As we have previously noted, wealthy New Englanders renovating their homes on This Old House sure do love their gas heating and hot water systems, despite the climate activists and opinion columnists being given OpEd space in our major newspapers calling for bans on not just gas stoves, but gas appliances in general.

But it isn’t just the wealthy. For Season 42, the Dorchester Triple Decker in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, the show worked with the owner of a working-class triple decker house which suffered damage from a fire. Unlike the very well-off homeowners we normally see on the show, this one had serious budget constraints, as the homeowner was not wealthy by any means, and the insurance settlement for the fire wasn’t huge.

And in the season 42, episode 23 show, the installation of the gas-fired heating and hot water systems — three of them, one for each apartment — was shown. The final episode, episode 26, showed that all three kitchens, one of which was to be rented not to family but a regular tenant, had gas ranges. We have previously noted that it “seems that almost everybody prefers a gas range,” even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice.

Naturally, with the recent stink about the Consumer Product Safety Commission reviewing gas ranges with at least a possibility of banning them, but with that report, both the commission and the White House hurriedly denied that such was anywhere under serious consideration.

Enter the very lovely and self-proclaimed foodie Amanda Marcotte, who took a far different tack.

“Gas stoves!” freak-out is the least convincing fake Republican outrage ever

Suddenly the party that despises kale and Dijon mustard wants to pretend they’re precious about culinary techniques

by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, January 19, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar.

“If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands,” Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Tex., tweeted. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex. — essentially a chatbot that churns out culture war nonsense — falsely accused Democratic of being hypocrites for having gas stoves they never said they intended to ban. Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., tweeted out a stove-based Gadsen flag, declaring, “don’t mess with gas stoves!” So on and so forth. Very predictable and very, very dumb.

There have been many thoughtful responses to this faux hysteria, carefully detailing how massive a lie it is, how no one is banning gas stoves, and how Republicans gin up these pretend panics to avoid talking about real issues. “Everything becomes identity politics,” Alex Shephard writes for The New Republic. “The right has long since stopped trying to come up with solutions to problems like climate change.”

Here’s where Miss Marcotte fails: conservatives have recognized that many of the articles I linked above supporting the elimination of gas ranges also called for the elimination of all gas appliances, particularly gas furnaces, in favor of heat pumps.

All good and true, of course, but frankly, I couldn’t even get that far, because I was laughing too hard at these ridiculous Republican men pretending they could even tell you what kind of stove they have in their homes, much less give nuanced opinions on culinary techniques. Right up until last week, it was a standard view on the right that the only testicle-preserving foods to consume are deep-fried, and that being a foodie automatically makes you queer and/or a woman. This is the party that screams vitriol at the mere mention of kale and obsessively dunked on President Barack Obama for even acknowledging the existence of arugula or Dijon mustard. Who coined the term “latte liberal.” This is the party of Donald Trump, who made a point of bragging about how he subsisted on takeout burgers, implying all other food consumption is emasculating. They’ve even alienated themselves from the supposedly masculine art of grilling to the point where disgraced former congressman Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina failed to convincingly sear a burger. As I was reminded on Twitter, Cruz famously lived on canned soup.

LOL! Some of us evil reich-wing conservatives have even planted kale in our gardens. And I could tell you what kind of range is in our kitchen, because I installed it myself! But Miss Marcotte wasn’t writing for me, wasn’t writing to persuade Republicans that yeah, we needed to give up gas ranges, but was playing to the prejudices of her usual audience that conservatives just don’t know good food.

The author then got a fact right, but misinterpreted it completely:

As journalist Jared Holt pointed out in his excellent write-up of this pseudo-controversy, “most of the nation’s gas stoves are installed in states firmly held by the Democratic Party.” Indeed, the deep dive on this by Liam Denning at Bloomberg really outlines the link between gas stoves and liberal politics, as two-thirds of gas stoves sit in states where Biden won.

As we have pointed out previously, the South is the only region of the country in which the majority of homes use electric heat. This is true for two reasons:

1. In the more rural southeast, fewer homes have natural gas available, and it is simply less expensive and easier to get electricity to widely spread out homes than to run gas lines to them.
2. With the milder winters in the southeast, electric heat is more capable of keeping up with the heating needs of homes than in the bitterly cold winters of New England and the interior midwest.

That’s also why I’ve used the remodels on This Old House as examples: houses in cold New England, and homeowners prefer gas heat because that’s what their homes need in the northeast.

Miss Marcotte definitely lets you know one thing: she has nothing but contempt for those who have different beliefs than her. It’s the kind of writing which got her noticed and hired by Salon, so it has clearly worked for her. But while she’ll always reinforce the beliefs of her fellow travelers, she’ll never persuade anyone different from her.