The owner of a vegan food truck in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was forced to shut down her business and go into hiding after receiving blowback from a Facebook post celebrating the fate of the “fifty nine meat eaters” who died in last week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas.
The Mother Nature Vegan Cuisine food truck is now out of business after the owner, Delinda Jensen, 60, drew massive criticism for posting an October 2 message to Facebook reading, “Yes I am jaded. Fifty nine meat eaters dead. How many animals will live because of this?”
As people began scolding her on the post, she jumped back in to reply, “I don’t give a (expletive) about carnists anymore,” the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported.
The business owner’s post started going viral, forcing her to try to clean up the mess. Jensen told the paper that she apologized and did not celebrate the murders in Vegas.
“Meat eaters or not, no one deserves to die like that,” Jensen exclaimed. “I wasn’t celebrating the death of those people. That’s not how vegans think — we are non-violent.”
While it is hard to read her initial post as doing anything except celebrating the death of people who will now not be around to eat animals, Jensen only admits that her post was “poorly written.”
“I (expletive) up,” Jensen told the Times Leader. “Was it poorly written? Absolutely. Do I regret it? Yes. I am so sorry I wrote that.”
Jensen lamented that a “lynch mob” has now formed against her and that her post also became a platform for people to ridicule vegans.
“It’s almost like a lynch mob is forming,” Jensen said. “It seems that it’s no longer about the Facebook post — now it’s about eating meat.”
She also insisted that her family, in particular, and vegans, in general, are not “bad people.”
“We are not bad people,” she told the paper. “We are aware that there are people on social media who have been trying to organize groups to come after us.”
The former food truck owner ultimately said that she is now scared to go outside, despite her apology for the posting, because so many people attacked her for her post celebrating the murder of “meat eaters.”
After the continued rebuke from Facebook visitors, Jensen put an end to her food truck business, put her bright green vehicle into a secret storage facility to shield it from irate customers, and then deleted her social media accounts. She also installed security cameras at her home.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.