This Political Ad Is Going Viral. Is It The Worst Ad Ever Made?

I’m about to show you one of the most cowardly and self-defeating political ads ever produced in modern American history.

With just over a month to go until the midterms, in a year that’s been dominated by legitimate concerns about the cost of living and the difficulty of finding stable, long-term employment that can support a family and a mortgage, the Republican governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has just made the baffling decision to demonize the most loyal supporters of her party — namely, white men. 

I call this decision baffling, and it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s unexpected or surprising. This is the Republican Party, after all. They might be useless and unreliable, but at least you can always count on them to be openly contemptuous of their own voting base. 

According to Republicans in Arkansas, contrary to what you’re seeing every day with your own eyes, the truth is that lazy white men are the real problem. Yes, it’s white men. White men are the ones dragging us down. They’re the cinder block chained to our ankle, pulling us, as a nation, into the icy depths. They’re defrauding the government. They’re ripping off the treasury. They’re unwilling to work, improve their own lives, or contribute to society. 

Forget everything you’ve seen, or think you’ve seen, about Somali daycares and EBT scams and “home health care” shams and welfare fraud — you know, all of that rampant, pervasive corruption that’s overwhelmingly committed by non-whites, including millions of foreigners. 

In the eyes of the Republican Party establishment, you should focus your disdain, instead, on an imaginary epidemic of 20-something white male welfare queens. 

Watch:

You pay taxes to cover welfare for people who just choose not to work. That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.

If you’re young, healthy, and get government assistance, you should work, go to school, or volunteer. https://t.co/M83nxNMdry

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 28, 2026

Source: @SarahHuckabee/X.com

At first glance, it’s surprising to see a white male depicted in an ad at all. That’s a rare sight these days, as we know. I was watching football on Sunday, and I don’t think I saw a single commercial with a white male unless he was depicted as part of a biracial couple or multiracial friend group. Aside from that, you’ll only see white males in commercials if they’re portraying burglars in a home security ad, or greedy credit card company executives in an ad for a different credit card company. That’s the kind of brilliantly subtle messaging we’ve come to expect from our nation’s illustrious marketing departments. 

It’s also, apparently, exactly what we can expect from the Republican Party, which rose to power in the last election by campaigning — quite explicitly — against DEI and anti-white discrimination in general. Now they’re trying to convince us that the prototypical welfare parasite is a 23-year-old white guy named Brad — which is exactly like producing a PSA calling attention to plummeting math scores, featuring a procrastinating, incompetent East Asian math student named, like, Zang Chen or something. You know, exactly the sort of person that immediately springs to mind when we think of people who aren’t good at math. 

The truth, of course, is that white males are among the least likely to be on any kind of welfare at all. Young white males like Brad are virtually non-existent on the welfare rolls. 

There’s a reason why, when Republican politicians and consultants get together in a room to come up with an ad for their new welfare policy — which, by the way, is a good policy, and we’ll talk more about that in a moment — they make the deliberate decision to represent welfare leeches with a stereotypical “lazy white male” caricature. There’s a reason they specifically chose not to use a more statistically accurate caricature. If you think the conservative critics of this ad are overreacting, then just imagine how basically everyone would have responded if they had used the exact same approach, but with a different race. 

Someone on X called “Dr Clown, PhD,” who may or may not be a legitimate medical doctor, posted an AI mock-up with the races swapped out. Here it is:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ welfare ad, except I used the slacker they were too scared to show. pic.twitter.com/orP69RS1JA

— Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) September 28, 2026

Source: @DrClownPhD/X.com

Now, I object to that on the grounds that it’s AI slop. It’s also still not really representative of the statistically standard welfare moocher, who is more likely — and most likely — to be a black single mom with multiple children. 

The people attaching themselves to the welfare system like barnacles on the hull of a ship, and staying on the dole for their entire lives, and costing the taxpayers untold billions of dollars every single year, are generally not young male gamers of any race. But the point still stands. That AI slop video is a lowbrow, insulting black male caricature. You would never see that or anything like it — AI or otherwise — from any politician on the Left or the Right. And if you ever did, it would be widely condemned as racist. Nobody would pretend that they don’t see the problem with it — that they don’t understand what the ad is doing or why. 

This is the kind of demonization that only ever goes one way and only ever targets one group. White males have been degraded, demeaned, and systematically disadvantaged by every institution in the country — explicitly, openly so — for decades. That is a fact. Some of us are tired of it. And we expect our elected representatives to push back against it. Or at the very least, if they don’t have the gumption to push back, at least don’t participate in it. 

Not every conservative feels this way. As the ad provoked a loud and justified backlash from many on the Right, some were quick to rush to its defense. For example, Joel Berry, who used to write for the Babylon Bee, posted the following to X: 

There’s a strategic reason behind using a white guy in this ad. It’s designed to keep the conversation on the merits of the policy instead of making it a racial issue. That would’ve worked great 10 years ago, but now we have a growing contingent of whites who are just as cripplingly insecure and neurotic about race as a BIPOC sjw.

