Straight from the Heritage Society. Pronatalism and Nationalism have always gone hand in hand. As far as "the Church" is concerned, it's a complete win-women removed from public life (knowing their place) and platoons of Jesus kids (smooth revenue stream, good tithe payers, future Reich Wing voters)

Cut education. Cut the social safety net. Put kids to work, and having kids of their own asap. This is where the Broligarchs start creaming their pants- more consumers to fleece, and a massive, cheap, labor force who will work for food, and the government gets more taxpayers to drain dry.

"How are we supposed to continue our Unlimited Growth Forever policies if you poors won't give us fresh meat to exploit?"

Unbelievable

I know I'm not the only one who thinks this but these "foundations"/organizations such as the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation need to be destroyed and dismantled. They want human enslavement.

Holy fuck, they really want policies that send us backwards.

my own summary would be, "barefoot and pregnant"

They want to keep everyone uneducated and keep women, literally, barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen.

This was my favorite part: religious people are “less bothered” by the expense of raising children. As if this cost is a minor triviality. Living paycheck to paycheck and being barely able to cover the basics is the reality for many working adults. Having a child would be irresponsible.

So the summary, It’s cheaper to keep women less educated and under the thumb of misogynistic religion so they are hopeless and are trapped into having more children. Nevermind the poverty and domestic abuse that is rampant in these circles What an horror show of an article. Not surprised at all.

Fml. Unbelievable.

Wowwwww. Who do I talk to to share that I don’t have kids because the idea of losing one to gun violence has weighed so heavily on me that I don’t think I would survive the grief. And I would like to survive this live emotionally whole.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z23t...

Gemini, write a conservative case for increasing the birth rate by gutting higher education and promoting religious school voucher funding. \\

There they go again saying the quiet part out loud. Privatizing K-12 +making college unaffordable= Brainwashed, dependent women with no choices. #keeptalking

I'm surprised they didn't make up some "statistics" to support taking away women's credit cards and home ownership.

The Fascist, not The Federalist 🤬

Wow, so many fallacies all in one place!

This article made two-advanced-degrees mom-of-two me want to punch someone in the throat.

Same

AI will replace a lot of jobs. A lower birthrate will be fine.

I wonder if anyone thought of improving living conditions and future prospects to maybe help people feel like they'd want to have babies?

I couldn't get through that. How did ANY of that make sense to the person who wrote it? Yeah, let's move backwards and discourage education...?!?!

O. M. G. Is right! These people really really scare me.

Of course. Just keep ‘em stupid, deluded, and regressive. That’ll solve everything.

Good heavens. I feel like I lost a minute of my life in 2024 to a time machine.

To summarize: taxpayer funding of religious schools to indoctrinate kids into religion that prioritizes baby making, combined with ending subsidized student loans so the young people can’t pursue higher ed and just make babies.

“Thank you for sharing.” That is the exact opposite of what I was expecting.

The Federalist is a conservative publication. I mean, we SHOULD be subsidizing day care, for one thing...

Where does this article promote subsidizing day care? It says higher education and lack of religion cause women to not want a large family. Government policy to keep women from post-high school education, especially advanced degrees and pushing religiosity will increase the birth rates in the US.

LOL. Where did I say it did? I was actually puzzled as to why Jess was posting an article from the Federalist—I thought at first she was recommending it. If you read my comment from that standpoint, maybe you'll get my meaning. In any case, I didn't read it. It's The Federalist. Not interested.

The article does not promote subsidizing anything that would take the financial burden off of families. That’s the point.

So we need to eliminate the separation of church and state and direct taxpayer dollars to religious institutions that are unregulated and tax exempt, to the detriment of public education for all, because religious people tend to have more babies, even if they can't afford them? WTF.

I couldn't finish it! Knew what was coming given it's The Federalist.

In “1970” a family of 4 could live quite well on a single blue collar income…today’s consumption economy as well as the loss of well paying blue collar jobs…almost requires two incomes just to get to the point of talking about having kids

That is actually a myth promoted by advertising companies who were trying to lure women back into the home full-time to use all their new products. By 1970, 50% of single women and 40% of married women were part of the labor force. So, Mommy's paycheck was helping to fund the lifestyle.

