Here is what I wrote, by the way.
— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) April 25, 2025 at 7:05 PM
President Theodore Roosevelt was making speeches decrying the Great Replacement of decent Anglo-Saxon Americans a century ago… but in his day, it was the savage Irish and the cunning Jew conspiring against The Way Things Should Be. Now Mike Flynn and Stephen Miller consider themselves assimilated enough to throw up their uncalloused hands at our newest strivers…
Philip Bump, at the Washington Post — Let’s have more babies — and less of this; [gift link]:
… It is true that Americans are less likely to have children than they were a few decades ago. Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week indicates that the fertility rate in the United States remains near its record low. This is not a development that is unique to the United States. Across the globe, people are less likely to have children than they used to be…
There’s an obvious contributing factor. In the 1970s, about 1 in 5 U.S. babies were born to teenage mothers. This spurred a crisis of its own, with enormous resources applied to reducing the number of teenage births. It worked. In 2023, there were more babies born to women 40 and older than to those 20 or younger.
My wife and I had a life together and careers before deciding to have children. I wish I had more time with my sons, but am glad for the time I had with my wife — and for the maturity I had by the time my oldest son was born. Had we jumped into having kids as soon as we were married, though, we could have had even more kids, likely having to give up one of our careers to make it work.
Women are not dependent on men in ways they were a century ago, a shift away from a traditional ideal that can be grating to conservatives. But the underlying politics has another dimension: That fewer Americans are having babies means the nation is more reliant on immigration to backstop population trends.
The idea that there’s an intentional effort to replace Americans with immigrants has seeped from the right-wing fringe into the White House. Vice President JD Vance and Tesla CEO Elon Musk joined former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in suggesting that something American was being lost as the birth rate among native-born Americans declined…
The “pronatalism” movement that’s received so much attention of late (including via articles at the Atlantic and in the New York Times) is deliberately and inescapably right wing.
“To say that most of the conference goers leaned right would be an understatement,” Mother Jones’s Kiera Butler wrote of a recent gathering in Texas. “Some of the topics under discussion were the ethics of gene-editing embryos to endow them with desired traits, how having more babies could save ‘the West,’ and why most women should forego careers to be mothers.”…
The Times reported that the conference was started by a conservative who “came up with the idea after watching a Tucker Carlson documentary about falling testosterone levels.” (This idea, which is not supported by scientific research, was hyped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Fox News on Tuesday night.) Another speaker was a guy who had “posted white nationalist theories on X and written books for Antelope Hill Publishing, which sells translations of works by Nazis.”…
Even before Donald Trump was first elected president on a platform of ostracizing and expelling immigrants (and non-White immigrants in particular), his allies on the right were warning about a sort of immigrant-ification of the country. Stephen K. Bannon once claimed, falsely, that 1 in 5 U.S. residents were immigrants, taking jobs from U.S. citizens. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan carries an obvious appeal to a greatness that preceded our current racial and cultural diversity.
It is the case that immigrants make up a larger percentage of the U.S. population than they used to. But the percentage of immigrants — and, importantly, of Americans born to immigrant parents — is not higher than it was a century ago. At that point, an often explicitly prejudiced backlash produced legislation that effectively curtailed much immigration until the limits were lifted in the mid-1960s…
Many of pronatalism’s proponents object as much or more to who is having babies in America than to the fact that Americans are having fewer babies. For every 1,000 White women in 2024, there were 51.7 babies. For every 1,000 Hispanic women, there were 66.1 births. There does not appear to be a robust effort from pronatalists to learn how Hispanic U.S. residents are succeeding where White residents are failing. Because the idea that Americans are being “replaced” is centered on the idea that it is non-White babies who are serving as the replacements…
I will admit that I don’t know what the answer is. Perhaps it’s simply accepting that populations ebb and flow and that the U.S.’s once-robust position as a magnet for the world was an effective way to continue to grow. Maybe it is ensuring affordable day care and more robust parental leave policies, making it easier for younger women to have kids.
What seems obvious, though, is that the effort to increase the number of children born in the U.S. is harmed by being associated with a parallel movement centered on defending the primacy of White people in American society. At least for the next four years or so, such an association is unfortunately probably inevitable.
When I was writing about these pronatalist people this week I came across this anecdote from the Guardian about the guy In the CNN clip.
— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) April 25, 2025 at 5:46 PM
sab
If the governments made some effort to have first time home buying and rentals more affordable our young adults might be willing to risk having kids. Or publlic college and trade schools more affordable.
Oops, Biden did that and lost the young vote.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Of course America’s* Favorite Himmler, Stephen Miller, is one of the bigger voices in this.
*77 million voters
sab
If the governments made some effort to have first time home buying and rentals more affordable our young adults might be willing to risk having kids. Or publlic college and trade schools more affordable.
Oops, Biden did that and lost the young vote.
ETA Young male vote. Bide/ Harris got young women.
Suzanne
I refuse to think of this movement as anything other than sexism and racism made manifest. If there was any actual will for more children, there would be discussion of appropriately scaled, universal incentives.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Agree.
