A Conservative Walks Into A Food Pantry ... (That's It. That's The Joke.)

This is why we can't have nice things.

When I was 4 or so, I legitimately believed that people would never admit to being Republicans, because they wouldn't want anyone to know that they hated poor people. That, I imagined, would be very embarrassing.

I soon learned that wasn't a thing (although I do believe the first time someone told me they were a Republican I did ask "Why do you hate poor people?"). What they did instead — and really, what a lot of people who weren't even Republicans did — was to demonize and dehumanize the poor and make them as unsympathetic as possible in order to justify not helping them. They'd talk about how panhandlers were secretly rich and living in mansions off of what they make begging for change on the street, about "welfare queens," they'd say "Oh, they actually want to be homeless," they'd say "if you give them money, they'll just spend it on drugs," they'd make up stories about people buying king crab legs with EBT cards.

 Because if poor people are bad, you're not bad for not helping them. You're not bad for ignoring them, or for voting for things that hurt them.

That was the conclusion that Didi, Twitter's main character this week, claims she reached when she volunteered at a food pantry.

“I volunteered at a Catholic food pantry for a long while. After months of watching ‘low income’ people on government assistance show up at our door week after week in brand new cars, their children dressed better than mine, I stopped volunteering. They would bop on in like they…”

— Didi (@Didi) 1684365282 

She wrote:

I volunteered at a Catholic food pantry for a long while. After months of watching ‘low income’ people on government assistance show up at our door week after week in brand new cars, their children dressed better than mine, I stopped volunteering. They would bop on in like they were on a weekly jaunt to the grocery store….no modesty, no gratefulness. Nothing but expectation and entitlement. All we did was enable these people to work the system instead of making them go out and work jobs. The Dems hook these people in and make them rely on the system. The Dems make them believe they deserve the benefits, and they don’t realize they are just being handled. Democrats are evil.

First of all, I don't believe for a damn second that Didi over here volunteered at a food pantry for a "long while." But let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that she did. Because I want to address some things.

"Low-income"

32 percent of American workers make less than $15 an hour. The jobs they do, the jobs that pay under $15 an hour, are largely the jobs that were classified as "essential" during the pandemic. What does this mean? This means that we need people to do those jobs and literally cannot function as a society without them. They are not a figment of the liberal imagination, they exist.

Indeed, when there were not enough people willing to work these jobs after things opened up — because many of those who were working them previously got better jobs that did pay them enough to live — good Christian conservatives complained about how entitled they were and went on and on about "No one wants to work!"

... On government assistance

She had no way of knowing that, actually. People can make more than they need to qualify for government assistance and still be poor enough to need to go to a food pantry every now and then.

... In brand new cars

She also had no way of knowing if they had borrowed a car, if someone had donated a car too them, if a caseworker had driven them to the pantry, if they were living in their car, if they had just recently lost their job and were just trying to survive until they got a new one and didn't rush out and sell their car, or if they were driving for Uber or Lyft or Grubhub and relied on their car as their source of income.

... Their children dressed better than mine

This, of course, could be a question of taste. Judging by her hair, Didi does not strike me as someone who is especially sartorially gifted. She also doesn't know that those clothes were not hand-me-downs or donated or thrifted or, hell, if they were knockoffs like the Flendi wallet I had a while back and bought for like, $8 at a flea market. Or, hell, if their parents just had style.

... They would bop on in like they were on a weekly jaunt to the grocery store

Yes, because that is literally what they were doing. Were they meant to look shamed? Should they have walked in flailing themselves with whips?

... no modesty, no gratefulness.

I mean, is that why you were doing it or because you wanted to help people? Did you want to be praised as a saint?

All we did was enable these people to work the system instead of making them go out and work jobs.

Lady, they have jobs . We are only at 3.4% unemployment right now. In 2018, 70 percent of people getting SNAP had full-time jobs , and it's probably higher now. That's not entirely crazy, either, because a lot of people who get assistance are not able-bodied, are seniors, are parents for whom childcare would literally be more than what they earn. Let us not forget that Republicans are the reason we can't have nice things like subsidized childcare.

The Dems hook these people in and make them rely on the system ... Democrats are evil.

TO WHAT END? So that they will vote for Democrats ... who will then go to Congress or the Senate and do more things that will help them? Again, to what end? What is the nefarious plan here? What could it possibly be?

If that nonsense wasn't enough, it does get worse. The top reply is from another blue checked sucker who claims, ridiculously, to know people who get $1400 a month in food stamps. The only way that would be true, where she lives in Michigan, would be if they were a family of seven. Given the cost of groceries right now, that is not very much food .

Several responders barely concealed their racism, asking if they all had their hair and nails "professionally done," to which Didi replied in the affirmative. For the record, you can't actually tell if people have their nails professionally done or not. I can actually do my own acrylics and nail art and so can a lot of other people.

Didi continued her bullshit throughout the week, ultimately claiming that because there were no typos in the tweets of those criticizing her, that they must not be real people, but "bots."

Good morning. Yesterday I was brutally attacked by the Left for tweeting about my personal volunteer experience. At first I was, like anyone with a soul would be, defensive, hurt, confused and angry. These 'people' were unjustifiably attacking my character. But then I realized it was nothing more than a coordinated attack on me, most likely by bots and AI. I say this because, although, there had been negative comments here and there I was simultaneously attacked by hundreds upon hundreds of so called 'liberal accounts' within minutes. I was attacked both on my feed and DMs. It was as if an alarm clock went off at Twitter HQ and the hounds were released. Going back to look at the comments I noticed that there are zero typos...zero. None of the accounts had editing capabilities. I also noticed that the sentence structure and theme of the remarks were all identical, just different wording. They took one thought from my tweet and ran with it with thousands of different very tiny accounts. And the theme they went with was so far off from the concept of my tweet that I now know none of them are real accounts. This is dangerous. If this can be done to a small, basically, 'nobody' account like me, it can be done to all of us.

So — just to be clear, here: Poor people don't exist, liberals don't exist, people who disagree with this woman in general don't exist ... is this one of those "everything is a simulation" theories?

Under normal circumstances, I'd just let these tweets from random people go or write them off as trolls. But I can't. I just can't. Because I truly don't think we have been loud enough over the years when it comes to people demonizing and dehumanizing the poor. There are consequences to these ridiculous urban legends — they make it easier to not help people, they make it easier to be selfish, they make it easier to block it out and not care. They make it easier for people to tell themselves "Oh, well, I'm still a good person because if they all looked and acted like Tiny Tim, I'd care! It's their fault, really, that I don't care about them." And we need to be a hell of a lot louder if we are going to drown that narrative out.

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