I say, let every football player tell us what’s on his mind, for MAGAs are sneaky fakers, and if we hand them a microphone and encourage them to speak their minds, everyone will know who they are and no surprise, the racist, misogynist, sexist, anti-semetic, anti-immigrant, pro-corporation, anti-climate, toxic masculine, homophobic, anti-semites we suspected they were all along.

In my small Southern town, if you want to find MAGAs, and other factions of White Supremacy, go to Golden Corral or other big corporate restaurants where food is delivered in shrinkwrapped bags and boxes, then reheated in a microwave, and skipping a tip for the waiter won’t be a problem.  More importantly the place is noisy and packed with other like-minded conservative republicans, and everyone can talk freely and there’s no paper trail or text message or email to prove their bigoted conversations. MAGAs prefer “meet-ups” to phone calls. 

For several years my husband and I were foster parents, and like my mother, grandmother, great grandmother, you could find me in the kitchen cooking healthy delicious meals, packing lunches with real fruit and vegetables, and fixing picnic lunches with the same fabulous homemade chicken salad I make to this day. Our children made requests for fresh food and we were happy to deliver what they requested.  

It was my honor to be a foster mother, and I loved teaching and tutoring our children, using my experience and education to help them succeed. 

The department director, a proud Republican, dropped several hints to me and my husband several times during her visits: “Maybe you should patronize a restaurant like Golden Corral. Use your stipend to support local industries.”

We did, and in the rearview mirror I saw glum faces on the drive home.  Not only was the food bland, but the MAGAs wouldn’t leave us alone, visiting our table and asking us “Are these your children?”  My husband kept repeating, “Yes. Of course!” One person explained to me that since the state pays for it, these children actually belong to them.

If you wonder why North Carolina or other states can no longer find enough foster parents, look no further than the Republican party.  They don’t care about them, or how they are treated.  Moving children from one family to another, up to 14 times the average. Nor do they care about the quality of food they consume.  Otherwise when the state revealed they had mostly black children sleeping on the floor of DSS, the FBI would have shut it down. (They did nothing.) Instead Social Services continues to use this story to shame people into becoming foster parents, and it didn’t work. “We need you!”

In our car drive home that night, more than one child asked us if this would be our habit from now on, going out to a restaurant for dinner. From then on we gave them a choice. That night I had fresh fruit waiting in the fridge when we came home. 

No complaint here, but the stipend foster parents are paid is minimal, and we supplimented that stiped with our own money.  But we knew that when we decided to pledge our assistance. 

I told the director the story about taking the children out to Golden Corral, and she told me, “Well, that’s because you set too high of expectations.  Take them to IHOP next week and see if they like it.”

But it was my experience that my black foster children loved to frequent the grocery store and help me and my husband pick out good food. 

The terrible generalization made by this director was an effort to support corporate companies.  The longer our foster children stayed with us, the more stories they told us about their life before they stayed in our home.  They had parents and grandparents who made delicious homemade recipes, and I tried to accommodate them.  They told us that on Sundays in particular the entire family gathered together at a relative’s home for more homemade recipes. It turns out our foster child’s grandmother had a vegetable garden in her backyard. 

To assume that black children don’t know the difference between good tasting, healthy food or food that is bad for them, or as Spike Lee famously said, don’t know when they are being bamboozled, is racist. 

And this is why Harrison Butker is a liar.  

I met a woman once who was married to a MAGA, but decided to leave him when it became too hard to fake his public persona, and to keep her makeup, wardrobe, and body the way he wanted it: “It became too hard to do anything because he made me wear impossibly long porcelain nails.” One day she packed suitcases and ran away with her children, drove her car straight to a shelter for abused women like her.

Honestly, I worry more about Isabelle Butker, and after hearing her husband’s disturbing speech, I hope she knows when to get help. 

Considering food quality, here’s the most disturbing diagram ever created: Who owns all the food in the world? This is what Butker wants, a male-centered fascist world where corporate America produces products that make us sick. Like other MAGAs, he won’t say it out loud, but these are his sponsors, the companies who pay him to spout his viscious ideology.