Carts full of groceries wait to be given to people in need at a Miami food bank before SNAP benefits are due to end because of the federal government shutdown. | Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesOn Saturday, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — also known as food stamps — will run out for more than 40 million Americans. Those millions of Americans are collateral damage from what is thus far the second-longest government shutdown in US history. But even as the looming deadline has underscored the very real impact of the deadlock in Washington, DC, it has also led to the latest flare-up of America’s decades-long war over welfare benefits. On social media, creators are gaining views by posting rage bait posing as people receiving food assistance living a life of luxury on the government’s dime. These videos have racked up millions of views and tons of angry responses. Krissy Clark is a journalist who has covered the social safety net on The Uncertain Hour podcast. Clark says that these videos are a part of a long history of Americans stereotyping SNAP recipients as lazy and entitled. Clark spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk about how the “welfare queen” stereotype has long been a presence in American politics and is still shaping policy today. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.Tell me where your thoughts go when you see videos like this. We have no idea who these people are or if they actually do receive food stamps or not. I was looking at one of these videos, and it’s specifically a parody account that says that it’s somebody who likes to do satire and skits. So I think one thing is: Are they actually authentically food stamp recipients themselves? “Two-thirds of participants are children or adults over age 60 or people with disabilities.”And then the reactions that you see in the comments, people [are] calling these people entitled, parasites, looters, people living off food stamps, intergenerational dependency. The first thing that comes to mind is: This is just not an accurate representation of most people who are receiving food assistance. It is a very old set of tropes and stereotypes, but if you actually look at the numbers, that is not an accurate depiction of most food stamp recipients. For one thing, two-thirds of participants are children or adults over age 60 or people with disabilities. Then when you take those folks out and you look at most SNAP participants who theoretically can work, a majority of those people are working in any given month, and a vast majority of them have worked either in the last 12 months or the next 12 months, or will be working in the next 12 months. The average benefit for the average food stamp recipient is about $6 a day. So this whole idea that the typical SNAP recipient is just sucking off the government teat and doesn’t wanna work and is lazy, that is not reflected in the data.What about the response — “entitled,” “parasites,” “looters,” “intergenerational dependency”? Does that surprise you? Christian values is questioning what people did with their October FOOD stamp money that they’re so worried about not receiving the assistance in November. pic.twitter.com/XNKdCrQ8LY— dara faye (@darafaye) October 22, 2025Sadly, it does not, because it is a story as old as our country and even older. There is this deep anxiety that folks in the US have collectively, and that has been amplified in many ways by politicians — this deep anxiety about when we help people collectively, are we helping the right people? There’s this fundamental divide I think a lot of Americans have, that runs through American history, of who are the deserving poor, the people that deserve our help, and who are the not-deserving poor.How do our assumptions and even our suspicions get turned into policy?We all have probably heard of Reagan’s tropes around “welfare queens.” That was tied into efforts that he made to put deep cuts into food stamp eligibility and food stamp payments in the 1980s. And then you jump to 1996, when Congress passed the most sweeping welfare reforms in history. The New Republic, the magazine, had a cover photo, in August of 1996 with the big splashy headline, “Day of Reckoning, Sign the Bill Now,” encouraging [President Bill] Clinton to sign the welfare reform acts that were going to really gut welfare as we knew it. And on the cover of the magazine is a picture of a Black woman with a cigarette in her hand holding a little baby who’s drinking from a bottle. I remember the 1990s. I was a kid, but I know that the “welfare queen” trope was kind of in the water. It does make me think about what’s going on in the present day, where a single tweet that claims to be a video of a woman saying, “I have nine kids and I’m never gonna get a job because I get food stamps” can suddenly reach millions of people. When you see these videos on social media, is there something different now because of just how viral they can go? The feeling that I get is not, “Oh, we’re in this new world.” It is, “Here we go again.” This is the same playbook, the same fears. Maybe they’re amplified, they get to people faster. But yeah, I was a kid in the ’90s also, and it was in the water. It was just kind of what, there were these certain stereotypes and certain suspicions that we didn’t need social media for. They were already there. And I think that that message and those suspicions are gonna travel one way or another.There is one big difference in 2025 from the past, and we’ve talked about it on the show: Safety net programs are typically seen as Democratic terrain. Democrats vote for them; Democrats need them. But then the situation changed after the 2024 election, because a lot of poor and working -lass people voted for Donald Trump. So recently you saw Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, write an op-ed in the New York Times saying we need to fund SNAP. Do you see Republicans changing their tune on welfare, because increasingly the people who need benefits are voting Republican?I would push back a little bit on it. I very much was sort of reading it through the lens of, [Hawley is] trying to focus on the “deserving poor” here. I also think that if you actually look at his voting record, this summer, he voted for the sweeping changes to food stamp eligibility and other sorts of public assistance eligibility that were in the so-called One Big, Beautiful Bill. Those in some ways are going to have much more long-term and far-reaching effects in terms of limiting who has access to food stamps and to other kinds of government assistance.Saturday is when the benefits run out. You’ve been reporting on this, Krissy, for a very long time. When people lose their benefits and when they lose them in such great numbers, where do they turn for help? Where do they go to find food?There is a network of food banks and food pantries. The nonprofit sector is obviously trying to fill in the breach, but I think anybody you talk to in that world says there is no way that we could replace the kind of support that food stamps offers, and that we, collectively as a nation, through our government, offer. A few years ago I was in Dayton, Ohio, and I was at a Walmart right at midnight, because I knew that when the clock strikes 12:01, you have your monthly benefits. The number of people who, right when the clock struck 12:01, were going into Walmart late at night to start buying food showed you the immediate need. This isn’t something you can wait until the next day [for] even. I ran into this woman who was with her 8-year-old son. Her food stamps had already run out from last month. As much as she tried to budget things — she also had a job; she worked for I think a Dollar General — she just couldn’t make ends meet without this help. So think about that come November 1st.