MSNBC’s Ari Melber was up in arms Wednesday night, as he filled in on The Rachel Maddow Show, at Fox News for daring to report that food stamp fraud was up to roughly $70 million in 2016. But the outrage at Fox gave way to outrage at the white working class for falling for the racist “dog whistle” of caring about said fraud. “Why is this all coming up again now,” he inquired to his radical leftist guest Joan Walsh from The Nation.
“Well, why now is because we have Fox News, which is awaiting a President Donald Trump by rerunning their greatest hits,” she declared, “I mean, Fox has done this before. They did it under Obama. They chased this idea of food stamp fraud.” Walsh completely wrote off the facts and pretending like the fraud was not happening, while smearing everyone who brought it up as racist:
But it goes way back, it goes back to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan in the '60s talked about strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks with their food stamps and everybody knew who he was talking about. So when Newt Gingrich talked about Obama that way, it's a dog whistle. We've heard it before. We'll hear it again and hear it a lot under President Trump.
Walsh’s cries of racism shifted into a pseudo intellectual critique of President-elect Donald Trump’s supports, implying that they didn’t understand they were voting against their self-interest (a common smear from liberal elitists looking down on the working class). “First of all, seven out of ten states that are top food stamp recipients are red states,” she opined to Melber, “They voted for Donald Trump. So the politics of this is very interesting.”
She slammed Republicans for not having solutions for the plight of the working class, while Melber noted that some of those red states had high rates of ObamaCare enrollment. In response to Melber’s point, Walsh whined that people blame the government for their problems and not understanding otherwise, “But we've got this tradition of the white working class sadly hating programs that actually benefit them.”
“Really believing they've come to blame the government for their joblessness or the fact that their jobs pay low wages. So they resent, even though they benefit,” Walsh continued. But what goes well over Walsh’s head (and what she describes as “weird conundrum for Democrats”) is that the working class is smarter than she gives them credit for. The people understand that government erects hurtles that stifle success, and that the liberals’ assault on actual free markets hurts their ability to get ahead.
Ironically, the whole discussion was started when Melber claimed that Fox News had lied about the $70 million in food stamp fraud. Melber claimed that MSNBC called the Agriculture Department and were told they didn’t know the origin of the number. He cited the radical leftist website Mother Jones as a “fact checker” who found “There's zero evidence that fraud is at an all-time high.”
But according to a Washington Post piece criticizing the Fox News report, the number is not an issue but arguing it requires the end of the program is.