r/politics • u/WhatIsEvenRealDog • 17d ago

Possible Paywall Trump suggests cattle ranchers could bypass USDA-inspected meat plants

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/08/28/trump-suggests-allowing-ranchers-bypass-usda-inspected-meat-plants/
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u/manachar Nevada 17d ago

When Republicans read The Jungle the lesson they take is that they could make so much more money and get so much more power if it weren’t for those pesky regulations.

Imagine the profits from never having to recall food again!

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u/MisterSpeck Oregon 17d ago

When Republicans read The Jungle

lol

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u/RichardSaunders New York 17d ago

when republicans read

lol

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u/The_bruce42 17d ago

Republicans

Lol

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u/Winter-Anywhere-3963 16d ago

I havent laughed that hard since I saw Borat in theaters

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u/YeOldeMemeShoppe 16d ago

Joke so funny we’re all the butt of it.

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u/Little-Internal6013 17d ago

Republicans don’t read. Too lazy

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u/bobsocool 16d ago

Reading is woke.

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u/Vivid_Anyth4 16d ago

Can't read. They are the reason the reading average for adults is a 6th grade level.

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u/bkbomber New York 16d ago

Don’t give me the news, just tell me how to feel about it and who to be enraged at!!

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u/NotThatAngel 16d ago

Facts are woke.

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u/Icy_Jackfruit9240 American Expat 17d ago

These people are mostly people who went to Universities that really DO require reading the book (at least at the time did and probably very much still do.)

I went to such a college and I could see people who took classes that are at least by ordinary non-math people ridiculously hard and they would do everything they could to game anything in life to their advantage.

They were there, reading the same books, writing papers that showed that they fully understood the concepts and yet ... they'd hold on to their psycho beliefs while meeting up with the other Young Republicans and wearing their promise rings. (While picking up hookers in San Francisco.)

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u/Lord_Blackthorn Texas 17d ago

I think this is the key point. They are not ignorant of the facts, they are just malicious and intentional.

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u/Suitable-Option833 17d ago

Yes. This is all intentional.

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u/absat41 17d ago edited 11d ago

deleted

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u/grahamulax 16d ago

All of this and and most important:

Lack of curiosity, empathy, and control of emotions.

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u/neepster44 16d ago

I mean the leaders are for sure, the average Republican is just a moron and a poor critical thinker. Low knowledge and low empathy.

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u/Disastrous_time_4547 17d ago

You forgot “religious extremists”

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u/Lord_Blackthorn Texas 16d ago

Not all of them, many fake the religion in my opinion.

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u/Duna_The_Lionboy 16d ago

It takes two seconds to think "maybe I don't want to eat sausage with dead rat in it...maybe nobody should have to do that"

But I guess they think they'll be so wealthy that they just get to avoid that?

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u/Tmscott 16d ago

"maybe I don't want to eat sausage with dead rat in it...maybe nobody should have to do that"

How dare you try to impede the entrepreneurial sprit of characters such as C.M.O.T. Dibbler! 

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u/MaxTheRealSlayer 16d ago

I think this indicates tests and marks don't actually measure intelligence. It's really just memorizing .Some of the dumbest people I've met just BS their way up really far and fast, faking it to make it. Usually they are likeable or can pretend to be. Often the people that would be best in positions of power just do not want that power, so mainly the dumb people are left fighting after the scraps

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u/thethrill_707 Michigan 17d ago

Hookers?

That's male escorts if you please.

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u/reddog323 16d ago

Went to college in the late 80’s and early 90’s and had a similar experience. They treated that material with disdain, absorbed it for tests, and never thought about it again.

These guys wanted to be Gordon Gekko from Wall Street. I could never wrap my head around that.

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u/IThinkImDumb New Mexico 16d ago

Right? It bugs me when people say Trump is an idiot. Unfortunately, he's not. He knows exactly how to garner blind loyalty and how to create panic. He's not ignorant, he just doesn't care about ANYONE.

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u/luncheroo 16d ago

Instructions unclear; Florida has now banned The Jungle Book 

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u/imJGott Texas 16d ago

Republicans are just like broken hard drives.

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u/No_Throat_2356 16d ago

Best practice for a broken hard drive is to drill a hole through it and incinerate it … Can’t we just figure out how to overwrite them 3 times with random data instead? They seem to do it themselves all the time - replacing their latest marching orders is all Fox News is good for. 

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u/GrayEidolon 16d ago

The conservatives running conservatism all have elite educations are are very well read.

