Authored by Andrew Korybko,

A new US license is being interpreted as prohibiting Venezuelan energy companies from transactions with China among other countries, which if true, could lead to India purchasing the 642,000 barrels of oil per day that China imported on average last year and thus halving its import of Russian oil.

RT drew attention on social media to the Department of the Treasury’s newly issued “Venezuela General License 48” allowing US companies to provide “goods, technology, software, or services for the exploration, development, or production of oil or gas in Venezuela” with two strings attached.

The first one is that any contract that their partners enter into will be governed under the laws of the US, which segues into the second one prohibiting any transactions with Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and China.

It’s for this reason that RT interpreted the abovementioned license in their tweet as the “US Ban[ning] Venezuelan Oil Producers From Doing Business With Russia & China”.

That’s reasonable since it was explained here that the Trump Doctrine is shaped by Elbridge Colby’s “Strategy of Denial”, which in its simplest form, seeks to deny strategic resources to US rivals such as the previously described countries.

This is especially the case as regards China, the US’ systemic rival, but Trump earlier sent mixed signals.

He recently welcomed Chinese investment in Venezuela’s energy industry, but in retrospect, that might have just been for the sake of managing the Sino-US rivalry amidst their ongoing trade talks.

Trump wants a deal with Xi, which might become much more difficult for his counterpart to agree to if he openly declares his intent for the US to deny China continued access to Venezuela’s strategic resources. It therefore makes sense for the US to quietly implement this policy through its new license instead.

Even prior to its promulgation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov complained that “our companies are being openly forced out of Venezuela”, so this policy was already being informally implemented by Delcy Rodriguez’s government under US pressure. Apart from Cuba, none of the countries that the US’ new license prohibits transactions with are dependent on Venezuelan energy, but cutting them out of this industry serves another purpose arguably even more strategic than denying them its resources.

Trump boasted earlier this month that India agreed to stop purchasing Russian oil as part of the terms of its trade deal with the US and replace its imports with American and possibly Venezuelan oil instead. It was hitherto assessed prior to the US’ new license that “India Is Expected To Only Slowly Reduce Its Import Of Russian Oil” in no small part due to the Venezuelan Ambassador to China confirming his country’s interest in continuing exports to it and Trump welcoming Chinese investment in this industry.

If RT’s interpretation of the license is correct, and Lavrov believes so after complaining about the US’ new prohibition on Venezuelan energy transactions with Russia during his latest appearance at the Duma, then India could purchase the 642,000 barrels per day of oil (bpd) that China imported on average last year.

That’s more than half of the 1 million bpd that India imported from Russia last month, which could lead to a sharp reduction in the budgetary revenue that Russia expected to receive from such sales.

The US is actively monitoring India’s direct and indirect import of Russian oil per the condition under which it recently lifted last summer’s punitive 25% tariff that was imposed because of these dealings.

Therefore, by cutting China out of the Venezuelan energy industry and consequently enabling India to replace its import of that country’s oil, the US is facilitating India’s rapid reduction of Russian oil imports and might even zero it out if this policy is soon replicated with respect to Iran’s oil exports to China.

What happens when spending $70,000 to signal virtue with your fancy EV goes wrong? FIRE! 

Mercedes-Benz USA has announced a recall of 11,895 electric vehicles due to potentially faulty cells in the automobiles’ high-voltage battery packs that could lead to a fire, like what happened in front of a MBZ dealer in Malaysia in 2024 – though that one was in the middle of charging, while this recall says they can ‘spontaneously catch fire’ either while parked or while driving. 

The move comes after the NHTSA issued a safety recall notice posted on X on Feb. 12 announcing that it affected 1,708 Mercedes-Benz EQB 350 4Matic battery-powered SUVs model years 2022-2024. On top of that, 3,674 Mercedes-Benz EQB 250+ hybrid compact SUVs model years 2023-2024 and 6,513 2022-2024 EQB 300 4Matic vehicles were recalled. 

According to the agency, the vehicles could spontaneously catch fire either while parked or while driving due to an internal short circuit in the automobile’s high-voltage battery power supply. The issue stems from variations in the battery manufacturing process, the notice stated.

“Certain battery cells in the high-voltage battery, from an early production period, are considered to be less robust against different stress factors potentially occurring during the life of the vehicle,” Mercedes-Benz said.

“If a thermal incident were to occur during driving, the driver would be made aware of the issue by a high-voltage battery warning malfunction message in the instrument cluster. Should the thermal incident occur while the vehicle is parked, the driver would not receive a warning.”

In early 2024, an EQB caught fire while charging outside a MBZ dealership in Jahor Bahru. 

As the Epoch Times notes further, the lithium-ion batteries were manufactured by China-based Farasis Energy.

Mercedes-Benz said that after being made aware of vehicles catching fire it issued a software update to remedy the problem. However, in November 2025, two vehicles located in Europe combusted after receiving the software update, triggering an in-depth analysis of the efficacy of the software remedy in markets outside of China.

In December 2025 and January 2026, Mercedes-Benz began working with the battery supplier to tear down and test battery packs and cells. It also conducted an on-site inspection of production methods at Farasis Energy’s manufacturing facilities in Ganzhou in southeastern China.

“MBAG concluded that the effectiveness of the current software update to sufficiently reduce the risk of thermal incidents cannot be fully confirmed for all affected vehicles,” the NHTSA recall notice said.

To date, Mercedes-Benz has received reports of two vehicle fires in the United States that were attributable to faulty battery cells. The company said it would replace battery packs in the recalled vehicles at licensed Mercedes-Benz dealerships at no cost to owners.

Owners of recalled vehicles are advised to only charge their vehicles to 80 percent until they can get their battery packs replaced.

“Out of an abundance of caution, customers are additionally advised to park their vehicles outside,” the recall notice said.

MBAG said a change in production procedures eliminates the issue with faulty cells for vehicles produced after July 31, 2024. Owners will be notified of the recall campaign beginning on Feb. 27. The NHTSA recall number is 26V073.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Major unrest looms as political leaders kick the can down the road on immigration and integration failures, according to a seasoned military expert.

