Even pizza chains are joining the culture war
Yesterday, noted conservative thought leader and renowned inventor of garlic butter dipping sauce John Schnatter said that the NFL’s ongoing inability to stop its players from kneeling during the national anthem is hurting his company’s sales of shitty pizzas. By making this brave, nonsensical stance, Schnatter further enshrined his company as the barely edible, undercooked pizza of choice for “blue lives matter”-style racists everywhere.
Today, in a stunning escalation of the pizza-football culture war, Pizza Hut commented to CNBC that they are “not seeing any impact” of NFL player protests on sales. In point of fact, Pizza Hut’s sales were slightly stronger than expected year over year, unlike Papa John’s, which have indeed been more sluggish than expected in an overall down pizza market. All of which leads to several possibilities: 1) People dislike buying pizza while professional athletes protest the murder of young black men by police officers; 2) People do not like to buy pizza from degenerate conservative talking-point stooges like John Schnatter; or 3) People do not like to buy Papa John’s shitty pizzas. We will leave such matters for the economists of the world.
Nevertheless, Schnatter’s comments have brought the nation’s enflamed political discourse to the world of pizza, a blissful place where “left-right divide” previously only referred to the thing you do when you’re ordering with a vegetarian. Politics is now not a matter of actual policy (which we are confused by) or even representation (which we don’t care about) but proxy wars fought along the lines of our various cultural focal points. MAGA chuds everywhere are owning the libs by shoveling Papa John’s garbage wax saucers into their mouths. Pizza Hut is now the official pizza of the resistance, just as Wolfenstein is the violent shooter and Lyft is the ride-sharing platform. Both sides are pissed at the NFL, meanwhile, which is a sort of funny side-effect of this whole thing.
Of course, pizza has always been a lightning rod for opinion in America, whether it’s via fiercely contested regional variants or its stand-in as bread to be broken with the common man by traveling politicians. (Let us never forget that Donald Trump eats it with a knife and fork.) All of which raises the question of how other players in the greater pizza-political dialog will weigh in. DiGiorno’s was quick to insert themselves:
Thus solidifying their stance as the establishment-disrupting outsider that people just can’t deny (so, Bernie?). The real question is where Little Caesar’s will weigh in—their $5 Hot-N-Ready is the true pizza of late capitalism, and as they go, so too shall the republic.