AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
America loves to pretend it doesn’t have a lactose problem. Ask around. Most will tell you they tolerate dairy just fine—no issues, no discomfort, completely normal digestion—while simultaneously reacting to certain milks with the kind of visible tension usually reserved for IRS audits. They say they “don’t see dairy,” but somehow their discomfort only ever shows up when a particular kind of dairy enters the room. Curious.
The issue isn’t the discomfort. Bodies react. Digestion is weird. Nobody’s judging the biology. It’s the denial—the frantic refusal to admit that the churn isn’t coming from lactose itself, but from something deep, personal, and long left unexamined. People aren’t avoiding dairy because of dairy. They’re avoiding dairy because of what dairy reveals about them.
And the quiet ones—the lactose intolerant—are the most devoted practitioners of this ritual. They insist they’re neutral, objective, above it all. They claim to have nuanced opinions about dairy while somehow never eating it, supporting it, defending it, or wanting it anywhere near their communities. These are the folks who couch their discomfort in polite language. “I don’t mind dairy,” they say, right before explaining why it doesn’t belong in their schools, neighborhoods, or family gatherings. They always have one dairy friend—a carton of something tucked in the fridge—to prove how open-minded they are. As if proximity cancels out the symptoms.
Their whole worldview depends on never admitting the obvious: dairy doesn’t bother everyone, just them. Their gut reaction isn’t universal, but they treat it like it should be. And because they refuse to own it, they quietly reshape the world around their discomfort—redesigning menus, rewriting norms, and setting unspoken boundaries so they never have to metabolize anything that challenges their system.
But if the lactose intolerant are quiet architects, the lactose avoidant are the ones sanding the edges. They’re constantly “just asking questions” about dairy. Big-picture questions. Deeply concerned questions. “Is dairy good for children?” “Should we be promoting dairy culture?” “What about the impact on traditional digestion?” They’re not against dairy, they insist—they just don’t want dairy “forced” on anyone. Their tolerance always has an invisible asterisk. Their curiosity is always conveniently aligned with their discomfort.
Eventually, this pipeline leads to the lactose bigoted—the loud, dramatic, dairy-denouncing extremists who get all the headlines. These are the folks melting down at school board meetings because a cafeteria added yogurt. The ones posting shaky videos about “Milk Replacement Theory.” The ones screaming in grocery aisles about oat milk conspiracies, convinced that almond beverages are eroding the foundations of Western civilization. They’re not hiding their intolerance—they’ve turned it into a personality, a mission, a crusade. They proudly claim they’re defending “real digestion” from creeping dairy infiltration.
It would be easy to dismiss them as fringe weirdos. And honestly, they are. But they didn’t hatch spontaneously out of a bad cheese stick. They were cultivated—slowly, steadily, and predictably—by a culture that lets people deny their own intolerance until it metastasizes into ideology. Lactose bigots are simply the final, public form of something quiet and common: ordinary people who refuse to admit what their bodies have been telling them for years.
The lactose problem isn’t dairy. It’s what people do to avoid confronting their reaction to dairy. It’s how far they’ll bend reality to keep their discomfort unexamined. It’s the endless dance of:
“I’m fine with dairy.”
“I tolerate all dairy.”
“I just think dairy should stay where it belongs.”
“I’m not anti-dairy, but…”
Until one day they’re blocking the entrance to an ice cream shop with a handwritten sign about digestion purity.
America keeps pretending this is a dairy issue. It’s not. It’s a people issue—silent, persistent, and surprisingly violent.
If your gut twists every time dairy shows up, the problem may not be dairy activism. It may not be dairy “culture.” It may not be the milk, the cheese, or the people enjoying them.
It might just be you.
