There are certain sensations you don’t realize belong to an era until they’re gone: the modem’s electronic shriek as it connected to the internet, the satisfying clack of a landline receiver, the little metallic weight of an arcade token in your palm. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the basket of free chips and salsa — dropped almost ceremonially onto the table before anyone has ordered a thing — might eventually join them.

At El Nopal, a regional Mexican chain my family has frequented for years, the opening minutes of dinner follow a familiar choreography. We slide into a pleather booth beneath burnt-orange walls and televisions playing Spanish-language fútbol. Half the table orders Diet Coke, the other water with lemon; someone requests a skillet of molten white queso. Then come the chips: hot, sturdy, generously salted, piled into black woven baskets alongside ramekins of fire-engine-red mild salsa and a darker, spicier version flecked with onion and jalapeño.

For our family of six, there are always two baskets, dividing the table into loose territories. Those seated in the middle are expected to choose a side; reaching from both feels vaguely lawless. Everyone has a salsa ritual. Mine is two-thirds spicy, one-third mild. My sister mixes the mild with queso until it turns a muted pink. One of my brothers splashes vinegary house hot sauce into the spicy. Soon the menus are stacked, the pebbled Coke cups are sweating rings onto the table and somebody is pointing with a chip while saying, “No, no, tell her the part about —”

The Trump administration has made that little ritual more expensive to maintain.

In July 2025, the administration withdrew from a long-standing agreement governing fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico and imposed a 17.09% antidumping duty on most of them. The Commerce Department said the move was intended to counter Mexican tomatoes being sold in the United States at unfair prices and protect domestic growers.

Then the weather got bad.

Poor conditions in Mexico and Florida further reduced supplies, and tomato prices climbed to their highest level in roughly two decades. Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association, told Houston Public Media that at one point the fresh tomato market had jumped to about $80 a box. Grocery stores began backing away from tomatoes earlier in the year; restaurants, he said, held on longer.

There is only so much a restaurant can absorb.

“The challenge is for our Texas restaurants, they operate on very narrow profit margins in what I would call good economic times,” Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told the publication.

These are not, she continued, particularly good economic times for running a restaurant. Food is more expensive, but so are labor, utilities, insurance and credit card swipe fees — virtually everything required to keep the doors open. Eventually, the arithmetic gets down to the ramekin.

“You have restaurants that are simply saying, ‘Look, I can’t afford to put salsa on the tables anymore,’” Galeazzi said. “What are consumers going to do? Where are consumers going to find this relief?”

The tragedy of a $4 basket of chips is obviously not the $4. It is the moment someone at the table inevitably says, “Eh, do we need these today?” Sometimes the answer will be yes. Some days undoubtedly call for acid, salt and crunch. On other days, maybe you skip them. You wait patiently for the entrées. The stories still get told. Someone finds a plastic straw to point with instead.

It’s fine.

But the texture of the wait is different.

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That small decision — chips or no chips — moves the diner almost imperceptibly from guest to customer. The thing that once arrived as part of the welcome now joins the same mental ledger as everything else: Drinks? An appetizer? Queso? Dessert? Do we need it? Is it worth it? Should we just save the money?

People sometimes joke online about whether you grew up in an “appetizers and drinks” family or an “entrées and water” family. It is a joke, mostly, about the invisible financial rules children learn at restaurants: what counts as normal, what counts as a treat and what you know better than to ask for.

Part of the appeal of the neighborhood Americanized Mexican restaurant has long been that it offers a particularly accessible kind of abundance. You can order an inexpensive combination plate and a soda, or water with a squeeze of lime, eat something hot and filling and deeply flavorful, and be out the door in 45 minutes without anybody making you feel strange about any of it.

And while you wait, you get the same chips as the table ordering margaritas.

Free chips briefly flatten the distinction between the appetizers-and-drinks family and the entrées-and-water family. Everybody gets to start with something.

Of course, restaurants cannot run on symbolism.

The “free” things on the table have never actually been free to them. Somebody bought the tomatoes. Somebody fried the chips. Somebody washed the ramekins and refilled the baskets. Hospitality has always had scaffolding beneath it; ideally, the guest simply doesn’t spend much time looking at it.

Lately, that scaffolding has become harder for restaurants to hide.

One of my favorite Chicago breakfast spots recently changed the way it serves Texas toast. Two slices had been the default for years. Now the waiter asks: Do you actually want two, or would one be enough? They were happy to bring two, he explained. But a lot of second slices were coming back uneaten, and they simply couldn’t afford to keep throwing them away. It is difficult to begrudge a restaurant that calculation. In fact, the question struck me as a rather thoughtful solution: Have as much toast as you want. Just tell us you want it first.

But it also made visible, for a moment, the financial scaffolding behind the plate.

That is what interests me about the chips and salsa, too. Not that restaurant owners are becoming less generous, but that the economic forces pressing on them increasingly require them to show their work.

Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets. Then someone opens an invoice. A tomato costs more. A batch of salsa costs more. The complimentary appetizer that was once cheap enough to disappear into the cost of doing business becomes expensive enough to notice. Eventually, somebody has to decide whether hospitality can continue to absorb it.

And then, one night, a server has to ask if you would like to add chips.

This is a mundane outcome of economic policy — almost comically so. No one’s dinner is destroyed. No one sits staring mournfully at the bare lacquered table. There is simply a small patch of negative space where something automatic used to happen.

But small gestures are often where hospitality lives.

The loss of free chips and salsa isn’t really about chips and salsa. It is about what happens when policy decisions force restaurants to make the scaffolding of their hospitality more visible — when a gesture designed to make guests forget about the transaction becomes part of the transaction itself. At El Nopal, when the baskets arrive, nobody asks who is paying for this round. Nobody pauses to determine whether everyone wants enough chips to justify them. Nobody calculates how hungry they are with their entrée still twenty minutes away.

