Tag: MAGA

Stuck Inside a Bunker with the Tariff Blues Again

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The stairs creaked beneath my boots as I descended into the bunker, a subterranean shrine to American paranoia. The air was thick with the scent of lard, motor oil, and the unmistakable tang of off-brand cola gone slightly flat. Somewhere in the dim recesses, a radio squawked out a tinny voice—half preacher, half doomsday salesman—preaching the gospel of tariffs and self-reliance.

“Damn shame about the price of Oreos,” my host muttered, lighting a cigarette with the shaky hands of a man who had seen too much daytime television. “But we were ready for this.”

And ready, he was. Floor-to-ceiling stacks of canned Vienna sausages, Velveeta bricks gleaming like gold bars in a vault, gallon drums of mayonnaise arranged with near-religious devotion. He kicked open a plastic tub labeled EMERGENCY RATIONS—inside, a sea of bottled ranch dressing, bulk ramen, and enough Moon Pies to outlast civilization itself.

“You got water down here?” I asked, trying to ignore the way the fluorescent light buzzed like a dying hornet.

“Water?” He let out a laugh like a truck misfiring. “Ain’t worried about that. Got plenty of Coke.”

He patted a tower of two-liter bottles like they were old friends. Somewhere deeper in the bunker, a generator growled to life. The man cracked open a can of SPAM with the precision of a surgeon and slid a chunk onto a cracker.

“We’ll ride it out,” he said, chewing solemnly. “America’s been through worse. Hell, my granddaddy lived through the Carter years.”

I took a step back, careful not to disturb the delicate ecosystem of snack cakes and beef jerky that lined the walls like grotesque wallpaper. This wasn’t just survival—it was a vision of the future. A land where commerce had collapsed, but the dream of infinite processed cheese had endured.

Outside, the world might be unraveling, but down here? Down here, the Republic still stood—propped up by Twinkies, canned chili, and the last defiant crackle of a Slim Jim being snapped in two.

“What are you doing for veggies?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. A man with a mayonnaise drum the size of a washing machine isn’t tending a hydroponic lettuce farm.

He squinted at me like I’d just spoken in tongues. “Veggies?” He let the word roll around in his mouth, testing it, suspicious. “Well… got pickles.”

He kicked open another tub—sure enough, floating in a briny abyss were enough pickles to survive a biblical famine. Next to them, cans of creamed corn, green beans cooked to the color of Army surplus, and a suspicious number of cocktail olives.

“Fruit?” I pressed, feeling reckless.

He jerked a thumb toward a lonely stack of canned peaches drowning in syrup thick enough to patch a radiator. “Peach cobbler in a can, brother. That’s dessert and vitamins in one.”

I nodded like this was the gospel truth. Who was I to argue? The man had planned for everything—at least, everything that could be purchased in bulk from a Walmart clearance aisle.

He leaned in, lowering his voice. “If things get real bad… got these.” He reached into a crate and pulled out a pack of Flintstones vitamins, the kind that taste like chalk and childhood neglect. “One of these a day, I’m set.”

A vision flashed in my mind—some post-collapse wasteland where this man, pale from years underground, ruled over the last gasps of humanity with an iron fist and an unlimited supply of gummy vitamins.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” I asked.

He cracked open a warm can of Dr Pepper, took a long, satisfied swig, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Son,” he said, “I been ready since NAFTA.”

I noticed the trapdoor in the corner, half-covered by a stack of government cheese and what looked like a taxidermied raccoon wearing a Make America Great Again hat. It was bolted down with a length of chain and what I could only describe as unnecessary enthusiasm.

“What’s that for?” I asked, knowing damn well I wouldn’t like the answer.

My host exhaled through his nose, shifting uncomfortably in his lawn chair. “Well…” He scratched the back of his neck, eyes darting around the bunker like the walls might betray him. “It’s for the peppers.”

I blinked. “The what?”

“The peppers,” he repeated, nodding. “You ever had a jalapeño that don’t behave? Gets too spicy? Gets ideas? Well, I got a place for ‘em.” He patted the trapdoor like an old dog. “They cool off down there. Learn their place.”

I took a slow step back. “You have a cell for insubordinate peppers?”

He shrugged. “You eat a bad one once, you understand. Ain’t takin’ no chances.”

Something deep below us groaned. A low, guttural sound, like a rusted-out Buick trying to start on a cold morning.

I turned to him. “What the hell was that?”

His eyes went dark. “Might be the geek.”

He said it casually, like he was talking about the weather. Just another day in the bunker, keeping mayonnaise fresh and negotiating territorial disputes with Satan.

“The geek.”

“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “Man’s gotta have company, don’t he?”

I stared at the trapdoor, at the black gap where the chains didn’t quite meet the wood. The air that seeped through smelled like sulfur and warm root beer.

“You’re telling me you have a geek locked in your bunker, next to a bucket of powdered mashed potatoes?”

