State of Wednesday: THE SOLE SOCIETAL IMPERATIVE
We’re now thankfully rolling back a lot of these policies
Greetings, Dear Reader,
I’m going to do something I pretty much never do outside of my close family members.
Shall we?
THE SOLE SOCIETAL IMPERATIVE
I’m 44 today, which means I’m optimistically a little more than half dead.
My staff here will be surprised to read this. I’ve never disclosed my birthday to anyone and have asked every operations manager not to staff-wide email well wishes when Feb. 4 rolls around on the calendar.
We all have our little peccadilloes, and for me, the ritual seems so arbitrary. Fielding all the attention is a distraction, frankly. When people would ask me directly, I’d usually just say my birthday was in 1982 and leave it at that.
If it weren’t for the women in my life, I’d likely breeze right by it. I once spent an entire year thinking I was 37 until one day my wife was telling people I had just turned 37. Apparently news to me.
Yes, I’ve been somewhat of a birthday grinch. As far as I’m concerned, after the discovery of antibiotics and the advancement of modern dentistry, birthdays are basically meaningless outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Perhaps if I were a fisherman off the coast of Alaska, I’d take a beat when the anniversary comes. But I have a laptop job in Northern Virginia in 2026 America. Should anyone be surprised I survived yet another year? Shocker!
This morning, as I was in a daycare classroom saying goodbye to my daughter, who is about to turn four this upcoming March, she ran up to a complete stranger who was also dropping off her kid.
“My daddy’s birthday is today and we’re going to the bakery!”
Her joy was so undeniable that she couldn’t help herself. Others must know the news.
The complete stranger smiled at her and looked up at me.
“Happy birthday!”
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Having children is a radicalizing experience. In modern America, it’s also increasingly an act of rebellion. In terms of culture, nation, the human race, and the very cosmos, having children is not just an existential imperative, but an act of persistence, patriotism, optimism, and service.
On an individual level, I frankly don’t care who you are or what you’ve achieved in life, if you never had kids, you are a failure. (It really puts into perspective the tragedy and heartbreak of being born sterile.)
On a societal or group level, there is no more acute measure of spirit and health than the birth rate.
But Geoff, you say, the aforementioned Sub-Saharans have tons of kids. So do people facing poverty historically.
Sadly, in that context, kids are commodities and insurance policies. The more you have, the more opportunity for the family. Kids age. They eventually work. They’re useful. Plus, when infant mortality is so high, couples tend to roll the dice much more often.
Just as one extreme can be an indication of poor health and spirit, the other can be as well.
In a stable, prosperous society, it’s a real problem when human beings take on the discordant sexual disposition of both pandas, who won’t procreate to save their species, and the unbridled hedonism of bonobo chimpanzees, who will have sexual relations with just about anything — objects, friends, same sex, even their own adolescents.
If my worldview on life and society and our place in it was somewhat formed prior to having children, the experience after having children rapidly hardened it into a spearpoint of progress.
The point of that spear is simple and brutal.
What is good? Things that help families.
What is bad? Things that don’t.
—
It’s not entirely accurate to look at most people in the modern left wing and say “they” don’t value families. Some do. Most do. I have tons of liberal friends who have tons of children. Their individual beliefs also reflect that value.
As a group, however, it’s hard to divorce group results from group values.
Looking at images of 1950s and ‘60s black families, for example, can be similarly radicalizing. It’s clear as day to anyone paying attention that whatever policies America pushed since then have not helped black families, regardless of stated intent.
Famed economist Thomas Sowell puts it fairly bluntly.
“The cold historical fact is that most blacks did lift themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps—before their political rescuers arrived on the scene with civil rights legislation in the 1960s or affirmative action policies in the 1970s,” Sowell wrote about LBJ’s great civil rights initiative, which gave birth to the modern welfare state.
The effect of the welfare state on black people was dire, according to Sowell.
“It is clear that broken homes were far more common among blacks at the end of the twentieth century than they were in the middle of that century … even though blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century were just one generation out of slavery.”
“The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state,” he concluded.
Obviously this is not the stated intent of individuals within the group. Liberals frequently howl about overworked black mothers when conservatives consider restrictions on welfare programs.