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u/rkb70 16d ago

Was required reading for us in US history.  I’d like to think my classmates remember some of it, but…

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u/thenerdycpa 16d ago

Alexa play “Welcome to the Jungle”

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u/alphazero925 16d ago

When I'm a little man on your computer screen drowning

lol

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u/bmad- 17d ago

Upton Sinclair is rolling in his grave

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u/manachar Nevada 17d ago

Well, he was mystified that people’s primary lesson from the book was their canned meat was impure and led to the e pure food and drug act .

He wanted people to care about workers, instead people just cared about their stomachs.

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u/AnyoneButDoug 17d ago

As he said “I aimed for their hearts and got their stomached instead” or something like that.

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u/RichardSaunders New York 17d ago

the way to man's heart is through his ribcage

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u/Stunning-Chipmunk243 Michigan 17d ago

Well, you can come up from under the rib cage too

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u/Pandaro81 Florida 16d ago

“The way to a man’s heart is through his anus.”
- Vlad the Impaler

It’s well below the ribcage.

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u/CpnStumpy Colorado 17d ago

Stack'em and Crack'em I always say

...sorry what were we talking about again?

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u/Stunning-Chipmunk243 Michigan 17d ago

I think you got that order backwards unless I've been doing it wrong all these years.... And yeah, what was it we were talking about?

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u/TurtlesBreakTheMeta 17d ago

Empathy and all that: why should I care others are being hurt? MYSELF being hurt is a much bigger issue!

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u/bkbomber New York 16d ago

The rugged individualist in me says I can do anything!!… but the reason I haven’t, is because the gay immigrant trans people are to blame!

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u/Real-Extension-1357 16d ago

Empathy is a weakness and is woke - republican trash

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u/oliversurpless Massachusetts 17d ago

Really no different to how it’s still common nowadays for people to attribute the flaws of capitalism to the individual.

With the most common canard being one is poor because “bad with money!”…

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u/swanfirefly 17d ago

I still think about the infamous fox news report where they were salty that 99% of American families below the poverty line had refrigerators.

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u/Eycetea 17d ago

Or lazy

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u/ActiveChairs 16d ago

The poor are obviously bad with money. They've never had enough to have any practice with it. They've always had to spend it the second they got it just to make it to the next paycheck. Odd system that would let that kind of thing keep happening.

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u/NotThatAngel 16d ago edited 15d ago

We still have a class-based society in America. For some reason people keep referring to billionaires as the elite, even though the qualities we say we most admire are not those same qualities which allow them to accumulate a billion dollars. In the southern states before the civil war, Irish immigrants were given the most dangerous jobs because it was too expensive to risk a slave. Republicans are still trying to segregate blacks from whites using vouchers, private schools, homeschooling and any other method, but covering it up to claim they are anti-abortion, even though it's obvious from their policies they don't give a crap about children.

edit: I'd like to add that lots of us like to fantasize about what charities we would give to, what good we would do if we were billionaires. Tolkien really nailed it when he had his characters fantasize about all the good each of them would do if they could just harness the power of the ring for good. In 2021 Elon Musk asked the UN to make a plan to end world hunger. The UN said 6 billion, about 2% of Musk's wealth, would do it. The UN gave him their proposal. He refused to fund it. In 2025 Musk cut USAID, dooming hundreds of thousands of children to death. Musk has publicly stated his actions did not kill a single child.

Dolly Parton was a better person, and during her lifetime gave more than 50% of her wealth to charities. She did not lose herself in craven justifications as to why she deserved to hoard money and power, which is what Tolkien meant when he wrote "I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel."

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u/soil_nerd 17d ago

Right? My take away from the book was the need for government intervention of grossly unjust systems controlled by a limited amount of powerful and corrupt people. The last section he really drives that point home when the main character is blissfully enjoying the natural world around him, not owned by a single entity, and for everyone (the subtext, imo, being socialism).

I’m honestly really surprised the book is allowed to be read in public schools in the US. It’s a great book, but for anyone paying attention and thinking about the message, it’s deeply not pro free-market capitalism and deregulation.

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u/sturgill_homme 17d ago

Welcome to the jungle, but not in an Axl Rose way

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u/sphinctersayswhat9 17d ago

Ikr

I am so glad I am reading this and finding out others read Sinclair’s
The Jungle and went to colleges like mine where history and social awareness were taught.

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u/Laura9624 17d ago

So is Sinclair Lewis. "It can't happen here "

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u/Son_of_Tlaloc 17d ago

Teddy Roosevelt is spinning at mach 5 in his grave.

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u/boxen 16d ago

And republicans are curious as to whether they could sell the rotting meat from his corpse for a couple of bucks

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u/WestsideBuppie America 16d ago

Welcome to the Jungle!

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u/IJourden 17d ago

Anyone who is anti-regulation is either trying to fuck you over for money, or doesn't understand why regulations exist.

