The Handmaid’s Tale is finally coming to life, as the Trump administration rolls out “marriage camps” for single women to find partners and start pumping out babies.
At least, that’s what viral videos are telling millions of impressionable young people who get their news from TikTok.
“They are planning to spend millions sending unmarried people to Marriage Boot Camps where communal weddings are the only way out,” one TikTok video with 4.4 million views claims. “Project 2025. Y’all [are] joking about the Handmaid’s Tale, but the Heritage Foundation is not.”
“The group behind Project 2025 is pushing a new plan to send unmarried Americans to government-run ‘marriage camps,’” another video with 1.8 million views suggests. “The proposal insists that this is all voluntary, but this wouldn’t be the first time in history that a voluntary program stopped being voluntary.”
“So, it’s a rape camp,” reads one comment with thousands of “likes.”
“The Handmaid’s Tale got it,” another comment that has been “liked” 47,000 times concludes.
Viral tweets have uncritically parroted this narrative and shared, absent any context, headlines blaring: “Creators of Project 2025 Want to Send Unmarried People to Camps.”
There’s just one problem: None of this is true. The entire alarmist viral narrative is based on a bizarre distortion of one minor detail of an uncontroversial proposal. It all traces back to the Heritage Foundation’s recent publication of a detailed report on ideas to promote the revitalization of the American family. Some aspects of the report may indeed be politically controversial, but the only actual mention of “marriage camps” is not.
In reality, the report suggests the idea of a marriage bootcamp — notably, not a physical camp — that is not for single women to be sent to but instead for “cohabiting couples with children.” Private organizations like churches, not the government, would run the boot camps with funding from federal programs that already exist.
“A local church could use this type of grant to run a program that covers important topics like communication, money management, blended families, fidelity, and conflict resolution,” the Heritage report reads. “The bride and groom would also be matched with a mentor couple to help them to navigate the highs and lows of early married life.”
The horror!
The report further suggests that “wedding bonuses” of $5,000, funded by private organizations, not taxpayers, could be paid out to couples who get married. It describes this as a way to “create an incentive structure geared toward the outcomes many people desire.”
Sure, you can question whether this kind of program is really necessary or effective. But there’s nothing dystopian or reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale about local churches taking advantage of existing grant programs and running marriage bootcamps for cohabiting couples to participate in if they want to. And whether one likes the idea or not, it bears almost no resemblance to the distorted depiction of it that’s gone viral on social media.
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This matters.
Not only are the Heritage Foundation, and the Trump administration, by implication, being smeared unfairly in the public eye, but millions of people are being riled up and scared by social media narratives with no basis in reality. That’s a recipe for more extremism and polarization — and a perfect example of the corrosive impact social media influencers who value attention over accuracy are having on our politics.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
