“Why is the Biden administration helping migrants and not hurricane victims?” You’ve no doubt heard this line, or some version of it, from your Facebook Uncle over the past two weeks. “Why is the government spending money on food stamps for drug addicts and not taking care of homeless vets?” Rhetorical questions like these, drenched in faux-populist concern for the “average American,” have always been crowd-pleasers in conservative media and online circles, but their popular appeal is growing as climate chaos accelerates acute disasters and exposes the broken liberal state of the world’s ostensibly wealthiest country. As bridges fail, trains derail, disaster responses struggle to keep up, and infrastructure continues to erode, the very same forces that seek to gut the social state will turn to these failures—some real, some imagined—and exploit them to show how the priorities of liberalism are “anti-white” and anti-rural.  None of it makes any sense; it’s draped in transparent cynicism and hypocrisy. But this doesn’t matter. What matters is that this line works, and liberals have failed to sufficiently build a media and political system that can counter it—a problem that will only get worse as climate chaos exposes the United States’ uniquely poor infrastructure and social welfare system.  This talking point has become a full-blown Trump campaign focus in the last few weeks before the election. As dual hurricanes, Helene and Milton, destroyed much of the southeastern coast of the United States, Republicans didn’t even wait for the dead to be named and counted before exploiting the tragedy to attack immigrant communities. “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd last Friday. “It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally.”  “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you! It is happening right in front of your eyes. And FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason,” Elon Musk insisted on Twitter.  “There’s a bucket of money in FEMA that’s gone to illegal aliens and that’s somehow separate than the bucket of money that should by right go to American citizens,” JD Vance told Fox News’s Fox & Friends last week. None of these claims, of course, are true. It’s simply a variation on an increasingly popular GOP attack line: feigning social welfare concerns for True Americans while claiming sinister minority groups or immigrants are soaking up free government cash. The most recent “Appalachian hurricane victims are left to die while migrants live high on the hog” meme comes after a similar lie, since debunked, was spread by Republicans last year, this time pitting “homeless vets” against migrants supposedly getting free housing.  Thus far, liberals’ response to this line of attack—which we’ll call The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican—has been to feign incredulity and fact check. Incredulity and fact checking are fine, and the White House was smart to quickly put up a website debunking the most outlandish of the lies, but not before they went viral and created a contagious thought meme that permeated online to millions of Americans.  So how can liberals and leftists counter this seemingly effective talking point? A useful place to start would be to not point out Republican hypocrisy for its own sake, but orient this hypocrisy in contrast to a liberal vision of a more egalitarian, social welfare worldview for everyone—poor whites and poor migrants alike.  Republican hypocrisy, make no mistake, is galling and worth noting.  Trump, while president, sought to cut $271 million for FEMA disaster relief and redirect the money to “cracking down” on border enforcement. The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025— which Trump and his running mate Vance have championed, despite efforts to distance themselves from it—explicitly seeks to gut FEMA response capacity. As Ali Velshi documents at MSNBC, the authors of the Heritage foundation’s blueprint call for ““Privatizing … the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant programs.” The blueprint also says the federal government’s cost-sharing for disaster response should be reduced, which would be particularly burdensome for poor states. The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for. Likewise, Republicans—chief among them then-President Trump—have sought to gut housing services for veterans and cut the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs more broadly.  The groups right-wing demagogues like Trump and Vance claim are being harmed by liberals shoveling money to immigrants are the exact same groups these demagogues routinely seek to cut services and support for. They’re the exact same groups the corporate-funded think tanks that will take over and run Trump’s policy priorities have spent decades disempowering, endangering, and polluting.   But it can’t all be hypocrisy gotchas. While it may feel good to point out what naked phonies Trump and Co. are, doing so is no substitute for politics. There’s a fairly competent and well-funded center-left media industry that can do the work of pointing out both that Republicans are lying, and that they are totally full-of-shit, small, austerity-driven hypocrites.  The next part––the hard part––is where liberals have more or less given up. Tales of widespread FEMA neglect are false. But Democrats countering Trump’s dark nativist vision with the politics of social welfare is a dream that more or less died when the Sanders campaign fizzled out in early Spring 2020. From de-industrialization to free trade ideology to sunsetting COVID-19 aid, Democratic leadership, with some exceptions, has proudly adopted the mantle of On Your Own politics, embracing austerity and free market dog-eat-dog capitalism. Add to this Democrats’ almost wholesale concession on the racist premises of immigration panic, and the ability to credibly combat The Sudden, Selective Social Democrat Republican becomes that much more difficult. From a messaging standpoint, Democrats’ defense of the Department of Homeland Security’s meager support for migrants is unconvincing when these same Democrats consistently frame migrants as little more than a burden on civilized society.  Misdirecting populist anger toward vulnerable populations is, of course, not new. Peasant uprisings in 1848 Europe sometimes turned their ire away from the aristocrats and focused it on local Jewish communities. In his excellent book Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, historian Christopher Clark recites dozens of examples of local clergy and petit bourgeois redirecting popular anger towards the “other.” In revolutionary Galecia, he illustrates one example: prominent Polish-Armenian priest Karol Antoniewicz told the angry masses that the chief culprit for their ills was “the Jews” who, “like spiders, had wrapped the poor peasants in their web of immoral behaviour.” Antisemitic pogroms followed throughout central Europe, while the landed gentry watched in comfort and amusement from afar.   But we can look to more recent examples to elucidate this point. Ronald Regean rose to popularity reciting a made-up story about a “welfare queen,” a Chicago woman who supposedly had “80 names,” “30 addresses,” and $150,000 a year in income from public coffers. And during his speeches throughout the South, while campaigning for the presidency in the 1970s, he made up an equally fictional “strapping young buck” using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” Using immigrant scapegoats to channel justified—and sometimes unjustified—popular anger is as old as popular anger and immigrants.  To an extent there’s only so much liberal-left messaging can do. Conservative media is sprawling, well-funded, and exists in its own alternative universe. They’ll use brain-dead fascistic claptrap to divide and conquer Americans no matter how economically populist Democrats become.  But working to create a genuine social safety net, openly campaigning on universal, non-means-tested programs like single-payer healthcare and free higher education for all, would combat the image—not altogether unfounded—that Democrats are increasingly the party of only the highly educated and professional. Democrats have lost large swaths of the white working and middle class, and, increasingly, working and middle-class minorities. This is the logical outcome of (1) an overt pivot to Wall Street and neoliberal ideology (self-inflicted), and (2) the fact that Republicans just got better at exploiting racism (out of Democrats’ control).  To combat fake populism requires not just hypocrisy dunks or fact checks—both of which are fine and true as far as they go—but a vision of actual populism, of a government that fights for and with the working class, whether they be migrants or born in the US, Black or white, rural or urban. These divisions are artificial constructs of class control, ones gleefully used by billionaire-funded Republicans. Liberals should work to erode them with a broad message of collective social welfare. This, more than any front-row-kid “fact check” or whining to the media refs, would inculcate Democrats from charges of abandoning disaffected working-class voters.