Retired Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has issued a stark warning about the trajectory of social cohesion in Europe and Britain. Speaking to Israeli broadcaster i24News, Kemp highlighted how integration breakdowns have worsened over the past two decades, paving the way for inevitable conflict.

“Things have been getting worse, getting bad, for many years, and they are only going to get worse,” Kemp stated, pointing to the reluctance of governments to confront the issues head-on.

Kemp, who also served in counter-insurgency operations in Northern Ireland and held intelligence roles in Westminster and the Cabinet Office, emphasized the lack of political will to address what he termed the “Islamification” of the UK. 

“No government, the government now or any prospective government of the UK, has the guts to stop it,” he said. “If they want to take strong action to prevent the Islamification of the UK, it’s going to mean big trouble for them. They don’t want trouble, they look four years ahead, they will kick the can down the road to someone else.”

This political shortsightedness, according to Kemp, is fueling the risk of “civil war in Europe.” He described a potential scenario resembling Northern Ireland but on a far more intense scale, where “you have the indigenous British and some of the immigrant population and the British government all on three different sides fighting against each other.”

The officer attributed the slim chances of maintaining social order to democratic dysfunction and a lack of real choice for voters. 

“The big problem that British people have is they don’t have political choice. We don’t really live in a democracy,” Kemp asserted. “Whatever party you vote for, you get the same policies. That applies also to immigration and to the way in which the Islamic population is allowed to grow in numbers and dominance.”

Kemp also noted the rise of Islamist politics in the UK, with Gaza-focused candidates winning seats in high-migration areas. “We’re going to see much more of that in the next election,” he predicted, referencing concerns within the Labour Party, including Health Minister Wes Streeting’s private message: “I fear we’re in big trouble here – and I am toast at the next election. We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51% Muslim, Ilford S) to a Gaza independent. At this rate, I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats.”

This isn’t the first time Kemp has raised the alarm. As we highlighted last year, he previously warned of growing unrest over mass migration and allegations of child sexual abuse by new arrivals, stating: “There’s only so much that I think people can take of that, and they’ve been very quiet up until now, the people in the UK have not really raised their voices against this, or in a very limited way only. But the more it develops, and it is going to develop more and more, the more unrest we are going to see.”

In that earlier commentary, Kemp went further: “And they have no option. I’m not encouraging or supporting this, but I think the people will feel they have no option than to take action into their own hand rather than rely on political leaders who are doing nothing, in their eyes. I think there is every likelihood, I don’t know what the timeframe is, but I would go so far as to not just predict civil unrest, but civil war in the UK in the coming years if this situation continues which I believe it will.”

Kemp’s views align with broader expert analyses on Europe’s fracturing societies. King’s College London Professor David Betz has warned that countries like the UK, France, and Sweden are already in a “pre civil war” state, with “dire social instability,” “economic decline,” and “elite pusillanimity” as key precursors. 

Betz stated: “We’re already past the tipping point, is my estimation… we are past the point at which there is a political offramp. We are past the point at which normal politics is able to solve the problem… almost every plausible way forward from here involves some kind of violence in my view.”

Betz further urged: “I would probably avoid big cities. I would suggest you reduce your exposure to big cities if you are able,” and concluded: “Things are bad now, but they are going to get very much worse. Hopefully after they will get better, but you will have to go through the period of very much worse before you get there.”

Echoing these concerns, academic Michael Rainsborough described Britain’s path as intentional rather than accidental, rooted in elite strategies of division. 

He referenced historical policies under Tony Blair aimed “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity,” and warned of a “descent into what we termed dirty war,” involving internal repression and low-intensity strife.

Rainsborough highlighted the erosion of national sentiment, noting public spaces filled with “Pride flags, Palestinian flags, Ukrainian flags — anything, it seems, but the Cross of St George.” 

He cautioned that such dynamics could lead to “Balkanisation — or, in the local idiom, Ulsterisation,” drawing parallels to Northern Ireland’s troubles.

These repeated warnings from military and academic figures underscore a pattern: unchecked mass migration, elite detachment from public will, and a refusal to enforce borders are eroding the fabric of Western societies. 

As globalist policies prioritize appeasement over security, the pushback from ordinary citizens grows—demanding leaders who put their own people first, before the powder keg ignites.

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Authored by Gerry Nolan via The Islander

They like to pretend it came out of nowhere.

They like the bedtime story: Europe was peacefully humming along in its post-history spa — open borders, cheap energy, NATO as a charity, Russia as a gas station with a flag… and then, one day, the barbarian kicked the door in for no reason at all.

That story is not just dishonest. It’s operational. It’s the propaganda you tell yourself so you can keep the addiction going without ever admitting how self-destructive it is.

Because the truth is uglier and far more incriminating: In Munich, on February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin stood on the most flattering stage the Atlantic system owns — the Security Conference where Western officials applaud themselves for maintaining “order” and he laid out, to their faces, the skeleton of the coming disaster. He didn’t whisper it in a back channel. He used the microphone to deliver some much needed medicine, however hard it would be for the Empire to swallow.

He even signaled he wasn’t going to play the usual polite theatre — the kind where everyone agrees in public and stabs each other in classified annexes. He said the format allowed him to avoid “pleasant, yet empty diplomatic platitudes.”

And then he did the unforgivable thing, (gasp!) he described the empire as an empire. He named the unipolar intoxication — that post–Cold War hallucination that history had ended, that power had found its final owner, that NATO could expand forever without consequences, that international law was optional for the enforcer class and compulsory for everyone else.

Putin’s core argument was brutally simple: a unipolar model is not only unacceptable, it’s impossible. Not “unfair.” Not rude. Impossible.

(Because in a world with) “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making” is a world where security becomes privatized — where the strong reserve the right to interpret rules (with exemptions for themselves), and the weak are told to accept it as morality. (And yes, he put it in exactly those terms — one center, one force, one decision — the architecture of domination.)

And when you build that kind of world, everyone else does the only rational thing left: they stop trusting the wall of law to protect them, and they start arming for survival. Putin said it outright: when force becomes the default language, it “stimulates an arms race.”

This is where the Western client media — professionally disenginuous as ever, clipped one or two spicy lines and missed the larger point: Munich 2007 wasn’t “Putin raging.” It was Russia publishing its redlines in front of the class.

