Were you to stumble across it in screenshotted form on Twitter, you could be forgiven for thinking that the words “My Chipotle Bowl Just Got More Expensive, And It’s The Federal Government’s Fault” represented a recent effort from satirists at ClickHole or the Onion. With all due respect to the talented writers employed at both websites, their finest work sometimes peaks at the headline. This entirely real and completely earnest recent intervention from an editor at the Federalist, on the other hand, only gets better as you dive in.

In many ways, the salvo is just another paint-by-numbers entry in the burgeoning genre of right-wing complaints that federal unemployment and COVID relief checks are hurting the restaurant industry — a genre whose existence is owed, in large part, to a concerted industry campaign that aims to defend the chronic underpayment of millions of American workers in perpetuity. Stripped of the artifice characteristic of the standard Chamber of Commerce agitprop, however, the Federalist’s contribution rather hilariously lays bare the combination of untested assumptions, facile grievances, and rank class entitlement that so often animates the conservative media ecosystem.

Here’s how the piece begins: