Editor’s Note: Woke Wars, formerly an email newsletter from The Sentinel meant to cover the cultural insurgence of wokeness in our society, is now exclusively available on our website.
The leftists like to virtue signal about supplying people with welfare benefits.
As with many other causes they support, forcing taxpayers to feed tens of millions of people across the country requires nothing from the leftists personally, while allowing them to accuse conservatives who support welfare reform of wanting children to die or hating poor people.
Those talking points made a resurgence when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that SNAP recipients may be banned from buying soda and other junk food with their benefits.
Seems like common sense.
“Will we ever take food out of a hungry child’s mouth? Of course not, this is the United States of America,” she told reporters. “I look forward to working with Bobby Kennedy as we figure out, ‘Do we have the healthiest choices?’ So when a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are we okay with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children?”
Such a position is perfectly reasonable. Our government funding junk food for children rather than nutritious food only guarantees a continued obesity and chronic illness crisis. If parents are receiving taxpayer money to buy food, they should at least be required to buy actual food.
But the leftists had a problem with that position, framing the policy as selfish and cruel.
One woman claimed online that she was on food stamps as a “single full time employed mom” and asserted that “sometimes even poor people who’ve made bad life choices want to eat pizza and ice cream once in a while.” This champion of the poor added that “their kids have birthdays just like yours do,” as if they could not use their own money once per year to buy junk food.
Such a compassionate soul.
The leftists are not willing to think critically about their positions. The leftists rely on their positions for their sense of morality, because they often lack other forms of virtue in their lives.
In this case, that is leading leftists to support pumping poor children full of junk food with your taxpayer dollars, meaning that you have less money to buy real food for your own children.
The administration should simply tune out the complaints of the woke scolds and the virtue signalers as they implement common sense policies that the vast majority of people support.
