Burrito-Gate: Why Establishment BoomerCons Are Using "Capitalism" as a Cudgel

What they call “capitalism” increasingly isn’t capitalism at all. It is a bastardized system of privatized profits and socialized losses, where multinational corporations demand free markets when they want cheap foreign labor, unrestricted capital flows, tax advantages, deregulation, and access to American consumers, then sprint to Washington for bailouts, subsidies, contracts, tariffs, loan guarantees, and Federal Reserve intervention the moment the market threatens their societal Ponzi scheme. Americans are told this is the “free market.” It is capitalism for the losers and socialism for the winners, with working Americans given the bill. That system was exposed this week in conversations about a $20 burrito.

I love saying, “I told you so.” It ranks somewhere between finding twenty dollars in an old pair of jeans, right after finding out I still fit in them, and watching chickens peck their new barnyard toy. It’s one of those simple joys in life. The problem is that opportunities to say it usually arrive wrapped in really bad news, and this one just arrived inside a tortilla.

Several months ago, I warned that the next phase of Establishment Conservatism™ wouldn’t revolve around calling everyone “racist,” “Nazi,” or “antisemite.” Those labels have been dragged behind the political pickup truck for so many miles they’re nothing but frayed rope and broken bumper stickers now. Every time someone is called “literally Hitler,” those bugbears stop being monsters under the bed and start becoming laughingstocks. The power of those accusations loses currency the more they use them. Instead, I argued that the new accusation would be something simpler. As soon as ordinary Americans started questioning the economic order that has quietly hollowed out the middle class, the establishment would reach back into the Cold War junk drawer and dust off the word “Communist.” It wouldn’t matter whether anyone had read Karl Marx, understood Marx, or could have picked Marx out of a police lineup. The label wouldn’t exist to describe reality. It would exist to stop the conversation before it begins.

I wrote on X at the time…

I warned I2I followers yesterday that Establishmentarian globalists and NeoCon Unipartyists would soon begin alleging that the “dissidents” are secret Commies. I explained that James Lindsay just invented “Woke Right 2.0” with “Marxist” as a descriptor for people who believe in Nationalism and oppose globalism, and these two are led around by James Lindsay on a leash because they’re incapable of original thoughts. They got the memo with full talking points.

That is the go-to reaction of the Boomers who have managed American decline for 70 years. It’s all they know. It’s the only familiar card they have left. Challenge the existing power structure, the Post War Consensus corporate globalism that has ruined America and sold us out to foreign nations and interests, and they reach for, “Marxist.”

It’s the last, drying gasp of geriatric geezer middle-managers, terrified of losing the reigns of political power, too dumb to realize they never had them. It is the sad, pathetic last go-round of the very generation that has brought the U.S. to its current laughingstock status on the world stage, turned the greatest empire in world history into a vassal state of Israel that couldn’t win a war against Iran, and turned every generation after them into rentoid debtors and tax cattle.

So, when they say “Communist,” what they mean is, “People who give a damn about Americans and our best interests.”

When they say “Critical Theory” they mean caring about your family and personal well-being.

And whatever globalist economic forces are raping America’s interests, gutting our children’s future, and turning the U.S. into a borderless economic zone of homeless, indebted paupers in a post-modern hellscape? That’s just “capitalism,” and you had BETTER support our continued plundering or else we’ll call you “Commies.”

The strategy:

1. Spend every ounce of political and economic capital vilifying 2-3 celebrity figures in a 24/7 non-stop deluge of hyperbolic, catastrophized screeching. Call them “literally Satan,” for example.

2. Tie the entire MAGA 1.0 America First movement and Nationalist populism to those 2-3 figures.

3. Call them “Commies” because it’s the only movement on the right that even pretends to care about what your groceries cost, or how hard it is to buy a home, or a debt economy, or wars that cause hyper-inflation but enrich trans-national corporations.

Get it? They care about you. That’s “Communist,” obviously. Now be a good Capitalist and line up to get chipped and pay your fresh air tax. Israel needs the money for their next conquest.

What the Metamucil-sipping Boomer-Cons don’t comprehend is that their proximity to power in the Swamp has given them a disproportionate influence compared to the masses who are tired of their crap. They have the ear of POTUS and Beltway lobbyists, but not We the People. They’re on Fox, talking to nursing homes and airports, but no one is watching but captive audiences. And they’ve hitched their wagons to a shooting star in the White House who will be a lame duck in a matter of months.

They’ll wake one day, not long from now, and discover exactly how irrelevant they’ve become.

I gave that warning above because James Lindsay had sent out the memo that “Woke 2.0” would be people who complained about the NeoCon economy, and since then, Jeremy Boreing and absolutely everybody in the Israel First ecosystem has been complaining about “closet Commies” in the conservative movement who complain about things like the affordability crisis. Well, now Burrito-Gate has happened, and it unfolded almost like somebody found my prediction, highlighted it with a yellow marker, and passed it around the group chat. What happened – which I explained here at NXR – was that a young man remarked that “a burrito shouldn’t cost twenty dollars,” and any adult with an IQ higher than his thermostat immediately understood his point. He wasn’t writing a doctoral dissertation on the inflationary price of Mexican cuisine, and probably not being terribly literal, but instead was talking about groceries, housing, insurance, debt, inflation, and the increasingly absurd reality that young families are expected to finance what their grandparents bought with one blue-collar income and a handshake.

