A Missouri cattle farmer is facing financial ruin after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) froze funding for key conservation programs, despite previously signed contracts with the government.
The freeze, part of the Trump administration’s sweeping federal review of spending programs, has left Skylar Holden, a first-generation farmer, scrambling to save his land.
Holden, who voted for President Donald Trump, had signed a $240,000 contract with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to improve water lines, fencing, and wells on his farm.
Research needed on a second term president?
If you take Trump at his word on the 2020 elections, then it would be his third term. Which, ya’ know, is illegal.
Given his sponsorship of an assault on the government, it was illegal regardless.
Holden admitted that he relied on a 25-question online quiz to tell him how to vote
This shit is why stuff like Free Software and the Fediverse matters. Who made that quiz? Was it propaganda? How’d he run across it? Was it pushed at him by a proprietary social media algorithm?
The oligarchs are using technology to stack the playing field against democracy. It must be forcibly leveled again, at all costs.
This isn’t an issue of simple individual responsibility. There’s an entire conspiracy behind exploiting these idiots.
It would be cool if there was some tool for non technical folks to see survey results on consensus from professionals in IT on if something is probably bullshit or not. I know plenty of people that would have fallen for scams or misinformation if they didn’t have someone in their life they could ask & be confident their answer wasn’t profit or power motivated.
Any such tool would rely on impartiality on the part of the creator, which doesn’t exist. (Imagine if the thing being presented as such a tool were, say, Grok, and you’ll immediately see the problem.)
Unfortunately, there is no substitute for critical thinking.
There’s an entire conspiracy behind exploiting these idiots.
there’s a certain type of person that feels their ignorance is as valid as someone else’s educated knowledge, so even when we point out to them that they’re being taken, they only hear they’re being called rubes… and double down on whatever grift is draining their pocketbooks.
it’s famously worked nearly flawlessly for religion for all of human history.
so even when we point out to them that they’re being taken, they only hear they’re being called rubes…
Beceause too often that’s literally what we tell them - you’re being taken. Their reaction follows naturally. Ever since I started talking about concrete (class) issues affecting them I’m getting different responses.
Dumb. Ass.
Must have been in a fucking coma during the first term.
Midterms are coming up. Wanna bet this guys punts again saying he’s working too hard to find out that the country is currently being run into the ground by billionaire pedophiles that he voted for last time?
Holden defended his thought process in trusting the quiz and voting for Trump, explaining that his 17-hour workdays leave little time for political research.
If he’s working 17 hours a day 7 days a week, he’s farming wrong.
Even if he is, it is not mind occupying work out there. I grew up in farm country. He had a radio on, how much you want to bet it was tuned to the local conservative talk radio constantly?
I bet he had plenty of time for Fox News.
Now now.
It could have been AM radio in the tractor.