And then came the part that should have frozen the room. Putin named it – NATO expansion. Putin didn’t argue it as nostalgia. He argued it as provocation — a deliberate reduction of trust. He asked the question no Western leader ever answers honestly:

“Against whom is this expansion intended?”

And then he drove the blade in: what happened to the assurances made after the Warsaw Pact dissolved? “No one even remembers them.”

That line matters because it goes well beyond grievance — it’s a window into how Russia saw the post–Cold War settlement: not as a partnership, but as a rolling deception. Expand NATO, move offensive infrastructure, then call it “defensive.” Build bases, run exercises, integrate weapons systems, and insist the other side is paranoid for noticing.

Putin’s formulation was clean: NATO expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

Now pause and look at the psychology of the West in that room. They didn’t hear a warning. They heard audacity. They didn’t hear “security dilemma.” They heard “how dare you speak like an equal.” That’s the cultural glitch at the heart of the Atlantic project: it believes its own core lie and cannot process sovereignty in others without treating it as aggression.

So Munich 2007 became, in Western memory, not the moment Russia told the truth — but the moment Russia “showed its hand.” The implication: Russia’s “hand” was evil, and therefore any response to it was justified. Which is exactly how you sleepwalk into catastrophe.

The real prophecy: not mysticism, mechanics

What was prophetic about Putin’s speech isn’t that he had a crystal ball.

It’s that he understood the West’s incentive structure:

• A security system that expands by definition (NATO) needs threats by definition.
• A unipolar ideology needs disobedience to punish, otherwise the myth collapses.
• A rules-based order that breaks its own rules must constantly produce narrative cover.
• An economic model that offshore-outs its industry and imports “cheap stability” must secure energy routes, supply chains, and obedience — by finance, by sanctions, by force.

Putin was saying: you can’t build a global security architecture on humiliation and expect it to be stable. Russia had lived through the wreckage of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and that this playbook would be used again and again, with Georgia, with Syria, Libya, Iran and Russia itself if Putin did nothing.

He was also saying and this is where the Russophobic mass hysteria accelerates — that Russia would not accept a subordinate role in its own neighborhood, on its own borders, under a wannabe hegemon’s military umbrella.

This is where the Western catechism kicks in: “neighborhood” is called “sphere of influence” when Russia says it, and “security guarantees” when Washington says it. And so the hysteria machine warmed up.

You saw it in the immediate reception: Western elites, including Merkel and McCain treating the speech as an insult rather than a negotiation offer. You saw it in the years that followed — the steady normalization of the idea that Russia’s security concerns were illegitimate, and therefore could be ignored with moralistic lectures, free of consequences..

Ignore, expand, accuse, repeat.

That loop is your road to 2022 and to today, in Munich 2026. Groundhog day without learning the vital lessons to end the loop of utter madness.

Munich, Feb 13 (2026): Merz admits the order is dead — and calls it “uncertainty”

Fast forward. Same city. Same conference. Same Western liturgy, just with more panic in the eyes and the nucleus of a terrifying realization.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz using his best performative courage, murmured that the world order we relied on is no longer there. Framing the post–Cold War “rules-based order” as effectively crumbled and almost begging for a reset in transatlantic relations. He goes further: he talks up a stronger European defense posture, and pointed to discussions with France about a European nuclear deterrent concept, a “European nuclear shield.”

And then comes the line that should be carved into the marble of the Munich conference hall as Exhibit A: Merz argues that in this era, even the United States “will not be powerful enough to go alone.”

Read that again. The BlackRock chancellor on NATO’s spiritual home turf is effectively saying: the empire is overstretched, the illusion of old certainties are gone, and Europe will be left hung out to dry. Talk about strategic vertigo!

And it is exactly what Putin was talking about in 2007: when one axis tries to act as the planet’s owner, the cost accumulates — wars, blowback, arms races, fractured trust, until the system starts to wobble under its own contradictions.

Merz also reported begged the U.S. and Europe to “repair and revive” transatlantic trust. Repair trust with what currency? Because trust isn’t repaired by speeches. Trust is repaired by reversing the toxic and suicidal behaviors that destroyed it.

And those behaviors were precisely what Putin named in 2007:

• expanding military blocs toward another power’s borders,
• treating international law as a menu,
• using economic coercion as a weapon,
• and then pretending the consequences are “unprovoked.”

Europe is now gasping at the invoice for that policy set: industrial stress, energy insecurity, strategic dependency, and a political class that can’t admit how it got here without indicting itself.

So instead of confession, you get moral performance. Instead of strategy, you get hysteria and cartoon slogans. Instead of peace architecture, you get escalation management — the art of walking toward the cliff while calling it deterrence.

Merz’s remarks underscore that Europe is being forced to contemplate a harsher security environment and greater responsibility, all of its own suicidal making — but it still frames the Russia question in the familiar moralizing register.

Which is the whole tragedy: they can feel the tectonic plates shifting beneath them, yet they keep reciting the same old prayers that summoned the earthquake.

Why we’re here: the Western addiction to expansion — and the manufactured Russophobia that lubricated it

Russophobia is more than just bloodthirsty prejudice. It’s the (failed) policy tool of choice of the last few empires against Russia. It’s what you pump into the Mockingbird media bloodstream to make escalation feel like virtue and compromise feel like treason.

You don’t have to love everything Russia does to see the mechanism: a permanent narrative of Russian menace makes every NATO move sound defensive, every EU economic self-harm sound righteous, and every diplomatic off-ramp sound like appeasement.

It creates a psychological environment where:

• NATO expansion becomes “freedom,”
• coups become “democratic awakenings,”
• sanctions become “values,”
• censorship becomes “information integrity,”
• and war becomes “support.”

Putin’s 2007 Munich speech is the most important he ever gave. After years of failed attempts to have Russia included in a shared pan-European security architecture based on indivisible security, Putin warned Russia could no longer accept the threats posed by US global primacy pic.twitter.com/qQg7d3X0g3

— Glenn Diesen (@Glenn_Diesen) August 21, 2025

And once you install that operating system, you can torch your own industry and still call it moral leadership.

