A new government memo feels like it’s straight out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
A new government memo feels like it’s straight out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
The memo also said recipients of federal transportation dollars must cooperate with immigration enforcement, a hit to so-called sanctuary cities.
Summary
The Department of Transportation (DOT) has issued a memo prioritizing federal funding for communities with marriage and birth rates above the national average.
The directive, which applies to grants, loans, and contracts, also prioritizes projects benefiting families with young children.
A congressional aide criticized the policy, saying, “Considering fertility rates when prioritizing federal grants? We obviously have no idea what the full impact of that will be… It’s absolutely creepy. It’s a little ‘Chinese government.’”
The memo also blocks mask mandates and requires compliance with immigration enforcement.
Wait until conservatives find out that communities with high birth rates are not white.
The ones actually running the show don't actually care what skin color they have so long as they are able to work them hard with minimal labor protections and rock bottom wages.
If you look around at the news articles out there... nobody is talking about farmhands getting picked up by ICE. It seems to be exclusively people in major cities. Maybe someone has seen some articles talking about ICE arrests at places of work, but it seems like this time the goal is to nab them at church, the grocery store or when they are bringing their kids to and from school.
Cheap labor. Meat for the grinder.
Can't let their slave labor pool dwindle.
Me and my wife have been watching Handmaid's Tale over the years and we've been saying for some years now that America is way closer than what's comfortable to actually becoming that society. It's actually unreal to see it unfold.
This kind of sounds like government officials coming up with a more trump proof way of saying "build infrastructure in areas with predicted growth".
“Considering fertility rates when prioritizing federal grants? We obviously have no idea what the full impact of that will be,” said this aide. “It’s absolutely creepy. It’s a little ‘Chinese government.’ [The Trump administration] would hate that comparison, but I don’t know where else I’ve seen a policy of ‘we need to incentivize baby-making.’”
Can't disagree there, it's very CCP like and creepy.
Also
Wouldn't that just reward areas where the babies have already been made? It's not going to incentivize babymaking. Like what are they imagining? "Hey babe, let's make 5 more of them, we'll get better roads"?
There's a movement in the American churches where members are told to fill their quiver, AKA have a lot of kids. I wouldn't be surprised if an order like this came from the christian nationalists with project 2025. They are wanting to build up their own communities and spurn the areas that they aren't populating.
Edit: those kind of people also say that allowing donations to churches to be tax deductible is god's way of rewarding them for tithing. They want the government to reward them for their beliefs.
When people want tp have kids they usually will consider what is a good area for the next 20 years or so to raise a kid. Technically the messaging is correct but with trump its always whether he's being honest or not.
Ah, so they'd have to move to where there are a lot of kids already, in order to have the funding benefits actually do anything by the time they need to start driving their kids to school.
On the other hand, in an area with a lot of kids, you'd have more traffic jams so it's still kinda counter productive IMO.
It's not a surprise. The oligarchs are going to need more slaves after they send the army out to kill us.
Creatives: produces warnings
Conservatives: Hey check out this cool instruction manual I found!
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create The Torment Nexus
This is going to benefit communities with a lot of hispanic families, lmao.
Inb4 non-white children born only count as three fifths
They will have more work to do and it will be closer to home. Win win!
Utah enters the chat...
Do illegal marriages count?
Gonna solve that 101 freeway issue right quick
Remember how all the protest voters told us how Harris would have been the exact same? Something about the DNC not offering a candidate that would be any better than trump?
Yeah… Don’t believe them when they try to tell you that they didn’t go out of their way to help make this happen.
Yep. Quite a few of them have gone quiet, I've noticed. Not one of them has apologized for their cloying sanctimony before the election, no matter how wrong it was.
I sincerely hope that each and every one of them is at least capable of feeling guilt. Because I so badly want them to suffer the guilt of having helped caused this. I don’t even care anymore that they refuse to admit it. They know it, I know it- them admitting it doesn’t make it better.
Knowing they feel the full weight of guilt pressing on them for being partially responsible for everything that will happen as a result of their ignorance?