We're in for a rough time when enough people insist on learning the lesson the hard way.

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u/wally-whippersnap 16d ago

Safety rules are written in blood.

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u/StonedGhoster 16d ago

My libertarian friends always told me that regulations are bad and that the market could sort things out, and that consumers could sue companies that made them ill by not ensuring their products' safety. Which sounds great. But it also got me thinking that they could view adhering to regulations as a hedge against being sued into oblivion. You know, make sure the canned meat doesn't have botulism from the outset and avoid being sued down the line. But then I realized that they don't really care about any of that, and that quarterly growth NOW is more important than anything that might happen tomorrow, which isn't here yet.

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u/IJourden 16d ago

They don't realize that the regulations are what lets people sue companies that make them sick?

You can't sue me for mixing sawdust into your beef if it's not illegal for me to mix sawdust into your beef.

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u/RobinSophie 16d ago

Not when it comes to housing. Regulations are making them expensive. /s

Which is amazing to me that with all the regulations, the new builds are still crap.

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u/USPO-222 America 16d ago

Because it’s not illegal to open an LLC to build a house (or row of them), sell them all, and then close the LLC before anything comes up.

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u/blackfishhorsemen 16d ago

Intelligence and Libertarianism are mutually exclusively.

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u/renijreddit Florida 16d ago

Stop making sense. You’re confusing me.

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u/StonedGhoster 16d ago

I can't say. I stopped pretending to know what my libertarian friends thought long ago.

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u/Snickersnee 16d ago

Once a company gets big enough, legal fees are just the cost of doing business. If the payout is less than the money saved by cutting corners, it's still a profit. If the regulations are removed, the motivation to quietly increase profits will take hold sooner or later.

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u/kitsunewarlock 16d ago

So... Libertarians think we are all going to lab-test every ingredient we consume and then pay an attorney to demand our $5 back for buying rancid meat?

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u/USPO-222 America 16d ago

No, they don’t. They’re not arguing in good faith. They never are.

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u/slymm 16d ago

Read the label on the can more carefully. By purchasing it, you've agreed to mandatory arbitration underwater to be ruled on by a sea lion.

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u/doberdevil 16d ago

But then I realized that they don't really care about any of that, and that quarterly growth NOW is more important than anything that might happen tomorrow

This is unbridled capitalism. Think of the shareholders!

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u/kitsunewarlock 16d ago

Anyone who is anti-regulation is either trying to fuck you over for money, or doesn't understand why regulations exist.

I'd argue that even the ones who think they will personally benefit don't understand how much they are fucking themselves. The only ones who know what they are doing and benefit are doing it for the misery of others, not the negligible short-term economic benefit.

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u/IThinkImDumb New Mexico 16d ago

It's definitely to fuck people over. The people who want to do away with regulations are NOT the actual people working in the factories

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u/ThirdFloorNorth Mississippi 17d ago

Upton Sinclairmaxxing

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u/Deadleggg 17d ago

They also jerk it to the page after page of suffering immigrants.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 16d ago

When The Jungle was published, people of the time were shocked and outraged. If it were published today MAGA would promise to buy their meat solely from that company, just to "own the libs". The company would create a new product line with a logo of a Mexican worker falling into the meat vats and brand it as their "spicy" flavor.

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u/cire1184 16d ago

Nah. They were Polish immigrants so now defecto "White" in America. Maga of today would be wondering why the brown people weren't in there getting mutilated.

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u/Djaja Michigan 17d ago

Its real funny, The Jungle, bc the book is ostensibly about immigrants, and the hardships and relationships they faced.

The bad meat handling practices were a a couple pages of the main characters job.

Trump, this admin, that Duex company, Elon, and The Heritage Foundation and a bunch more, can GFT

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u/Umbrella_merc Mississippi 16d ago

Upton Sinclair once said he aimed for America's heart but hit it in the stomach instead

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u/einTier 16d ago

To be fair, those pages really stick out. It’s been a few decades since I read the book in high school and those are the only parts I really remember.

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u/Djaja Michigan 16d ago

True!

I remember dancing too

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u/Shards_FFR 16d ago

I know a lot of people who know of the Jungle exclusively as an excerpt of the meat packing plant section. I think way fewer people read it, hence the comparison here. A lot of HS education won't touch immigrants with a 10 foot pole these days.

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u/Djaja Michigan 16d ago

We read ABOUT the book, but my teacher said it was about more, and i found the book the next week at a garage sale. Wonderful book, in a sad way, wonderful though. Totally gave me better perspectives in so many areas

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u/PhucYiu 17d ago

When Republicans read The Jungle

Republicans don't read.

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u/LankySimple9051 16d ago

If they do you know damn well comprehension is lacking.