Suzanne
@Baud: If staying at home taking care of kids is so liberating….. dudes are welcome to do it.
bbleh
@Suzanne: concur, and one notes from whom paeans to “more babies” come, and from whom we DON’T hear them.
(Btw, does Bump ever explain WHY there should be “more babies”? I have no intention of reading the article, just wondering idly.)
Steve LaBonne
Currently reading this, which makes me even less inclined (though can inclination be represented by a negative number?) to sympathize with the “wypipo are responsible for civilization” lie.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Europe’s success was based on embracing an increasingly liberal mindset. That approach is available to any race of people that want to embrace it.
sab
@Suzanne: My husband was disabled in his fifties and forced to stay home. It was actually a godsend to his two teen-aged sons. They were upset by his divorce from first wife (before I met any of them) and the time at home gave my husband the chance to talk with these angry kids without me lurking around. They are all grown up and sensible adults now, raising dogs because they cannot afford kids.
Martin
So, I’ve been arguing here for better part of a decade now that the white christian population falling into minority status somewhere circa 2012 would result in that group consolidating and fighting to restore themselves to majority status one way or another. That can take the form of deporting non-whites, this pronatalism bullshit, public dollars for christian indoctrination, subverting democracy so they can have majoritarian power without majorities, all the way to a proper civil war if necessary (Jan 6 being a step on those last two paths).
They aren’t stupid or evil. They have an agenda that they believe is just. Democrats need to stop treating it like a bunch of clueless asshole outliers and start dealing with it systemically.
sab
@Martin: See my comment at #3. Housing.
ExPatExDem
The reason the young aren’t having children is easy enough to identify.
In the last 75 years, we’ve gone from one high school educated worker being able to support a family on a single income to two full-time employed adults barely able to support themselves.
The federal minimum wage at full-time hours isn’t enough for a 1 bedroom apartment in any of the 50 states.
The prosperity never trickled down since 1980 and counting. Instead we got tinkle-down economics of the rich taking a piss on everyone else and telling us that it’s raining.
Gin & Tonic
As my dear wife and I have very (very) recently been blessed with another grandchild, I idly wonder where on the Miller/Carlson/Musk spectrum this US-born girl falls. Her father is the grandson of white European immigrants, while her mother is herself an immigrant Mexican citizen.
Jay
KKKreeps.
The main reason why the US Birthrate is down, is:
KKKapitalism. The backseat of your 20 year old Toyota Corolla, your parents basement, or a tent on the sidewalk in front of the closed Macy’s is no place to raise a large family.
There is a tiny, smaller than microscopic subatomic Truth in the Great Replacement Theory. KKKorporations import workers because they have less protections, work harder, are better educated and work cheaper, and can be used to keep wages down. Some eventually get Permanent Residence Status or Green Cards, most don’t.
Martin
@sab: How do you ensure only the deserving white people get the housing?
Biden didn’t make college easier to get into, though. He only rewarded the people who cleared that hurdle. And he didn’t do shit about housing. And Democrats aren’t doing anything to increase opportunities to get ahead, to create wealth, which is going to require cracking down on a lot of the financial industry, etc. That’s why Biden lost the young men – the US economy has been garbage for a long time now. You can clear the 4 year university hurdle and hope your employer doesn’t lay you off because investors want a 59% profit margin instead of a 47% one. Or you can engage in the fraud economy which is what a lot of them are doing, with our fraudster in chief at the helm.
When the economic growth benefits all flow to the investor class, you have created a defacto zero sum economy, and you can expect the entrants to that economy to eat each other. That started in the 90s, but it’s got materially worse in 2008, and again under Covid. And the CHIPS act really only benefits the professional and investor classes, and not the working class. It created opportunities for the people who already have opportunities. The infrastructure act did help some, but they also blew too much of that money on stupid EV credits.
Baud
Earth has too many people. I don’t mind some reduction through individual choice.
Tehanu
They may believe their agenda is just, but it isn’t. They may not be stupid, but they are definitely on the side of evil and will stay there until they figure out that they aren’t entitled to rule the world just because they have white skin.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@ExPatExDem:
And to this day, we’ve got lots of people on both sides of the aisle still preaching this nonsense. They rebrand it, use a lot of banal “progressive” language to tart it up but it’s the same crap with the same results.
Martin
@Tehanu: Calling them evil is a cop-out to engaging with the agenda. That’s true when conservatives do it about liberals as well as the reverse. You can scream in their face all day long that they are evil, it won’t change a fucking thing. It’s just performative.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: What’s the optimal number?
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
3
Professor Bigfoot
That depends on whether you think straight white male supremacy over all aspects of American life, law, and culture is “stupid” or “evil.”
I’d say they are both.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: You, me, and Penelope Cruz?
The Audacity of Krope
@Professor Bigfoot: I didn’t find the word “evil” terribly useful in the past. Too ambiguous, too wrapped up and an individual’s values.
I took some time to find a core principle of what I would term to be evil. Turns out that was abuse of power. And these evil fuckers abuse power with abandon.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Now that you say it, it’s clear you’d be a third wheel.
different-church-lady
Babies suck. Fight me.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
That’s how they feed.
different-church-lady
Goddamn, the media does nothing but nutpicking now.