Yeah… That does make it a little better.
Still here, not going to appologize, I stand by my statement, both of them are facist, and the only two difrences between them where trajectory into utter decay, and retoric. Both of them make libs sanctamonious and tell me that I cannot call a spade a spade because the spade is actualy a hoe (it is very much a spade).
I never said they where congurent, or exactly the same, I said they where in the long run equivelent, and I stand by that statment. I said that Harris did nothing to earn my vote, and I stand by that, I said that running on "I am slightly less bad than the other guy and because there are only 2 parties that means you have to chose me" is not a sound or acceptable electoral stratagy, and I once agian stand by that. I said that her winding down her "they are wierd" and "Its neighborly not to hord wealth and be a rich ghool" tactics, that where working, and where austensably the reasons she chose Walz as her running mate because her brother in law, an Uber Exec did not like it was moronic and I stand by it.
Why have I decided not to keep posting about this, because your lot has stopped screaming that I have to cast a vote to someone that if I did I would not be able to sleep at night because I made an afermitive choice to suport them, because i see no significant disagreement between your view that "trump is a facist and the US is NOW facist" and mine "Wow trump as expected really plunged at a steep slope, he took some of the plausable denyability out before I was expecting, but it does not change that the Previously Facist US that is still Facist is moving down the Facism railway" so there is no god damn reason for me to post about it all the time
And before you ask, yes I know there are lives at stake and live are being torn apart, I am aware and not unsympethetic, no I do not think that it would have accelerated this fast with Harris, no I am not an accelerationis, no I did not "want" trump, yes if only 2 options exist harris would have been the slightly better one, but agian that is like saying eat dog shit, or eat dog shit coated in chocolate, I am not going to willingly chose either of those options.
So no, I am not sorry, no I am not gone, and no I am not "quiet" I just see no significant disagreement on the basis that I feel the need to write a comment, let alone now that election season is over you see a whole lot less trying to tell me that one would be the greatest thing ever.
I'm not quiet, my comments just keep getting deleted, and only the comments pretending I said something else get to stay.
As ever I will not take any lectures on morality from anyone who watched a politician arm a genocide and voted for them (or their VP) anyway. We had multiple non-Trump candidates, you all picked the biggest genocidal scumbag Nazi traitor out of all of them - both in the primaries and the general - and you lost. Blame yourselves for rallying behind a monster.
P.S., nobody said "the exact same". You all just love rolling that out, but at the same time can't even acknowledge exactly WHAT similarity it implies, that two "opposing" politicians both UNQUESTIONINGLY PARTICIPATE IN A GENOCIDE. Really, finally, at long last here - take a minute out of your life and seriously ask yourself - HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? What in god's name brought us to that situation? Because if you can't explain that, you don't understand anything about what's happening.
If you all are going to keep repeating these lazy narratives I demand you back them up with data.
Further, I demand you hold leaders like Biden and Harris accountable for failing to listen to voters, just because you don't like our opinions doesn't mean you can simply ignore us and expect to form a functioning coalition.
Centrism and neoliberalism are dead, everybody has abandoned this category of politician and politics, it is an extinct belief system that brought about an environment it could not survive in. People either want genuine hope and working class politics rooted in a proud sense of leftism/solidarity with the average worker or they want fascism and not the diet kind centrist liberals serve up, a very small amount of people want cowardly, spineless status quo managers who are unable to do anything but try to convince people they are less bad than the really bad guy.
Also, I voted for Harris, all the leftists I know did. You are yelling at random people with intimate connections to Palestinians who couldn't bring themselves to vote for someone who wouldn't even let a Palestinian voice speak at the DNC. That is the fault of the DNC for failing to understand people won't vote for them if they refuse to do ANYTHING of substance to stop a genocide that could have been stopped with a single damn phone call from Biden if he grew a spine or a heart. Leftists recognized the catastrophic consequences of this strategic blunder and attempted to steer the bus away from the cliff but centrists just completely and utterly ignored leftist and Palestinian voices and actively worked to discredit and silence them, often as jeering insults told in the company of Republicans as a way to try to get them to like them for being centrist, as if Republicans would ever vote for a Democrat in any significant number?