Wow 😮

Wha'? I only got as far as women need to stop pursuing higher education (so they can breed in their 20's instead of continuing their educations), and we should push more religious education/indoctrination, before I had to bail on this article. Head exploding, but that seems to be MY new normal.

It’s from the Heritage foundation so of course it’s going to look like a bad remake of the Handmaid’s Tale serie. That project 2025 is a threat to a future with gender equality, educated citizens, secular state and much more. 😤

Is the fertility rate higher in say Alabama/Missouri/Arkansas than Massachusetts or Maryland? Thinking that there is data we can use to test the hypothesis of this article.

Jess, you’re scaring me. I’d rather bury my head in the sand instead of learning they want us to attend religious school, not to attend college, to marry early, and all for the economy. Only a few decades ago we were told to worry about overpopulation

That is absolutely insane. Heritage foundation Gilead bollocks from start to finish. Why did you make me read it???

Reads like 1940s Nazi medical research.

Well this makes perfect sense why they are pushing for the Ten Commandments to be posted in public schools as well as attempting to have teachers provide instruction on the Bible & enforcing prayer in classrooms. I hope we swing back hard in 2026 & 2028🩵

Take away education & birth control, discourage vaccination, basic healthcare beyond the paycheck of most, force religion, limit opportunity for women, limit opportunity for poor & middle class & rural males gives us a futuristic nightmare of hunger, ignorance and disease. Dystopian nightmare .

JFC 🤦🏼‍♀️

The Federalist use to actually publish a good article every now and then. This crap is why media credibility is eroding. The problem not only is the babble of garbage in the writing the author wants to have their cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, social policy solutions do not work that way.

@piperformissouri.bsky.social makes sense what the republicans want to do!!! They’re only discouraging women to not get married or have kids. God forbid you get pregnant in Texas and have complications 🙄

A few paragraphs in and I can see where this is going. Religion as a tool for the subjugation of white women. Tie them to a husband and home from a young age, indoctrinate them with religious bullshit. Make them think they have no real choice. And these fascists will continue working to ensure it.

And make no mistake, it's white women they want to have all these babies. Their real motive is white male supremacy. Making America a white Christian country, with white men in complete control.

Good grief

Correlation is not causation. The article ignores the fact that the cost of education has soared -- forcing a debt burden onto people who want educations -- a debt burden that squeezes out the opportunity to buy homes or, yes, have multiple kids.

Also: Classic case of starting with a conclusion and searching for facts to support it. Rather than looking at the facts and drawing a conclusion. You can boil this down to: If women weren't so dang uppity and knew their place, they'd stay home and have babies.

Education would be cheaper if fewer people wanted it. Say...79% fewer. Image source: educationdata.org/college-enro...

I personally know of women who have one child and would like have another, but they live in states with abortion bans. They are afraid if something went wrong with their second pregnancy they might die from lack of care and their first child would be left motherless. So they are stopping with one.

I live in a blue state and I'm still too afraid to go through another pregnancy. Not risking having federal law change and put everything at risk, I have a healthy child to raise and live for.

Bottom line. We need more white people to have kids.

Putrid religious fascist extremism. These “people” are so gross. 🤮

Like all GOP/rightwing think tanks, Heritage Foundation starts with the regressive authoritarian policies, cherry pick stats to support them, while veiling actual intentions & motivations in superficially reasonable sounding rhetoric This gets past the majority of voters who aren’t political junkies

Completely ignores that per capita disposable income has dropped by 50% in the past 50 years.

Summary for tl:dr Spend public education funds on religious indoctrination. Don’t go to college, start a family at 20. Thus have more kids.

Sounds like a buncha BS. Look instead at the disparity between rich & average… And the way the wealthy class gets away with crimes & tax evasion while middle class does not.

If we keep them religious and don't teach people how to think for themselves they'll have more babies. Young dumb and uneducated. Yep, that's the recipe for conservatism.

The only takeaway that I have from the article is that the 2 PhDs that wrote it would have been better served stopping their own educational pursuits at high school as their thesis is at that grade level…full of opinion dressed up as fact, and manipulation of scant data to infer causation.

