Are you eating politically correct chicken? Are your kids getting groomed by their guacamole?! Those are ridiculous questions, right? And yet, the right-wing moral panic over “the woke mind virus” is entering a new frenzied state, where conservative pundits are now obsessing over the political characteristics of the companies that make their food.
All this anxiety reared its ugly head when far-right figure Charlie Kirk, a man who believes he’s in the throes of “spiritual warfare,” went on a tirade about “woke” food. While reading out a sponsor ad for a coffee company “100% committed to conservative values from sourcing the beans to the roasting process” (???) on The Charlie Kirk Show, he started speculating on whether the food he has in his own kitchen are secretly too left-wing for his tastes.
“I’m guilty of this,” he said. “I’m going through my kitchen, I’m going through my refrigerator, and I’m starting to ask the question, ‘Well, is this ketchup bottle woke? Is this mustard? I mean, literally.”
Now I have the mental image of Charlie Kirk sitting in front of his refrigerator light at midnight, jaw agape, having a panic attack over whether the 57 Heinz flavors are non-binary.
Kirk’s anxiety may seem strange, but it reveals a lot about the right-wing mindset. For the average right-winger, their lives must be filled with paranoia, fear, and anxiety over the simplest of life decisions. Everything they own must regurgitate their far-right belief system, lest they give their money to the gays. This, of course, is how we end up with nonsense like ultra conservative beer, right-wing coffee companies, and random Twitter Blue subscribers waxing lyrical about gas stoves.
So go ahead, Charlie Kirk. Ask me if ketchup is woke. Wonder if mustard is too LGBTQIA for you. Let me know if you think your apple juice would’ve supported January 6 or not. In a world where conservatives are taking aim at any corporation that puts up a rainbow flag, it only makes sense that pundits like Kirk would encourage a retreat into a cottage industry of far-right products that, more likely than not, are simply not that good anyway.
(featured image: R. Nial Bradshaw/Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Remix by Ana Valens)
