A new video from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was standard issue Republican messaging for promoting her state’s stricter rules for people on Medicaid. No more could able-bodied people lounge around while receiving taxpayer-funded healthcare, she said — they needed to work.
But the decision to portray an unemployed moocher as a young, white, cheeseball-chomping gamer named Brad upset some conservative commentators last week. Five decades after Ronald Reagan popularized the “welfare queen” trope about people living luxuriously while not working, they wanted to know why the video wasn’t featuring a Black woman instead.
“Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain,” posted Matt Walsh, a conservative writer. “Even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.”
My wife used to work as an optician, and she said that almost every client from a nearby rural town was on Medicare or Medicaid.
From the Wikipedia page on the town discussing the census results: The race distribution is as follows: 554 White, 0 African American, 0 Asian, 8 American Indian and Alaska Native, 0 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, 34 Other, and 12 who identified by two or more races.