......1000 facepalms
Centrism and neoliberalism failed, stop trying to pretend like y'all own the narrative, your strategy and description of how things would pan out failed miserably, and actually nobody else really cares about you whining and blaming others for not voting for a shitty candidate.
Trump is worse than Biden or Harris would have been, we know. We knew that before. You aren't listening if you think that is a big GATCHA to us?
They just moved back into their underground slayers where naysayers are immediately banned.
They will never apologize because they insist they are right and we're wrong. Further they hold the actual left wing voters responsible and claim we are allowing this to happen, we are complicit and we need be held to account. I've been assured that liberals are The Enemy.
For all intents and purposes they need to be placed among the cult of the right. They aren't a logic based lovely. They are not progressives. They are a flavor or authoritarian. They literallly believe their flavor of idealism is the only valid flavor.
They actually remind me of libertarians, where everyone has maximum freedoms for to as they wish so long as they don't use that freedom to form a government. Neither has any doubt. They are 100% they are correct and as any inllectual has told us, that's 100% nonsense.
Yeah, this is all the voters’ fault!
Quite the naive take you have there, playing right into the divide and conquer strategy which fascists love to employ.
Many of those protest voters have been intensely pressuring the DNC to make serious changes to their leadership to signify they do actually intend to learn something from their defeat and do better next time. So far, Dems have largely refused to do so. In fact Dems seem intent on making the same mistakes again in the next election cycle - so buckle up for an even more devastating loss next time. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they somehow find a way to forego a democratic primary again in ‘28, if we make it that far. It will be alright though, for them - they have been assured the donor checks will keep coming, and they can continue grifting with insider trading through the next term. Just like these fossils have been doing for the past 50 years.
Dems/Liberalism can not save us from fascism.
Ninety million people didn’t vote. That’s over one third of the voting body of the country. Third party votes made up another three million. Don’t even try to offload the responsibility non-voting had in the mess we’re in.
And don’t pull that “divide and conquer” bullshit here. We all tried to get you to join us in solidarity against trump. You refused. So no, that shit isn’t going to play here at all and you should be embarrassed for even thinking about mentioning it.
Hypocrite.
🤣 Well, I see someone has learned no lessons.
Anyway, YES, it IS the fault of some of the voters. Absolutely. Just because you don't get a pretty pony doesn't mean you absolve yourself of everything.
Intensely pressuring who?!? The DNC who think they have "good billionaire" bankers???
Get over yourself; your deluded fantasies have no impact on reality.
Prioritize funding for places with higher birth rates, you say? So... Communities with loads of immigrants. Got it.
the "white" was implied
They don’t even have to imply it!
They can just define it with congressional districts or some arbitrary measure that clusters their desired groups and fragments their undesired groups.
Even if this wasn’t the actual, real end to even the charade of U.S. democracy, it would take at least a generation or two to “prove” those policies are hurtful in the courts.
What then? The damage is done. Infrastructure built. Certain groups given generational advantages, certain groups left behind.
They were removed from the calculation after Elon was given network access and privs to the US government.
"I was told there would be a medal".
Shamelessly clipped from History.com:
This Day In History: December 16
1938 Hitler establishes Mother’s Cross to encourage German women to procreate
On December 16, 1938, Adolf Hitler institutes the Mother’s Cross, to encourage women of "pure" German origin to increase the size of their families and grow the population of the Third Reich.
The Nazis started such encouragement early. When members the League of German Girls (a wing of of the Hitler Youth movement) turned 18, they became eligible for a branch called Faith and Beauty, which trained these girls in the art of becoming ideal mothers. One component of that ideal was fecundity. And so each year, gold medals were awarded to women with eight children or more, silver medals to women with six to seven, and bronze medals to women with five. The crosses were distributed between 1938 and 1944.
Knowing Turnip the medals will probably be cheap gold colored metal with an image of himself on it.
