Menagerie of Bullshit

More than 50% of Indigenous communities in reserve areas in Canada are at high risk of pipeline spills. When there is a spill, reserves are disproportionately impacted.

The National Energy Board and Supreme Court of Canada has a history of declaring the "public interest and economic interests outweigh Indigenous and treaty rights." Basically, Indigenous peoples don't count enough as "public" to matter.

Pipelines are built without proper consent from the Indigenous Nations they choose to occupy. Keep in mind I say choose, because this is the case even when alternative pipeline routes are suggested that could avoid reserve land. This is a direct, constant, and often violent threat to Indigenous sovereignty.

The MMIW crisis is funded by the oil industry through the creation of worker's "man camps" near reserve land. These "man camps" are nothing but pits of sexual violence and human trafficking of Indigenous women and girls. I am not exaggerating; this is well studied and well documented.

Resources & Sources:

To become an ‘energy superpower’, Canada wants to bulldoze Indigenous rights (START HERE!)

Indigenous Resistance to Alberta Oil and Gas Development Report

When the environment is destroyed, you're destroyed: Achieving Indigenous led pipeline justice

First Nations Consent Ignored as Canadians Asked to Subsidize LNG Expansion

Oil pipelines and food sovereignty: threat to health equity for Indigenous communities

Is Violence against Indigenous Women in “Canada’s interest”? Liquified Natural Gas in B.C., Sexual Violence & Narratives of Terra Nullius

The colonial playbook never ended, Canada’s pipeline deal proves it

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.