Which is where the amused observation starts.

Massachusetts is in the middle of what the rest of the country has been calling the Biden border disaster since 2022 — and, if you're one of the migrant families who crossed the southern border and worked your way north through the country's cities, this is where you were told to end up.

Why here? Because Massachusetts, more than almost any other state, has been happy to hand you a list of freebies most residents will never see.

Not one freebie. A whole menu.

Hotel rooms in the state's Emergency Assistance shelter system. Catered meals delivered to those hotel rooms — Boston Globe and Herald reporting has documented plate-per-family kitchens set up in hotel conference rooms at state expense. Subsidized ride-share transportation to medical appointments, WIC offices, and school enrollment, including Uber rides paid for by state contracts. Then, on the way out of the shelter system, HomeBASE covers security deposits, broker fees, rent-stabilization payments, furniture allowances, and even landlord bonuses to keep the lease in place.

If you are a young Massachusetts household paying $2,600 a month in rent and building your security-deposit fund out of the leftover, the list reads like a joke someone made up. If you are the state government, it is the enacted budget.

r/aboutMassachusetts is a small subreddit — a few thousand active users, mostly people who actually live in Massachusetts and talk about MBTA delays, town-level budget votes, and the odd fiscal question about state government. Its editorial center of gravity leans anti-establishment right: fiscally-conservative, skeptical of progressive-Beacon-Hill mandates, town-meeting-old-timer readers.

That has made it a target. In recent days, the comment section has been visibly dogpiled by users tied to broader left-wing Massachusetts Reddit spaces and to political currents including the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America — a national organization whose formal program openly calls for the abolition of capitalism, the collective ownership of the means of production, and the replacement of the current American economic system with a socialist one. Boston-area DSA has become one of the more disciplined ground games in Massachusetts local politics. The comment sections on immigration and benefits posts in small Massachusetts subreddits have been the visible edge of that push.

The bad-faith brigade landed in familiar tabs: MAGA is upset. This is disingenuous. Sourceless. Racist. Divisive. The same phrases, in the same order, in every dogpile of every small local subreddit that lets a fiscal question slip through. It is not evidence the OP was wrong. It is evidence that his post cleared a keyword tripwire.

They were not defending the working-class Massachusetts family the OP described. They were defending an ideology happy to set its own taxpayers on fire to fund migrant families who crossed the border to come here specifically because of the freebies.

In almost every other developed country in the world, presenting yourself at the border with the stated intention of collecting a state benefit would put you on the next flight home before the paperwork was even printed. That is the default posture of every sovereign nation on the planet. Only the American progressive movement — the ideological water the r/aboutMassachusetts brigade is swimming in — has convinced itself that gatekeeping public benefits, or even asking who gets them, is a moral failing.

Emotional-Disk5571's post got downvoted below zero within a few hours. The state budget page is still there. The freebies are still there. And you, the Massachusetts taxpayer, are still paying for them.