I don’t know why Berry is pretending he doesn’t understand the point. But I do know that he is pretending. He’s smart enough to know that there is a rather significant difference between the white people criticizing this ad and the “BIPOC sjws.” 

The difference is that the latter group complains about systemic and institutional bigotry against their favored demographic groups, except that the systemic and institutional bigotry is not real. The “growing contingent of whites,” as Berry calls them, complaining about systemic and institutional bigotry against white males, in that case is real. 

Joel, do you understand the distinction between complaining about a thing that isn’t happening, and complaining about a thing that is happening? Do you see why there is no logical or moral equivalence between the two? I think you do see it. You’re pretending that you don’t. 

In fact, I know you see it, because you admit it in the first sentence. You say: “There’s a strategic reason behind using a white guy in this ad. It’s designed to keep the conversation on the merits of the policy instead of making it a racial issue.”

Why would that be the case, Joel? Why would political consultants assume that the only way to avoid a racial controversy is to portray the oafish, dishonest, useless parasite as a white male? Is it because white males are the only group that can be portrayed that way in our society? Is it because that is the unspoken — and sometimes actually spoken — rule that every major institution in the country has followed for decades? 

Yes, you’re right. And that’s the point. Some of us are not okay with white males being the default punching bags. If that makes us “cripplingly insecure,” so be it. But I’d say someone appears to be emotionally crippled in this conversation, and it’s not us. 

Meanwhile, in the face of this backlash, instead of firing her communications team and admitting the ad was a terrible idea, Huckabee Sanders proceeded to make the situation infinitely worse. She didn’t simply double down. She took a cue from the Joel Berry camp and pretended she didn’t understand what everyone was upset about. Here’s what she wrote:

Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period.

Again, these “critics online” are conservatives who are simply tired of seeing even our own side demonize young white men. Your team made an obviously intentional decision to not depict a more statistically representative welfare leech, which, as you know, would be a black single mom. 

Can you explain why you made that decision? Can you explain why there’s no way in hell, no way in a million years, you would ever produce that kind of ad with any other group as the villain? If you don’t want to explain it, because it’s precisely the answer we already know, then at least don’t insult our intelligence by pretending that you don’t understand the point we’re making.

You certainly know that we aren’t upset about work requirements for welfare. Republican voters support work requirements, where people have to demonstrate that they’re trying to find a job before they can get benefits. 

Many of us want to go much further than work requirements. Speaking for myself at least, I’d like to eliminate food stamps entirely. The SNAP program has no reason to exist. It’s the single easiest welfare program to defraud, and that is obviously saying something. It’s built on a false premise, which is that millions of Americans need free food or else they’ll starve. That’s just not true. It’s a fantasy. Nobody in America is at risk of starvation. We’re all going to die. We’re at risk of many different kinds of physical calamities. But starvation is not going to be the thing that takes any of us out. Americans are, by orders of magnitude, more likely to die from eating too much than too little.

As The Wall Street Journal reported this year:

America doesn’t have a “hunger” problem. About three-quarters of adult food-stamp beneficiaries are overweight or obese. Only 3% are underweight. More Americans of all income levels die from illnesses caused by overindulgence than by hunger.

Yes, three-quarters of adult food-stamp recipients are overweight or obese. This is a program that costs around $100 billion per year, and 75% of the adult recipients, by definition, do not need “food assistance.” If anything, they need the opposite. 

You could make a much more compelling case for distributing taxpayer-funded Ozempic than for food stamps. Not that I’d be in favor of that. But the point still stands. And if anyone does need help accessing food, they have about ten other welfare programs they can draw money from, not to mention private charities, soup kitchens, food pantries, and so on. 

That’s why, if you spend five minutes on TikTok, you’ll find that food stamp recipients are generally obese and highly entitled. They’re also bragging about making “plates” and selling them on the street using their food stamp money. 

Watch:

Tiktoker says she’s gonna be robbing and stealing from stores if SNAP benefits are paused and threatens to hurt security if they try to stop her @FBI @FBIDirectorKash pic.twitter.com/TvAg0yhRfY

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 29, 2025

Source: @libsoftiktok/X.com

and:

There’s an entire underground economy where welfare recipients turn their benefits into “plates” and sell them for a profit on social media

GOP cowards won’t address it because the recipients look a little different than they do in this ad pic.twitter.com/pdJOvn3mQK https://t.co/ORKjhH7kQg

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) September 28, 2026

Source: @AuronMacintyre/X.com

This is the kind of fraud worth depicting in a political ad. It would actually resonate with voters, because it’s really happening. And it’s costing us tens of billions of dollars every year.

