caplan cited examples, now nearly a decade old, and from the anti-Trump website The Conversation, to justify his argument. Instead of saying “for years,” Caplan should have said, “for a year.”
He concluded:
Racism and eugenics, sadly, may be playing a role in the sudden drive to fetishize drinking whole milk. Drinking whole milk is a dog whistle to far right, white nationalists. The campaign to promote whole milk may have many factors behind it, but at a time when eugenics, racism, and white nationalism fuel too much of our political rhetoric, the whole milk campaign must be swallowed with care.
Caplan’s argument is a shift from some sage advice he offered in 2005, when he warned people against being quick to invoke the “Nazi analogy” in debates.
“Sixty years after the fall of the Third Reich, we owe it to those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis to insist that those who invoke the Nazi analogy do so with care,” he warned.
Meanwhile, well-respected bioethicist Wesley Smith called Caplan’s argument “idiotic.”
He wrote in National Review:
One of the honored guests at the Oval Office signing ceremony of the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act — mentioned in passing by Caplan, which put whole milk back on school menus — was that notorious white supremacist Dr. Ben Carson. One of the early sponsors was Senator John Fetterman, a famous KKK sympathizer.
As Smith said, drinking milk is about health, not “bigotry.”
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