That’s the dark comedy of Europe since 2014 — accelerating post 2022: self-sanctioning, deindustrializing pressure, energy price shocks, and strategic submission to Washington’s delusion of carving up Russia, sold as “defending democracy.” Meanwhile, Moscow reads the West’s behavior the same way it read it in 2007: as a hostile architecture closing in, dressed up as virtue.

Putin’s Munich speech — again, not mysticism — warned that when the strong monopolize decision-making and normalize force, the world becomes less safe, not more.

So what did the West do?

It made the “rules-based order” a brand — while breaking rules (international law) whenever convenient. Exceptionalism at almost biblical levels, God’s chosen people. It expanded NATO while insisting the expansion was harmless.

It treated Russian objections as evidence of Russian guilt — which is circular logic worthy of an inquisitor. And it nurtured a media culture that could not imagine Russia as a rational actor responding to a pattern of ugly regime change behavior — only as a cartoon villain driven by pathology. Not analysis but theological warfare.

The punchline Munich won’t say out loud

Here’s the line Munich still cannot speak, even in 2026, even with Merz admitting the old order is gone: The West didn’t misread Putin’s warning. It rejected it because accepting it would have meant limiting itself.

Munich 2007 was a chance — maybe the last clean one — to build a European security architecture that wasn’t just NATO with better PR. A chance to treat Russia as a Great Power with legitimate interests, not a defeated adversary to be regime changed and broken apart.

And now, in Munich 2026, they stand amid the wreckage and call it “uncertainty,” as if the storm blew in from nowhere. The BlackRock Chancellor calls for resets, for revived trust, for Europe to become stronger, for new deterrence ideas.

But the reset Munich needs is the one it refuses:

• reset the premise that NATO will remain a viable alliance beyond the war in Ukraine,
• reset the premise that Russia must absorb strategic humiliation and accept the inverse, the reality as it is – where it’s in fact Western Europe that is wearing the humiliation.
• reset the premise that international law is a tool of the powerful,
• reset the premise that Europe’s role is to be the forward operating base and European sovereignty sacrificed to buy the Empire time .

Until that happens, Munich will keep happening — every year, more anxious, more militarized, more rhetorical, more detached from the material reality its own disastrous policies created. And Putin’s “prophecy” will keep looking prophetic — not because he conjured the future, but because he correctly described the machine.

Tinder forever changed the landscape of online dating when it introduced the swipe function in 2012: left to pass, right to like. The result was a gamified experience that felt frictionless and addictive. Other dating apps copied it, and then the “swipe era” ignited.

Before that, online dating was mostly on boring websites, like Christian Mingle and Farmers Only, that felt closer to digital classifieds. Matches were more local and delivered in slower batches, and users worked through profiles and messages to decide whom to meet. The process is now largely automated by an algorithm and resembles a game, with matches presented in rapid succession.

Tinder and other dating apps have forever changed how heterosexual couples in the U.S. meet, overtaking introductions through friends around 2013, according to a recent survey.

The chart below shows how online dating was fundamentally transformed by two waves of technology: first, the online web’s takeoff in the mid-1990s, and then the smartphone era after 2007. The rise of the iPhone and Tinder in 2012 helped propel the second wave, with roughly 40% of heterosexual couples in the U.S. now meeting online. That figure was in the low single digits in the mid-1990s.

“We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together,” researchers Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas, and Sonia Hausen wrote in the 2019 paper.

Online dating hasn’t rewritten love – it’s just greatly expanded the pool of potential partners. It also shows how an even larger share of human life now happens online.

Remember during the Covid-era when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg aggressively pushed the metaverse as a way to move more of daily life online?

Beyond the metaverse’s failures, online dating has also been running into headwinds lately, as younger people reduce screen time and choose to meet in the real world again.

According to Adjust.com, an app insight blog, “Looking at dating app installs and sessions from January 2023 to December 2024, it’s clear that user interest has been gradually declining. From January 2023 to December 2024, dating app installs and sessions declined by 13% year over year. Despite this overall decrease, sessions remained resilient, particularly during key seasonal periods.”

And, weirdly enough, Gen Z has given up on alcohol (readers already know that), but a new report suggests they’re also giving up on sex. Likely because sex can lead to babies, and babies can lead to drained bank accounts.

It increasingly looks like Gen Z’s habits are reshaping daily life and parts of the economy. They’ve certainly dented alcohol consumption and may soon influence family formation. And, as noted above, they could also be contributing to a peak in dating app usage.

Authored by Jim Bovard

A few presidencies ago, Washington politicians used boundless political and intellectual chicanery to drag America into a ruinous war. Thousands of Americans died and scores of thousands of Iraqis perished due to the official myth of Saddam Hussein as the twentieth hijacker.

Last November, Axios published new damning information on the role of Saudi government officials in bankrolling the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Private lawsuits against the Saudi regime “unearthed evidence showing one Saudi official—who acknowledges aiding two men who became hijackers—made a drawing of a plane and a mathematical formula that allegedly could have been used to fly into the World Trade Center.” That was only the latest stunning revelation in a coverup that will celebrate its twenty-fifth birthday this year.

In 2002 and early 2003, the W. Bush administration rushed to exploit 9/11 to justify invading Iraq. But there was a problem with that con job. A 2002 FBI memo stated that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these [9/11 hijacker] terrorists within the Saudi Government.” A joint House-Senate congressional investigation found extensive evidence that the Saudi government, not Saddam Hussein, propelled the hijackers. The Bush administration succeeded in suppressing the key twenty-eight pages of that congressional report on the Saudi role on 9/11. 

The late Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) became a leading proponent of declassifying those twenty-eight pages, declaring in 2013:

“If the 9/11 hijackers had outside help—particularly from one or more foreign governments—the press and the public have a right to know what our government has or has not done to bring justice to all of the perpetrators.”

Those twenty-eight page were finally released (mostly) in 2016, revealing how Saudi government officials directly financed and provided diplomatic cover for several of the hijackers in the United States shortly before they unleashed havoc.

Truth delayed is truth defused. Blocking the evidence of the Saudi bankrolling of 9/11 enabled the Bush administration to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis.

The Bush administration sold the Iraq war as payback for 9/11. While false claims by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have received ample coverage, the Bush Saudi-Iraqi Bait-and-Switch has faded into memory.

