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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Aug 5

Trump's New Work Rules Are Triggering a Rural Hunger Crisis

One grocer lost 40% of her SNAP sales overnight. For the families who disappeared, the food isn’t unaffordable — it’s unreachable.

“We Had Fewer Carts. More Silence.”

🧵1/10: In Monticello, Arkansas — population just under 9,000 — the shelves aren’t empty, but the aisles have fallen quiet. For Teresa Johnson, who has run Johnson’s Market for over 16 years, the change was sudden and unmistakable. “Week one, it was like a light switch,” she said. “We had fewer carts, fewer kids, more silence” The New York Times.

Her store once served nearly 400 SNAP-reliant households, many shopping multiple times a week. But since enforcement of the new work requirement began in early July, Johnson estimates a 38 to 42 percent drop in food stamp purchases — almost entirely from regulars she used to see weekly.

The shift wasn’t tied to seasonal change or economic growth. It stemmed directly from the revised SNAP work policy implemented under President Donald Trump’s second term, passed as part of the June debt ceiling compromise. The rule increased mandatory work hours from 20 to 30 per week for childless adults under 60, classifying those who do not meet the new standard as ineligible The New York Times.

While federal officials defended the change as a way to promote employment and personal responsibility, small-town grocers say the reality is a cascading retail crisis. “They’re rationing,” Johnson said. “Some are sending one family member with a list for everyone else” The New York Times.

Monticello has just one major grocery store — the one Johnson owns. The nearest full-service alternative is nearly 45 minutes away. With fuel prices high and transit options scarce, every lost customer represents not just a personal hardship, but the fraying of a town’s entire economic loop.

“This isn’t a city where folks can hop on a bus to Aldi,” she said. “This is where you see your neighbor, buy your dinner, and sometimes ask if anyone’s hiring.”

As July wore on, Johnson noticed more parents counting coins, more elders holding off on protein, and fewer families walking through her automatic doors. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” she added. “Not even during COVID.”
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/trumps-new-w…

SNAP Isn’t a Bonus — It’s the Business Model

2/10: For rural grocers like Teresa Johnson, SNAP isn’t a bonus — it’s the economic foundation. At Johnson’s Market, nearly 70 percent of all monthly transactions once involved SNAP Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Since the July work rule changes took effect, Johnson says her revenue has dropped by more than a third The Guardian.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has long been portrayed by federal policymakers as a welfare safety net. But in rural economies, it’s something else entirely: a stabilizer for private business. “If I lose my SNAP customers, I don’t have customers,” Johnson said.

That collapse is already visible across the country. Rural store owners from Mississippi to Missouri are cutting hours, laying off staff, and slashing fresh inventory. Some have already posted closure signs The Guardian.

In these communities, SNAP doesn’t just help feed families — it keeps grocery infrastructure viable. A single SNAP household might spend $100 to $250 a month, most of it on staple goods with low margins. But multiplied across dozens or hundreds of households, that spending represents the volume necessary for small retailers to qualify for bulk purchasing rates and maintain access to perishable suppliers.

“When those EBT cards stop scanning,” Johnson said, “the dairy truck stops coming.”

Unlike suburban chains, independent rural grocers don’t have the buffer of private equity or diverse customer bases. They operate close to the line, often stocking inventory on 30-day credit. When SNAP-funded purchases dry up, the line collapses.

The new policy’s impact isn’t just about economics, Johnson says. It also reshapes her sense of community. “I’m not just losing sales,” she said. “I’m losing neighbors. I’m losing Sunday church conversations. I’m losing the everyday check-ins that hold a town together.”
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/trumps-new-w…

A Rule Change with No Cushion

3/10: The new SNAP rule didn’t arrive with a cushion — no bridge funding, no grace period, no public awareness campaign tailored for the rural South. “Most folks didn’t even know it was coming,” said Teresa Johnson. “They just showed up one day and their cards got denied” The New York Times.

Under the terms of the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed in June, the work requirement for able-bodied adults aged 18 to 59 without dependents was increased from 20 to 30 hours weekly. The new policy took effect on July 1, 2025. But in places like Drew County, Arkansas, the infrastructure to absorb that shock simply doesn’t exist.

Federal officials estimate hundreds of thousands of Americans may be disqualified in the initial wave. Rural counties — already short on job openings, child care, and transportation — are absorbing a disproportionate share of the fallout The New York Times.

Drew County has an unemployment rate nearly double the national average. Jobs are scarce, and many that exist don’t offer stable schedules. “If you have to work 30 hours to qualify for food,” Johnson said, “but your job only gives you 25, what are you supposed to do — quit and go hungry?”

