MAGA Furious Over Republican Ad Featuring White Man as Face of Welfare

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is facing right-wing backlash over an ad featuring a white man playing video games who got off welfare thanks to the state’s work requirement. 

Several conservative personalities lashed out against the ad on social media for depicting “Brad,” who chooses not to work and plays video games on his couch instead, over the right-wing stereotypes of women and people of color living off of government assistance.  

“This Republican ad calling out welfare leeches uses a young white male named ‘Brad’ as the villain. Meanwhile, back in reality, women are significantly more likely to be on welfare than men. And black people are astronomically more likely to be on welfare than white people. So the number of single young white male ‘Brads’ abusing the welfare system is minuscule,” posted Matt Walsh. “Practically non-existent. But of course Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain. Even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.” 

Failed far-right Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback also disliked the ad and threw in some misogyny with his racism. 

“White men named Brad don’t typically commit welfare fraud,” Fishback said. “I’d recommend you start with the baby-momma with a BMW who just got back from her Carnival Cruise.”

“Almost zero white men under the age of 62 are on welfare. 69% of all immigrant classes are on welfare. The GOP is filled with anti White leftist,” posted right-wing poster Paul (@WomanDefiner). 

Right-wing influencer RAMZPAUL said Sanders “needs to apologize for her blood libel.”

“Sarah Huckabee never had a real job. Her daddy was a two-time governor. She never worked in the private sector. She never served in the military. Her entire qualification was her daddy,” the influencer added. “Maybe she should be cut off the taxpayer funds and get a job as a waitress. She may also want to cut down on the Cheetos.”

Sanders doubled down on the post on Tuesday, posting, “Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period.” 

Despite MAGA’s outrage, statistically in Arkansas, between 52 and 54 percent of food stamp, or SNAP, recipients in the state are white, as are 57.8 percent of those on Medicaid. But Sanders’s program won’t solve any problems, as adding work requirements doesn’t reduce poverty, and in some cases, makes people poorer. Regarding programs like health care assistance, most recipients are already working. 

And, as one commentator pointed out, Sanders has only ever held political jobs thanks to her father, former Arkansas Governor and current U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and has never had to apply for a real job herself. 

Former special counsel Jack Smith swears that President Donald Trump committed “serious crimes.”

In his opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Smith reiterated the findings of his two indictments against the president of the United States.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

“After leaving office in January of 2021, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive national security information was held in a bathroom and ballroom where events and gatherings took place,” he said.

Smith’s team determined that Trump kept a hold on those documents in order to help advance his business interests.

The former special counsel’s statements were practically identical to his January testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that his investigations uncovered proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump had engaged in criminal activity.

In December, Smith testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing before the House committee. He has long sought to testify in a public hearing, but was rebuffed by Republicans until Tuesday in favor of one behind closed doors.

Utah Senator Mike Lee was the only lawmaker to vote against a bipartisan bill that would have banned the demolition of presidential memorials such as the Kennedy Center without congressional approval.

The bill in question—the Protecting Presidential Memorials Act—was the brainchild of Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Maine Senator Lisa Murkowski. The Democratic-Republican duo tried to pass the bill via unanimous consent, a procedure that fast-tracks votes and skips debates on noncontroversial matters by only passing a measure if the entire chamber votes the same way.

Lee, however, apparently did not feel that protecting presidential memorials was a pertinent issue, despite the president’s recent machinations surrounding the Kennedy Center and the ensuing looming threat of the historic theater’s destruction.

“Unfortunately, a colleague objected to this common-sense bill,” Merkley wrote in a statement after the vote. “Trump’s threats are straight out of the authoritarian playbook and should infuriate every American who values our nation’s history and the rule of law. Instead of wasting taxpayer dollars putting Trump’s name on memorials and monuments as if he is a king, we should be focused on putting money back into the pockets of working families and honoring America’s greatest cultural institutions, not destroying them.”

Since the start of his second term, Trump has worked tirelessly to plaster his name on the Kennedy Center. Part of that effort included replacing the center’s board with a spate of Trumpian loyalists (and appointing himself as its chairman), and leveraging that power to find avenues to affix his name and brand on the revered performing arts space or its grounds. He has been profoundly unsuccessful in doing so, however: Trump has faced numerous legal obstacles in his quest to rename the Kennedy Center, in no small part because the site itself is under the jurisdiction of Congress.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center needs him—and his brand—to survive. Yet tax documents obtained by Zeteo earlier this month disproved that conspiracy, revealing that it was actually Trump’s intimate involvement in the building’s affairs that triggered the beginning of its rapid decline.

After the Monday night vote, Trump’s team filed an appeal in the legal saga reiterating his claims. Justice Department attorneys argued that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”

“The stakes are existential,” the attorneys posited.

Another one of the people President Donald Trump hired to investigate the cases against him has quit.

Kurt Olsen resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida Monday after spending months working on the probe into Trump’s classified documents case, as well as the claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As many as eight people have now left the office. The departures spell doom for the investigation, which was looking into officials from the Obama and Biden eras but thus far had not resulted in any charges.

Olsen has a history of election denial–related work. His previous position was a “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” according to the FBI, and in 2020, he worked with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to try to convince the Supreme Court to overturn that year’s presidential election results.

Olsen was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee in 2022 over allegations that he “contacted various high-level officials at the Department of Justice” to file challenges to the election results on the president’s orders, speaking with Trump multiple times on January 6, 2021. He also was behind the search warrant to search Fulton County, Georgia’s election offices earlier this year. The FBI seized boxes of ballots and other 2020 election materials.

Now that Olsen and many others have left a Department of Justice office tasked with going after Trump’s enemies, it is unclear what happens to those efforts. Is the probe fizzling out, or is Olsen leaving because it was going too far? Trump’s revenge and election activities only raise more questions, as the Trump administration has no results for its efforts just over a month before the midterms.

President Donald Trump’s inner circle is already bracing for a “f*cking rough” round of midterm elections.

With just weeks until November, Trump advisers have privately acknowledged that there is little chance for the president’s party to prevail, CNN reported Monday night.

“It’s obviously going to be fucking rough,” one adviser told CNN. The best case scenario is for Republicans to lose the House, but narrowly retain control of the Senate, the adviser added.

As Trump’s polling has hit humiliating new lows, he has opted to use the midterms as a referendum on his presidency—leading some GOP candidates to quietly scrub any mention of “Trump” from their campaign platforms, and others to openly criticize his policies.

Trump intends to spend much of October on the road “spending money, and helping every one of them get elected,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday.

One official told CNN that Trump intends to be “playing hard in Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio,” and to focus on battleground districts. Another official, however, told the outlet that even in purple states, Trump will only be visiting more conservative areas. Next week, the president will head to Alabama and Oklahoma.