The Sarah Huckabee Sanders team is going out of its way to demonize one of the few demographics in the country who are actually net contributors to the U.S. economy. That may not have been the conscious motive. The conscious motive was more likely to simply avoid offending racial minorities, in particular black women. And that’s exactly what makes the decision so ludicrous.

This is a demographic that overwhelmingly votes Democrat in every single election. Something like 92% of black women supported Kamala Harris. Ninety-five percent went for Joe Biden. Ninety-four percent went for Hillary in 2016, and 96% went for Obama. You cannot find a single election where black women supported Republicans to any significant degree. 

It has never happened and never will happen. And yet Republicans would rather alienate their actual base to appease groups that nearly universally despise them, and will never feel any differently toward them no matter what happens. These cowards don’t have the guts to criticize groups that will never vote for them anyway. They just never learn.

To be clear about this, Huckabee Sanders does not oppose the idea of SNAP in general. In April 2025, she publicly advocated to ban SNAP for junk food — which is good policy. At the same time, she demanded that the federal government allow people to buy hot rotisserie chickens with their SNAP benefits. Her stated reason was that she wanted people to be healthier, even though there are already plenty of healthy foods people can buy with SNAP if they want to. 

Watch:

The honest explanation for what’s going on here is that it’s corporate welfare. Some of the biggest corporations in Arkansas — Walmart, Tyson’s, Sam’s Club, Kroger, and so on — sell hot rotisserie chickens. If Huckabee Sanders were able to secure an exemption allowing people to buy these chickens with SNAP benefits, it would be a very big deal for all of these big grocery stores. 

In general, SNAP isn’t allowed to be spent on prepared foods, since it’s supposed to be an absolute last resort — it’s supposed to help people get the essentials that they can prepare at home, and nothing more. But Huckabee Sanders wanted an exemption, which would benefit companies like Walmart. And as you’ve probably guessed, the Walton family — which owns Walmart — is a major donor to Sarah Sanders and her various initiatives. The Waltons were some of the largest individual donors to Huckabee Sanders’ campaign. Jim Walton sent half a million dollars to an education-focused group that employed Huckabee Sanders’ campaign manager, Chris Caldwell, in a high-level position.

Is this a conspiracy? Who knows. But it certainly doesn’t look good. If we really want those dastardly 20-year-old gamers to get off the couch and find a job and stop bilking the welfare rolls — all, like, 5 or 6 of them who are doing that — why exactly should we be paying for them to eat hot rotisserie chickens from Walmart? Why don’t we tell this mostly fictional group of welfare recipients to eat rice and beans every day until they finally put down the controller and go to work? Hot rotisserie chickens taste good. It’s the kind of food people can eat every night and feel great about doing so. That’s the opposite of the kind of food we want to give people for free. They should be getting the bare minimum, since, again, virtually all welfare recipients are already overweight.

If Huckabee Sanders were truly concerned about the plight of young white men, she would be talking about the rise of mobile sports gambling in her state — which the government legalized just a few years ago. In 2019, a total of $11 million was wagered on sports in Arkansas, according to the state government. Then states legalized betting on smartphones, and everything changed. By 2025, more than $655 million was wagered in a single year in Arkansas. 

This year, more than $2.5 million is wagered on sports in Arkansas every day. This is a massive financial problem for young men in the state. Instead of investing in their own retirement or a home, they’re making extremely risky bets on their phones. And, mostly without realizing it, they’re playing a rigged game — the sportsbooks go to great lengths to ban anyone who wins too much. 

Has Huckabee Sanders said anything about this? As far as I can tell, she hasn’t. She’s allowed gambling to proliferate instead. In fact, the Arkansas Racing Commission just approved a petition from casinos to partner with all the major national sports betting apps to expand access to gambling even further.

We’re told not to worry about any of this. We’re supposed to mock the poor, unemployed white guy living in his mom’s basement, but we’re not supposed to criticize the sportsbooks in any way. Oh, and while we’re at it, we’re supposed to pay for everyone to buy chickens at Walmart. This isn’t simply an incoherent message. It’s catastrophic. It’s the kind of messaging you get when a political party wants to lose.

What’s interesting here is that Huckabee Sanders is far from the only Republican who’s pushing the message that white people are lazy degenerates. Here’s House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), along with his deputy, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA). These clips are from 2025. 

Watch:

Speaker Johnson: “Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it.

It’s not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We’re going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!” pic.twitter.com/GIbTvz8I5n

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 27, 2025

Source: @libsoftiktok/X.com

and:

REP. SCALISE ON THE OBBB: “The 35-year-old who’s sitting in his mom’s basement playing video games is going to have to go get a job!” pic.twitter.com/SpD8iJTRuY

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 1, 2025

Source: @Breaking911/X.com

This is the go-to talking point on the Right: the people who are sucking up the welfare dollars aren’t black women, or Somalis, or Venezuelans, or anything like that. The real enemy, we’re told, is gamers in their mother’s basement. Young white males named “Brad,” who are playing with their virtual reality headsets on the sofa, are bleeding us dry. That’s the message that the consulting class is telling Republican politicians to push. 