He cracked a grin. “Well, I didn’t plan on it, but, you know, these things happen.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So let me get this straight. You were stocking up for the tariffs, built a bunker, started locking up misbehaving peppers, and at some point—what? You not a tenant ?”

He nodded. “Yeah, ‘bout sums it up.”

There was a scraping noise below. Something shifting in the dark, slow and deliberate, like it knew we were listening.

I took a deep breath. “What does he do”

He hesitated. Just for a second. But I saw it—the flicker of recognition, the shadow of a secret he hadn’t meant to say out loud.

He took a long sip from his now-lukewarm Dr Pepper. “Well,” he said, licking his lips, “depends on what you mean by ‘deal.’”

I shouldn’t have taken those drugs, because things started to get really weird right then. The walls of the bunker, once reassuringly mundane in their suffocating beige, now rippled like they were made of water. The faint hum of the generator was replaced by a low, rhythmic thump, like the heartbeat of the entire goddamn planet—or maybe it was the devil himself, thumping in time with some cosmic snare drum.

The trapdoor creaked open by itself. Slow, deliberate, like a funeral march made of wood and rust.

I tried to focus on my host, who was now staring into the corner, his eyes glazed over, mouth slightly ajar. His hand trembled as he lifted the can of soda to his lips, but it wasn’t Dr Pepper anymore—it was glowing neon green, pulsing with a light that made my retinas burn.

I rubbed my eyes. Maybe the stuff was kicking in. Maybe I had taken too many tabs, but it didn’t explain the shadows stretching unnaturally across the room, twisting like they had minds of their own. Or the muffled screams now echoing from beneath the trapdoor.

“What the hell’s down there?” I rasped, clutching the edge of a shelf as if it might ground me back into some form of reality.

He didn’t answer at first. His eyes twitched, and a thin smile crept onto his face, but it wasn’t the smile of a man at peace. It was the kind of grin you’d expect from someone who had just sold his soul for a lifetime supply of Pickle Juice Energy Drink.

I swallowed hard. The trapdoor was open just a crack, but the air pouring out of it was thick and wrong—hot, metallic, humming like a power line about to snap. Something was moving down there. Something vast and slow, shifting in the dark like a great beast stirring in its sleep.

“What the hell is down there?” I rasped, gripping the shelf to keep myself steady. The bunker suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in, like reality itself was starting to fray at the edges.

The MAGA guy—let’s call him Dale, because he looked like a Dale—wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead and leaned in close. His breath reeked of beef jerky and conspiracy. “I think it’s the Chinese,” he whispered.

I blinked. “The Chinese?”

He nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah. The goddamn Chinese.” He exhaled, took a sip of his lukewarm Dr Pepper, and then launched into it like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.

“See, people think the Chinese been buildin’ up their military, right? Thinkin’ they’re gonna come at us with jets, or missiles, or some kinda Red Dawn bullshit. But no. No, no, no. That’s just a distraction. The real plan? They been diggin’, man. Diggin’ for decades.”

I stared at him. “Digging?”

“Yeah.” His eyes darted to the trapdoor, nervous. “Tunnels. Deep ones. They started somewhere outside Beijing, just diggin’ straight down, deeper than any man’s ever gone before. And you know what happens when you dig too deep, don’tcha?”

I nodded, throat dry. “You awaken something.”

“Damn right you do.” Dale’s fingers twitched. “At first, they just wanted to get under the Pacific, see? Sneak up on us from below, pop up in San Francisco one day, all grinnin’ and sayin’ ‘Ni hao, motherfuckers!’ But the thing is… they didn’t stop.”

The trapdoor rattled slightly. A low, grinding noise echoed from below.

“They dug too deep,” Dale whispered. “Kept goin’, past the magma, past the mantle, right through the goddamn core of the earth. And you know where that tunnel comes out?”

I already knew where this was going, but I had to hear him say it.

“Right here,” he hissed, pointing at the floor. “Middle of goddamn America.”

I took a slow step back. “You’re telling me there’s a direct tunnel from China to this bunker?”

I could barely process what I was hearing, but he wasn’t done.

“I seen things, man,” he continued, voice dropping to a near-whisper. “Strange things. Sometimes, late at night, I hear ‘em down there, speakin’ Mandarin real low, tryin’ to copy our voices. Other nights, I hear ‘em eatin’—crunch, crunch, crunch—like they’re gnawin’ on bones or somethin’.”

Something thumped against the trapdoor from below.

Dale jumped, eyes wild. “Jesus Christ, they’re closer than I thought!”

I staggered back, my mind racing. This was beyond paranoia, beyond madness. This was a fever dream of xenophobia, processed snack foods, and too many hours of late-night AM radio.

The trapdoor rattled again, harder this time. Dale grabbed a can of SPAM like it was a weapon. “If they break through, we go to plan B.”

I swallowed. “What’s plan B?”

He locked eyes with me, deadly serious. “We drown ‘em in ranch.”