Someone tells a story. Someone interrupts to improve the punchline. Someone else points across the table with a tortilla chip. And everyone reaches into the basket without asking.

The post Trump’s tariffs may kill free chips and salsa appeared first on Salon.com.

Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought. 

Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.

It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.

From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.

“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering  reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of  Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus. 

“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.

If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know  that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool. 

Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles. 

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On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.

In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.

The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark: 

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift. 

 

UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.

The post The Daily Wire is too mad to make a movie appeared first on Salon.com.

Pete Hegseth is odd. This isn’t just a personal opinion, though there’s no doubt that he gets widely mocked for his carefully cultivated public persona, which is a mix of megachurch preacher, gym rat and Robert Duvall’s napalm-huffing character in “Apocalypse Now.” The fact that the defense secretary is different is simply a statistical reality.

It’s not just that he’s a white evangelical Christian, a group that, according to PRRI, makes up only 13% of the population. Hegseth’s church, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is extreme even for the right, with a leader who argues against women’s suffrage and teaches that slavery was the height of “mutual intimacy and harmony” between the races. Even within MAGA, those remain fringe positions, despite great efforts by some Christian nationalists to reignite “debate” on such long-resolved issues. 

All this means it’s hard not to laugh when Hegseth pontificates about his hatred of “weirdos.” Although he has a war to fight in Iran, somehow he finds time to focus his attention on what he clearly sees as the greater battle: remaking the military according to the demands of his very white, very male, very right-wing vision.

“No fatties, no t******s, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals,” Hegseth said during a Sept. 30 speech at the U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He didn’t explicitly say “no women,” but his kicker — “with testosterone testing on top” — made the implication plain. The “no beardos” demand may seem strange, but as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times explained, it’s coded racism. Hegseth ended medical exemptions that allowed beards for people, mostly Black men, with certain skin conditions. This may explain why he has no problem when white men have beards, as seen on his church leader, Doug Wilson, or the many celebrities the defense secretary likes to take photos with. (Hegseth himself sported a beard in 2018.) 

“Wimps,” “radicals” and “weirdos” are more ambiguous pejoratives, but Hegseth’s recent actions suggest his definitions are expansive enough to cover the vast majority of Americans. He’s been on a firing spree, demanding a 20% cut of the Pentagon’s top brass in an apparent effort to expunge those he deems “woke.” The move comes after nearly two years of blocking promotions for and pushing out Black and female military leaders. Hegseth also rewrote the list of religions recognized by the Pentagon, narrowing from over 200 faith categorizations to a mere 31 — 22 of which are Christian. He claims this is to simplify the bureaucracy, but his motives are likely more disturbing: to stigmatize non-Christians and restrict the definition of “Christian.” The Air Force is already forcing service members to register their religious beliefs under the truncated list, drawing criticism from atheists and others whose belief systems are not included as options. 

Last week, Hegseth upped the ante by announcing the formation of the Office of Religious Affairs “to strengthen the moral, ethical and spiritual readiness of our warfighters.” Despite boilerplate claims that this action will not “compel religious participation” or “diminish the free exercise rights” of service members, both the policies and pomp surrounding the announcement made it clear that the goal is to promote Hegseth’s version of Christianity — and shame anyone who does not adhere to it. The office will be run by the defense secretary himself and, in ominous language, promises to fund “research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness,” which sounds like a data-gathering operation to ensure troops meet Hegseth’s esoteric views on proper religious practice. 

“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God,” Hegseth said in his announcement, using language from the Book of Ephesians that will be sure to resonate with Christian evangelicals. 

Taken together, this purge helps clarify what Hegseth means when he’s talking about “weirdos” and “wimps,” as well as other slurs like “t******s.” He’s hostile to women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and anyone who doesn’t adhere to his vision of conservative Christianity — although it’s worth noting that with his message of peace and love, Jesus Christ himself would not be accepted by Hegseth as a Christian.

The secretary may have gone to Princeton University, but he hasn’t yet grasped the concept of irony. The people he deems “weirdos” far outnumber those in his narrow category, presumably of non-weirdos, many times over. 

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Hegseth has tried to justify his position and rhetoric by arguing that a proper military should only contain “the real 1%” of supposedly superior people. But as Eliot Cohen of The Atlantic notes, this claim is ignorant of history. You need large numbers to win wars, which inherently means that armies can’t be elitist institutions.

Hegseth has a real math problem on his hands. His “real 1%” of alleged non-weirdos is just not enough people to staff a modern military, especially in times of war. His solution appears to be to hit the road, trying to recruit more mini-Hegseths to enlist. On Sept. 19 he embarked on the Send Me Tour in an effort to reach out to people in white evangelical-heavy parts of the country with a Bible-heavy pitch about how Jesus wants them to fight for their country. Both the tour’s name and the secretary’s stump speech rely heavily on Isaiah 6:8; Hegseth equates God’s call to the prophet to be faithful with his own plea for evangelicals to join the military.

In a response video, Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democrat from Georgia who is also an ordained minister with multiple theology degrees, didn’t mince his words. “Pete Hegseth is busy twisting the scriptures yet again . . . When Isaiah answers that call, it is not a call to go into battle.” Instead, Warnock said, “Isaiah challenges corruption” and “those who would crush the poor.”

Those objectives, of course, are not remotely Hegseth’s. His creation of a hierarchy that places white, straight men at the top and relegates everyone else into an underclass of “weirdos” and “wimps” ignores the Bible’s historical context — and actual meaning. Anyone who doubts that can simply examine his behavior in office and his monomaniacal focus on sorting America’s service members into a worthy-unworthy dichotomy, based solely on how much they adhere to his own self-serving ideals of what a soldier should look like.

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