The fall of plastic, the rise of paper, and the gold rush at the center of 2019’s unlikeliest cultural battle.

One day in 2015, swimming in waters off Costa Rica, a sea turtle felt himself brusquely hauled from the ocean and onto the deck of a small boat. He struggled against the human hands pinning down his flippers. He endured a biopsy and was affixed with a metal tag. When the researchers noticed an object obstructing his left nostril, they came at him with good intentions and a pair of pliers.

Christine Figgener, a marine biology grad student aboard the boat, filmed with her phone as a colleague tried to yank some sort of tube from the turtle’s nose. At first, Figgener thought it might be a worm. Then she saw it was a piece of plastic. “Is that a freaking straw?” she exclaimed, outrage blooming in her voice. Indeed, it was. In time, the straw was plucked from the turtle’s nose and the sad, green fellow liberated. But Figgener—who’d been researching turtle behavior in pursuit of her Ph.D. and had seen marine life tormented by plastic junk countless times before—could not stop fuming as the boat returned to shore. It was, if you will, the last straw.

“I remember my mind racing about what to do with this video,” Figgener told me when I spoke to her recently. “Because I remember feeling it was evidence that I couldn’t keep to myself. I also didn’t want to shoulder it by myself anymore. Other people can sleep soundly every night because they don’t have to see that.” She uploaded the clip to her little-used YouTube channel. The next evening, after hours out on the boat, she logged back on to discover the post had racked up 20,000 views. Another couple of days and it was half a million. Now, four years later, her video has been watched more than 37 million times.

It’s easy to see why this short film went viral. For one, the turtle is a star. His large, friendly eyes wince in pain as the straw is extracted. His suffering is steeped in ancient, reptilian nobility. There’s also narrative tension: What is that object? Will they get it out of him? And then the horrifying reveal: Gasp, a plastic straw! Coupled with Figgener’s irate, ad-libbed narration, it’s a compelling document. The path from slurping a Diet Mountain Dew to injuring a sea turtle has never been more succinctly captured.

But the video didn’t just get clicks. It inspired an uprising. In the years since Figgener filmed that agonized turtle, plastic straw restrictions have passed in Seattle, D.C., California, and England, to name just a few places. More straw laws—it’s hard to keep track of them all—are working their way through municipalities across the country and the world. Major companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Disney have vowed to cut plastic straws from their corporate diets. In many bars and restaurants, you now need to make a special request to get a straw, and when it’s grudgingly trotted out, it’s made of paper, or hay, or avocado seeds. “It was the beginning of an interesting movement,” says Figgener of her video. “Nowadays, that turtle is a poster child.”

Straw activists argue that the best thing for the environment would be to cut out straws altogether. But if you’ve got to use one, they say, at least make it paper. Unlike plastic straws, which can sit in landfills and oceans for hundreds of years, paper straws biodegrade as quickly as a couple of months after they’re discarded. That means they won’t become part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or wash up in clumps on beaches, or, yes, injure charismatic animals. And switching to paper does make a lot of sense—until you’re trying to suck a ginger ale through a cardboard straw that collapses into mush the moment it meets your lips.

In part because of how rapidly the plastic straw went from normal object to Not OK, and in part because of how shoddy some of the paper replacements have been, the right has turned straws into a new front in America’s culture war. To the Make Straws Great Again crowd, paper straws are a symbol of the liberal nanny state run amok. Or, as a Sept. 9 Trump campaign email put it:

The Democrats have shown that there is truly no limit to how far left they will go in their climate crusade. In addition to other countless liberal ideas, they’ve publicly stated they want to BAN STRAWS—can you believe it?

Their answer to everything is MORE government control and LESS individual freedom. They want to control every aspect of YOUR life—and banning straws is only the beginning.

President Trump wants to send them a message, so he’s calling on EVERY AMERICAN PATRIOT to get their Official Trump Straws, to show the Democrats that AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A SOCIALIST NATION.

The email links to the campaign’s merch page, where a pack of 10 red plastic straws goes for $15. After a similarly heated July email (“Much like most liberal ideas, paper straws don’t work and they fall apart instantly”), sales of these straws reportedly earned the campaign $670,000 in one month.