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BBQ Brains

Updated: Apr 15

Drawn on February 28, 2025 | Published from Miami | Updated on April 14, 2025

Two MAGA people fighting over an agreement.
BBQ Brains

The day Donald Trump channeled his inner-Putin to aggress Zelenskyy in the oval office [1], triggering the western world to scramble priorities toward potentially creating NATO 2.0 without the U.S. at the table [2], Lyma and I figured barbecue was the way to take the edge off. Naturally.


Browsing through a menu at a bar in a corner of Shorty’s restaurant, I noticed an old man next to us, struggling to type on his phone. He stared over his glasses at his screen, in locked horns with the predictive text pop-ups. The contents? A jumbled collage about the USSR and 1960. Interesting.


I glanced back at the menu.


Moments later, defeated by his keyboard, he started dictating into his phone — praising Trump’s wisdom, then something about nuclear weapons, agreements with Russia, and how Zelenskyy was a treacherous ruler. Odd. I was intrigued, but not enough to make it my business, so I went back to reading. Short ribs would do the trick.


Suddenly, the man stood up and loudly declared, “Long live Stalin, long live Lenin.”


He eased himself out from between the bench and the counter-top while exhaling a wet cough, and walked away.


“Well, you don’t hear that every day… They get dumber by the minute.” I tossed.


In comes our waitress, an older lady as well, ready to take our order but also confused.


“What you havin’, sugar? And what did that man say?” She asked in an Texanized slavic accent.


I repeated his devotional outburst.


She scoffed. “If he loves them so much, then he should go live in Russia! We’re capitalists here!”


I politely nodded in agreement, turned to Lyma to relay her order — a brisket — but mostly to avoid the woman’s psychotic gaze.


“We’ll have a square of cornbread too please.”


She walked away.


Returning with two cups of water, she interjected, “You know, I betcha he was a Walz guy. Walz went to China, you know! He has the red book and everything! A communist! We don’t do that here — it doesn’t work!” She tapped my shoulder. “I’ll grab ya some plates.”


While dining, ribs in hand, I couldn’t stop reflecting on the caliber of stupidity that had triangulated us that night:


This kind lady’s decision to commit to the stereotype and entrench her pinhole opinion by clarifying that Vice Presidential Candidate Walz was a commy, betrayed her political allegiance with no room for ambiguity.


On one side, a crazy old man, seething with hatred over Kyiv’s defiance of Putin, proudly declared his love for Soviet Russia. On the other, an unnerving waitress who despised Communists with a bizarre fixation on Tim Walz. Yet, amazingly enough, had they faced off, their instincts would have genetically driven them into a fistfight — blissfully ignorant of the fact that they were on the same team: MAGA.


Disagree to agree, I guess.


This is the depth of mind-melting propaganda that has conquered the stupid and divided America. Propaganda so successful in fact, that its disseminator emerges victorious, no matter which cultist wins the brawl. Truly, no matter the situation, his lambs would rather fight each other than defy the Lord — because even a good Christian would sooner blame himself than accuse God for being cast into hell.


By design, the countercultural stance of MAGA feeds both the theocrats consumed by a martyrdom complex as well as the disillusioned liberal anarchists' desperation for immediate gratification. The whisper of doubt, that last flicker of intellectual restraint, is drowned in the noise — leaving only reflexive outrage and incestuous logic. With MAGA as church doctrine, the holy idol Donald Trump is the common-denominator for every anti-social group to seek truth in. [more here]


The propagandistic model abuses nuance, stripping any form of rationalism clean off the drumstick and compelling both dumb and smart, empowered imbecile and downtrodden intellectual, to spiral into whataboutisms based solely on face-value soundbites. [more here]


Propaganda renders its victims’ relativity-scale so defective that they can be brought to mistake the fleeting coincidence of a broken wrist-watch's twice-daily accuracy for the predictive precision of the Cesium-133 atomic clock — quantifying each as absolutely identical truths in an imbalanced equation. One could concede that both systems have their flaws in reliability, but to Kool-aid drinkers, every way of telling time is inherently broken — in equal measure.


"All clocks are subjective, so I cannot trust time." MAGA in a nutshell.


Really, at this rate, we might soon see barbecue-brained people set their schedules to sundials.


This troublesome difficulty in reconciling relativism raises questions about their ability to grasp the depth of issues beyond the superficial. If all is bad, then personal indifference appeals, to some, as being the only recourse to moral virtue. Therein lies the success of propaganda — not just in the rallying cry, but in curating a mutual detachment from the inhumane, serving as a numbing agent that dissolves solidarity into something unrecognizable. Effectively, in the grips of confusion over subjects as elemental as concentration camps, the question turns from "Should we do it?" into a far more pathologically pragmatic "How else would we do it?"


Hyperbole?


Just now, for instance, we are seeing this propagandistic calculation manifest in the U.S. deportation scheme to El Salvador. This on-brand apathetic effect of MAGA-brainwashing has twisted public rationale into a routine justification of the unconscionable. Indeed, by indiscriminately exporting the incarceration of social undesirables — such as Venezuelan immigrants, with no serious regard for their criminal status [3] — Trump and his minions erect an international barrier of plausible deniability for the atrocities against humanity to come. Sponsoring El Salvador's President Buk-ele as a farmed-out SS Lieutenant General Theodor Eicke [4]. This is the core of an unchecked purge without due process against the people — openly declared by Trump in defiance of the Supreme Court [5] — and chiefly, one he has no intention of limiting to foreigners but against "homegrown" Americans as well [6]. Very American, isn’t it? We outsource labor and manufacturing — why not death camps?


We ate our meal quietly, both shocked and depressed by this surreal interaction — struggling to make sense of the abject intellectual depravity cursing our flanks at this humble highway smokehouse.

The meat fell off the bone. I guess that’s what counts in the end.


We paid the dinner — 18% tip for her troubles.


We never got the cornbread.



[1] Watch Angry Exchange between Trump and Zelensky at White House (2025) BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cdel2npwe50o (Accessed: 03 March 2025).


[2] Melley, B. and Burrows, E. (2025) UK’s Starmer says Europe is at ‘crossroads in history’ as leaders agree to steps to Ukraine peace, AP News. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-britain-zelenskyy-europe-starmer-trump-russia-b980170ead74a1a7914c565f14ee6cc9# (Accessed: 03 March 2025).

"Last week, Starmer pledged to boost military spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027. Other European nations may follow suit."


[3] Unchecked deportations:



More reading


Macron correcting Trump on Ukraine financing:


Ukraine Support Tracker:


All audio is AI generated.

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