Washington, D.C., is a hot and swampy place to live. Making matters worse, it’s almost impossible to cool off with an ice-cold drink — unless you’re willing to taste flakes of cardboard, that is.
Effective January 2019, D.C. banned plastic straws, threatening business owners who dare offer functional plastic products with an $800 fine. This has forced most local businesses to use awful, ineffective paper straws. D.C. is just the latest of numerous cities and localities to pass similarly absurd, paternalistic policies banning plastic straws.
Thankfully, President Trump is standing up for the rights of ALL Americans, and doubling down on the fight that matters — against the nanny state and the tyranny of the paper straw.
I thought it was a joke, but it’s true…the Trump campaign is selling plastic straws.
“Liberal paper straws don’t work.” pic.twitter.com/6PIgsELCAk
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 19, 2019
The Trump campaign just unveiled new red plastic straws with the Trump logo emblazoned on them. With the unveiling of this merchandise, and his new slogan — marketing genius — “LIBERAL PAPER STRAWS DON’T WORK,” Trump is spot on. Anyone who has ever used one knows this to be true.
Yes, $15 might sound like a bit much for 10 Trump-branded straws. But can we really put a price on freedom?
Plastic straws bans are a prime example of how paternalistic big-government policies inevitably backfire. They’re intended to reduce environmental waste, as even though plastic straws (like the Trump campaign ones) can be recyclable, they often end up in landfills or littered anyway. But bans on plastic straws actually fail to achieve any meaningful reduction in environmental waste, and are backed up by no actual scientific evidence. (The whole thing was based on a number made up by a nine-year-old.)
Paper straws don’t work, so you often end up using several of them. I’ve personally gone through three drinking one large iced coffee from Starbucks, because they fall apart so easily. Is that supposed to help us conserve resources, especially considering that the production of paper straws still produces pollution?
Plastic straw bans have had another unintended consequence: Severely hurting the disabled. For the disabled, plastic straws are extremely useful, often allowing them to drink in a way no paper or metal straw could. Advocates have made this clear in the aftermath of these bans, with disability advocates speaking out against the ban.
In one tragic example, a 60-year-old woman with a disability actually died in the United Kingdom, impaling herself on a metal straw after an accident. And one woman’s tweets went viral recently, after she described the humiliation it causes disabled people to have to specially request plastic straws at restaurants. In her case, she was told by a waitress she didn’t “seem disabled,” and eventually dismissed by a manager who said “people like that aren’t worth it, just give them the damn straw.”
Even proponents basically acknowledge that plastic straw bans are all virtue signaling without no virtue. The New York Post quoted one Seattle-based environmental activist as saying “Our straw campaign is not really about straws. It’s about pointing out how prevalent single-use plastics are in our lives.” What could be more woke than doing something meaningless in order to show what a good person you are? Clearly, these bans are more about making a woke pro-environment statement than actually making a difference.
So we should thank Trump for standing on the right side of history on this issue. Even if you’re not willing to pay $15 for Trump-branded plastic straws, you can at least see that the president’s heart is in the right place.
