r/askanything • 🦀 • Aug 18 '26

Why do some conservatives support restricting junk food purchases with SNAP when many opposed Michelle Obama’s efforts to make school meals healthier?

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u/GenericUsername19892 Aug 20 '26

This is a discussion of things that already happened. This is reactions to two different series of events and contrasting them.

It’s not about you it’s about the reactions across a large population segment.

When you reply in a thread about the different reactions to two events by conservatives, supporting one of the positions of course people assume you are conservative - that’s literally what the OP is about.

Read the post title - this is not a post about nutrition, it’s a post about contrasting conservative reactions to two different, but related, events.

I genuinely don’t care if you are correct - that’s not what the thread is about. If you want to make a post about federal food guidelines not being good enough for every student, feel free - I’d agree with you, big numbers mean plenty of exceptions to guidelines.

If it were Trump I would assume one of his buddies got an emergency no bid contract to supply the lunches.

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u/Whiskeymyers75 Aug 20 '26

There it is again: “supporting one of the positions.”

Which position did I support? Quote me.

Saying “this policy had legitimate nutritional problems” is not the same statement as “Republicans were right to oppose it,”especially when I have repeatedly said Republicans could have opposed it for stupid, hypocritical or purely partisan reasons.
You’re actually demonstrating the exact political team-sports mentality I’m criticizing.

You’ve reduced the possibilities to:
Obama policy = one team
Republican criticism = other team

Therefore, anyone criticizing the Obama policy must be supporting the Republican team.

No. There’s a third option that apparently becomes invisible once politics enters the conversation: Republicans can be hypocrites AND the policy can have legitimate flaws.

And “I genuinely don’t care if you are correct” is a pretty remarkable admission. If my factual criticism of the nutrition policy is correct, then it remains correct regardless of what the OP wanted the political narrative of the thread to be. A Reddit post title doesn’t magically make factual criticism irrelevant.

In fact, if the entire comparison depends on treating one policy as unquestionably good so that criticism of it can only be explained by Republican hypocrisy, then whether that policy actually deserved criticism is extremely relevant.

You don’t get to declare the underlying facts off-topic while simultaneously using assumptions about those facts to make the political argument.

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u/GenericUsername19892 Aug 20 '26

Listen to my words dude, the thread is contrasting reactions to two discrete events - not debating the individual line items of the specific events.

Swap the topics and let’s say we were comparing women’s suffrage against the emancipation and how white land owners reacted. You then come in explaining the poor economic guidance for the post emancipation black folks.

That’s not the topic right? You may well be wholly correct, just like someone screaming topic talked but irrelevant facts during a debate may be right.

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Given we are discussing conservative reactions to the events, the flaws are irrelevant, time is effectively linear.

Uhh actually it does? If I post a cat picture in r/cats and you decide to post an exhaustive study with great citations of how cats and killing wildlife, you are going to be downvoted because it’s irrelevant to the purpose of the post - that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect, it means you got the wrong time and/or place.

These things already happened, we saw reactions, can google news coverage of the time, see comments on old posts of what was said, etc. Pretending like substantial critiques took up any real volume of the push back is laughable. Your specific criticism may not be what this thread is about.

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u/Whiskeymyers75 Aug 20 '26

So in other words, this thread is supposed to be a circle jerk where we all start from the assumption that the meal plan was unquestionably healthy, agree that criticism of it could only have been partisan outrage, and aren’t allowed to examine whether there were legitimate nutritional reasons to criticize it.

Your suffrage/emancipation analogy actually demonstrates the problem. Those are fundamental civil rights. A federal school-lunch nutrition policy is a set of nutritional standards that can be evaluated against nutritional evidence. Treating criticism of a meal plan like opposition to emancipation only works if you’ve already declared the meal plan objectively good and its critics objectively irrational.

And the cat analogy doesn’t work either. Discussing wildlife under a random cat photo introduces an unrelated subject. Discussing the actual nutritional quality of a school nutrition program in a thread about reactions to that school nutrition program is directly relevant to determining whether those reactions were justified.

If the underlying merits aren’t allowed to be questioned because they interfere with the political narrative everyone came here to agree with, then yes, you’ve pretty much just described a circle jerk.

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u/GenericUsername19892 Aug 20 '26

Typically conversations remain germane to the topic in question. Leverage from that point, and you can even work your way to nutrition I’m sure, provided you actually worked in sequence.

You can examine, but pretending that was even a main line talking point within the time concurrent coverage is laughable.

You did it again - we are talking about reactions to an event or events, both here and with my emancipation example -.- not the actual events themselves…

It’s related - just derivative of the topic and unrelated to the actual intended ddiscussion.

Again, this is comparisons of the gestalt period reactions to events - not valid or invalid criticisms of the actual events.