- Paul Krugman on food stamps/SNAP; the common conservative belief that recipients are malingerers; and some facts about who actually gets those benefits;
- The Labor Department’s white supremacist posters;
- Short items;
- Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld on Trump’s disrespect, and how he’s wrong in the head.
Paul Krugman, 28 Oct 2025: The Hunger Games Begin, subtitled “40 million Americans are about to lose food stamps”
While in in the check-out line, I often see some patrons, typically elderly and/or disabled, paying with EBT cards. EBT cards are the way the government delivers food aid under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. SNAP has become a crucial part of America’s social safety net, with more than 40 million Americans relying on those EBT cards to put food on the table.
And unless the government shutdown ends this week, which seems basically impossible, federal support for SNAP will be cut off this Saturday.
He goes on with four things to know: It’s a Republican decision; The pain will likely hurt Republican voters worse than Democrats; Despite what Republicans believe, SNAP recipients aren’t malingerers; Food stamps are an investment in the future.
On the third point:
Why are Republicans hostile to a program that benefits tens of millions of Americans? Pay attention to right-wing rhetoric about food stamps and you’ll hear again and again assertions that SNAP beneficiaries are lazy malingerers — the “bums on welfare” who should be forced to go out and get jobs.
But that myth is punctured by
a quick look at who gets SNAP. The fact is, the great majority of SNAP recipients can’t work: 40 percent are children; 18 percent are elderly; 11 percent are disabled. Furthermore, a majority of recipients who are capable of working do work. They are the working poor: their jobs just don’t pay enough, or offer sufficiently stable employment, to make ends meet without aid.
Then reviewing evidence about the long-term benefits, to expand on the fourth point.
Which brings us back to the impending cutoff of SNAP. It’s gratuitous: Republicans could easily avoid this cutoff if they wanted to. It’s cruel: Millions of Americans will suffer severely from the loss of food aid. And it’s destructive: Depriving children, in particular, of aid will cast a shadow on America’s economy and society for decades to come.
So of course the cutoff is going to happen. At this late date it’s hard to see how it can be avoided.
My thought: don’t Republicans realize that when SNAP is cut off, and the health-care premium subsidies expire, everyone will blame *Republicans*? That’s what they want, and what Democrats have been holding off on a budget agreement to resist.
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Right on cue:
JMG, 28 October 2025: Walsh: SNAP Recipients Are “Simply Entitled, Lazy, Barely Literate, And Frankly Just Bad People”
From “Self-avowed Christian nationalist Matt Walsh.”
This confirms another one of my provisional conclusions about conservatives as typified by wrong-headed, simple-minded, and mean-spirited thinking. Conservatives think the worst of other people. Or to put it in different terms: they have extremely tight circles of moral empathy.
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Several fact-checks have been floating around on Facebook, which make the point similar to Krugman’s. Here’s one:
Some important facts about SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program):
If you’d like to push back against some common misconceptions about the program or the people who rely on it, here are a few things to know:
• Members of Congress receive $79 per day for meals.
• The average SNAP recipient receives about $6.31 per day in food assistance.
Food stamps aren’t what’s bankrupting our country. The real issue? Greed.
Roughly 30% of SNAP recipients are working, many of them full-time. The rest are largely children, older adults, or individuals with disabilities who are not expected to work.
• About 30% of all recipients are children, showing how vital SNAP is for families trying to provide for their kids.
• Around 4.5 million households that include a person with a disability rely on SNAP—about 1 in 5 of all SNAP households.
• Roughly 21% of recipients are older adults, or about 8.6 million seniors, many of whom depend on SNAP to meet basic nutritional needs.
More at the link. You could easily relate this issue to that of inequality, in which an increasingly small number of billionaires seem to own everything, and Republican voters apparently approve of that.
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Or, here’s an AI Overview to the Google question “who gets snap benefits”.
Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities receive SNAP (food stamp) benefits most frequently, with the majority of benefits going to households with at least one of these members. Most SNAP benefits also go to households with incomes at or below the federal poverty line. Among specific demographic groups, families with children make up the largest share of SNAP households.
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To some extent, I suspect, such conservative resistance and suspicion is simply racist, reflect the ongoing theme of white supremacy within the Trump administration. Here’s another meme that’s been going around on Facebook, captured by Boing Boing.
Boing Boing, Carla Sinclair, 27 Oct 2025: Trump Labor Dept promotes Aryan workforce in creepy Nazi-style ad campaign
Calling all white Christian men: The Trump regime “NEEDS YOU!” to “Build America’s future!” and “Restore the American dream.” If you’re anything other than a Caucasian young buck, however, you’re out of luck.
Only freshly scrubbed white dudes are featured as real workers in the U.S Department of Labor’s months-long “Blue Collar Boom” ad campaign, which uses Nazi-like propaganda posters on Instagram and X to promise prosperous days ahead. (See examples below.)
And here’s a screen capture from someone on Facebook.
What decade are we in again? What century?
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I think everything else from today can be captured briefly.
- JMG, 28 Oct 2025: Musk Launches Far-Right Competitor To Wikipedia — Namely “Grokipedia” using a word from Robert A. Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND from 1961; doesn’t he know there already a Conservapedia?
- Similar note. The Guardian, 28 Oct 2025: An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’, subtitled “Patrick Gelsinger, executive chairman of Gloo, has made it his mission to advance Christian principles in Silicon Valley” — Alas.
- Vox, Joshua Keating, 28 Oct 2025: Has Trump actually ended any wars?, subtitled “The president’s peacemaking claims range from partly true, to misleading, to baffling.” — No. You can’t trust anything he says.
- JMG, 28 Oct 2025: Duffy Threatens To Defund NYC’s Subway System — “lying as usual about NYC crime rates during today’s appearance on Fox & Friends”
- JMG, 28 Oct 2025: Texas Supreme Court: State Judges Can Refuse To Officiate Same-Sex Weddings Over “Religious Belief” — This invites the question about whether believers can violate *any* on a religious exemption. My answer: they shouldn’t be able to. They should get a different job.
- Media Matters, 27 Oct 2025: Pete Hegseth is replacing the Pentagon press corps with MAGA propagandists — As I’ve been saying.
- The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, 25 Oct 2025: Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing, subtitled “The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat.” — Because he could.
And finally,
LGBTQNation, Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, 25 Oct 2025: A president who creates anything like Trump’s feces video has no respect for this country, subtitled “Posting that video takes a president who believes he is above the people and the law, and a president who has something terribly wrong in the head.”
The question we must all address is:
What does it take for a president of the United States to create and post an AI-generated video of himself wearing an imperial crown and dumping massive amounts of feces from a “King Trump” jet onto No Kings protesters marching below?
It takes a president who has no respect for his constituents, whether they voted for him or not.
It takes a president who has no respect for the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to redress grievances.
It takes a president who believes he is above the people and above the law.
It takes a president who has absolutely no moral compass.
Quite frankly, it takes a president who has something terribly wrong in the head.
And furthermore, I would add, why do so many people not care, or still approve of him? I think there is some sort of moral rot in human nature. But that verges on paradox. I’ll think about it.