Well, didn’t take long for him to fly his fucking idiot colours. Just paragraphs in… “in 1970, when the U.S. fertility rate was at 2.5, per-person gross domestic product was almost one-third what it is today. Somehow, people with a lot less money managed to have many more kids”. I can’t even… 🤯😂smh

So much stupidity in one simple article. Almost unfathomable. “Keep ‘em young, ignorant, and stuffed with religion, by George!”

Bingo!

And poor!

I can't even anymore 😟

I'm not sure which policies are promoting higher education. Is it the reduced number of Pell Grants or the reduced amount of money that states put into state education?

Maybe it's the lack of well-paying jobs that that don't require a college degree to be considered, and that aren't explicitly hostile towards non-men.

In 1970, you could go from high school to a job at GM and you could live a pretty comfortable middle class life. Now...good luck. You need some college just to get some jobs.

I mean hell, even trade school is post high school.

And where I live, there's a waiting list for trade school programs so long, you'd be dead of exposure or starvation long before getting to start getting educated. And some of the trades are, sadly, rather hostile to people who don't present as cishet men.

I would imagine there is a demand but not as much demand as some people like to portray.

Just going by the amount of time I was quoted when I asked about the waiting lists for some of the programs that I would have loved to take.

I mean I get it you can't outsource plumbers, electricians, etc. But how often do you need one of those things? In areas where there is alot of construction, yes but in more mature areas, not so much.

0.o No, *individuals* don't need them that often. But the *aggregate* demand is pretty high - buildings need maintenance, repairs, and upgrades after all. New construction is only one (relatively small) corner of the picture.

Makes sense, I guess.

There's actually not enough of those to go around already, and when the older members retire, it'll get dire.

Yup. But hey if they get their way with AI, it will make other jobs obsolete too....

That might be what I was trying to say but not so well.

So much is wrong about this article not one of which being the author not understanding the difference between fertility rate and birthrate. Sigh. Followed by a heavier sigh.

OMG! But, I am positive that most on college educated Protestant fundamentalists believe every word of this. The ones I personally know absolutely do. Nothing can be done with that.

Apparently, my Masters’ degree, self esteem & deconstruction (not to mention age) have rendered me useless as a birthing vessel. I’m sorry, America.

Once again, terrifying. This article is saying the quiet part out loud: “hey! Stop educating women and force them into parenthood when they’re barely post-adolescence. Problem solved.”

Why? I have looked on lists of endangered species and we are not there.

Heritage Foundation, so no surprise this article discourages higher ed, especially for women, and supports tax dollars for religious K-12 education. Sweet zeebus, WTF is in store for us? No contraception, no abortion, forced marriage?

When I tell you I'm grateful every single day that I opted out of having children I'm not exaggerating.

Same. Every. Single. Day. And I weep for my nibblings

Scheduled a sterilization right before the election and they are taking that shit out basically as close to the installation as possible. They listened when i said i won't become less than a person and I'm deeply thankful

Make it as difficult as possible for women to be independent in any way.

For example, in 1970, when the U.S. fertility rate was at 2.5, per-person gross domestic product was almost one-third what it is today. Somehow, people with a lot less money managed to have many more kids. —— umm GDP isn’t a measure of income of people. WTF?

I think they were counting on no one noticing that. What percentage of GDP went into the pockets of workers compared to now? And how much wealth was hoarded at the top?

A whole lot less went into the pockets of the rich. They ignore that.

I was going to post this as well. I guess the authors followed their own advice (education is bad for you).

No, education is bad for YOU, not them.

I would like a country away from people who think we should use God to trick kids into having babies.

How juvenile. So they basically want to eliminate higher education opportunities for low and middle income families, and use my tax dollars to fund their children’s’ religious education.

😱

Good lord...

Da fuq is wrong with these people? People get educations to get started in a world where PE companies own more and more of the starter-home market, and charge high rents; children are wonderful but costly. If billionaires were restrained from picking everyone’s pockets, fertility might improve.

Hoping and praying it’s two men that wrote this. Can’t wait to benefit from their advice!

One of the writers is in fact a woman. Which is even more horrifying that she holds views that women shouldn't be educated while holding a PhD.

Oh, so she’s exactly like Phyllis Scafly. Fuck em.

👎🤮🤬

I'm going to be honest I skimmed this...the horror of reading the Federalist was to panic attacky.

I didn't bother at all. There's no surprises awaiting in that article, and as I don't have the time to gleefully pick it apart, I don't need to check their purported sources for any data they put forth.

