Why Tim Walz’s Spicy Dad Jokes Give MAGA Weirdos Acid Reflux

Joy to the world!

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have fully embraced joy. The vice president and the Minnesota governor describe themselves as “joyful warriors.” Joy is a much better campaign message than “unity,” which Republicans consistently denied President Joe Biden while he received all the blame.

However, while Republicans might refuse Democrats unity, they can’t steal our joy unless we let them. “Joy” masterfully coexists with the argument that Republicans are off-putting and weird. Harris/Walz don’t even have to go negative. They can just release joyful messages and Republicans will respond in the weirdest way possible.

Last Thursday, the Harris campaign published a YouTube video featuring an informal discussion between the presidential and vice presidential nominees about politics, music, and food. It’s up to 1.6 million views as of this writing. This ticket has amazing chemistry that you can’t fake. They genuinely seem to like each other. You can’t imagine Donald Trump and JD Vance just having a friendly chat like actual mammals.

Spice Up Your Life

The MAGAverse is so disconnected from reality that they’ve helped the video go viral with their weird reaction to a harmless joke Walz made about his limited food palate.

“Here’s the deal,” Walz says. “I’m not a spice guy. I have white guy tacos.”

 “What does that mean?” Harris asks. “Like, mayonnaise and tuna? What are you doing?”

“Pretty much ground beef and cheese,” Walz replied. “They said to be careful and let her know this. That black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.”

Blackface expert Megyn Kelly complained, “So super fun to see a white man mocking his whiteness and a black Vp join in as he self-flagellates. This is what the media is telling us is a ‘man’s man.’ (Bulwark.) Um, no.”

Walz’s remarks are the fairly standard “cultural difference” humor you’d find in a 1970s or 1980s sitcom. The difference, of course, is that Harris is Walz’s boss and not his sassy maid mumbling about how she has to make him “white guy tacos” instead of the “good stuff” as the studio audience roars with laughter.

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A later sitcom plot might feature junior executive Harris, up for a promotion, making sure she doesn’t expose her white boss to her wacky ethnic food, but the twist at the end is that Walz loves spicy food! He might even offer her tips on how to improve her recipe. Black women should never underestimate white men, who always have hidden depths!

Of course, what likely enrages MAGA world about the Harris/Walz exchange is the implicit power shift. The white man acknowledges the preferences of a Black woman, and he’s upfront and self-deprecating about his limitations — instead of trying to eat Nashville hot wings and almost dying while the studio audiences applauds. Harris ribs Walz but she’s not going to make him eat Texas-style ribs. “We’ll get you some cantaloupe,” she says. This is integration not assimilation, but MAGA demands that straight white men dominate — culturally and politically. Anything less is white genocide.

Far-right podcaster Matt Walsh, who chooses to live his life devoid of joy, also railed against the joke.

Crazy that a presidential candidate can just casually let out some blatant anti-white racism and nobody cares. Imagine if Donald Trump said that a “black guy taco” was made with fried chicken and watermelon. Nuclear meltdown.

That’s not “anti-white racism” because Harris’s domestic agenda doesn’t involve restricting white people to mild food. Soul food, after all, has its origins in the meager food rations that enslaved people received. “Mayonnaise and tuna” don’t have the same cultural connotations as “fried chicken and watermelon.” There is no version of Birth of Nation where “lazy” white people eat tuna salad. Also, before Richard Hellman helped bring mayonnaise to the mainstream, it was considered a luxury food item.

Anyway, if someone said they enjoyed “soul food tacos,” it’s hardly racist to ask if the fillings contain soul food staples. Sisters of the New South in Savannah serves “soul rolls,” a version of the classic egg roll but with oxtail, mac and cheese, and greens. (As Rick Steves says about duck confit: Not for dieters.)

Spice World

Ben Shapiro, who has denounced “joy” in political movements, also accused Walz of self-inflicted anti-white racism.

See, folks, it's funny that white people hate spices! Not racist at all! Just funny!

(FACT CHECK: Europeans liked spices so much that they literally got involved in several hundred years of war in order to determine control of the spice trade.)

Typical with anyone who includes an all-caps FACT CHECK, his argument doesn’t contain many facts. It’s true that Europeans colonized almost every culture they encountered, but that doesn’t translate into an actual culinary appreciation for spicy food.

Chicken tikka masala is considered the British national dish these days. A popular story regarding its origins is that a customer at a curry house in 1970s Glasgow, Scotland, complained that the chicken tikka was “dry,” so a Bangladeshi chef added a tomato cream sauce — the result was a milder, less “spicy” dish that appealed to the British preference for meat in gravy. (My lovely wife enjoys chicken tikka masala, but whenever she’s out of town, I order lamb vindaloo and a gallon of water.)

Medium writer LiaL said in a 2022 piece that the British in particular “loved spices. The pantries of the aristocracy and gentry of the Middle Ages, around 1300, was full of peppercorns, ginger, saffron, cloves, and mace. Spice was the food of the elite which meant the bland food that was passed down in wider circles was based on barley, wheat, vegetables, beans, grains and oats, most easily grown on our land.”

However, she points out that once spices became affordable enough for the lower classes, the elite started to reject them. Their noses turned upward, they decreed that true gourmands should enjoy how food tasted naturally and additional seasoning lessened the meal’s purity. This is consistent with the mistaken belief that enslaved people and some Asian cultures only seasoned their food so they could mask the taste of rancid meat. Considering that Shapiro claims rap isn’t “real music,” he likely would’ve been one of those snobs who sneered at spices.

Shapiro, who’s often confused, seems very confused about the spice trade in general. The spices traded were used for both food and medicine, and most were not what we’d consider “spicy” — cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, star anise, and clove. Pumpkin pie is not the same flavor profile as jerk chicken. Generally, whenever someone says they’re not a “spice” person, they are referring to “heat” not seasoning. The “heat” in Mexican, Thai, and Indian foods, for instance, comes from chili peppers. Chili powder is usually a mix of paprika, oregano, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder and cayenne pepper, which is what delivers the heat or the pain depending on your palate.

In the early spice trade, they used to classify any pepper that was especially hot as “cayenne.” According to New Orleans Chef Kenneth Temple, cayenne pepper “gives you the spicy, black pepper a little mild heat, and white pepper’s gonna just lay across the palate like it’s on a beach somewhere.”

“Whiteness” itself is a loaded sociopolitical concept, but culturally speaking, the midwesterner Walz is the platonic ideal of whiteness. He’s the “normal” American dad in TV and movies. White guys from Brooklyn or Alabama are presented in most media as exotic characters, almost like different “races” entirely. (The very Italian Carla on Cheers often referred to WASPy Diane Chambers as “whitey.”)

Some MAGA weirdos accused Walz of lying — debasing himself for Harris’s benefit — because he’d once bragged about his award-winning “Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish.” The ingredients included “1 can diced mild green chilies,” “1 bottle taco sauce (medium)” and “chili powder.” This is a very white definition of hot. I could serve this to my wife. One reason chefs often advise making your own spice blend is because supermarket chili powder is to heat what Cinemax was to porn.

“White guy tacos” are a real thing that have existed longer than Taco Tuesday. The seasoning is minimal and the flavor is mild. That’s fine! People should eat what they like, but it’s hardly “anti-white” for Walz to joke about the preference.

MAGA is a movement for the emotionally damaged who only see humor as a form of dominance over others. Donald Trump is incapable of making a joke at his own expense. His ego is too fragile. Walz can laugh at himself precisely because he’s capable of joy.

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