It’s disheartening to see misinformation like this post on Threads by Ms. Rachel, the popular YouTuber and children’s educator:
Imagine slashing SNAP
the program that helps children in the U.S. not go hungry
while sending billions in weapons to another country to kill other children
It’s a powerful, emotional appeal—and wrong. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program isn’t being gutted because of foreign aid. It’s being gutted because Republicans decided poor and working-class Americans don’t deserve help. That’s not complicated, and it’s not about Gaza.
Ms. Rachel has millions of followers across social media, and with that kind of reach comes a responsibility to get the basics right. You can be fiercely pro-Palestinian, and you can condemn Israel and its murderous Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all day long—but what does any of that have to do with SNAP?
This kind of false equivalence does real harm. The slashing of food assistance in the U.S. has nothing to do with Gaza, Israel, or anyone outside our borders. It happened because President Donald Trump and his Republican minions in Congress decided it should. Period.
Blaming Israel—or anyone else—muddies the truth and lets the real culprits off the hook.
The irony is that this line of thinking isn’t new. It’s a political scam conservatives have been running for decades: We can’t afford X, because Y took it.
Sometimes X is health care, or it’s housing, or it’s food assistance.
And Y is whatever scapegoat the right is obsessed with that week—immigrants, Black and brown people, transgender people, single moms, or whoever else makes for an easy target.
It’s lazy. It’s divisive. And it’s designed to distract from the people actually pulling the rug out from under them—the Republicans cutting benefits while pretending to defend American families.
Ms. Rachel may get plenty of “engagement” by playing to her audience, but blaming Israel for cuts to domestic programs like SNAP doesn’t help Palestinians, and it certainly doesn’t help the millions of Americans losing food assistance because of Trump’s GOP. The outrage is justified. The target is not.
