Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's new reality TV show
Trump administration's new babies-for-roads policy is sure to draw a large audience
By Sam Bellamy
Get married.
Have lots of babies.
Don’t wear a mask or get a vaccine during a pandemic, even if you’d like to be around for those babies.
Support the Trump administration in its godly endeavor to forcibly remove all brown- and black-skinned foreigners from your midst so they don’t get anywhere near your babies – or you, if you happen to recover from that pandemic thing.
And do not speak, ever, of diversity, equity or inclusion.
Do all that, and your community will get plenty of funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Loans, grants, programs. Beaucoup bucks for your babies.
This Trump administration initiative in social – excuse me, highway – engineering is detailed in an order issued Wednesday by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
“The American people deserve an efficient, safe and pro-growth transportation system based on sound decision-making, not political ideologies,” Duffy explained in a separate press release.
Right. Not a bit of political ideology to be found anywhere in this advancement in social – damn it! highway – engineering.
Trump is a practitioner of common sense, not wokeness, as he artfully reminded us during his press conference this week about the tragic plane-helicopter collision outside D.C.
Duffy was there, too, helping expose the considerable risks involved in bypassing able-bodied, quick-thinking white people in favor of broken-down people of color who are so ill-educated they know nothing, for example, about the heroics of American patriots who took over airports from the British during the Revolutionary War.
To be fair, Duffy’s order didn’t actually say you couldn’t get a vaccine or wear a mask to prevent whatever pandemic the presumptive Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. whips up for us during Trump’s second term. It’s just that governments and businesses cannot require to be vaccinated or masked. It’s simply none of their business if people are dropping dead on their watch.
In addition to the above, the order also strongly discourages any talk of climate change and, specifically, carbon, except as a perfectly fine component of asphalt. “The calculation of the ‘social cost of carbon,’” the DOT order states “is marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.”
Here again is world-class order-writing, notable for its total lack of political ideology. Trump, a veritable emperor of empirical science, has taken a Sharpie to all that so-called climate “research” and concluded that, “The planet has warmed and cooled since time began. So, climate change is natural. It isn’t caused by humans.” Besides, more oceanfront property is a good thing.
But let’s return to the roads-for-babies portion of this DOT order. Duffy says funding priority will be given “to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
Duffy, by the way, has nine children. He met his wife on MTV’s “Real World: Boston” in the last 1990s before returning to his home state of Wisconsin, where he was elected to serve in Congress from 2011 to 1019. He later served as a Fox Business host.
Now, there is a tad of logic in the notion that America should build roads where there’s a rising birth rate. More babies turn into more drivers in about 16 years.
Of course, you have to be careful about the assumption that most of those babies are going to stay in their home state.
That’s not always the case, as in South Dakota, which – being perpetually freezing – is one of the top baby-making states in the nation but – again, being perpetually freezing – is one of the top exporters of teenagers and twentysomethings in the nation.
And in Utah, where baby-making is a godly endeavor every bit serious as Trump’s harassment of immigrants, there is indeed a rising baby population, in addition to people moving in. Surprisingly, many of these new arrivals are from California. Does Trump really want more roads to encourage Californians to leave their current confines?
Perhaps what is most discomfiting about Duffy’s order – aside from the bigotry, willful scientific ignorance and reckless disregard for human life – are the echoes of J.D. Vance’s misbegotten idea that Americans who’ve been begetting more children should be getting more votes.
“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” Vance told the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2021, before he refashioned himself as a MAGA Jed Clampett Goes to Washington. “You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
Quite a bit of Trumpian logic, that was. If you don’t have kids, your investment is, well, purt near negligible, Jethro.
Here’s an idea: Let’s stick to the quaint one-person, one-vote rule, and let’s fund roads and public transportation where, well, there are currently lots of people, where we see lots more people moving in, and where history (found in books, not Trump’s head) tells us lots of people tend to dwell. Major cities. Not so much Athol, S.D. or – close your eyes, MAGAites – Mexican Hat, Utah.
Babies are great, especially when they giggle. Marriage can be great, whether of the traditional or same-sex variety. Families, at least of the non-dysfunctional sort and non-criminal sort, are great. Small towns and rural communities are great.
But using highway funds to engineer our country into some sort of conservative Norman Rockwellian vision of America that even Rockwell – upon the advent of that whole diversity, equity and inclusion movement in the early 1960s – realized was nonexistent and pretty darned dangerous?
That’s not common sense. It’s nonsense.