In a memo Bush sent on March 18, 2003, notifying Congress that he was launching a war against Iraq, Bush declared that he was acting “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

Bush invoked this justification even though his administration had never offered a shred of evidence tying Saddam to 9/11. Bush and team continually threw out new accusations and then backed off, knowing that few people were paying close enough attention to recognize that previous charges had collapsed like a houses of cards.

In the first months after 9/11, there was little mention of Iraq in the public pronouncements by Bush and his top officials. But in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush stunned many people by announcing that Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, were part of an “axis of evil.” Since the Global War on Terror had stratospheric support levels in the polls from the American people, the best way to sanctify a war against Iraq was to redefine it as part of the Global War on Terror. Bush declared on September 25, 2002:

“Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn’t, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world…You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. They’re both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.”

The next day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that the United States possessed “bulletproof” evidence linking Saddam and Al Qaeda. But it was a bullet that could never be exposed to sunlight. An earlier alleged link between Iraqi agents and hijacker Mohamed Atta meeting in Prague had collapsed, with the story disavowed by both the CIA and the Czech government.

On October 7, 2002, Bush, speaking to a selective audience of Republican donors in Cincinnati, laid out his logic:

“We know that Iraq and the Al Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy—the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade…And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.”

The fact that some Iraqis cheered the carnage on September 11 proved Saddam could team up with Al Qaeda for a second 9/11.

The link between Saddam and Al Qaeda then took a three-month recess, returning in the 2003 State of the Union address, when Bush declared that “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.” Bush reached for the ultimate hot button:

“Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.”

Three days later, when Bush was directly asked by a journalist at a White House press conference, “Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September the 11th?” Bush replied, “I can’t make that claim.” Yet, that did not stop him from endlessly making the inference.

But the Bush administration’s new “evidence” failed the laugh test. The Los Angeles Times revealed:

“The Bush administration’s renewed assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda are based largely on the murky case of a one-legged Al Qaeda suspect who was treated in Baghdad after being wounded in the war in Afghanistan.”

Time noted of Bush’s message on Saddam and Al Qaeda:

“If there was no visible evidence to link the two, he just used that fact to argue his point: the danger is everywhere, even if we can’t see it; the threat is growing, even if we can’t prove it. The Administration’s argument for war is based not on the strength of America’s Intelligence but on its weakness.”

In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3% of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But by February 2003, 72% of Americans believed that Hussein was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17% of respondents knew that none of the hijackers were Iraqis. 73% believed that Saddam “is currently helping al-Qaeda.”

American soldiers were hit with more concentrated doses of propaganda than private citizens. A 2006 poll of American troops revealed that 85% believed the U.S. mission sought “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.” That belief likely helped spur some of atrocities against Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.

U.S. intelligence agencies always knew that the Saddam-9/11 link was a political concoction by pro-war politicians. In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page report that recognized that the CIA accurately concluded that “to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance” in the 9/11 attacks. The report noted that the CIA’s accurate judgments on Saddam, Al Qaeda, and the non-link to 9/11 “were widely disseminated [prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq], though an early version of a key CIA assessment was disseminated only to a limited list of Cabinet members and some sub-Cabinet officials in the administration.”

Neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney were ever held liable for their lies that led to carnage in Iraq. Perhaps that is the biggest lesson that Washington policymakers take from the Iraq War.

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump sounded as if he recognized the vast folly of invading Iraq to topple Saddam. But Trump’s promise to “end the endless wars” seems like a hundred years ago. An Associated Press poll last month found that 56% of Americans believed that Trump had already “gone too far” with his military interventions abroad. But will pro-war politicians and political appointees fabricate new pretexts to attack Iran or elsewhere?

Across much of the world, long-standing norms around marriage and family formation are changing.

In many countries, having children outside of marriage has become increasingly common, while in others it remains rare.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, shows countries ranked by the share of children born outside of marriage using the latest available data from the OECD Family Database.

Latin America Leads by a Wide Margin

Colombia leads with 87% of children born outside marriage, followed by Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico—all above 70%.

In much of the region, cohabitation has long been socially accepted and legally recognized, reducing the importance of formal marriage. Historical inequality and lower access to legal institutions have also played a role in shaping these patterns over time.

Nordic Countries Redefine Family Norms

Several Nordic countries also report high shares of non-marital births, including Iceland (69%), Norway (61%), Sweden (58%), and Denmark (55%).

Unlike Latin America, these trends are closely tied to strong welfare states and legal protections for children regardless of parents’ marital status. Cohabiting couples often enjoy rights similar to married ones, making marriage a personal choice rather than an economic necessity.

Lower Rates Persist in Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean

At the other end of the spectrum are countries such as Japan (2.4%), Korea (4.7%), Türkiye (3.1%), Israel (8.6%), and Greece (9.7%). In these societies, marriage remains closely linked to childbearing due to cultural expectations, religious traditions, and legal frameworks.

Social stigma and limited support for single parents further discourage having children outside of marriage.

Anglo and Western European Countries Sit in the Middle

Countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and much of Western Europe fall between these extremes. Around 40% of children in the U.S. are born outside marriage, a similar share to Austria and Italy.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The World Has Passed Peak Child on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

BRACKETTVILLE, Texas—The chaos caused by millions of illegal immigrants flooding across the southwest border under the Biden administration left scars on this border town.

​The constant high-speed chases, buzzing helicopters, screaming emergency sirens, hurried school lockdowns, torn barbed-wire fences, and decomposing bodies on ranches and along the Rio Grande all took their toll on Texas towns near the Mexican border.

​The border crisis drained resources and changed the lifestyle of Brackettville, a little town with two traffic light intersections in Kinney County. Residents of the county and beyond said the madness stopped almost overnight after President Donald Trump took office.​

Now they say the chaos of illegal immigration has just moved into the country’s interior to places that include Minnesota.

Illegal border crossings plummeted to record lows after Trump took office. In fiscal year 2025, Customs and Border Protection reported 443,000 encounters at the southwest border with Mexico.

In 2024, that number stood at a little less than 2.5 million.

​‘Back to Mayberry’

Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 people per year moved through the county in 2022 and 2023.

