Obviously not all vegans are as dangerously psychopathic as the late YouTube shooter Nasim Aghdam.

But it’s an unfortunate fact that a significant minority are imbued with exactly that toxic mix of fanaticism, burning outrage and weapons-grade self-righteousness you find among all the most ruthless terrorists.

This Twitter thread by Martin Daubney makes the connection well.

“Do the #vegan and #AnimalCruelty movements have blood on their hands over the #NasimAghdam #YouTube shoot-out?” This is an investigation worthy of merit, and I shall attempt to explain why > pic.twitter.com/S8quFSX0Sg — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

Some years ago I hung out with a group of activists who were v into animal cruelty protests, at labs. In many ways some of nicest guys (and girls) you will ever meet. But… — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

They were also some of the angriest. Strong crossover with anti-capitalism/Class War/hunt saboteur movements. Many had been arrested and were proud of that. All were consumed by a burning injustice – and an unwavering belief they were right — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

What struck me as odd is that they shared barbaric, horrendous pictures of animal cruelty/vivisection that they used to recruit. Women in particular responded to animal cruelty and some became almost possessed with rage — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

What we had was a powerful sense of “them and us” and an immovable feeling the world was wrong, and non-believers were evil. This was pre-internet. So let us fast forward — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

Two things happened then. First, I spent many months chasingBritish jihadists on Twitter/YouTube/Kik etc for a series of deep investigations. Here I saw the precise same radicalisation going on, only now the torture was human, and moving images — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

Two things happened then. First, I spent many months chasingBritish jihadists on Twitter/YouTube/Kik etc for a series of deep investigations. Here I saw the precise same radicalisation going on, only now the torture was human, and moving images — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

The sense of burning injustice, though, was the same. It resulted in ordinary boys and girls fleeing their safe UK homes to fight for ISIS. Many never made it back. Another thing that kept coming up was a rage that they were being silenced by YouTube — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

YouTube then became the “them”. It was complicit with silencing the “us”. It became the enemy. Ring any bells? Except these kids had bigger fish to fry: the West, and anyway they were in Syria, not San Francisco — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

Next, a few years ago I deciddd to post a picture of a rare steak on #wordveganday which I thought was funny. It wasn’t. For three days I was trolled by militant vegans with the same animal cruelty pictures I’d seen years before. Only now, videos too — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

My son, 6, accidentally saw a picture of a decapitated cow’s head id been sent. It made him cry and really bothered me. I told my troll who said “you both deserve it”. Now we don’t know what YouTube censored from the shooter’s channel. But what if..? — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

What if she was a radicalised vegan/animal cruelty campaigner (her videos allude to this). What if she was tipped so far she became a killer? Discuss… — Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) April 4, 2018

Veganism is on the rise. In the UK – if the Vegan Society is to be believed – there are half a million vegans. In the US veganism has increased by 600 percent over three years, with 6 percent of consumers now claiming to be vegans.

Why not just go vegetarian rather than full-on vegan? Well presumably because the monastic asceticism of a vegan diet – No honey? What’s that all about? How exactly is it exploitative to bees to provide them with a nice home and get them to do what they love doing anyway: flying around, landing on flowers, making honey…? – is especially appealing to the kind of straight-edge obsessives looking for a radical cause.

Maybe we should be grateful that the kind of people who might otherwise be searching the web for bomb-making tutorials are instead busying themselves trying to work out what exactly it is you do with quinoa and goji berries.

But the problem with this theoretically harmless self-abuse is that the more veganism becomes normalized in our culture, the more the fanatical element in the vegan community will be emboldened in their mission to convert the whole world to veganism, much as radical Muslims wish to bring over the entire world to Dar Al Islam.

We’re often told by vegan propagandists that meat-eaters are aggressive. But I’m not altogether sure that there’s such an obvious correlation between veganism and pacificism.

Consider, for example, the current poster boy of the militant vegan movement, Joey Carbstrong:

Carbstrong claims he has ‘evolved’ since he took up veganism and has since deleted about 150 old videos, many of which contained inflammatory content. However, until yesterday many messages posted on Facebook and Instagram remained online. ‘If you support dairy farmers you are supporting a regime worse than Nazi Germany. Hitler is still alive and he lives in the heart and mind of every animal abusing rapist slave-owning dairy farmer,’ he wrote. ‘If you eat fish you are a disgusting psycho,’ he ranted in an Instagram post from March 2016. ‘Don’t be a parasite… Choose vegan.’ And only this week Carbstrong compared the dairy industry’s practice of artificial insemination to child sex abuse. ‘Sexually violating an animal who cannot give consent is akin to inappropriately touching a small child,’ he wrote in a Facebook post.

I know just how he feels. I too am prone to deranged outbursts when I get hangry – a problem to which vegans, on their weird monastic diet, must surely be more susceptible than most. But here’s a tip, borne of long experience. Whenever I get one of my hypoglycaemic episodes, I find the crisis can be very easily resolved by a juicy hamburger, served pink in the middle, with a rasher or two of thick, smoked back bacon, and a chunk of cheddar cheese, possibly with a bit of salad for decoration.

Do you think it’s worth my sending in this top tip to the Vegan Society website?