PizzaGate Is the GOP’s Silliest Gambit Yet
By Jon Friedman, July 18, 2023
Remember that classic “Seinfeld” episode when a goofy plan by Kramer and his business partner Poppie to let people make their own pizza pies illogically (but hilariously, of course) morphed into a review of the abortion issue?
Well, the Republicans’ insistence on sparking a “woke” provocation – whatever that is – involving pizza ovens is every bit as illogical.
If only we could find humor and laugh at the GOP.
The flap started after the New York Post castigated new environmental regulations addressing gas and wood-burning ovens as “woke.”
And no, this item did NOT appear on the Post’s Page Six, a department that regularly lumps together gossip, contrived stories and more gossip. It appeared as a news item. Honest!
You can’t have a woke furor in 2023 without Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis elbowing his way into the fracas. It’s almost as if the Florida governor, who continues to trail former President Donald Trump badly in the polls for Republican supremacy, has some kind of Pavlovian mechanism inside his head. Someone in the media uses the fashionable word “work” and, sure enough, DeSantis jumps into the controversy with both feet.
Talking Points Memo noted that DeSantis took time to vent while having a pizza at Grimaldi’s on Sixth Avenue with a Fox host. TPM quoted the candidate as saying:
“They just want to control,” he says. “You have an itch on the left. They wanna control behavior. We saw the same thing with COVID, a lot of that wasn’t about your health, it was about they wanted to control your behavior. So they just don’t want people to be happy and be able to make their own decisions.”
Of course the real story here has nothing to do with pizza, ovens or even saving the environment. Instead, the delusional debate continues a pattern of issues that are invented out of whole cloth by the Republicans.
We’ve seen the pattern before. Someone in the right-wing media invents a scandal and the simpatico politicians try to exploit it. Then, the prospective voters yawn at the ridiculousness of it all and move on. Pretty soon, whatever seemed scandalous dissolves into a footnote and a trivia question worthy of a drunken contest at the corner bar.
Inventing Scandals
What matters here is that the Republican-tilting media are going down a very bad road with this kind of tactic. Inventing scandals, which at root make no sense anyway, seems amateurish at a time when data show that inflation is receding as a national threat to our way of life.
This must really gall the Republican media base, who worked so hard in recent months to show that “Bidenomics” was leading on to a path of economic ruin.
We see now that the opposite may be true. On Wednesday, it was reported that inflation cooled notably in June. The revelation was interpreted as the path to a “soft landing” for the nettlesome economy.
Meanwhile, U.S. consumer prices rose far more slowly in June, a cause for celebration among beleaguered American consumers.
We can be sure that the Biden administration will eagerly take a victory lap. Heck, if the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan was available for renting out, you might see the Biden team holding a victory parade there, worthy of honoring a World Series winner.
The bottom line is that the favorable economic data smack of real news, information that American consumers can put to use. The other thing, the pizza nonsense, is not a serious issue. And if Republican media and politicians try to shove it down the electorate’s throats again, they may get a very rude awakening by the voters.
Jon Friedman wrote MarketWatch’s media column from 1999 to 2013 and has taught classes in journalism and other subjects at Stony Brook University. He has written three books and has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Sunday Business Section, The New York Post, Esquire and Time.
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What matters here is that the Republican-tilting media are going down a very bad road with this kind of tactic of criticizing environmental regulations like wood-burning pizza ovens as “woke.” Inventing scandals, which at root make no sense anyway, seems amateurish at a time when data show that inflation is receding as a national threat to our way of life. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