​Images of illegal immigrants were caught on game cameras meant to give ranchers photos of deer and wildlife on their property, which allowed Coe to estimate the traffic.

​“If we hadn’t stepped up when we did in the way we did—I think it would totally destroy the county, had the wave of illegal immigrants continued,” he told The Epoch Times.

​Brackettville sits north of the Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. Route 57 past Eagle Pass and west of the Uvalde checkpoint, making it an ideal location for gotaways, or illegal immigrants who evade capture.

​“It’s really a geographical thing with the checkpoint locations to some degree,” Brent Smith, Kinney County attorney, told The Epoch Times.

​The area attracted state and national attention as a hot spot for high-speed chases involving smugglers during the border crisis.

​The depth of the problem along the smuggling corridor was the subject of an Epoch Times documentary: “Gotaways: The Hidden Border Crisis.”

​But now, ranchers are not spending all their time repairing fences, picking up dumpsters full of discarded water bottles and clothing, or worrying about who might walk out of the brush.

​They no longer have to black out their windows in fear that the light will attract unwanted nighttime visitors. Families are once again accompanying hunters to their deer leases, Smith said.

​“So, it’s kind of back to Mayberry,” Coe told The Epoch Times, referring to the idyllic small town featured in the 1960s TV series “The Andy Griffith Show.”

​Matt Benacci, a school board member for Brackett Independent School District, said life has returned to normal at the district’s K–12 campuses as well.

​School lockdowns have all but stopped, he told The Epoch Times.

​During the border crisis, schools would sometimes have to lock down two times per day because of smugglers bailing out of vehicles and running on foot through the town, he said.

A car of gotaways once jumped the curb onto school grounds and the occupants fled, and one illegal immigrant tried the gym doors to get inside the school, he said.

​Brackett Independent School District placed giant stones along the perimeter of its schools to serve as barricades to protect against future incidents.

Those kinds of chases turned deadly for residents because it sapped their town’s resources.

Smith recalls two instances during the mass migration in which Kinney County residents suffered life-threatening medical emergencies when their resources were dispatched to crashes involving smugglers.

“If we have, like, a huge crash or pursuit, 20 miles, 25 miles north of town, all of our resources are out there,” he said.

​If an ambulance had been available on a fateful day in 2024, perhaps Benacci’s mother might still be alive.

​“I try not to dwell on it because the only thing you can do is get really angry,” Benacci said, his voice breaking, eyes pricking with tears.

​Gloria Benacci, who was in her 70s, died two years ago after suffering a stroke, he said.

​The local ambulance crew was not available because it was responding to a deadly crash involving illegal immigrants. Likewise, rescue helicopters were tied up, he recalled.

​State troopers chased a vehicle containing a U.S. citizen and several illegal immigrants in early March 2024. The vehicle rolled over, throwing people from the truck. Four died.

With local emergency services tied up, an ambulance from Uvalde, about 40 miles away, was dispatched for Benacci’s mother and arrived in about an hour.

​It took another couple of hours to get her to a hospital in San Antonio. She never recovered the ability to breathe on her own, he said, and she passed away on March 13, 2024.

​“Once an ambulance is dispatched out there to something like that, you can’t divert them to something else,” he said, referring to the illegal immigrant crash.

Larger border cities were not spared, either.

​In Eagle Pass, Fire Chief Manuel Mello said his department received as many as six calls per day for drownings along the Rio Grande in 2022. In 2025, the number dropped to about six for the entire year, he said.

Now, ​emergency calls to the Rio Grande and those involving foreign nationals have dropped by 95 percent,  he said.

​“Once the new administration came in, things started to slow down significantly,” he said. “We were getting calls almost every day to the river’s edge, and right now, I don’t think we’ve had one call in the last two, three months.”

​Things were so bad for a while that he had a designated crew just for responding to calls to the river’s edge. It would get multiple calls and, at times, get overwhelmed, he said.

​People trying to ride the trains into the United States often incurred horrific injuries or death, he said. Many had their limbs crushed or amputated in the doors that would slide shut as the train moved.

​“We were seeing a lot of amputations, a lot of decapitations, a lot of injuries,” he said.

​Mass migration strained the entire medical system, he said. Emergency medical services and the hospital system were overwhelmed, according to him.

​“There was a point where we were waiting 45 minutes to an hour outside, waiting for a bed,” he said.​ “So right now, I guess my guys are breathing a little easier.”

Border Scars

​Wanda Selby, 88, said she no longer feels the need to carry her Smith and Wesson .38 revolver when she goes on walks with her dog, Lady.

​“They’re just not coming through like they were,” she told The Epoch Times as she ambled among the towering live oaks in Red Bridge Park.

​Selby told The Epoch Times that in 2022, she decided to forgo her frequent walks alone after striking up a conversation with a young Texas highway patrolman.

​He was parked along a rural road near a friend’s ranch where she liked to walk. The lawman told her that a .38 would not help her because human smugglers, or coyotes, working for the Mexican cartels carried AK-47s.

​“‘You don’t want to let anybody know you have a gun, because they have a bigger gun,’” she recalled him saying.

​She opted to walk in her neighborhood afterward.

​In 2022 and 2023, it was common to hear helicopters buzzing overhead in her neighborhood. Sometimes illegal immigrants on the run would come onto people’s porches, she recalled.

​Border Patrol agents and state troopers frequently combed her neighborhood.

​“It was a nightmare down here,” she said. “[Former President Joe] Biden, he didn’t just let them in—he welcomed murderers, drug dealers, anybody that wanted to come in. They were not vetted at the border.”

Damage to Ranches

Ben Binnion, 39, is a wildlife biologist who manages thousands of acres of ranchland outside of Eagle Pass across from the Mexican border.

​Beginning in 2021, the ranch became a superhighway for human traffickers, suffering at least $350,000 in damages, he said.

​Many illegal immigrants would walk around the checkpoint east of Eagle Pass, with some using Farm Road 481, which is near the ranch, to head north.

Read the rest here…

During a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) confronted Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. The Missouri Republican exposed Ellison’s ties to the Feeding Our Future scandal, where fraudsters stole $250 million in federal child nutrition funds. 

