Ep. 1847 - This Political Ad Is Going Viral. Is It The Worst Ad Ever Made?

The Matt Walsh Show

Matt Walsh critiques a recent political advertisement from Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders that depicts a white male as a welfare rec

Key takeaways

• Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders released an ad portraying a white male named 'Brad' as a welfare recipient.
• Walsh cites USDA data showing that 35% of SNAP recipients are white, despite being only 60% of the population.

Main topics

• Political advertising strategy
• Welfare and SNAP statistics

Notable quotes

They might be useless and unreliable most of the time, but at least you can always count on them to be openly contemptuous of their own voting base.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a critique of modern political communication str

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) What you're about to see is one of the most cowardly and self-defeating political ads ever produced in modern American history. But just over a month ago until the midterms, in a year that's been dominated by completely 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. Now, I call this decision baffling, and it is, but that doesn't mean that it's unexpected or surprising. I mean, this is the Republican Party, after all. They might be useless and unreliable most of the time, but at least you can always count on them to be openly contemptuous of their own voting base. So you can rely on them for that, at least. According to Republicans in Arkansas, you know, 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 are 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 or improve their own lives or contribute to society. So 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 that rampant, pervasive corruption that's overwhelmingly committed by non-whites, many of them not even Americans. Well, 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. Speaker 6 (1:48) Yeah, you want some of this? Speaker 2 (1:50) Take that. Speaker 6 (1:50) Come on. Me and Brad. 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. Whoa. That's why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement. Almost there. Now, more Arkansans are working than ever before. Even Brad. Speaker 2 (2:20) Well, of course, you know, at first glance, it's surprising to see a white male depicted in an advertisement at all. I mean, 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 like a multiracial friend group. Aside from that, you know, you only see white males in commercials if they're portraying, of course, the burglars in a home security ad or... You know, maybe the greedy credit card company executives in an ad for a different credit card company that doesn't have greedy executives, of course. That's the kind of brilliantly subtle messaging we've come to expect from our nation's illustrious marketing departments. And 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 against anti-white discrimination in general. even if usually they won't call it that. 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 Zhang 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. Now, the truth, of course, is that white males are among the least likely to be on any kind of welfare at all. And young white males like Brad are virtually nonexistent on the welfare rolls. You know, we'll dig into the numbers more in a minute because this is actually a much more revealing moment in American politics and culture than it may at first appear. 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. 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. I mean, there's a reason they specifically chose not to use a more statistically accurate caricature. You know, if you think conservative, the conservative critics of this ad are overreacting, well, then just imagine how basically everyone would have responded if they had used the exact same approach. but with a different race. Now, somebody on X called Dr. Clown PhD, who may or may not be a legitimate medical doctor, I don't know, posted an AI mock-up with the races swapped out. So this is basically the exact same ad, but with the stereotype this time being of a black guy. Here it is. Speaker 6 (5:04) Oh, hell no. That's a hole. Throw the flag, man. Meet Deshaun. Deshawn has turned relaxing into a full-time profession. But you, you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Deshawn who just choose not to work. That's why I launched a welfare to work requirement. Now more Arkansans are working than ever before. Even Deshawn. Speaker 2 (5:36) Now, that, of course, is AI slop. I object to it on the grounds that it is AI slop, on those grounds at least. It's also not really representative of the statistically standard welfare moocher who is more likely to be a black single mom with multiple children. You know, 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. You know, that AI slot video is a lowbrow, insulting, crass, black male caricature. And the whole point is that you would never see that or anything like it, AI or otherwise, from any politician on the left or right. And if you ever did, it would be widely condemned as racist. Nobody would pretend they don't see the problem with it, that they don't understand what the ad is doing or why. And when people objected to that ad, if it ever did exist, which it never would, You know, you're not going to get people saying, what? I don't. Oh, you're upset about that? I have no idea why. That wouldn't happen because this kind of demonization only ever goes one way, only ever targets one group. White males have been degraded, demeaned and systematically disadvantaged by every institution in the country explicitly. So openly so for decades. That's a fact. You know, that's that's not just like a sob story. That's actually just a fact. It's true. 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 against it at least don't participate in it. Now, not every conservative feels this way. As the ad provoked a loud and justified backlash from many on the right, there were others who were quick to rush to its defense. For example, Joel Berry, who used to write for the Babylon Bee, posted this, quote, 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 have 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. Speaker 2 (8:04) Now, I don't know why Joel 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, quote, 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. On the other hand, the growing contingent of whites, as Joel calls them, complaining about systemic and institutional bigotry against white males, in that case, the systemic and institutional bigotry is real. So we're complaining about a thing that is real, it's actually happening, as opposed to complaining about a thing that is not real and not happening. Speaker 2 (8:58) 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's no logical or moral equivalence between those two? I think you do see it. I think you're pretending that you don't see it. In fact, I know you see it because you admit it in the first sentence. You say, again, 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. Hmm. Hmm. 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? Why is it? 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, in this case by you, 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. We're not okay with a situation where we say, okay, well, we need a group to be the punching bag here. Let's just use white males. Obviously, it's going to be white males. We need a bad guy. Got to be a white male. Like, yes, I agree that that is the strategy. That is what they're doing. Our point is that that is bad. Okay, that's not, we shouldn't accept that. Okay, we're critiquing that. And if that makes us cripplingly insecure, then so be it. But I'd say, you know, someone appears to be emotionally crippled in this conversation, and it's not us. You know, any white male, on the other hand, who's willing to just sort of lie down and take it, I'd say they're maybe the crippled one, even the insecure one. Speaker 2 (11:05) Now, meanwhile, in the face of this backlash, instead of firing her communications team and admitting the ad was a terrible idea, Sarah 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 that she didn't understand what everybody was upset about. Here's what she wrote. Quote, 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're able-bodied, you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work, period. Speaker 2 (11:37) Again, these critics online are conservatives who are simply tired of seeing even our own side demonize young white men. OK, your