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Americans woke up this week to panic and finger-pointing after a government notice announced that November SNAP payments would not be issued if the shutdown continued — and instead of blaming the people holding Washington hostage, the left’s usual chorus rushed to blame Walmart. The truth is simple and ugly: a federal funding collapse tied to the October 1 shutdown is what put food assistance at risk, not a private retailer making a business decision.
The USDA itself posted a blunt notice saying “the well has run dry,” explaining that benefits cannot be issued on November 1 unless the federal government reopens or contingency funds are tapped — funds the administration says are reserved for disasters. That is the real source of this crisis, and it exposes how weaponized federal programs become when either party treats everyday Americans as bargaining chips.
Meanwhile, social media lit up with hysterical claims that Walmart would lock its doors or stop taking EBT cards, driving fear and division among working families who already live on the edge. Those rumors were false — Walmart told fact-checkers it would remain open, and the viral panic was driven by Washington’s chaos, not by the retailer.
Make no mistake: private companies have plenty of room to be criticized, and Walmart’s recent business choices — like reinstating a minimum basket fee for certain online orders — deserve scrutiny for how they hit low-income shoppers. But that’s a corporate pricing call, not the wholesale theft of benefits; conflating the two is political theater designed to distract from who actually controls the purse strings in Washington.
Let’s also be blunt about where the real political culpability lies: this shutdown and the stalled negotiations over health subsidies and other priorities are what left millions of families wondering how they’ll put food on the table next month. Democrats in the Senate demanded concessions and refused to reopen government without additional policy riders, and both sides are now playing chicken with people’s grocery budgets.
Patriots should be furious at the spectacle. We can hold corporations accountable for fair pricing and transparency, but we must not let the left and its media handmaids shift blame away from the politicians who weaponized funding and turned food on the table into a political cudgel.
Hardworking Americans deserve better than partisan theater. Call your senators, demand a responsible reopening, and refuse to let politicians pretend that private businesses are the enemies when it is Washington’s dysfunction that is starving families of certainty and security.
