Meet Brad. Brad is the star of a new campaign ad by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who’s running for governor of Arkansas.
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“Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession,” Sanders tells us as we watch Brad lying on a beanbag in front of the TV, playing video games and finding inventive ways to shovel food into his fat gob without moving.
“But you, you actually work hard,” Sanders continues.
“You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad 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.”
The ad has caused something of a stink since it dropped on Monday. That’s putting it lightly.
Sanders has only made the situation worse for herself by doubling down and choosing to misunderstand the criticism she’s facing.
“Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad,” she said after the video had accrued something like seven million views and thousands of furious comments and quote-tweets.
“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.”
It’s not about the cheese balls, Sarah. It’s not about the policy, either. I don’t think anybody likely to vote for Sarah Huckabee Sanders or any other Republican candidate would object to denying welfare to people who can work but choose not to. It’s a good policy, in line with basic conservative principles. The policy would have my vote, for sure.
No, the problem is that Brad is white. And after decades of virulent anti-white hatred, in which white men in particular have been demonized for all the world’s ills—quite literally—and made subject to official and unofficial discrimination in every possible form, in education, the workplace, the media, and popular culture, you simply don’t have to do this shit anymore. You don’t have to pretend it’s true.
President Trump was elected on a promise, among other things, to dismantle race-based discrimination in the U.S., which almost entirely disfavors white Americans, and in his first 18 months, he’s done exactly that. The Department of Justice’s despicable Community Relations Service, which actively covered up anti-white murders like that of Donald Giusti, stoned and kicked to death in a park in Maine by a group of Somalis, has been scuppered (it still has to exist because of the Civil Rights Act). DEI is being torched. The U.S. even has a pro-white foreign policy. The State Department now warns European allies of the dangers of mass immigration and excoriates the government of South Africa for the murder of thousands of white farmers and a new law that could see Zimbabwe-style land seizures. The only refugees being let into the U.S. are thousands of Boers.
So why is a Republican candidate portraying a slovenly welfare scammer as a young white man by default?
The charitable explanation would be that it’s just a careless choice. A hangover from that long, dark period when everyone had to pretend white men were the source of all the world’s problems. Maybe Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her media team just have a tin ear, so to speak, and they can’t hear how radically the music has changed. But that doesn’t change the fact that the ad should never have been released, and Sanders stupidly compounded her error.
The reality of welfare fraud is very different. The best data we have are federal conviction rates for welfare fraud. In fiscal year 2025, 57 percent of people for welfare fraud were black. About 13 percent of the American population is black, a statistic you’re already likely to know if you’ve made “noticing” your preoccupation in recent years. By contrast, 20 percent of convictions were handed down to white Americans: a significant underrepresentation. We also have some local data. In Harris County, Texas, over a period of 30 years, 70 percent of defendants in welfare fraud cases , and black women accounted for 63 percent of all prosecutions.
We don’t have any decent stats for welfare fraud in Arkansas, but my hunch is the trend would be the same as in Harris County or in the U.S. as a whole at the federal level. Per capita, Brad is not the problem, even if young white men do abuse welfare, which nobody is denying.
Eliminating welfare fraud has been one of President Trump’s flagship policies. There’s now a White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, led by Vice President JD Vance, a National Fraud Enforcement Division at the Department of Justice, and a public “fraud ledger” so people can see the scale on which the hardworking American taxpayer is being fleeced. The most egregious revelations so far have been a series of massive schemes in Democrat-run Minnesota that probably cost the American taxpayer billions, maybe tens of billions, of dollars. One fraudulent nonprofit, Feeding Our Future, billed a federal child-nutrition program for $250 million of meals that were never served. The perpetrators were almost all from Minnesota’s vibrant Somali community. They bought luxury goods, expensive cars, and property, and large amounts of money were sent back to the country they actually care about—Somalia. Federal money may even have ended up in the hands of terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab, who are currently threatening shipping in the Red Sea.
A depiction of a stereotypical lazy black man who abuses government welfare—or why not a stereotypical lazy black woman?—would, of course, have generated significant outcry from the liberal media and probably from the wetter elements of the Republican Party itself. If the evidence from Minnesota provides any indication, the groups actually perpetrating serious welfare fraud don’t like to be told they’re doing so or that there’s an obvious pattern that has nothing to do with video games. The fraudsters and their political overlords are only too ready to reach for the magic R-word in response. But so what? The truth actually matters, or it should.
If you care so little about the truth, though, why not make Brad a Martian or, better yet, an Asian woman?
The Sanders advert appeals to the absolute worst boomer tendencies of the GOP. It reinforces a totally false picture that serves no other purpose, as far as I can see, than to reinforce the older generation’s sense of self-worth and self-importance. The younger generation is weak, feckless, undisciplined, and unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve a good life and everything that comes with it. If only they’d pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop complaining, they too could own a five-bedroom house, a fishing boat, a fleet of ride-on lawnmowers, and a third wife from the Philippines… See, stereotypes are easy to fall into. Some persist because they’re more or less real and useful, while others persist mainly because they provide psychological relief in some form or other. I don’t hate boomers, by the way.
Of course, the GOP needs the support of boomers in places like Arkansas, and flattering them is probably a good strategy. But right now the GOP is in no state to take the youth vote for granted, especially not this close to the midterms. There’s been widespread talk of a collapse in the youth vote that played a crucial role in Trump’s 2024 election victory, especially among young men. Trump’s approval rating among the young in general, aged 18-29, is at a subterranean -45, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. Other firms have put the figure even deeper in the earth’s mantle. It’s not clear exactly how much of that shift is due to young white men in particular, who have been Trump’s strongest soldiers for the past decade and stand to benefit most from the elimination of the crushing burden successive regimes, Democrat and Republican, have put on their backs. But does the GOP really want to find out? Cheese balls indeed.