By: Samuel Mortel
Over 40 million people were at risk of losing their SNAP benefits and going hungry.
Conservatives online, in the media, and even in the government were working to convince the American people that food stamps were no big deal. If anything, it was even ideal. In many ways, what we saw from the right was predictable. These are not new narratives. In fact, part of what makes them shocking is how shamelessly trite they are.
Conservatives have always had an adversarial attitude towards any form of government assistance or social safety net. This goes back decades, with a core figure of this war against welfare being none other than the 40th US President Ronald Reagan.
Welfare fraud was a concern for conservatives before Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign, but he fully brought the issue to the mainstream by popularizing the term “welfare queen”. Reagan was able to weaponize a few cases of people abusing welfare in order to demonize social programs as a whole, mainly focusing on stories of women who had many children out of wedlock, used the money to buy drugs, or used several fake aliases to collect multiple checks. Though there was no explicit racial element to these stories, the image of the “welfare queen” in the cultural consciousness later evolved to be Black women, which is most likely due to a combination of preestablished, intersecting stereotypes about Black people: generally being categorized as lazy, and Black women being promiscuous and sexually irresponsible. This leads to a narrative that lazy Black women are having a bunch of kids out of wedlock so they can reap the benefits of welfare that they either directly spend on frivolous things or, in some cases, sell to other people at a profit so they can buy frivolous things.
In recent years, the narrative has expanded to allege that third-worlders are flooding America to take advantage of our “welfare state”, leaving their home countries solely because they know Democrats are willing to supply them with free food and even free housing and healthcare.
This line of thinking usually leads to a popular right-wing conspiracy theory that Democrats are only so protective of social safety nets because they are effectively using these programs to buy votes, creating a system where minorities are so dependent on the government that they’ll perpetually vote for the party that will keep supplying them with free stuff.
This conspiracy theory has spread from the fringes of the party and has since become a somewhat mainstream talking point. As of the writing of this article, several government websites have banners on the front page blaming the ongoing government shutdown on Democrats because they, among other things, want “healthcare for illegals” to use as “leverage” points.”
According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, white people make up 62.7% of adult SNAP recipients, and native-born people of all races make up 87.8% of adult recipients.
This is far from what conservatives would have you believe about the average American on food stamps. Still, they’ve strategized an effective way to get their predominantly white base to support gutting welfare programs. This strategy convinces the public that the majority of people who benefit from the programs are members of a minority group that they don’t care about or are prejudiced against. The fact of the matter is that programs like food stamps go directly against the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality of the Republican Party.
Since Reagan, the party has preached an ideology of self-reliance and individualism. If you subscribe to this ideology, people’s tax dollars being used to take care of others is nothing short of an abomination, and, unsurprisingly, they’ve been trying to chip away at welfare for decades.
Republican politicians like President Donald Trump are often committed enemies of social programs.
In his first term, the Trump administration considered numerous ways to restrict the number of people on food stamps, including implementing drug testing and tightening work requirements. Trump has kept up his fight against food stamps in his second term, with his “Big Beautiful Bill” including a plan to cut nearly $200 billion from SNAP through 2035. Even now, the Trump administration, with the help of the Supreme Court, is still fighting to avoid fully funding SNAP. When this government shut down and this fight over food stamps first showed up in the news cycle, conservatives saw this as another opportunity to argue that these benefits shouldn’t exist in the first place — this time with the help of new tools.
During the media cycle, several AI-generated videos were making the rounds online, all depicting Black women yelling into their cameras about SNAP losing funding.
In multiple videos, the different AI women can be heard repeating the same backstory: that they have seven kids from seven different men, and are distraught because it’s the taxpayers’ job to feed their children.
There was one instance where a real TikTok user uploaded a video repeating the AI video script verbatim, seemingly as a form of ragebait, a form of clickbait through inciting angry viewers. It was convincing enough to fool a Fox News writer, who published an article titled “SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown,” and specifically referenced the video as if it were authentic. Eventually, Fox caught on and later edited the entire article, with the headline now reading, “AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral”, shifting the topic to be about AI videos of women complaining about the shutdown, similar to the fake video they themselves fell for. The only evidence of the old article and the Fox News writer’s mistake is an editor’s note at the very end.
Conservatives on the social media site X (formerly known as Twitter) spent the last few days of October posting screenshots of high-quality foods like lobster tails and dijon mustard labeled “SNAP EBT eligible”, expressing the belief that SNAP recipients shouldn’t be allowed to purchase these items. One user posted a picture of a pack of cookies with an “EBT Eligible” sticker, captioned, “When I go to the store and see them advertising big tubs of chocolate chip cookies as EBT eligible, it makes me not care about it getting shut down.”
This post garnered 25,000 likes. Posts like these are meant to feed into the narrative that people are using food stamps for frivolous purchases, the frivolous purchases in this case being mustard or cookies. It’s also a thinly-veiled way to insinuate that poor people shouldn’t have nice things.
On Oct. 31, NewsMax host Rob Schmitt has a discussion with Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson about SNAP.
Stating, “This is a program that has exploded over the last 20 years, and we are just dumping 100 billion a year into a program that we all know is being so woefully corrupted and exploited, and people are selling their benefits, people are using them to get their nails done, to get weaves and their hair. I mean this is a really ugly program.” He later doubles down, saying, “I don’t think [welfare programs] are even well-intentioned. I think it’s all just a game to get as many people on them as you can, because then you got a very reliant base of voters. If they need that program—if they need that money—they’re always going to vote for it.”
It shouldn’t be a stretch or wild accusation to say that claiming food stamp recipients are using their benefits to pay for weaves and nails is clearly painting an image of a very specific group of people.
Does Senator Johnson push back against this heavily racially coded language?
Not at all.
In fact, he agrees with Schmitt, saying, “I can’t argue with you.” Of course, he’s also pushing the previously mentioned conspiracy theory that Democrats are effectively buying minority voters using food stamps.
It’s important to note that all of these instances, though they may seem somewhat disconnected, are all working toward the same goal.
They want to completely delegitimize SNAP and other social programs in the eyes of the average American.
They want to build a culture where we all think that it’s not the government’s job to help people, and even if it is, too many people are misusing these programs, so we might as well get rid of them entirely. Suppose there’s any question why the president of the United States is comfortable leaving tens of millions of his constituents hungry. In that case, it’s because he’s following through with a crucial pillar of the Republican agenda.
As conservatives move closer and closer to completely shredding the social safety net and leaving the most vulnerable amongst us to fend for themselves, it’s essential to stay alert, call out this behavior when we see it, and stop them from ever getting the job done.