And that’s when I knew: I had to get the hell out of this bunker.

Vegetables

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MAGA doesn’t give a damn about tariffs on fruit and vegetables because their food pyramid is built from steak, rage, and the dried-up tears of a civilization they claim to despise but can’t live without. Vegetables are a direct assault on their brittle sense of self—an affront to the sacred right to wallow in self-indulgence and post-millennial meat sweats. Fiber is for cucks. Discipline is for the weak. And anything green might as well be socialism on a plate.

The whole Bronze Age schtick? Absolutely a chest-thumping overcompensation for the deep, primal terror of a Brussels sprout. Lacan would see this as the flailing rejection of the symbolic order—an outright refusal of the ‘soft’ rules that make society function, like, say, eating food that doesn’t come wrapped in grease and paranoia. No, they don’t want civilization. They want a return to some fever-dream Real, where men were hulking, blood-slicked warlords who never knew the pain of a clogged artery because they died at 27 from a minor infection.

Nietzsche, of course, would diagnose this as classic ressentiment—a deep-seated loathing of anything associated with balance, health, or the faintest whiff of restraint. To them, a salad is not just a meal; it is an existential crisis, a betrayal of their primal essence. They’d rather choke down raw liver and testosterone supplements than admit they need a little roughage in their diet. But at the core of all this performative barbarism is the trembling insecurity of a man who knows—deep down—that he is one bowl of kale away from total psychic collapse.

And then you’ve got the real freak show—the unholy alliance of fascist vegans and ultra-meat, deep-fried warlords, bound together by a shared hatred of the modern world and a desperate need to dominate it. It’s a coalition that makes no logical sense but thrives on pure, unfiltered resentment. One side believes the body is a temple, a sacred engine of purified efficiency, fueled by kale and cold showers, while the other sees the body as a weapon of brute force, forged in steak grease and testosterone supplements. But at the core, they both want the same thing: a world where weaklings are crushed, order is restored, and they alone hold the keys to physical and moral superiority.

The fascist vegans march in crisp uniforms, extolling the virtues of plant-based purity, convinced that a diet free of animal products will purge the filth of modernity and bring forth a new, hyper-disciplined, ethno-aerobic utopia. No pesticides, no processed food, no impurity. They see meat as decadence, a symbol of corruption and excess. Meanwhile, their deep-fried, steak-chomping counterparts reject all of it—health, moderation, restraint—because to them, civilization itself is the disease. No, they say, we must return to the savage Real, where men ate raw liver and killed their own food, where the weak perished and the strong ruled, where nothing green ever touched their lips except the mold growing on their last meal.

And yet, despite these contradictions, they find common ground in their disgust for the soft, decadent masses—the people who still eat ‘normally,’ the ones who don’t see food as a battleground for ideological supremacy. They are bound together by a mutual loathing of the center, the in-between, the reasonable. Whether through dietary purity or excessive indulgence, their goal is the same: purification, dominance, and an unshakable belief that whatever is wrong with the world, it can be fixed by making people eat exactly like them. It’s a grotesque parody of politics, waged through nutrition labels and dietary manifestos, but make no mistake—this isn’t just about food. It’s about power, and who gets to decide what’s on the menu when the world burns down.

And things are gonna get bad for everybody—real bad—but especially for these swaggering food fascists, because they’ve built a game they can’t win, a war they can’t fight, a system they can’t control. They think they’re storming the gates, ready to seize the machinery of power and bend it to their will, but bureaucracy is a swamp with no bottom. Even if every dead-eyed functionary in Washington saluted their flag and swore allegiance to the New Order, they still wouldn’t be able to make it work. It takes more than raw aggression and dietary manifestos to run a crumbling empire.

They don’t have time, and they don’t have skill. Four years isn’t enough to master a system designed to outlive any one leader, let alone a coalition of steak-crazed berserkers and quinoa-fueled ascetics who can’t agree on whether butter is a crime against nature or the essence of masculinity. No, this is a last-ditch sprint—a kamikaze run at the heart of the machine before the contradictions tear them apart from the inside. They won’t build anything, but they’ll break plenty. Probably enough to make sure the U.S. never recovers, enough to guarantee that we go down as a second-tier country, limping through the wreckage of its own self-inflicted collapse.

But let’s be honest—we’ve been working toward that for a while. The long, slow decline, the dollar-store Rome routine, the desperate flailing against history itself. The problem with American fascism is that it’s lazy, half-assed, allergic to patience. It wants all the grandeur of the Reich without the decades of methodical groundwork. It wants to rule without governing, to conquer without logistics. And when it all comes crashing down, when the machinery grinds to a halt and the food pyramid warriors realize they can’t run an empire on protein shakes and manifestos, they’ll do what they always do—blame the people who warned them in the first place. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left picking through the rubble, wondering how we let a bunch of diet-obsessed lunatics play emperor while the world burned around them.