It’s clearly sabotage, and Republicans are either unable or unwilling to see it. They’re paying enormous sums of money to consultants who are telling them to go to war with their own voters.

Meanwhile, back in reality, women are significantly more likely to be on welfare than men. And black people are astronomically more likely to be on welfare than white people. So the number of single young white male “Brads” abusing the welfare system is minuscule. Practically non-existent. But, of course, Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with “Shaniqua” as the villain — even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.

But even as Republicans go out of their way to attack their own voters, Democrats are adopting the exact opposite strategy. They’re building up an entire mythology around black women, even though it’s transparent nonsense. Here’s what Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) said.

Watch:

Black women are the backbone of our economy and we all benefit from their essential contributions to our workforce & communities.

By pushing Black women out of our economy, everyone is being denied their brilliance and intellectual capital. pic.twitter.com/UOJbRU1qBU

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) September 26, 2026

Source: @AyannaPressley/X.com

She’s talking about the “intellectual capital” of black women, and how we should all be in awe of their brilliance. And then, as evidence of this claim, she lists a bunch of federal government agencies that employ black women as bureaucrats, doing routine and unremarkable government work. She literally says that black women are processing applications for student financial aid, as if we’re supposed to sit back in awe at their sheer intellectual brilliance. 

What’s next? Did a black woman give someone a parking ticket? Did a black woman successfully stamp an envelope at the post office? 

We’re all supposed to be impressed here, but all Pressley is demonstrating is that black women hold a disproportionate number of government jobs. It’s really a barely disguised form of welfare, which is designed to minimize humiliation while maximizing payouts to black women. 

There’s a reason why only around 2% of black women in the workforce are employed in the fields of science or engineering, while around 22% are employed in roles involving the government — jumping to over 30% when you include roles in nonprofits and public administration. 

If you add EBT and all other forms of welfare, you end up with a hugely, vastly disproportionate number of black women who are on the public dole in one form or another. More than any other single demographic in the country, and it’s not close.

Everything Democrats say about black women — about how they built the country, are essential to the economy, the country would collapse without them, and so on — is true of white men. It’s not statistically true of black women. There is no actual evidence to support the “backbone of the economy” claim. It’s pure mythology. 

The fact is that if black women got sick and tired of being so oppressed and persecuted by our horrible country and all decided to book JetBlue tickets and leave for greener pastures tomorrow, there is no statistical, data-based reason to think that it would bring America to its knees. 

If white men were to all leave — though I’m not really sure where we would go — it would, without question, cripple our society overnight. That’s the reality. 

Yet no elected Republican on the national stage — and I really mean none of them, not a single one — would ever get up on stage and say about white men what Pressley and every Democrat say every day about black women. No Republican — not Huckabee Sanders, or anyone else — will get up and say, “white men are the backbone of our economy, and we all benefit from their essential contributions to our workforce & communities. By pushing white men out of our economy, everyone is being denied their brilliance and intellectual capital.” 

No Republican will say that, even though it’s true on every point. It’s true that they’re the backbone of the economy. It’s true that their contributions are essential. And it’s true that they’re being pushed out of the economy. Yet this is not a truth that will be explicitly acknowledged by any of our representatives. 

The most that some of them might do — maybe — is speak glowingly about the wonderful ways that various groups contribute to American culture, and include white men in the list. But most of them won’t even do that. And they certainly won’t say anything uniquely positive about white men. 

Should we just accept that? Should we surrender ourselves to this state of affairs? Should we just learn to love, or at least accept without complaint, the idea that white men can only be condemned, but never praised? Should we even sit back silently while the insulting stereotypes rightfully earned by other demographics are put around our necks instead? Should we just allow ourselves to be the sacrificial goats of modern Western society, saddled with the sins of society and exiled into the wilderness? 

My answer to that is not only no, but hell no. That should be the answer we all give. It should be the answer the Republican Party gives. But that will only happen if the GOP starts by getting rid of all their communications consultants — particularly the girlbosses and the DEI hires. 

They need to replace them with people who understand why they won the last election — and why they’re currently on pace to lose the next one. Instead of running a demoralization campaign against your own voters, try something productive — like suspending the H-1B program, or shutting down SNAP entirely, or launching a civil rights investigation into every government agency that has deliberately refused to hire white men. 

Maybe take a single concrete step to improve the lives of white Americans, instead of mocking them. That’s one way you can have some chance of actually staying in power — assuming you actually want to. 

White men did not simply build the United States. They also built the Republican Party — and without them, this party as we know it will cease to exist in very short order.