THE COMMON DENOMINATOR:

STARVING AMERICA ON PURPOSE

There are breadlines in America again. Not the sepia-toned kind from history books, but fresh, pixel-perfect misery: thousands of people standing in the cold, waiting for a box of pasta and canned beans while the self-proclaimed “greatest country in the world” bleeds dignity on the sidewalk. The air smells like diesel, exhaustion, and the cheap coffee being passed around to volunteers who haven’t slept since the last distribution run. It’s 2025, and the soup line has returned — rebranded as “community relief.”

And once again, the common denominator is the same malignant strain of political cruelty that keeps resurrecting itself like a virus we refuse to eradicate. Call it fiscal conservatism, call it Christian nationalism, call it MAGA — it’s all the same damn thing: a theology of punishment disguised as governance.

This time, there’s no pandemic to blame. No act of God. The suffering is policy — a fully human, deliberately engineered hunger crisis. Trump’s government has weaponized austerity like an art form, cutting food assistance with one hand while handing tax breaks to billionaires with the other. He calls it efficiency. His cronies call it patriotism. Economists call it suicide. The rest of us just call it evil.

If history were a straight line, you could trace the cruelty back through the decades like a scar. Hoover, who believed hunger built character. Reagan, who turned “welfare queen” into an anthem for rich men. Bush, who watched the markets collapse and called it freedom. Trump, who mistook sadism for strategy. Every time, the same story: a ruling class convinced that poverty is moral failure, that compassion is weakness, and that “the free market” is some divine slot machine that rewards the faithful and starves the unworthy.

They’ve always needed someone to blame — immigrants, single mothers, the disabled, the “lazy.” It’s a carousel of scapegoats. And while they’re busy performing the theater of hate, the real crime scene is at the food bank, where children wait in line beside their parents, clutching tickets for boxes of rice like it’s a damn raffle for survival. This is the America the GOP built, brick by brick and lie by lie. They called it small government. What they really meant was no mercy.

The cruelty isn’t a byproduct — it’s the point. Watch Trump talk about food stamps and you’ll see the same glint in his eyes that a bored cat gets before it bats a mouse to death. The man doesn’t understand empathy, only domination. His shutdowns, his tantrums, his cuts — they’re all variations of the same performance art: the spectacle of control. To starve millions while bragging about stock market gains is the purest distillation of modern American fascism.

Meanwhile, the people he claims to champion — the “forgotten men and women” — are quite literally starving in his name. Some of them still wear the red hats in those food bank lines, too proud or too broken to admit they were conned. That’s the cruelty of cult politics: it convinces the victims that their suffering is noble, that hunger is patriotism, that obedience will one day fill their bellies. It won’t.

If you want to understand America, don’t look at Wall Street. Look at the food line. That’s the real State of the Union — a living indictment of a government that’s chosen greed over grace, and power over people. Every cardboard box of food is a monument to policy failure, every volunteer a reminder that ordinary citizens are doing the work their leaders refuse to do.

And still, the same chorus echoes from the marble halls of power: We can’t afford it. We can’t afford to feed our poor, but we can afford another tax cut for a man who names his yacht after his shell corporation. We can’t afford to extend SNAP, but we can afford a trillion-dollar military that loses track of its own gold-plated screwdrivers. We can’t afford compassion because cruelty is cheaper — until it isn’t.

There’s an old saying that every society is three meals away from revolution. Well, America’s on meal number two and a half. The lines are getting longer, the shelves emptier, the lies louder. You can feel it in the air — the quiet panic, the slow unraveling, the hum of desperation beneath the patriotic slogans. The question isn’t whether this system will collapse. The question is whether we’ll let the same bastards who built it pretend to fix it.

Trump’s America is a machine that eats its own people and calls it “economic freedom.” And if history teaches us anything, it’s that the architects of cruelty never stop on their own. They have to be stopped — dragged from the banquet table of power and forced to see what they’ve done. Because the common denominator isn’t just bad policy. It’s the idea that suffering is necessary, that empathy is weakness, and that the hungry deserve to starve.

The truth is simpler and far uglier: they starve us because they can.

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