We must separate the emotions of the individual, however, from the practical effect of the group.
—
Raising children in the digital age presents a whole host of problems, mostly to do with the internet, easy access to it, and information that is predatory, toxic, and flat-out gross.
One enlightening element of the internet is just how perverse the results have been for women decades out from third-wave feminism.
The compulsion of people to disclose their every thought to their phones, and therefore to the public, has yielded a constructive peek at the state of female mental well-being. In short, it’s never been worse.
Adolescent females basically should never be on social media. None of it is good for them.
The adults are particularly tragic. For every 100 nurses or middle school teachers who reveal their predominant mental illness by recording themselves shrieking or scream-crying by themselves in their cars — over one conservative thing or another — there’s a handful that sadly and soberly reveal an inner monologue entirely at odds with the modern left’s worldview.
These have frequently made for news stories and content pegs on the political right. A hipster, beatnik trust fund girl who always thought she was a lesbian lefty until she dated a traditional man and felt something “feral” rise up in her. The dozens of women openly saying they want a male who looks conservative but is progressive. These crop up almost cyclically at this point.
Then there’s the ones who waited too long for one reason or another, usually for one or another stated imperative of the left. They wanted to be “independent.” They wanted careers and believed, inaccurately, family formation to be an obstacle. They don’t need no man!
The Free Press recently did a long piece about these kinds of women.
To cut it short, the practical result of leftism on the female brain is women waking up in their late 30s or early 40s realizing they’ve made a huge mistake.
—
Nothing could be more grotesque than the recent results of leftism on children. The most acute and disgusting of these is the institutional push to castrate confused young people and chemically malform them into something they are not and will never be.
We’re now thankfully rolling back a lot of these policies. The American Medical Association recently caved and said surgeons should “generally” stop mutilating confused children.
Progress!
There are many poor results for children and young people under the yoke of “empathic” leftism. One is the crushing debt of useless “free” education. The other “free” education, that being public primary and secondary school, has never been worse.
As I covered recently, it has in many places turned into a vehicle of the political whims of the left. Children are secondary to union dues, ruthless indoctrination, and achieving domestic political goals. Forget about literacy, kids, get out there and protest ICE!
(It figures that the party that disincentivizes procreation would require corrupt institutions to spread their ideologies to other people’s children.)
If we’re to dial in solely on the stated paradigm — good for family is good, bad for family is bad — there is no one thing that could be worse than castrating children.
Leor Sapir, who has been tracking sex changes for minors for years, estimates that more than 5,000 young girls will never breastfeed their children, if they can even have them now.
These are the practical effects of the one group whose explicitly stated purpose ad nauseam is to care for marginalized people, specifically minorities, women and children.
The result couldn’t be any more obvious: You’ve destroyed their capacity to form families.
—
For years, my standard line on Santa Claus was that I would eventually sit my kids down and tell them the reality is that Daddy Claus is why you have gifts under the tree. Daddy works really hard to provide for you, that’s why.
Then I had a little girl who was filled with wonder and imagination and optimism and an evolutionary compulsion to believe in something greater.
For most Western kids, the first thing is the infallibility of their parents. The second is Santa Claus.
So now every year, I go outside with 1,000 red lights that blink in funny patterns and I spell SANTA in the front lawn in giant capital letters.
She can’t quite read as of yet, but she knows what it says. She knows Daddy won’t run the risk that Santa misses her house.
—
There is no sole societal imperative greater than family formation and childbearing.
The actions of the contemporary left wing have shown their results. Individuals on every level are overwhelmingly wedded to the state, the party, and hollow institutions. Those are your new family.
Kids become lifelong wards of wayward medicine, exhausted black mothers betroth themselves to the nanny state, and childless women who pass the Rubicon spin further into mental illness only to take criminals, illegals, and plundering Somalis as adopted children.
For the right’s part, every policy — and I mean every one, even renditioning Maduro — needs to be measured against one metric.
Not America First, American Families First. Will this help Jane and John Q. Public raise kids?
Yes? It’s good.
No? It’s bad.
That’s it for the free portion of today’s State of the Day.
The full subscriber edition continues below with my forbidden takes.