“Steak ‘n Shake has gone Nazi” isn’t a sentence I ever expected to see, much less type. But here we are.
On Friday, the social media account of the fast-food chain Steak ‘n Shake published a series of fascist-pandering posts on X (formerly Twitter), then deleted them after public admonishment by everyone who wasn’t a Nazi. X is owned by Tesla and SpaceX mogul Elon Musk, who is currently the world’s richest man, the unelected co-president of the United States of America, and one of the primary drivers of the executive branch’s aggressive attempts to roll back American history and re-segregate the population.
It’s generally a bad idea to guess what this site’s founder, Roger Ebert, would have had to say about an event that occurred after his death. The exercise tends to end up inventing a fantasy version of Roger who agrees with whatever the person happens to be saying. But this is a case where the evidence speaks for itself.
Roger is on record calling Steak ‘n Shake his favorite fast-food chain. (“If I were on Death Row, my last meal would be from Steak ‘n Shake,” he wrote in 2012.) He was about as politically progressive a movie critic as you’d ever find in the mainstream press: anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro-gun control, and pro-government healthcare. He wrote that post 9/11 foreign policy was, per Paul Wolfowitz, “about oil,” that “in some sense, we are subsidizing our enemies,” and that the “Fox News ideology” boils down to “profits are good and must be defended against those who question corporate methods and outcomes.”
The Steak ‘n Shake posts fawned over Musk, President Donald Trump, and newly installed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, who is using his position to advance scientifically unsound and unhealthy beliefs, a complete list of which can be found here. Among them: the belief that beef tallow is a healthier cooking oil than vegetable derivatives (generally speaking, this is not true).
Steak ‘n Shake is not alone in its bootlicking behavior—a list of corporations going Vichy for Trump can be found here—but it’s among the more surreal examples of “pick me!” cravenness by U.S. companies during Trump II.
The sight of Roger’s favorite fast-food chain adding neofascism to its menu would have appalled him. It appalled the editors of RogerEbert.com, of which I am one.
One of the chain’s posts read, “Steak ‘n Shake is proud to support MAHA [ed: this is Kennedy’s branding acronym “Make America Healthy Again”] and Secretary Kennedy! Your days are numbered seed oil. We want to lead the way and make a difference!”
There was also a seemingly Gen AI-created image of Kennedy behind the driver’s seat of a car, from the vantage point of a Steak ‘n Shake drive-thru employee, with the caption “Did this man just pull up in our drive-thru?” (See image at top of page.)
And there were a couple of posts sucking up to Musk. One shared a post by a Steak ‘n Shake account follower: a Leni Riefenstahl-esque black-and-white image of a Tesla Cybertruck in a desert, parked on the cusp of a verdant land lit by heavenly sunbeams cutting through clouds. “I’d travel through rain, shine and mountains for those tasty burgers and TALLOW fries!” it said. The caption on Steak ‘n Shake’s repost was topped with a quote from Fredrick Nietzsche (the German philosopher who, it should be noted, was not himself pro-Nazi, but whose work was hijacked after his death and distorted into an endorsement of Nazism by his sister): “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Any doubt about how Roger would’ve felt about all this is answered by one of his own Tweets, posted in 2012 after the right wing-leaning fast food chicken restaurant chain Chick-fil-a got tangled up in a weird, self-contradicting controversy over whether it supported or opposed same-sex marriage. Opponents of same-sex marriage ate at the restaurant to demonstrate their solidarity. “Somehow it’s appropriate that people opposed to gay marriage would rally at a fast-food chicken chain,” Roger teased.
There was also a strange exchange wherein the Steak ‘n Shake account suggested Musk offer charging stations for Teslas at the restaurant, only to learn that Tesla already did that at six locations and had “another 20 in review.” (Tesla has charging stations at other fast-food joints as well.)
The Supreme Court notoriously decided in 2010 that in certain circumstances, corporations should be considered people. If that’s true, Steak ‘n Shake wears a brown shirt and swastika armband.
One of Roger’s favorite dramas about fascism was 2008’s “The Reader,” which had many detractors. Roger defended the movie as a plainspoken and accessible explanation of how evil happens on a society-wide scale.
“There are enormous pressures in all human societies to go along,” Roger wrote. “Many figures involved in the recent Wall Street meltdown have used the excuse, ‘I was only doing my job. I didn’t know what was going on.’ President Bush led us into war on mistaken premises, and now says he was betrayed by faulty intelligence. U.S. military personnel became torturers because they were ordered to. Detroit says it was only giving us the cars we wanted. The Soviet Union functioned for years because people went along. China still does.”
He concluded, “I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along.”
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