First off, yes, there is a Guantanamo Bay McDonald’s. I’m learning that a lot of people are learning that fun fact today. As someone poisoned with politics brain from my youth in the late 90s and early 2000s, this is a vivid memory of mine. It was how a young boy was taught about imperialism in a way my feeble teenage mind could grasp. The visceral image of the most iconic food brand in the world next to its most notorious torture chamber was impossible to see distinctly from each other. Their mere juxtaposition condoned each other’s missions; be it torture or cheeseburgers, and it affirmed that they both tread along the same imperialist path.
I don’t really have a dog in the “should we lower the American flag for Charlie Kirk” debate, other than I need to point out how my schmuck home state governor Jared Polis, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and California’s Gavin Newsom have unmistakably tied this act to their extremely thirsty 2028 Democratic primary aspirations. What hits me at my blogger core, my Iraq War memberberries where a switch flipped on in my brain that never turned off, is how the horrific and senseless assassination of Charlie Kirk the day before September 11th led to a moment where President Donald Trump and McDonald’s created a surreal series of one hundred percent accurate words in my title that only the famed dril could author. I would often half-joke with my former co-worker Jason Rhode at Paste Politics that we’re living in a simulation that’s actively messing with us, and this is an instance where perfect timing and tragic circumstance come together to author perhaps this theory’s best evidence yet.
The flags were lowered last night around the base by order of President Trump after the killing of Charlie Kirk and will stay at half-staff on this U.S. outpost in southeast Cuba until sunset on Sunday.
I get that it can’t fly above the American flag, but the Guantanamo Bay McDonald’s flag flying at half-staff for any reason is the most American thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Just take it down, man. This is supposed to be a solemn gesture, and I can’t stop laughing at this ridiculous image of the half-staff McDonald’s flag at torture HQ getting branded on to my hippocampus next to where it stores all my rage for Donald Rumsfeld.
I am committing a bit of an internet sin here and writing up a post of mine on Bluesky that went semi-viral, but sue me. I have a fiduciary duty to Splinter in a time where Google is making that impossible, and the virality of this title is simply the market affirming this observation to my finance brain. I’d be leaving much-needed money on the ground if I didn’t expand on this point. The game is the game to a degree, and everyone has to play it–the key as a blogger is just making sure that your readers always leave feeling like they got something valuable out of it. What I observed in the reaction to my observation on Bluesky is a community of like-minded aged millennials coming together to do the Leonardi DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme as the right combination of words from our relative youths come together to give us a genuine Vince McMahon meme moment as we react to each successive word in the title. dril is the only character on the internet who could envision the absurd world dictated by right-wing media that we presently occupy and now occupies us, and when we were young and naive and signed up for Twitter to post about sports and celebrities, we did not realize we were posting among an oracle who could see into the future. I did not author this thought, I plucked it straight out of the news cycle, and many others recognized it the instant they saw it too.
If you do not know who dril is at this point, then I regret to inform you that functionally speaking, you are in internet 2nd grade compared to the internet irony poisoning displayed in Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer’s shell casings. dril is so enmeshed in mainstream internet culture that the OG Splinter folks already had a dril category I could toss this post into. dril is shorthand for a kind of ironic internet language on the left, far distinct from the 4chan shitposting fluency Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer demonstrated, which now has Republicans like Nancy Mace posting things like “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will do the same.”
dril is a famous Twitter account who authored seminal memes like “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them’” and “go ahead. keep screaming ‘Shut The Fuck Up ‘ at me. it only makes my opinions Worse.” In a way, dril is the right-wing media’s anger translator, and I swear I saw this combination of words that construct our present reality on a post of his in like 2017. This cannot be real life, can it?