This is a terrifying march into Atwood world building. Gilead, here we come.

Good grief- Heritage Found author writes our country is suffering from low birth rate. The government needs to encourage fertility by discouraging higher education, funding private schools =increase religious teaching, increased religion =marrying younger & having more children .. #Handmaiden Tale

Well… at least The Federalist is consistently stupid.

📌

📌

Someone wrote this thinking they had hit the proverbial nail on the head. Sad.

Don’t educate women, indoctrinate with religion by defunding public schools and quit yer blubbering about propping up the middle class. Thats the summary.

Horrifying 🤯

Oh my god this is so sickening, internally inconsistent and a desire to manipulate people to sustain white births to work in factories so billionaires can be wealthy.

I can barely breathe. Literally.

It’s unbelievably infuriating.

Precisely

That's the bottom-line of this piece in totality.

They can just fuck allll the way off the planet with this bullshit

Honestly tho, I’m impressed how they painted such a layer of scientific gentility on a dystopian horror.

Holy shit

I bet none of their solutions are "overthrow capitalism and provide everyone with the material needs to support having and raising a child"

Holy sh*t- there were so many cringy moments in that article, but it seems to come down to the uneducated have more kids. It continued with that the gov. needs to disincentivize going to college. IMO: first steps are funding charter schools & disbanding the Dept. of Ed. 🤦‍♀️

Of the college age students I work with who don't want kids..the top 2 reasons are expense (expensive to have and raise a baby) and they don't see positive reasons to bring a baby into the world.

So where are they going with this? "Forbid women from going to college" was right there.

Along with "religious"education in K-12 that indoctrinates girls to be submissive so they won't fuss about having no higher education. What century are they living in???

I don't know how "perpetual growth is unsustainable" just doesn't compute for them! We have finite resources, the limits of which we are quickly approaching. This isn't a secret, so why are they all gas and no breaks? Also, where is Jonathan Swift when you need him? www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1...

The Yale and Harvard grads of the Federalist Society want to wage war on higher ed. because they don't want us to consider that their policies since their founding in 1982 are the real culprits:

Here's an idea. How about creating a country which welcomes everyone, has sane responsible leaders, and supports families. Then maybe people won’t be afraid to bring children into the world.

Options. That is what they are saying right here. They want to take away people’s options to how they choose to live their lives until the only one left is dumb, barefoot & pregnant

All the Republican Supreme Court Judges are Federalist Society members. Reading this article, Amy Coney-Barrett shouldn’t have gone to college or law school. This article wants women to be bare foot and pregnant🤬🤯

I love how the first thing you see is begging for money. Pretty sure these pervs are well-funded by rich people.

Mooooo.

Unbelievable 😠

Oh. This was absolute trash. Hadn’t ready anything in The Federalist, and now I’m starting to see why. 🤢

Vomit

Thanks for posting. It’s so typical for Maga to make this about higher ed. So, how do Dems articulate counter points to this view in ways that win votes?

Start by pointing out both authors have at least three college degrees each.

GROSS. Par for the course with The Heritage Foundation.

Wow. They use GDP as their gauge for how much money families have, completely ignoring the wealth gap today. That's just all kinds of messed up. Their solution is less education more and religion. Just wow.

Everything in this article is garbage. I haven’t read something from the Heritage Foundation that is not like this so far.

Yes, the GDP has gone up but the lions share of that has gone to fewer people.

So the message here is to go to church, give up school, stay poor and be a baby factory to provide an uneducated and unskilled workforce for the benefit of the country! My own experience is contrary to this bullshit propaganda article.

Fuck-a-doodle-doo this is awful!!!

This might be the stupidest thing I've read all year. And look, it's from HF, the org that wrote the blueprint for the incoming administration. #misogyny

Since when is this any of the government's fucking business?

🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

Reasonable summary, yeah.

Jesus fucking christ

Wow they really are preparing to go full Handmaids Tale.

I can- Get them pregnant young and keep them uneducated, religiously blinded and trapped in their circumstances.

We need to have a conversation regarding correlation and causation. While we’re at it, let’s discuss the validity of sources as well as considering the bias of the authors. In this case, the authors being part of project 2025 and the heritage foundation.

Omg what BS. “Women stay home and have children with no future”. That’s what they are implying. More lies.

Then when they can’t afford to live because they only have a HS education, multiple kids and rely on a one low wage income, we’ll refuse to help and shame them for being poor! The conservative way 🤪

Yikes. This is a long-winded rationalization for: 1. Stealing from public schools to fund religious indoctrination schools. 2. Discouraging higher education by defunding student loans. Both with the goal of making more babies earlier. This is religious fanaticism imposed on the masses.

Those are part of it, but there's more. It's white supremacist christofacism too. This all roots back to the racist theory that white people will be "replaced," and the fact that keeping women trapped at home and pregnant is a great way to keep the population poor, desperate, and easy to control.

True.

Nope, not giving them the clicks or ruining my search algorithm.

Oh I regret reading that 🤣 it’s not good

They’re out of their fucking minds!

My goodness. Misleading stats, feeble int’l comparison. Ideological propaganda. So many thoughts. Here’s one. Ignoring lack of evidence that church affiliation increases fertility, why do US churches need tax dollars to combat declining religiosity?

Good Lord. This is absolutely demented.

Omg. So we should have dumber parents who follow the rule of a bible that suppresses women. I mean to sum it up.

OMG!!

Scary stuff.

📌This is a must read for every woman that values her rights, freedoms & why we must continue the fight at all costs to keep them 💪💙 The Federalist is such trash 😠 bsky.app/profile/pipe...

Note that both authors, one of whom is a women, have PhD’s 🙄🙄

It's religious education that artificially boosts religiosity in future generations. Not the other way round. In the absence of childhood indoctrination, religiosity rates in human populations will plummet

"There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages." Richard Lederer

Is this hogwash teaching AI ?

We just got back from Greece. They are having a much worse time with a declining population. Capitalism relies on population growth . www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/12/...

WTF did i just read?!?! That's some grad A level bullshit right there. Want more kids, then stop educating people and teach 'em religion young. Bonus: now you don't have to spend money helping parents cause that just doesn't help anyway. GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE WITH THAT BULLSHIT!

People can and do have 2+ children when over 30. I did in the 90s WITH a college education I supported my kids with.

My sons have no children because at 27 and 30, they have not found the right one who thinks they are the right one lol

White men worried about becoming extinct

Hard to decide which part of this article is the stupidest. Top picks 1) the idea that higher ed is "highly subsidized and people don't have to pay"... News Flash: student debt has skyrocketed! 2) defining 1970 (50 years ago) as "recent". The stupidity goes on ...

Well I am nauseated.

"Even though people made less Gros income" And what's the labor-wage- purchase power rate? Good God

Yes, it's the educating the women to blame here. 🙄

Keep ‘em uneducated and pregnant….

I noped out when it said to decrease education and lower the age of parenthood.

Ok, I tried and I couldn’t. I got as far as ‘they keep on educating themselves and that seems to be a problem’.

They call higher education extended adolescents 🤬

. Their entire premise makes me laugh. Droning on about 1970 compared to 2024, but not mentioned: America's population in 1970 was 200,000,000. Today there are 330,000,000 Americans!

Interesting read. While the 1970 period had less money and more kids, gasoline was fifty cents a gallon and less women in the workforce. Today, by choice of career goals perhaps has limited birthrates.

I'm sorry was this article from Germany in 1938, or was this really written this year?

The federalists boast about religion which is supposed to be so “pure and blessed” yet they hate the thought of helping immigrants who are so desperate they leave their homes for a safe place just to live.

They hate people with different biological systems (skin color and genetic makeup and sex) than themselves. Conservatives—what would Jesus do?

Anyway…the Bible is a fabulous but fictitious piece of work.

Two PHDs blame well educated childless cat ladies for declining birth rates, ignore stagnate wage income in feckless analysis of recent trends.

But the loans.

Should’ve been your first alarm bell in reading this. Just inflammatory slop. Stop giving these websites clicks. They write this because they know this bait brings in traffic. The authors are from the Heritage Foundation, so we are why effing surprised that they wrote this?

FEDERALIST: "Y'know, you gotta hand it to Nicolai Ceaucescu for his pro-natalist policies...."

Guys, we’ve finally found out who funds the Federalist! It’s readers like you!