This isn’t a theoretical concern. Johnson says several of her longtime customers worked part-time at the local mill or gas station — jobs that never guaranteed 30 hours. When they lost their benefits, they also cut back on shopping, sometimes dropping by only for rice, eggs, or ramen.

“There’s no glide path here,” said one regional advocate. “This is a cliff. You fall off or you hustle to hang on” The Guardian.

Many affected individuals are unable to complete benefit appeals or requalification steps due to limited access to broadband or in-person guidance. Johnson said she’s fielded questions from customers who received rejection letters they didn’t understand. Some tried to reapply online but couldn’t complete the process without internet at home. Others gave up entirely. “You can’t navigate a bureaucracy from a flip phone,” she said.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/trumps-new-w…

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Aug 2

The Descent of American Democracy Shows No Bottom

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

― James Baldwin (1924–1987)

🧵1/11: IN 1968, just three years after Bloody Sunday and one month after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Black Americans in many Southern states were finally able to vote without fear of firebombs or billy clubs.

That was less than a lifetime ago—yet in those same states today, voters stand in line for hours, face surgical voter ID laws, or find themselves quietly purged from the rolls.

The weapons have changed—paper instead of chains, laws instead of whips—but the impulse has not.

The United States oscillates between emancipation and exclusion, between the promise of liberty and the practice of control.

But this latest swing isn’t natural. It is being pulled—by courts, legislators, billionaires, and ideologues.

And unless we confront that pull directly, democracy itself may not return to center.

…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-descent-…

A Democracy Built on Exclusion

2/11: From its founding, the United States has been animated by a paradox: a republic committed to liberty and built on domination.

Nowhere was this contradiction more violently expressed than in the American South, where an economy of cotton and blood sustained a regime of total subjugation—economic, legal, and spiritual.

Enslaved Africans were denied not just freedom, but even personhood—defined legally as property and spiritually as cursed.

The U.S. Constitution, for all its democratic pretensions, contained no affirmative right to vote.

It still doesn’t.

Voting was left to the states, many of which ensured that political power would remain white, male, and landed. Exclusion, in other words, was not a regional deviation. It was an architectural choice.

After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments promised something closer to full citizenship for the formerly enslaved.

But rights enshrined in law required power to enforce them—and that power collapsed quickly.

In 1877, as part of the infamous Compromise to resolve a disputed presidential election, Northern leaders withdrew federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. In exchange for executive power, they surrendered the project of Black citizenship.

The Jim Crow order that followed was not a spontaneous backlash—it was a deliberate reassertion of racial control through literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and racial terror.

The old slaveocracy had simply adapted to new constraints. It no longer needed chains. It had paperwork.

For nearly a century, democracy in the South was a mirage. Not until the passage—and federal enforcement—of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 did meaningful Black enfranchisement begin. And even then, it was incomplete. The Jim Crow order had not collapsed; it had simply rebranded.

Today, across many of the same states, polling places in Black communities are shuttered, voters are purged from rolls through “exact match” policies, and ID laws surgically target demographics unlikely to vote Republican. This is not a Southern betrayal.

It is an American design flaw—rooted in the founding omission of a constitutional right to vote, and perfected through a century of practice. The form is democratic. The function remains exclusionary.
…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-descent-…

Sectionalism Reborn

3/11: Today, the legal landscape of the United States is once again fracturing along sectional lines.

In one state, abortion is a protected right; in another, it’s criminalized. In one, transgender youth can access affirming care; in another, their doctors face felony charges.

This isn’t federalism in action—it’s the fracture of a shared constitutional identity.

The ideal of “equal protection under law” no longer means what it once did.

Some states, like California or New York, are expanding civil liberties. Others, like Texas or Florida, are engineering legal regimes to restrict them.

Once again, as in the decades before the Civil War, the country is being pulled apart not only by policy differences, but by incompatible moral visions.

These disparities raise urgent questions about national coherence.

Why should states that expand rights be required to fund federal and state systems that entrench repression elsewhere—through tax dollars, military bases, or judicial appointments?

What does “shared governance” mean when core values no longer intersect, and equal citizenship depends on geography? The Constitution may still bind the states together in law, but the cultural contract is fraying. Sectional resentment is no longer rhetorical; it’s becoming systemic.

And unless it is directly confronted, it may erode not just federal cohesion, but the very idea of the Union itself.

…eintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/the-descent-…

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Jul 27

The Rise of Hitler: A History of How Democracy Fell in Germany and Its Parallels to Today

🧵1/11: His past was steeped in scandal—a felon, accused of treason and sedition, his actions and rhetoric frequently straddling the line of legality.

He was convicted for attempting to overthrow the government, yet this criminal history didn’t disqualify him.

It only made him more appealing to those who viewed the establishment as corrupt and broken. Instead of disqualifying him, his criminal record and charges became part of his defiant charm, painting him as an outsider willing to fight the system.

Every accusation, every charge of treason, only fueled his rise, showing his supporters that he could not be tamed and was the only one willing to challenge the powers that had held the nation in their grip.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

2/11: At first, they dismissed him. The elites, the media, the political class—they thought they could control him. They mocked him as a sideshow, a foolish provocateur, destined to be forgotten.

But in the wake of high inflation, economic instability, and a country that had lost its bearings, his words struck a chord with those who had been cast aside.

In an age of rising populism, economic dislocation, and a shrinking middle class, his rhetoric didn’t promise solutions—it promised retribution.

It wasn’t just blame he offered; it was a convenient, scapegoated enemy to rally against.

His was a message soaked in anger, dripping with resentment for anyone deemed an outsider.

Minorities, immigrants, political rivals—all of them were the root of the nation’s collapse. And in this narrative of vengeance, he found his power.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

3/11: It wasn’t just the forgotten and the downtrodden who rallied to him.

His support was a web of disenfranchised voters, alienated workers, and desperate communities—a rage that turned inward, then outward.

People who had once believed in the promise of democracy now saw him as their only hope, their only defender. He was the hammer to crush a system they believed had betrayed them.

They didn’t care what he stood for, as long as he was willing to destroy the things they hated. And with every provocation, every scandal, his following grew—spurred on by his audacity and his defiance.

The more they despised him, the more they were drawn to him, their loyalty strengthening with every wave of mockery that he deflected effortlessly.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Jul 16

Trump Savages His Own Base Over Epstein Questions — While His Decades of Ties to the Predator Haunt Him

🧵1/8: Donald Trump, already an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon, has now turned his fury on his own supporters — for daring to ask questions about his long and sordid history with Jeffrey Epstein.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

Epstein Client List Demands

2/8: On July 16, amid growing calls from Republicans and MAGA influencers for transparency about Epstein’s client list, Trump lashed out at his base, calling them “weaklings” and accusing them of doing “the Democrats’ work” by continuing to press the issue.

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax," Trump declared on Truth Social. He went further in person, saying that Republicans questioning him were “stupid” and “foolish” and that he no longer wanted their support.
open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

Trump’s Friendship With Epstein

3/8: Yet the questions his supporters are asking are not without reason.

Trump’s friendship with Epstein goes back to the 1980s and 1990s.

They were close — so close that Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff he was Trump’s “closest friend for ten years,” according to The Yale Review. Together, the two prowled parties at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, “hunting women,” as Wolff put it.

Wolff recalled seeing a photograph, shown to him by Epstein, of Trump with two young topless women at a party — their ages unclear but “they looked young” — and noted that Trump had a stain on his pants, which he suggested could have been biological evidence of sexual activity.

Epstein himself said Trump “tried to seduce the wives of his friends” and was “a horrible human being” despite being “charming,” according to The Yale Review.

According to Michael Wolff, Trump’s friendship with Epstein reportedly ended after a dispute over Palm Beach real estate, but Epstein represented to Wolff that he continued speaking with Trump during his first White House term — a claim that startled even Wolff, who later shared excerpts of Epstein’s recordings with The Daily Beast.

open.substack.com/pub/theintelle…

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Jun 6

Black Saturday: The Day the United States Ceased to Be a Constitutional Democracy

The Moment Democracy Ceased to Function

🧵1/10: Saturday, March 15, 2025, may have seemed unremarkable to most Americans.

But in time, history will remember it as Black Saturday—the moment the United States ceased to function as a constitutional democracy.

For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president openly defied a direct federal court order—and nothing happened. No intervention. No enforcement. No consequences.

A legal ruling was issued, and the White House simply ignored it.

The White House’s Decision: Power Over Law

Inside the White House, the decision was not about law—it was about power.

A federal judge ruled against the administration. The debate inside Trump’s team was not whether the ruling was legal, but whether they could get away with ignoring it. They decided they could. And they were right.

This was not a clash between equal branches of government. It was the moment the judiciary was exposed as powerless.

The courts do not have an army. They rely on compliance.

But a court that cannot enforce its rulings is not a court—it is a suggestion box.