Crappy chocolate medal covered in golden foil.
Yup, because people don't move around... Wait... Want it a DOT memo? LOL.
Not gonna fix old broken roads unless y'all fucking and making babies like rabbits. Florida? NO ROADS FOR YOU! Texas? NO ROADS FOR YOU!
The memos of this administration will go down in history as the dumbest shit ever penned. Even worse the nupties who wrote them will get cushy private sector jobs lobbying or something later.
dumbest shit since Bush
which was dumbest since Reagan
which was dumbest since Nixon
you'd better believe it can get worse.
If Nixon had listened to his advisors about the potential impacts of climate change the state of the world could be in a completely different place. So many people know Exxon knew about the potential impacts of fossil fuels in the 70s, but what many over look is that the White House Science and Technology advisor who approved (and it never happened) of the monitoring of greenhouse gases caused by such was Edward E. David Jr. When he left the white House he went to work for Exxon as well and set up monitoring tools on vessels from within the company. That information of course would get blanketed and kept internal to the company, but they very existence of people knowing the real dangers, asking to monitor them and getting turned down by our government for what would amount to maybe about $150m-$200m in todays costs is absurd.
Imagine those conversations, "Sir, this could impact all life and species on earth, global changes to ocean and weather patterns, and could end in mass starvation, floods, large hurricanes, droughts and more".
"Yeah let's ignore that one for now" "That would cause it to get worse faster" "Yeah let's ignore that one for now"
Do you suppose Democrats will ever get better instead of chasing worse? Because I've pretty much lost hope.
I hope there's someone around to write that history.
Not in America obviously. We'll gloss right over them like slavery, woman's suffrage and genociding native americans.
Whoa! No fucking allowed, you sick fornicator. You better have those babies without any pleasure involved
I feel like they've buried the lead.
In addition to its directives related to marriage and babies, the Transportation Department’s memo blocks recipients of federal money from implementing “mask mandates,” a reference to requirements that transit agencies followed to limit the spread of infection during the height of COVID-19.
The memo also requires recipients to comply with federal immigration enforcement in order to receive funding — the latest effort by the administration to target undocumented immigrants, conduct mass arrests and deportations, and deny federal transportation funds to so-called sanctuary cities.
So (1) no ability for public transport systems to implement measures to stop pandemics (which will be important since avian flu is around the corner) and (2) no federal funding for transport to sanctuary cities (of which Washington D.C. is arguably one).
(just fyi, it's "buried the lede")
Both of those are illegal. The president cannot impose extra strings on federal funding.
The right wingers are just so chock full of rage-filled idiots. Wearing a mask IS annoying, but you aren't some kind of freedom-fighter to not wear one and go out of your way to disrupt public health, FFS.
But that's how all of these assholes see themselves: vanguards of "freedom". By completely ruining any chance of a sane response to a pandemic.
dont' forget to add in the effect of the back to office hardons.
Is there some problem with underpopulation? The qons were always saying "America is full" when it comes to refugees.
Gotta be the rwhite color...
They're just going to need more people in general, so they can let us die sooner and replenish the workforce.
This. They need fodder
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2069436850145993
50 States, 50 Protests, 1day
Feb 5 @ your downtown.
Pass the word!
I get it's still more popular than Fedi apps but using Facebook kind of feels like we're asking the King permission to revolt.
Meta can suck all the ass, but you have to admit that abandoning it entirely will just enforce the echo chamber. I think we should at least try to continue the fight inside. I almost never use it, and have disabled all the settings and tracking that allow it to make the most money off of me.
I feel like there's at least some importance to meeting people where they are.
For all those asking, the Facebook link didn't even work for me, so I just searched and there looks to be an active r/50501 group.
It doesn't seem like an organized thing, just be at your state capital. Here's a few posters from the reddit:
Is there a non-Meta link for that?
Lol. Nothing. I was pissed I wanted to see if anyone was organizing something and it looks like there is such a thing happening. Feb 5 at your downtown.
That looks important. Too bad I can't read or upvote it because it's a link to a fascist platform.
Make your own link in here and pas the word so it happens! Yeah I got no Facebook or reedit account. I'm just not gonna ignore it when the government wants to ship my mom off to India or Quebec.
Not that surprised. You have three options:
- Make babies above the replacement rate. This tends to be hard to control/enforce in general.
- Import lots of people from outside. This tends to cause cultural drift, reduced social trust and various kinds of other complications if you aren't careful about it.
- Have an aging and shrinking populace and with it tax base, GDP, and several other things that are pretty important at a national scale.
Since Trump is actively rejecting 2 and 3 is suicidal to a nation, that leaves 1 - promote people having kids above replacement rate.
What are the legal consequences of ignoring an executive order?
Ive heard they force you to convert all your holdings to dogecoin.
Sounds like something drafted by President Musk
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, TRUMP?
Why are you giving the guy a hard time? He's just doing all the awful stuff he said he was going to do plus maybe a little bit of extra awful stuff that he should have been expected to do.
The stunlock continues
Despite whoever is pushing this, doesn't it make sense? Communities with a lot of children need public transport more than others.
Said marriage rate too... that shouldn't be a factor, just a bias marker. More kids? Yeah public transit, more people? Yeah public transit. More public transit. This is just cherry picking it.
The money that is cut from welfare programs isn't going to be spent on helping people and we all know it.
I'm sorry to tell you this but there will be fewer workplaces in the future.
There have been three significant developments throughout human history:
- agricultural revolution
- heavy industrial revolution
- information technology
I'm afraid there won't be a third wave, and technological progress will slow down. I'm sure it will lead to a decline in well-paying employments, and wages will go down. An effective counter-measure would be if the number of workers in the country would also drop, as that would lower supply in workforce and increase prices for labor (a.k.a. wages).
I'm sure people at the agricultural and heavy industrial stages said the same thing. Maybe stop roleplaying you can see the future?
Extraterrestrial maybe? If we don't become a dust bowel first and starve
And instead of life being improved for everyone, all of the fruits of technological innovation are being given to the people who already have more than they could ever possibly use in thousands of lifetimes while everyone else is left to starve.
Total economic collapse
I know we like to shit on Trump for his dumb ideas, but why is this idea bad? I would remove the marriage rates, but prioritizing communities with many children, especially families with young children seems to me like a sane idea, this is where help is needed the most and where you make the most impact for the future generations or am I missing something?
Gay marriage will be used against areas. Fertility rates are higher in rural and conservative areas because of a lack of access to proper sex ed and contraception. Everything about this screams punish blue states, funding only for maga.
Who has marriage and birth rates higher than the national average? White evangelicals. This is a gift to the religious right.
Who's that weird family with a ton of kids? They get all the money. Also, Utah.
Will it be implemented fairly across zip codes? Or are "Some pigs are more equal than others?"
To summarize what everyone else is saying: It can (and therefore will) be abused to only benefit "the right people".
Off the top of my head, it makes it desirable to cook the stats to get money, whether by banning abortion or simply prioritizing births vs children. Every funding metric is gamed, that's why there's arcane rules to enact change by hoping for a certain game strategy. In this case every strategy leads to misery.
I mean why not just say higher population density and leave room for abuse? because they want room for abuse.
Which makes no sense when beep boops are around the corner. Every company is talking about AI this and AI that.
"Sooo you don't need more workers, lets scale down the pops so we have more resources to share, got it!"
And all I hear is "oh not like that"
and where you make the most impact for the future generations or am I missing something?
Yeah you definitely make an impact, if by making an impact you mean flooding the future labor market with quasi-slaves.
Thank you for taking the heat of the hive mind, I genuinely didn't understand the problems either.
If the criterion is to prioritise funding to areas that need the most why not just say higher population density? We already know republicans use "traditional family values" as a propaganda tool. Can you seriously not see how this can be abused by Trump administration after news like ordering to retract the word "gender" from medical articles published by CDC:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction