'Just horrible': Shocking stories emerge from Sarah Huckabee Sanders-run Arkansas
Dustin Maybee stopped letting his little girl accompany him to his coop because the starving chickens he'd refused to let Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' state workers smother to death were starting to eat each other, according to a new report.
Jamie Andrews was fired from her job when her 6-year-old son, diagnosed with cerebral palsy and microcephaly, became one of tens of thousands of children dumped from Medicaid by Sander's administration and she had to stay home to nurse him, the report states.
“It was just horrible," said Maybee.
"What else was I supposed to do?" asked Andrews.
Said state Rep. Jim Wooten, "I don’t know how many people I’ve had say to me, had I known what [state government] was going to look like under Gov. Sanders, I wouldn’t have voted for her."
These are just a few voices heard in Politico Magazine's vast and damning new report on life in Arkansas under Sanders, one of former President Donald Trump's top contenders for running mate in his upcoming 2024 election.
Images of Sanders stomping the campaign trail in designer clothes and hugging her dad, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in the governor's mansion are paired with horror stories from residents.
Andrews told Politico about how she's been denied unemployment insurance until her chronically ill son's condition no longer exists, “As if my son will just wake up one day and not be disabled."
ALSO READ: Trump campaign allegedly took ‘excessive’ contributions by the nickel and dime
A journalist details how a request for Sanders' travel records saw the Republican governor attempt to destroy the state's Freedom of Information act, which allows citizens to access and review official public records.
Maybee recounts the day the state's crew showed up on his farms with foam to suffocate his chickens.
His story begins with the abrupt closure of a chicken company that left state farmers responsible for chickens they could not sell as Sanders' administration refused to act.
Bryan King, a farmer and Republican state senator, begged Sanders to declare a state of emergency and send needed cash to subsidize growers and feeders, according to the report.
Instead, Sanders' representative spoke out against government bailouts and the state opted, without due process for the farmers, to euthanize more than one million birds; a move King described as “the most communist thing I’ve ever seen.”
When a crew showed up on Maybee's farm, he invited a local news station. The state said they were not allowed on his farm.
“My daughter, she always walked the [chicken] houses with me," Maybee told Politico. "But I had to quit letting her go in there, because they was dying so fast, and they was eating each other — I couldn’t keep up.
"I couldn’t afford any help."