And a presidency that can ignore the courts without consequence is no longer constrained by law—it is an untouchable executive.

Trump did not declare the end of judicial authority in a speech.

He demonstrated it in practice.

This is how democratic systems collapse—not with a single act, but with the normalization of defiance, the expectation that a ruling can simply be brushed aside.
theintellectualist.com/black-saturday…

How the System Failed to Stop Him

2/10: This moment did not happen in isolation. It happened because every prior attempt to hold Trump accountable has failed.

The system tried—and at every turn, it proved incapable of stopping him.

Impeachment failed—twice.

Criminal cases stalled.

The Supreme Court refused to rule on his disqualification.

Congress never moved to check his power.

At each step, Trump tested the system—and the system flinched.

He learned that laws are only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce them.

And so, when faced with a court ruling, he did what he had been conditioned to do—he ignored it. And nothing happened.

The Supreme Court’s Role in Making the Presidency Untouchable

The judiciary was already weakened by years of erosion, but in 2024, the Supreme Court itself ensured that when this moment arrived, there would be no legal recourse left.

In a landmark ruling, the Court expanded presidential immunity to such an extent that the office of the presidency is now functionally above the law.

A president can commit crimes while in office and face no immediate accountability.

And now, with Black Saturday, Trump has proven that he can ignore court rulings entirely without consequence.

This is not the separation of powers.

It is the absorption of power into a single branch. The courts were supposed to be the last line of defense. Instead, they have been reduced to issuing rulings the executive can freely ignore.

theintellectualist.com/black-saturday…

The Role of Fox News in Conditioning the Public

3/10: Fox News did not issue the order, but it made this moment possible.

In the aftermath of Trump’s defiance, Fox put the judge’s face on screen, not as part of neutral reporting, but as a deliberate act of intimidation.

They did not need to explicitly declare that judicial rulings no longer mattered—they had already spent years training millions to believe it.

Through relentless framing, they had conditioned their audience to see the courts as corrupt, as partisan, as obstacles to be overcome rather than institutions to be respected.

Trump did not invent this strategy; he simply acted on it, carrying their rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

Why Americans Do Not See the Collapse Happening

This is why the phrase “you cannot see the forest for the trees” is so powerful in this moment.

The trees are the individual events.

Trump ignoring a court ruling.

The Supreme Court making the presidency immune from criminal accountability.

Congress failing to act repeatedly.

The media normalizing the breakdown of democracy.

The forest is the overarching reality.

The U.S. government is no longer constrained by constitutional limits.

The judiciary has been rendered powerless through precedent and selective enforcement.

The executive branch now decides which laws apply to itself.

Most people living through history don’t realize they are inside a moment of collapse because each event, taken alone, does not seem like the end of democracy.

The shock of one ruling being ignored does not feel catastrophic.

The Supreme Court deciding a president is immune from prosecution feels like just another legal controversy. Congressional inaction feels like business as usual.

The media’s treatment of this moment as just another chapter in the ongoing Trump saga makes it easy to assume the system will self-correct.

But when viewed together, it becomes undeniable that the system has already failed.

theintellectualist.com/black-saturday…

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Jun 1

The Rise of Hitler: A History of How Democracy Fell in Germany and Its Parallels to Today

🧵1/11: His past was steeped in scandal—a felon, accused of treason and sedition, his actions and rhetoric frequently straddling the line of legality. He was convicted for attempting to overthrow the government, yet this criminal history didn’t disqualify him.

It only made him more appealing to those who viewed the establishment as corrupt and broken. Instead of disqualifying him, his criminal record and charges became part of his defiant charm, painting him as an outsider willing to fight the system.

Every accusation, every charge of treason, only fueled his rise, showing his supporters that he could not be tamed and was the only one willing to challenge the powers that had held the nation in their grip.
youtube.com/watch?v=ShqC31…

2/11: At first, they dismissed him. The elites, the media, the political class—they thought they could control him. They mocked him as a sideshow, a foolish provocateur, destined to be forgotten.

But in the wake of high inflation, economic instability, and a country that had lost its bearings, his words struck a chord with those who had been cast aside.

In an age of rising populism, economic dislocation, and a shrinking middle class, his rhetoric didn’t promise solutions—it promised retribution. It wasn’t just blame he offered; it was a convenient, scapegoated enemy to rally against.

His was a message soaked in anger, dripping with resentment for anyone deemed an outsider. Minorities, immigrants, political rivals—all of them were the root of the nation’s collapse. And in this narrative of vengeance, he found his power.
youtube.com/watch?v=ShqC31…

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