How A Welfare Ad Melted The Internet’s Alt-Right Snowflakes

The snowflakes that fall from the sky are all unique, but the ones who waste their days melting down on the internet are all the same.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders set off a blizzard on Monday by releasing an ad about “Brad,” a Cheeto-housing, video game-playing bum, to promote her administration’s efforts to comply with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s welfare reform provisions.

“Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession. But you, you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad, who just choose not to work,” marveled Sanders. “That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement. Now, more Arkansans are working than ever before — even Brad.”

The problem? The actor who played “Brad” is white, a microaggression that the Right’s dregs took as a declaration of race war.

Alt-right donor extraordinaire Charles Haywood panned the ad as “disgusting,” and deplored the “Boomer Republicans” he supposed it had been designed for.

The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre mocked “the courageous portrayal of young white men as welfare queens” and predicted that “the first political party to stop hating young white men will win for a generation.”

“You’re a coward and a joke,” raged the hysterical shock jock in a huffy reply to the governor.

James Fishback, the Buster Bluth look-alike who flew a little too close to the sun earlier this year, suggested that the next such spot feature a “baby-momma with a BMW who just got back from her Carnival Cruise.” That was only a prelude to an announcement that he would be holding a “press conference in Little Rock tomorrow about Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ false and disgraceful ad.” Stunning and brave — more so than anything we’ve seen since Fishback volunteered to get his clock cleaned by the black man he spent the entirety of Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary attacking on explicitly racist grounds.

The crashouts outnumbered the stars in the sky. Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame lamented that “all the GOP had to do was stop attacking White men and Gen Z and instead try to show them they actually care about their issues.” Mike Cernovich submitted that “Republicans are running a demoralization campaign against white men” and “don’t want them to vote in the midterms.”

“This is sabotage at a level rarely seen,” added Cernovich as The X-Files theme played in the background.

At this moment, dear reader, you might be asking yourself, “Am I missing something? Is Fishback’s dad named Brad? Does MacIntyre look a little too much like him? Does Posobiec house Cheetos? Did Huckabee Sanders include a quip about lazy crackers or white trash the author is eliding?” Surely, there must be some rational explanation for the puddle of tears pooling at these man-children’s feet.

Or at least one might think so, but there’s not. All that grievance is over an ad in which a singular white man (one, 1) was depicted as coasting off the system.

Now, the competent demagogue might divine some vague semblance of prejudice in Huckabee Sanders’ shot at “guys like Brad,” but it ought not take a rocket scientist to deduce who she was referring to. Not “white men,” but those of any color who might be keen to abuse the welfare system. Huckabee Sanders is Mike Huckabee’s daughter and a high-profile alum of the first Trump administration. Does anyone earnestly believe that she or anyone on her team set out to churn out anti-white propaganda? Or that the negative portrayal of, again, one (1) white actor conveys racial overtones?

The truth is that they probably landed on a white man for the same reason that a majority of Medicaid enrollees in Arkansas are white: they constitute a majority of the state’s population. They also make up a smaller proportion of the enrollees than blacks and Hispanics relative to their share of the population.

But none of that has anything to do with the ad, which wasn’t about race.

That it has become about race is profoundly troubling. Identitarian-flavored hypersensitivity on the Left is what yielded moral panics over “OK” signals, prom dresses, and monuments over the last decade, not to mention the multiple electoral backlashes that sent Donald Trump to Washington twice. This collective tantrum demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that, if widely adopted, it would produce the same intellectual and moral shortcomings on the Right, not to mention the consequences at the ballot box.

Those working tirelessly — and to their eternal shame — to compel their fellow conservatives to forsake the time-honored values of colorblindness and individualism in favor of primitive tribalism are no better than the faux-progressives they profess to oppose — and are all the more insidious for trying to corrupt civilization’s vanguard with their disease of the mind and spirit.

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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.