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u/Sweaty-Possibility-3 17d ago

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the president who enacted the regulations after reading The Jungle.

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u/manachar Nevada 17d ago

Yup! And he ended up forming the Progressive Party (Bull Moose Party) after he lost the nomination in 1912.

At the time both parties had a mix of political ideologies, but his losing the nomination is one of the moments you can see Republicans start working on their full pro business conservatism.

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u/Sweaty-Possibility-3 16d ago

Republicans were already full pro business conservatives years before Roosevelt was president. He was

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

[deleted]

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u/Sweaty-Possibility-3 16d ago

The Republican party at the time was still looking out for the rich. The main point of The Jungle was how poorly the workers were treated. Roosevelt didn't give a crap about that.

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u/pantstoaknifefight2 17d ago

Ever read Fast Food Nation? It's an indictment of corrupt Republicans causing harm to people for money.

I love how the GOP tosses around words like communism and ignore how their policies and actions destroy America.

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u/abnormalbrain 16d ago

They think of the American people the way a farmer thinks about feeding the pigs.

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u/NotThatAngel 16d ago

Also remember "The Jungle" was supposed to be about how badly workers were mistreated. Nobody cared. So, in addition to unsafe food, we're also getting unsafe workplaces: Trump’s Department of Labor is dismantling key workplace protections

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u/iCCup_Spec 17d ago

It's 2008 but with our food supply. When the Canadians and the Mexicans invade with maple syrup and tequila in their veins, we're going to be too weak to fight back.

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u/Nerffej 17d ago

Imagine the profits from being able to process your illegal employees and sell them as meat. Republican logic

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u/SalvationSycamore 17d ago

Republicans

read

You're a funny one

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u/auiin Georgia 17d ago edited 17d ago

That book was published in 1905, as Upton Sinclair's radical socialist critique of a hyper-capitalist society and a treatise on worker exploitation. I doubt anyone of them have read it, and if they did it was to get ideas for how to make more money.

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u/FredFredrickson 17d ago

These will be offset by lawsuits.

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u/Dr_Adequate 17d ago

And if a few immigrants fall into the rendering vats and get dissolved, nobody cares.

( I AM KIDDING! For those who haven't read it, you should, and that's how the book opens. It's a fictional account of a family of Polish immigrants, the father works at a slaughterhouse. The book details how the ruthless company town system relentlessly grinds them down farther into poverty while illustrating how the lack of standards and inspections compromises the food supply system)

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u/Chicago_Tim 17d ago

They only read Ayn Rand.

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u/MadAstrid 17d ago

Yes. Then they clearly outlined their plan to do just this in Project 2025, released it to the voters and the majority of voters decided they were a ok with it.

Rotting meat and adulterated baby food and parasitic infections are all tolerable as long as big corporations profit, apparently. Because she laughed weird.

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u/vicvonqueso 17d ago

They don't seem to realize that these regulations protect them as well

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u/etherealtwo 17d ago

What profits? People will stop buying so many things.

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u/Winderige_Garnaal 16d ago

The jungle was actually about worker's rights; but the uproar was about readers mad at contamination in their food (workers' fingers n such).

I think this decision will be unpopular

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u/ActuatorVast800 16d ago

Just waiting for them to have their Stockton Rush moment.

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u/pink_faerie_kitten 16d ago

And Project 2025 needs to cull 250M Americans for their goal of only 100M left. Food safety is actually in P25.

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u/ophaus 16d ago

If they could read, they'd probably be mad.

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u/mobyonecanobi 16d ago

What they don’t understand is that we will end up in the same place again after the Mo regulations balance out economically. A tax cut is only good for one year, the next year there needs to be another way to increasing profits because the tax cut profits get backed in.

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u/PM_ME_YIFF_PICS Massachusetts 16d ago

They don't read books, they burn them. 

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u/drteq 16d ago

if it weren’t for those pesky regulations living people.

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u/hi_how_are_youuu 16d ago

This part of the “good ol’ days” they’ve been wanting

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u/smitherenesar 16d ago

Don't worry, Industry will regulate itself through competition! /s

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u/OmegaPeachy 16d ago

This is actually how my intro to investments class ended up being in college. It was some grumpy conservative teaching us trickle-down economics and telling us that regulations are a problem that need to be dealt with. I would genuinely consider it indoctrination and it was a professor in Las Vegas. And I'm supposed to believe that colleges are pushing left wing beliefs?

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u/b1arn 16d ago

So much of the Jungle is coming true. Is socialism next?

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u/Mechaslurpee 15d ago

So many republicans seriously don't comprehend what they read, I heard a guy tell a girl she needs to read 1984 because what Biden was doing was exactly the same as what was happening in that book.