Hawley didn’t hold back, charging the Democrat with protecting fraudsters who funneled cash to terrorists and traffickers, as well as Ellison’s own campaign coffers, and telling him he “ought to be in jail.”

THERE IT IS 🚨 Official Hearing where Senator Josh Hawley confronts Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison about meeting with and taking campaign donations from Somali fraudsters stealing billions

He personally called and BLOCKED THE INVESTIGATIONS

Josh Hawley “Are you… pic.twitter.com/i40Ow5V9Zz

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 12, 2026

Hawley opened the confrontation by spotlighting $10,000 in campaign donations Ellison pocketed from players in the Feeding Our Future mess, which the New York Post broke last year, detailing how the money flowed in right after a December 11, 2021, meeting at Ellison’s office.

Ellison repeatedly denied it, calling it a false statement. But Hawley read directly from the meeting transcript, where money was discussed repeatedly. 

 An audio recording of that meeting revealed that Ellison met with members of the Somali community who were later convicted in the scandal. In the recording, the individuals ask Ellison for help securing funding before discussing campaign donations. 

“The only way that we can protect what we have is by inserting ourselves into the political arena,” a man is heard saying on the audio.

“Putting our votes where it needs to be. But most importantly, putting our dollars in the right place. And supporting candidates that will fight to protect our interests.”

“That’s right,” Ellison replied.

Ellison accepted $10,000 in campaign contributions from the fraudsters mere days later, as did his son, Minneapolis councilman Jeremiah Ellison.

Hawley proceeded to read from that recording, quoting Ellison’s own words back to him.

“Send me the names of all these folks who are investigating them,” Ellison said. He promised to call the Education Department and ask what was going on. “I already have my team working on this,” he told them, according to the transcript. “What day should we get together to discuss it again?”

Ellison pledged repeatedly to help them fight the investigators.

“You have my attention. I’m concerned about this,” he said. “Let’s go fight these people.”

“Why’d you do it? Was it worth it?” Hawley asked.

“This is what accountability looks like, of which you’ve had none,” Hawley countered.

“You helped fraudsters defraud your state and this government of $9 billion, and you got a fat campaign contribution out of it. You ought to be indicted. That’s the truth.”

Ellison shot back hard. He denied the donations flat-out: “a lie” and “No donations came.” He insisted, “You’re completely wrong. … I did not see anybody.” Hawley countered with video proof of their nearly hour-long sit-down—easy to find online. Ellison dismissed Hawley’s quotes as “cherry-picked.”

As the exchange got heated, Ellison repeatedly talked over Hawley, which the senator didn’t appreciate. “It’s my hearing, pal,” he snapped.

“Don’t call me ‘pal,’” Ellison shot back.

“Well, I should call you a prisoner because you ought to be in jail.” 

He demanded resignation. Ellison flipped it: “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

Hawley didn’t stop there. He brought up testimony from the previous day showing where the fraudulent money went: to terrorist groups, transnational criminal organizations, drug trafficking, and child trafficking. “You took $10,000 and helped them do it,” he said. Ellison kept denying everything, but Hawley had receipts. 

He cited a Minnesota Star Tribune report that Partners in Nutrition raised concerns with the attorney general’s office in 2018 and 2019, but Ellison did nothing. The New York Post reported that Ellison accepted campaign donations from individuals linked to the fraud after meeting with them.

“You’ve been right at the center of this fraud thing from the beginning, and you’ve enabled it,” Hawley said. “You should resign.”

Ellison shot back, “And, sir, you should resign. I was thinking the same thing about you.” 

Authored by Scott Pinsker via PJMedia.com,

So, barmaid, bring a pitcher, another round of brew

Honey, why don’t we get drunk and screw?

– Jimmy Buffett, Why Don’t We Get Drunk (and Screw)

It’s not just sex: Alcohol consumption has dropped by 54%, with youth (18 to 34) drinking falling ANOTHER 9% just between 2023 and 2025.

From TIME magazine’s article, “Why Gen Z is Drinking Less”:

[R]esearch from the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows that lifetime drinking, past month drinking, and past year drinking among young people began to decline around the year 2000. That means that such declines have especially impacted Generation Z, defined as anyone born from 1997 to 2012, and some Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996.

[…]

“It is becoming clear that, for whatever reasons, today’s younger generations are just less interested in alcohol and are more likely than older generations to see it as risky for their health and to participate in periods of abstinence like Dry January,” said National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism George F. Koob in a statement.

Maybe that’s not coincidental. Perhaps there’s a causal link (as famed philosopher Jimmy Buffett suggested). Maybe, just like peanut butter and jelly are complementary products, sex and alcohol are, too.

Koob seemed to agree with Buffett:

Another contributing factor has to do with the changing socialization patterns of younger generations. “Alcohol tends to be a social drug, even for young people, so part of the decline in underage drinking could be related to less in-person socializing,” said Koob. On average, the amount of time people spent with friends in-person decreased from 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 hours a month in 2020, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the epidemic of loneliness. That decline was especially marked for people aged 15 to 24. 

Back in 1991, more than half — 54.1% of all high school students — were sexually active. (The other 45.9% lied about it.)

By 2007, the number fell to 47.8%. Four years later, it dropped again to 43%. By 2017, it was just 39.5%.

As of 2023, it’s 31.6%.

What’s going on with kids today, with their wild, out-of-control abstinence and crazy teetotalling?!

It’s one of the strangest, most inexplicable cultural shifts in recent memory. I was certainly blindsided: I figured our sex drive was so biologically ingrained, it would never go away!

But it has. And with it, so has the U.S. birthrate: It’s now at a 40-year low.

We need a birthrate of 2.1 babies per woman to maintain our population. We’re currently at 1.6.

For decades, our shrinking birthrate was masked by immigration growth. In 1991, the U.S. population was 253 million. By 2025, it grew to 343.6 million. 

Since 2020, immigration has been the #1 driver of American population growth. 

With the new crackdown on illegal immigration, we’re flirting with our first-ever population decline. And it’s not just an American phenomenon — all over the world, birthrates have collapsed.

At least one geopolitical strategist and demographic expert predicts it’ll lead to the end of China within the next 10 years:

And three months ago, the Chinese government updated the data. They’re now reporting a 70% drop in the birthrate since 2017. That’s a faster decline than what was suffered by the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. 

