Last Friday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer joined “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss far-left freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s (D-NY) (AOC) disingenuous reaction to the news that the Trump administration intends to tighten the rules pertaining to food stamp (SNAP) distribution for able-boded adults without dependents. As The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo reported last Friday:
On Thursday, democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed the Trump administration is on its way to cruelly starving children and single parents to death over welfare reform.
However, the claim, which of course went viral on Twitter, is not true. As highlighted by Daily Caller reporter Peter Hasson, the work-requirement reform only affects able-bodied folks from the ages of ages 18-49 who are childless.
“My family relied on food stamps (EBT) when my dad died at 48,” the congresswoman posted to Twitter on Thursday. “I was a student. If this happened then, we might’ve just starved.”
Hammer joined Wheeler’s program to dissect and break down the false and misleading premise of Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet. Wheeler began by reciting the Left’s fear-mongering claims that children will starve, but said that she does not see evidence that this is true. Hammer began his response by playing off Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro’s signature line that “facts don’t care about your feelings”:
Well that’s because there is no evidence. Liz, my boss likes to say that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” which is obviously correct. But what I have noticed over my years in this business already — at the tender age of thirty — is that facts have an inherently conservative bias.
Now you see, this is just a perfect example of the kind of outright lies, distortions, obfuscations, exaggerations, and just general [un]truths that the Left is routinely forced to resort to in order to present their narratives. As you quite factually and elegantly laid out, [AOC] was nineteen years old [at the time]. Her mother could have claimed her as a dependent, so under these new rules, her mother would have still had SNAP payments. …
What is the broader point, that’s something I want to talk about as well, is focusing on … about [how] this was a Clinton-era law, okay? This [welfare reform] is a landmark Clinton-era law. It was not a small-potato bill — it was one of the legislative landmarks in the entire Clinton presidency. And what’s happening here, and we see this over and over again, Defense of Marriage Act, Glass-Steagall [repeal] financial reform — the Left in the year 2019, and really over the past five years in general, is engaged in a systemic breakdown, an extirpation of the roots out of the Clinton agenda. They are trying to move so far to the left of what the party stood for literally only 20 years ago, and this is part and parcel part of that project, I believe.
Wheeler then clarified that the new Trump administration rules will hardly abolish the SNAP program in any way; by contrast, it merely amounts to prudent means-testing.
WATCH: