Right now would really be a great time to go back in time and fire whatever Kamala Harris aide it was who told Tim Walz to stop calling Trump and his people “weird,” because honestly there is no other word for them at this point. Trump is ranting about “complicated lawnmowers” and “transgender for everyone” — which, who even knows what that’s supposed to be. Mandatory sex changes?
What else? Well, the Trump administration is getting close to realizing Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s dream, first announced all the way at the beginning of Trump’s current term but which he seems to think is a great idea to re-announce right before the midterm elections, of tying funding for public transit to birth and marriage rates. Now, it sounds crazy, mostly because it is crazy and also because those things do not have anything to do with one another, but it fits in with Duffy’s personal agenda of using his position as Transportation secretary to push his freaky pronatalist shit upon the rest of the country and turn us all into a bunch of Duggars.
THIS ONE!
Duffy, whose primary qualification for the role was his participation in MTV’s Road Rules/Real World Challenge, has nine children himself, with fellow reality TV wingnut Rachel “Absolutely Wanted To Fuck The Obnoxious, Smelly Homophobe Who Picked His Nose And Put It In The Peanut Butter Jar” Campos-Duffy.
Under the new proposal, areas that have higher birth rates than the national average will get up to 10 percent more funding than other areas, regardless of actual need.
“Moving forward, the federal government is focusing on smart, affordable projects with high ridership. If you want federal funding, your project needs to align with where communities and families are actually growing,” the Transportation Department said in a statement obtained by Politico.
Gosh, could it just be innocent? Could it be that he just wants to fund transit in the areas where it is most needed, due to population increases? Not even remotely! Because the five states with the highest birth rates are South Dakota, Nebraska, Alaska, North Dakota, and Kentucky.
Three of those states — South Dakota, Alaska, and North Dakota — are also in another top five: the top five states with the lowest population density. Which means that they probably don’t need a ton of buses or a high speed rail system.
Meanwhile, there are a ton of smaller cities with absolutely terrible public transit systems that actually do need that funding.
If you don’t pay enough attention to the bad parts of the internet, you may be wondering what the hell this is about. Well, the far Right has, in the last few years, gone absolutely bug-fucking-baby-crazy. They can’t stop talking about how OH MY GOD EVERYONE NEEDS TO HAVE TEN MILLION BABIES RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Even though, you know, we don’t have anywhere near enough obstetricians to deliver all of those babies or enough pediatricians to care for all of the children, especially in the sparsely populated rural areas where Duffy wants to put all of the buses.
There are a few reasons for this, all of which are very, very stupid.
First, the usual racism bullshit about propagating the white race and what have you. They don’t like it when they hear that, even just from a purely practical perspective, we need immigrants to work here, they’re upset about predictions that white people will eventually be a minority in this country, and their solution to this is “more white babies.”
Second, they believe it’s key to winning the culture war because studies show that people, women in particular, become more conservative when they have kids. They’re very, very mad at all of the lefty women going around ruining everything by voting and what-have-you and are trying desperately trying to convince the younger generation to aspire towards nothing but being stay-at-home mothers and sexmaids for their patriarchs.
Third, they want a redistribution of women. Thanks to the influence of crazy ass incel messageboards, red pill influencers, and professional misogynists, young men have become increasingly repulsive, which is probably why studies show that they are far more interested in getting married than are young women.
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All of this aside — doesn’t the Right actually hate public transportation? Like, hasn’t the whole crazy Republican thing for the last few years been that they think public transportation and 15-minute cities where you can walk to most of the things you need instead of driving are parts of an evil conspiracy to force them to stop having cars so that they have no way to get away when the we start doing tyranny to them and forcing them to become furries or something? Or aren’t they at least afraid that it might be better for the environment or that it could reduce our dependence on oil? Especially now that we even have electric/hybrid buses?
Even if they’re not crazy conspiracy theorists, I don’t know how many people are interested in dragging nine kids on a bus on the regular, unless they are using those kids to scam tourists into giving them money for their “soccer team.” At that point, I think you probably need to invest in your own sprinter van.
This is all about social engineering, which is not the usual kind of engineering we associate with trains. For all the Right cries that we’re trying to “control them,” they’re the ones obsessed with homogeneity, they’re the ones talking about how they need everyone to be just like them. They’re the ones trying to tell people what to do with their lives. Duffy wants to “reward” people for doing what he wants them to do with their lives.
But there is a chance it could backfire. Public transit is pretty fucking awesome, and providing that for people just might get them to start thinking differently about how we might use our taxes for things other than cops and war. For all Sean Duffy knows, this could turn them into full-on sewer socialists, expecting their tax dollars to be used for things that actually benefit them in their daily lives. The horror!
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I know people that aren't making it in 1-bedroom apartments with a job and driving Uber or Spark on the side. Even for people that want marriage and kids, how is anyone supposed to afford it these days?
>>Under the new proposal, areas that have higher birth rates than the national average will get up to 10 percent more funding than other areas, regardless of actual need.<<
They've also rejiggered the way in which grant funding is allocated so that communities with higher per capita income get more favorably reviewed than communities with lower incomes. Which means that suburban areas are far more likely to get federal grants than those filthy nasty cities. And I'll let y'all take a wild guess as to which "demographic" tends to be in the suburbs, especially here in the South.