Oh FFS!! Let's just encourage people NOT to go to college/get their required licensing (which btw is to protect the public from any tom, dick or harriet claiming to be a licensed and bonded beautician or electrician). Instead, push them to go to religious school where they learn the rhythm method.

Just off the top of my head, not sure why the Federalist assumes people didn’t have more money in the past when per capita GDP was lower. In fact, prior to Reagan’s tax overhaul, I would imagine they did. The middle class was more robust and the gap betw rich and poor was much smaller.

Omfg 🤢🤮

This slop is completely untethered from real sociological or statistical analysis. Higher income women DO have more children. Raising the living standards and economic prospects of Americans would boost fertility, and we don't have to become a theocracy to do that. ifstudies.org/blog/more-mo...

Clarification: every time you see "people" in the article, substitute "women".

I got about half way through and stopped. I started to get concerned about the effects of second hand stupidity.

The authors of this article, who both have PhDs and work at a think tank, argue that people who have PhDs and work at think tanks are the reason America has low fertility rates. 🤨

You're a talented writer. Want to learn more? shorturl.at/XCP0Q

It's time to drop Christianity when it's being used against you.

Makes me want to scream. Their whole agenda is to keep women dumb and pregnant.

Not once do they mention the dropping testosterone rate in men or podcasts which teach men to be unappealing to women

They follow the Birth Dearth ideology from Ben Wattenberg. I loathe these ppl.

I believe I will pass, lol

Or maybe if we had BETTER-educated men pulling their household weight, more women would want children. My Masters degree and a dedicated husband is why I have 3 kids. I can afford it financially and emotionally.

Scary shit

Holy shit. 🤮 Why do we need higher fertility rates? Just bring in more immigrants? Oh wait... They only want more white Christians. So sad for them that I birthed 2 atheists.

The Federalist Society wants to make the population less educated and more religious because then they'll have more babies. By "population," they obviously mean "women." In other words, it's the old "keep 'em pregnant and barefooted" strategy.

I think I will have to read it in small amounts with frequent breaks to recover, but I'm going to do it.

The symbol on the federalist page makes me think of nazis

if they're really worried about a population bust they'd relax their stance on immigration. oh....wait....

OMG

They are nuts

This is a very Trumpian Project 25 editorial.

So pretty much every time it says "people," what they really mean is "women."

Un-f*cking-believable.

The poorly educated and churches that promote patriarchy is the answer according to this.

🙄🤦🏼‍♀️

Terrifying. And oh so wrong.

The article contradicts itself. First, it claims government policies seeking to increase birth rates are ineffective. Then it recommends changing government policies to increase birth rates.

Then, it asserts that a main driver of lower birth rates are young women who choose to pursue graduate studies because those graduate student are well funded.

Finally, it calls for greater government support of religion. But religion already benefits from extraordinary tax and regulatory support in America, to a greater extent than in any other Western country.

So, is the objective here to make poor women more dependent on the good graces of wealthy men?

And don’t forget “barriers to religious education.” I saw that BS for what it is, but if anyone missed it, they want very specific kinds of religious education to be the only kind accessible to most Americans.

Go figure, another Heritage Foundation zealot

Disgusting.

In addition to what others have pointed out, note also the repeated references to “government occupational licensing with ever-expanding educational requirements” i.e. “making sure people are actually qualified for their jobs is so annoying”

not to mention the bit “…not the only arrow in the policy quiver” is a brazen shoutout to the evangelical Quiverfull movement

Complete BS. Student loans have…”created an artificially extended adolescence for the bulk of American young people. They remain in school much longer, often into their thirties,”.

Yet they ignore the subsidies that many states gave prior to the 90s.

And the lack of well-paying career jobs available to women without college degree or connections.

Wow wow wow They really can’t stand women having options or the ability to be financially independent. One of the phrases that jumps out at me, “over-consumption of schooling.” 👀

For me it was ‘extended adolescence’ 🙄 I guess you aren’t an adult if you are pursuing a higher education and a career.

I just can’t read all the way through. It’s despicable.

I thought fewer people was better.

Seems to me the religious element that’s discussed has more to do with having a community that supports your family. And the education element has more to do with cost and debilitating debt. So, reducing education costs and building stronger communities may be a better approach.