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A new ad by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders put white men at the center of her state welfare work requirement policy.
Independent journalism is facing unprecedented pressure. As newsrooms shrink, accountability disappears with them. Your membership keeps fearless, reader-funded reporting alive. Media commentators in the MAGA movement shredded Arkansas Gov.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday over a new TV ad depicting white male gamers as the target of a state welfare fraud crackdown — and claimed the Republican hadn’t injected enough race into her messaging. Drawing the ire of the right: Sanders’ promotion of new work requirements for Natural State welfare recipients, featuring a tousle-headed gamer named “Brad,” shown in the advert mashing a video game controller and scarfing potato chips.
“Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession,” Sanders tells voters in the ad. “But you, you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad who just choose not to work. ”You pay taxes to cover welfare for people who just choose not to work.
That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.of a gamer, typically young and male, when speaking about Americans they say abuse government benefits. But Sanders’ cheese ball-munching “Brad” proved especially offensive to far-right commentators.
The dustup targeting Sanders, a longtime Trump loyalist and former White House press secretary during his first term, illustrates how achieving long-standing conservative policy goals — like work requirements for government aid recipients — is often not enough for identity-obsessed MAGA allies, who want to display dominance over their perceived political enemies far more than they want to fix the nuts and bolts of governance. Conservative podcast host Matt Walsh claimed the number of single white men on welfare was “minuscule” and “practically non-existent.
” “Meanwhile, back in reality, women are significantly more likely to be on welfare than men,” Walsh fumed in a reply to SandersAnd Walsh made clear he thought Sanders and other Republicans should lean into the issue’s racial dimension.
“Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain,” he wrote. “Even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand. ”Walsh’s assumptions about Medicaid recipients might be a bit off.
Nationally, 36% of Medicaid recipients were white, 24% were Hispanic and 19% were Black in 2023, according to theJack Posobiec, a Turning Point USA contributor and longtime far-right activist, took to Sanders’ X replies to ask AI assistant Grok about the demographics of welfare recipients in Arkansas.
“Yikes,” heOther far-right commentators claimed “Brad” was an emblem of Republican disdain for white men. “A lot of the GOP is so scared of being called mean names by the media that they can only ever turn their guns on the one group that overwhelmingly supports them,”Walsh concurred, arguing that while white men formed the largest GOP voting bloc, the party “shits on” them “at every opportunity.
” “These idiotic cowards don’t even have the guts to criticize groups that will never vote for them anyway,” he said.
“They just never learn. ”Arkansas started imposing new limits on Medicaid benefits for unemployed adults without disabilities in July. Republicans in Congress last year told states to tighten so-called “work requirements” to help offset the cost of a massive tax cut tilted toward wealthier households and corporations.
“I’m thankful to President Trump and congressional Republicans for paving the way for this commonsense solution and allowing us to put our welfare work requirement in place,” Sanders said in July. Though cutting social spending is generally unpopular, billing the cuts as work requirements makes them much more palatable to voters. And Republicans have sought to villainize people affected by the new rules by portraying them as lazy gamers.
“The next time a Democrat makes false claims about ‘Medicaid cuts,’ just remember that what they’re really saying is they want illegal aliens and able-bodied adults playing video games at home to continue stealing resources from those who need it,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement from his office last year. There’s a grain of truth to the talking point.
In an analysis of American Time Use Survey data, the conservativethat childless, unemployed adults enrolled in Medicaid spent 4.2 hours per week watching TV or playing video games, while Medicaid recipients with jobs spent only 2.7 hours per week watching TV or gaming.
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