Day: November 11, 2025

Finally, our long national nightmare is over! With 8 Senate Democrats bravely crossing the aisle, the Senate approved the Continuing Resolution to end the longest government shutdown in history! Now, things can get back to normal.

Yeah…about that…

Although President Trump has been at the helm of the two longest government shutdowns in our history, this one feels a little different because of how people reacted to it and undercut the idea Leftists have been spinning for years about SNAP and the Affordable Care Act.

Let’s start with a shallow deep-dive into governance philosophy. Many people, including your humble correspondent, believe government is there to do the things we can’t do ourselves. You know, like having a standing army to fight off threats to the country or build/maintain roads. (Although, on that last one, I’m starting to think the people couldn’t do any worse of a job. My street has a pothole so big you would travel to the Land of the Lost if you fell in. #oldmanreference) The Left’s approach to governance is the government can and should do whatever you can handle yourself because you’re not as hip and enlightened as they are.

This coming from the people who said President Brick Tamland was fine and Queen Kamala the Appointed ran a flawless campaign, I might add.

To the Left, anything that prevents the wheels of bureaucracy from running is dangerous. And it is…to them. Leftists are so self-centered in the halls of power that they feel nothing can get done without them, and their drones who stagger through said walls like Hunter Biden looking for crack follow along. Even the non-essential workers feel a sense of entitlement.

You know what they call non-essential employees in the corporate world? Dead weight.

So, when Senate Republicans refused to budge, Leftists started creating horror stories about children and old people starving, people dying without healthcare, planes falling out of the sky, and just about anything else their PR department could come up with to scare us into submission.

But then something happened, something so ironically out of left field that Leftists couldn’t have seen it coming. Entities other than the federal government stepped up and helped with food donations. Restaurants, grocery stores, churches, local charities, and regular people saw a need and fulfilled it. Sure, to the more cynical among us, it makes for good press and temporary feel-good moments, but it tells me there is still a section of our population who are willing to help their neighbors when the opportunity arises.

And that was something the compassionate Left didn’t think about, mainly because of their approach to governance. They can’t conceive of anything good coming from a source outside of Big Brother…I mean government, let alone having those good deeds actually working. Even when states started offering SNAP funds (which is only one step down from Leftist governance), it made the federal government being shut down less of a major issue to most of the country. No rioting, no looting (save for the dumbasses who told the world their “secret life hack” of stealing from WalMart via TikTok), not a lot of civil unrest. Just people going about their days and helping out where they could.

If that isn’t a sign we may need to rethink SNAP, I don’t know what is.

As far as the ACA is concerned, I’ve already delved into it in greater detail, so I’ll give you the Readers Digest condensed version. The ACA didn’t make health care affordable in the least for most Americans, and lead to more money going to insurance companies than to actually helping Americans. To be fair, the ACA did help Americans, just the really wealthy ones who already had great healthcare. Anybody with an even cursory understanding of economics could tell you getting the government involved in anything will cause prices to skyrocket because the government will always be able to print more money to fund whatever it is they want.

Naturally, that’s why Leftists were shocked by the actual numbers.

Instead of putting up their hands and saying “we were wrong about the ACA,” they continued to throw money at it and laid a trap for Republicans by voting in a deadline to keep the ACA subsidies flowing. That is, of course, assuming they thought Republicans would take back the House and Senate at some point, but that’s a hard sell for me because Leftists suck at long-term strategy. Even a party picnic for Leftists requires at least 6 months of negotiations, planning, and cultural sensitivity training just to have 3 people show up just to say they’re vegan and they only eat free range cage free vegetables.

At this point, I honestly think Congressional Democrats planned on being in power when the ACA subsidies ran out, so they could force them into any budget they wanted. Yeah, how’d that work out for ya?

As far as all of the other disasters Leftists predicted would happen with a government shutdown, few if any of them came to pass. Planes didn’t fall out of the sky, TSA agents were still doing their jobs, the military was still at the ready, national park personnel weren’t as necessary as advertised, and generally not much changed. That’s the lesson we should all take here: the federal government isn’t as necessary as the Left makes it out to be. When you let yourself become a ward of the state by ideological means, you owe everything to the state, which means whenever the state wants to take something away from you for one reason or another, they can do it, and you won’t have a say in the matter.

In other words, when you get “free stuff,” you lose some of your freedom.

Just the way the Left likes it.

But not everyone who gets “free stuff” is as enamored with the idea of being a government drone. SNAP, for example, is used to help low income families, including members of our military and the elderly. It’s hard to be so completely cold-hearted to think they deserve to be without food or at the very least assistance.

Then, there are those who use SNAP so they don’t have to spend their own money to get food. I know that’s technically the idea behind it, but it’s not the way it’s being practiced by many people in this country. The way I know this is by watching people post TikTok videos complaining about having to spend their own money on food or complaining about the food they’re getting from non-governmental sources. I have a pretty good troll detector built in from being on the Internet almost since it became a thing, so I don’t think they’re making shit up; they’re legit upset at what they’re getting or not getting as the case may be.

The Left would have you believe the latter group is just as entitled to SNAP as the former. They’re not on the same level, in my opinion. Those who need SNAP the most are the ones who are making an effort to contribute to society in some way. I have no problem with them. It’s when you choose to get SNAP and you can work, but choose not to, that it crosses the line for me. SNAP isn’t meant to be a side hustle. It’s there to help you buy food so you can live, and given how well some of you SNAP scammers live, you can afford to shell out a little for your own sustenance.

That may be the best part of the government shutdown. People exposing how much they scam the government (i.e. us) so they can live better than us. You know, just like Congress. But unlike Congress, we might be able to do something about SNAP fraud, and we have you TikTokers to thank for it.

So, with the government starting back up again in the near future, they can finally get past partisan squabbling and get back to doing their real jobs: ignoring the will of the people and passing shitty legislation.