The response was magnificent in the way only political self-parody can be. BoomerCons all across America suddenly became forensic burrito investigators, rummaging through restaurant menus like the fate of Western Civilization depended on proving a carne asada special only cost $14.95. Erick Erickson, bless his heart, was rummaging through online burrito advertisements to see if the young man was lying. It was fantastically out of touch, as though they were all so far outside the realm of normal that they needed evidence that the price of things has really gone up, which means the value of the dollar has really gone down.

The answer, of course, is that yes, obviously they have. Inflation of goods and deflation of the dollar was already bad before Trump, and has gotten noticeably worse because government borrowing – on account of war – and the inflation caused directly by the war itself is what creates inflation. Combine that with tariffs (which in principle are fine, if done consistently and with something resembling a game plan) and oil prices that are much higher than their currently manipulated status because the Straight of Hormuz is pumping 19 million barrels less daily than before, and inflation is obviously going to skyrocket. Wars have consequences, and the people promoting the policies that have consequences are busy telling us that we are imagining an economy in the gutter. And worse yet, they’re telling us that anyone struggling needs to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and stop being lazy.

Dan Crenshaw’s response was to tell everybody to eat ramen.

Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost. Only communists care (they set prices remember? Then everyone starves, remember?) Are you a communist? Or are you an American adult male capable of handling his own shit?”

There was a day when a civil leader speaking this way to legitimately hurting people would be met with a guillotine. The good old days, right? I have nostalgia for an age I’ve never lived.

Keep in mind, Crenshaw voted to give Ukrainians $61 billion, voted to give Israel $26 billion, and voted to raise the government debt ceiling in the “Fiscal Responsibility Act” of 2023, when they literally ran out of money because balancing a budget is something they haven’t done since 2001. The Ukrainians, Israelis, and Congress do not have to handle their own shit. But you do. When they fail to handle it, Crenshaw will give them your money. When you’re having a hard time – in thanks, due to funding foreign nations, foreign wars, and the federal Congress – you can eat Ramen.

Think about how remarkable that actually is. The generation that supervised America’s post-war economic decline now recommends surviving it by eating the national goyslop cuisine of the country we fought at Pearl Harbor. Somewhere the Greatest Generation is trying to process the fact that after defeating Imperial Japan, building the strongest middle class in world history, and handing their children the most prosperous nation on earth, their political heirs have managed to turn “Congratulations, you’re eating ramen now” into a conservative policy platform. Apparently, the Japs won. National Geographic Ro... National Geographic Maps Check Amazon for Pricing.

Ben Shapiro took the comment like an autist with an attitude, with brutal literalism, saying, “Okay, young people: a burrito does not cost $20. If you’re paying $20 for a burrito and you’re not independently wealthy, you’re doing life wrong. We have enough problems as a country without insane expectations that the government is going to provide us gourmet-quality burritos.”

The point went right over his yarmulke. We don’t want the government to provide us anything. We want the government to stop financing foreign wars with monopoly money and giving Israel blank checks deducted straight from our family bank accounts. Does it matter if it’s at a $15 burrito? How about $10? My family doesn’t go to McDonald’s because we can’t get through the drive-through for less than $40, and I’m pretty sure my kids think I’m lying about hitting McDs on Tuesdays in college for 39-cent cheesburgers. Do you remember going to McDonald’s not that long ago because you were poor? I do. Now it’s a luxury item, and not because its brand went bougie. It’s because Chick-fil-A is even more expensive, and that’s the world we live in now. And please, no lectures on eating at home. The point is that the price of everything is commensurate. Stuff doesn’t cost too much. Rather, our dollar is quickly becoming worthless.

The remarkable part of Burrito-Gate was how quickly the conversation skipped over whether life has objectively become harder for ordinary Americans and landed squarely on, “Sounds like Communism.” Apparently, wondering why groceries require a second mortgage is Communist. Wondering why young couples struggle to buy a starter home is Communist. Asking why BlackRock has an easier time buying neighborhoods than young families buying a 2-bedroom house is Communist. Mentioning that endless borrowing, endless money printing, and endless foreign wars might not be fantastic for the purchasing power of the dollar is also Communist, and only Communists complain about the price of stuff.

Now, my grandfather is in the Great Beyond trying to understand how the patriotic answer to a collapsing dollar became Japanese noodles and lower expectations. I mean, not really. The afterlife doesn’t include such quandries, but you can only imagine what the bulk of WWII veterans who have gone on to glory would think about seeing 30% of homes in America be investor-owned, many of whom are outside the United States. When homes are asset investments instead of habitats for actual humanity, it means the economy isn’t working for people. It’s working for portfolios.

You see, Burrito-Gate wasn’t actually about economics. It wasn’t even about capitalism versus communism. If complaining about impossible housing prices, impossible insurance costs, impossible grocery bills, impossible debt loads, and impossible inflation automatically makes me a Communist, then what exactly is today’s conservatism conserving? Because from where I’m sitting, it increasingly looks like the answer isn’t families, churches, home ownership, or the American middle class. It’s the political establishment that’s run the ship aground for 80 years.

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