Why The Guy Stocking Your Pizza Could Wreck The Polls

There’s a middle-aged white guy in Michigan named Walt Z., a father of four who works at Red Baron. He was stocking shelves when an 18-year-old clout-chaser harassed him by pretending to steal his money while the incident was videotaped.

Walt Z. erupted in anger: 

It’s not a joke to me, okay? I don’t have time for this crap in my life. My life is hard enough as it is. Okay? I don’t need this crap. I got kids at home that went to bed without me right now. But I was supposed to be at home an hour ago, and I’m still out here working, and I got to get up at 5:00 in the morning and do ten more stores. So this is not a joke to me. … You’re probably making money off this. I can’t even pay my mortgage. And I got four kids at home, okay? So not funny!

This resulted in a white-pill moment and a GoFundMe for Walt Z. The GoFundMe stated, “This fundraiser is about standing up for a working person who is busting their butt and should not have to fear losing stability because someone wanted content and clicks.”

The GoFundMe has currently raised roughly $465,000. Red Baron Pizza said not only is Walt Z. not losing his job, but he also has a fan club. They put out a tweet saying, “He’s still here. He’s got a fan club, including us. Employee of the month. Nominations are closed. You know why.”

I don’t know who this 18-year-old streamer was, and I don’t know who Walt Z. is, but they are emblematic of a broad swath of other people in the country.

Walt Z. is the guy who matters here. The 18-year-old douchebag doesn’t.

But our entire politics is now built around the 18-year-old douchebags, which is one reason we have a bunch of entitled, selfie-addicted idiots running around harassing blue-collar workers for social media clout.

We’re supposed to care about this Gen-Z person, the same kind of person who is probably complaining he can’t get a $22 burrito from Chipotle delivered by hand from an Uber Eats driver.

But we should be much more worried about the guy stocking the freezers for Red Baron. For those who don’t know, that’s a company that makes and ships frozen pizza to your local Walmart, where it sells that pizza for five bucks. We should worry about the guy who buys pizza for five bucks or the employees who provide that pizza, not the whiny Gen Zers.

One of these guys is struggling to get by, and the other is a spoiled brat. They are not the same.

Let’s talk about Red Baron, because if you’re talking about how to make people like Walt Z more successful, the answer is: You make Red Baron more successful.

Red Baron is how America used to work. Red Baron was started in 1952 by a 23-year-old in Minnesota, someone closer to the age of the clout-chaser. That person started delivering ice cream door to door. By the 1960s, the company branched into frozen pizza. By 1970, it bought a small production facility in Kansas to make its own.

Fifty years later, it’s one of America’s biggest frozen pizza brands. In 2022, Red Baron reached $1 billion in annual retail sales, and they still manufacture over 100 million pizzas a year in Kansas.

This is not food that is being delivered to your door by an Uber Eats driver for $22. A Red Baron Pizza costs $3.99 at Kroger and $4.82 at Walmart, and under five bucks at Target.

As a business, Red Baron should be our focus. How do we make them more successful? Walt Z., as an employee of Red Baron, should be our focus. Red Baron’s customers should be our focus.

But let’s get real about this. Our entire political discussion these days is focused on the $22 burrito influencer kid.

Why?

There are two reasons. First: It’s really, really easy because you never see Walt Z. He’s not spending his days on social media clout-chasing. He’s actually out there doing a job.

Second: Most of our political class is more like the 18-year-old clout chaser than the Red Baron guy. They’re not stocking shelves. They’re making social media TikTok videos to try to gain the support of 18-year-olds and go viral.

There’s an entire cottage industry of political consultants who barely know that the middle-aged white guy who stocks the shelves exists. That is why the polls routinely underestimate Trump’s support.

Political consultants understand that what they do is a form of voodoo. They create metrics for their own success. In theory, political consultants succeed or fail based on whether their candidate wins — but they don’t know about that until Election Day. So, in the whole intervening time, they have to look at fake data, because there’s not a lot of great data on someone like Walt Z.

But you know where there is great data? On X. You can see precisely how many people have viewed a particular post. Or they can look at polls, which are all within the margin of error. They can look at social media likes and replies.

So political consultants, the experts politicians hire, are very often just a scam enterprise. You tell your politician that they went viral online and this is a “win.”

Whom does our political class have more in common with: the kid walking around with the camera looking for viral moments or the guy who spends his day loading freezers with frozen pizza before having to get up at 5:00 in the morning to do it all again?

The apex predator of the selfie-stick generation is now 65 and a career-useless person we made president: Barack Obama. You may recall him ripping on the Cheesecake Factory recently. The reason that matters is that it’s a cultural indicator. This is always who Barack Obama was: a dude who’s significantly more likely to spend his evenings at the French Laundry than at the Cheesecake Factory.

The Cheesecake Factory is a great American company. It is a factory that makes cheesecake, which is awesome. It’s not some Parisian chef in the back whipping up a specialized cheesecake for $100; it is a factory that rolls out cheesecake.

Obama doesn’t like that because that, of course, is too blue-collar. It’s gauche.

I guarantee you that for Walt Z. and a lot of people like him, the height of luxury is probably taking his family to Cheesecake Factory or Olive Garden.

There’s a reason why Barack Obama has always targeted the political youth: He’s a selfie-stick president. He always was.

And a huge percentage of our current politicians — the Democratic Socialists of America being the most obvious indicator — are people who are programming to the 18-year-old clout-chaser, not to Walt Z.

They like to pretend that they’re programming to Walt Z., because they’re “leading a revolution of the proletariat.” But people like Walt Z. or the blue-collar workers are not voting for Bernie Sanders. It’s a bunch of college-educated idiots who are voting for Bernie Sanders.

If you are building a political coalition, you need to center that political coalition on more Walt Zs and even Walt Z’s parents. According to the exit polls, age 50-plus voters cast 55% of all ballots in 2024 and 59% in 2022. More than six in 10 turned out in the last midterm in 2022, compared to just three in 10 people under 30.

Middle-aged men aged 45 to 64 voted Trump +7 in 2020. They voted Trump +20 in 2024, and that swing accounted for 2.2% of the full electorate in 2024 — 3.4 million net votes. If politicians were smart, those are the people they would be targeting.

Republicans and Democrats are making a gigantic error. They’re focused on 18-year-olds.

What the clout chaser did in the video was obviously immoral. It’s immoral to walk up to anyone and pretend to steal money from them. It is disgusting and wrong. That is not a prank; it’s delinquency.

What’s driving all of this? Social media, a need for attention, and boredom. These people don’t have real jobs, and they don’t think they need real jobs.

Apparently they don’t have kids yet. Many of them never intend to have them. What the polls show is that fewer young people than at any time in literally all of history now plan on having children. We’ve now trained entire generations of Americans to be this way.

If you have sympathy for Walt Z., it’s because he has four kids. And guess what? It makes you a better, more responsible human being to have children and responsibilities.

Walt Z. is a better person than the person who’s pretending to take money from him for clout.

We’ve built an entire society around the idea that we should be apathetic about these concerns.

That’s immoral and a gigantic mistake.

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