I was reading this in disgust yesterday:
https://www.salon.com/2025/10/31/maga-salivates-at-the-chance-to-cut-off-food-stamps/
“It is insane that there are 42 million Americans on food stamps. That is a wild statistic,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on his podcast. “And the amount of government dependency in this country is just way too high, period.” Right-wing podcaster Stephen Crowder similarly complained on X: “It’s rewarding people who abuse the system.” Conservative pundit Ann Coulter claimed that “the federal government has been paying Americans not to work by feeding, housing and medicating them for ‘free,’ and then wonder why we have so many useless, jobless, helpless people.” Slamming Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s attempt to pass a standalone funding mechanism for SNAP, Coulter suggested “40 million of them could get jobs.”
These are heartless and horrible human beings. Further, they are grifters whose “job” is riling people up for profit while attacking their fellow humans who are struggling.
Putting to a side the whole capitalism versus socialism argument, one thing that bothers me a lot is how it doesn’t seem to matter what the quality of your work is, provided it results in profits.
That leads to profoundly stupid conclusions. By that logic Kim Kardashian, Ben Shapiro, Anne Coulter and Matt Walsh are producers while poor children, the disabled, the struggling are “cheating” the system.
It’s cynically viewed as “gaming” the system when you find “suckers”, rather than as the real parasitism undermining life on this planet.
Why does no one challenge this? People who don’t make it in this system are not “losers”. Those guys are losers (and assholes).
I call it “junk capitalism”. A system of economics where low quality output that sells is considered a marker of success, while being poor, disabled or just plain failing at worthwhile endeavours is considered parasitic.
I am not in the US, but any which way I am fortunate in never having had to seek govt assistance. There is certainly no shame in it, but I wouldn’t take from a deliberately strained resource pool that our fellow humans need if I can help it. But this genuinely hateful garbage is an attack on those who have to seek assistance, while these morons are considered successes..
I feel for people who have to make money any which way they can. But I distinguish between people who have to be influencers online because the world kinda sucks and this Coulter/Shapiro/Kardashian/Walsh type.
These grifters are shameless, callous and so obviously projecting their secret fears and shame onto people who are struggling. I suppose on some level they know that what they say about the struggling is actually true of them. In societies which are less diseased that would be clearer.
And fwiw it doesn’t seem very Christian. What impression I have formed of Jesus has never squared with this.
I can’t really do much to help, but I can at least point this out. Their noxiousness lies not just in doing worthless, bullshit work that ends up depriving people of assistance. They also attack people’s morale while being complete parasites themselves.
I doubt that yelling “get a job” would help someone get on track to doing that. But then none of this is meant to make sense.
Even with lefty material I really like, one thing that frustrates me is the implicit acceptance that these morons are in fact elite.
Even without a surveillance apparatus their “output” can be judged on its merits.
I myself have to go work on some nice and dull routine science. But I explicitly tie real and worthwhile work with necessary pushback against this type of thought process. What a mind-numbingly stupid combination - austerity for the badly off coupled with tabloid friendly attacks. I can’t think of anything worse for any type of real work, white or blue collar.
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