And the Shanghai Academy of Sciences, which is kind of the Wiseman organization of statisticians in China that interprets all the data, says that this is still wrong. They estimate that the Chinese system has overestimated its population by over 100 million people. With all of the missing millions being people who would’ve been born during the one-child era, which is a rather sterile way of saying that all the missing millions are under age 40 suggesting that these yellow bars don’t even exist.

China has, at most, 10 years before it faces national dissolution. They will not be a unified industrialized nation state 10 years from now. [emphasis added]

—Peter Zeihan

So why aren’t young people drinking, hooking up, and having babies? How the heck did we go from Free Love to no love — and a hookup culture where nobody hooks up?

As with most cultural trends, there’s more than one root cause.

Smartphones are a contributing factor. At first, many experts predicted that dating apps and matchmaking sites would increase sexual activity. You could meet the next great love of your life while sitting in your bathrobe, drinking a cup of coffee, and scrolling on your phone. What could be easier than that?

But it sure hasn’t worked out that way. 

Perhaps it’s analysis paralysis: In a world with near-limitless dating options, it’s tough to make a decision and stick to it. And if social media has skewed your perception of reality, perhaps none of your real-life options are ever as appealing as the Photoshopped fantasies you see on Instagram. 

Or, perhaps, the BILLIONS of free “adult content” sites, videos, and stimuli are all you need to satisfy your sex drive. Why subject yourself to a real-life boyfriend/girlfriend and risk having your heart broken (or, since #MeToo, your reputation destroyed) when you can fantasize about someone different every single day?

I’ve got two teenage boys. I’ve heard how they talk around their friends: The fear of being “outed” for something they didn’t even do is a very real thing. 

You’re always one TikTok upload away from being a social pariah.

COVID could be a factor. We normalized being alone. The 15-year-old who wasn’t allowed to leave his house, go to school, or play with friends in 2020 is now 21. For a kid like that, hanging out in a bar with strangers is weird and creepy.

Either way, we’ve reached the point where loneliness is the #1 self-reported threat to Gen Z’s mental health:

Exclusive: Half of young people plagued by loneliness, family problems https://t.co/EyxNjYjSp7

— Axios (@axios) September 16, 2025

An additional factor might be the shift from alcohol to marijuana. We’ve gone from a drinking culture to a pot-smoking culture, with more Americans consuming marijuana than alcohol. 

In 1992, fewer than 1 million Americans used marijuana daily.

By 2012, it was 6 million.

Today, it’s 18 million.

The alcohol culture was ultra-extroverted: You went to bars, attended parties, met new people… and made horrible decisions ’round closing time. (And how!)

The marijuana culture is introverted: It’s something you do alone to placate your boredom.

None other than South Park succinctly explained this phenomenon:

A dark, misanthropic worldview is yet another factor: If you dislike humanity, you’re probably not inclined to prioritize the perpetuation of our species.

From NPR:

Does being more conservative mean having more kids? Several studies suggest that people in red states have more babies than those in blue states. And now a new report from a conservative-leaning group argues that that could have implications for politics and culture in the U.S. down the road.

[…]

[T]hese authors looked at young adults ages 25 to 35 who self-identify as liberal or conservative. They found that young liberal women today are much less likely to have children than young conservative women, with a gap of more than 30 percentage points. And that’s a big change since the 1980s, when there was a much smaller gap between liberal and conservative women. [emphasis added]

The political implications are obvious, both in the short term:

In the 2024 election, there was a remarkable correlation between a state’s fertility rate and the share voting for Trump!

The partisan gap around families continues to intensify. This also helps explain why Trump nearly won New Jersey! 🧵 https://t.co/CCM4xBlRAL pic.twitter.com/Bm4lhLiBis

— More Births (@MoreBirths) November 6, 2024

And in the long:

The analysis of reapportionment is even worse for Democrats.

Blue states losing 11 electoral college votes
Purple states gaining 1
Red States gaining 10 electoral college votes.

If Republicans hold North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, they win the presidency for a decade https://t.co/jh5xpJYehg

— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) January 27, 2026

The final reason why kids aren’t having sex may be the biggest — but fortunately, it’s also the one we have the most societal control over: Sex leads to babies, and babies are REALLY expensive.

That wasn’t true when we were a rural society. If you were a farmer in the 1800s, kids were an economic asset: They were free labor that helped you be more productive.

The more, the merrier.

But in urban environments, kids are an economic liability. Kids cost $23,000 a year — and by age 18, that’s $414,000! 

Because of sky-high housing costs, the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old. For female homeowners, that’s not the best math for having babies.

If they can’t even afford their own home until they’re 40, how the heck are they ever gonna reach 2.1 kids?

Government policies that lower housing costs would go a long way to reversing this trend. We want young people to be able to afford their first home when they’re still in their 30s.

In the 1980s, the average age of a first-time homebuyer was the late 20s. (Made it a helluva lot easier to have multiple children.)

Vice President JD Vance connected the housing market to illegal immigration:

🇺🇸 VP VANCE: 30 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS PUSHED HOUSING COSTS THROUGH THE ROOF

“A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive.

Why is that? Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that all by right go to… https://t.co/v4Grpae3z9 pic.twitter.com/l52OY0hcSe

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 13, 2025

So did the Department of Homeland Security:

“Rent is too high!”

There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.

“Groceries cost too much!”

There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.

“There aren’t enough jobs!”

There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country.

“Women…

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) November 20, 2025

There is no magic bullet solution, alas. No single law or policy change will reverse this no-nookie trend. But that’s to be expected; a problem with multiple causes requires multiple solutions.

It can’t be any one thing; it must be many different things.

Because, if it turns out the biggest problem of all is “adult content” on the Internet, things are about to get so much worse. With AI advances and video generation, we’re rapidly approaching the day when a teenage kid will be able to describe ANY fantasy to his AI — and instantly receive a video that’s specifically tailored to his/her tastes. Teens will even be able to hear their AI fantasy screaming their names.

That’ll enhance the illusion of intimacy and personal relationships. It’ll make their digital fantasies increasingly indistinguishable from reality.

Which will ultimately leave them lonelier than ever.