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: UNTIL they fall asleep, whereupon they become the most adorable creatures on Earth.
Thank God, because we would be extinct, otherwise.
ETA see, I give the happy grandpa answer, my man Audacity smacks that SNARK button. He wins. XD
The Audacity of Krope
Just a class of utterly dependent people. They should all be out to work.
VFX Lurker
Nah. My young male co-workers didn’t bitch about housing, jobs or education last October.
They instead discussed how Haitian immigrants were eating the dogs and cats. In the office kitchen, where the rest of us could hear them.
They dismissed every fact I flung at them. They told me I couldn’t trust any news reports or elected Ohioan officials pushing back against Trump’s lies.
They all listen to Joe Rogan.
Martin
@The Audacity of Krope: The problem isn’t that it’s ambiguous. The problem is that it’s absolute. If they are evil, they are not worth listening to, engaging with, convincing, winning over, and so on. You can morally justify throwing an evil person into a hole never to be seen from again.
Once you decide some significant part of the electorate is evil, you can no longer do politics, you can only do warfare, and none of you are on board with warfare.
The problem with calling someone evil is that it corrupts you.
Baud
@Martin:
No more calling rich people evil.
Matt
@Martin:
WTAF kind of logic is this? So did the Nazis. Didn’t make them any less evil.
We need to treat the churches and the politicians that have been pushing fascism like the cancer that they are.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
What would you have called the Nazis in 1920s or 1930s Germany? Do you think they or their voters/supporters could be reasoned with?
different-church-lady
@Martin:
I would very much enjoy an attempt to prove your hypothetical.
Jay
@The Audacity of Krope:
Unfortunately, like many young Americans, they have no job skills, no education and are unemployable.
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: So what do you call people who think you’re not quite fully human?
Rusty
Our oldest daughter let us know last week that she is pregnant, this will be our first grandchild. It’s a little early, but everything looks good. She and her husband are worried about the money needed to raise children, she is the oldest of 4 and he is the oldest of three. They would like a bigger family, but know it is out of reach. We are insanely thrilled, a baby is the most hopeful vote for the future ever. The wold is fucked up, but this is beautiful.
different-church-lady
@VFX Lurker: Let’s throw them in a hole and document the results.
The Audacity of Krope
No, that would be evil.
Worth doesn’t come into it. They aren’t open to it. They contest every aspect of reality to keep as many people as possible in a constant state of confusion while insinuating a rigorous pack of lies as the only knowable truth, the spurious “everybody knows.”
Not every Republican voter is evil, not close. But every one of their politicians and mouthpieces are.
Martin
@Baud: I don’t call them evil. I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone evil.
The problem with rich people isn’t that they’re evil, it’s that the marginal utility of money is real and they are bad for the economy.
different-church-lady
@The Audacity of Krope: They’re babies: they’re already out of work.
different-church-lady
@Martin: The real problem is that evil seems to be some kind of money magnet.
Professor Bigfoot
@Rusty: Congratulations, and all the luck to the wee one!
Baud
@Rusty:
Congrats!
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot:
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
The Audacity of Krope
@different-church-lady: That ought to have been a “put.”
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: I want to know what you call someone who doesn’t believe you’re fully human.
different-church-lady
Rich people suck too.
Jay
@Rusty:
Hoping for the best for you and yours.
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You could absolutely reason with them individually. That’s why we didn’t execute the majority of the German population after the war, because they went on to be the Germans we know today.
Only the leadership couldn’t be reasoned with, and that’s why politics failed and it had to be resolved with violence. That’s sort of my point. If you honestly think these people are evil, why aren’t you out shooting them?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jay:
A lot of people wonder what the point is if you’re just going to be replaced with “AI” or other forms of automation in the near future. Why spend years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars acquiring a college degree if it won’t lead to gainful employment? That’s been a problem for years/decades with people unable to find jobs in their chosen fields. Or if they can, their salaries aren’t worth it compared to the debt they racked up
And sure, not all jobs will be completely replaced with “AI”, but I’ve read that it could reduce the number of jobs available and drive down wages for those remaining
different-church-lady
@Baud: First rule of children and pets: never let them outnumber you.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin:
What you just described is both stupid and evil.
Right, like Hitler and the Klan. I don’t really have any answers as to how to deal with them systematically because building a new Auschwitz and shoving them in would kind of defeat the whole aim of not being Nazis, and I think it’s the only thing that would work.
Baud
@Martin:
We don’t kill people for being evil if we don’t have to.
Martin
@Professor Bigfoot: You can just call them wrong. Misguided. Racist. Lots of words. But you can convince a racist to not be racist. You can’t convince an evil person to not be evil. That’s the whole fucking point of the word.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Martin, I honestly think you need to take a break here.
Baud
@Martin:
That’s just wrong. You have a very odd understanding of evil.
The Audacity of Krope
Avoiding them most of the time and reading them for filth when I absolutely must suits me just fine.
different-church-lady
Okay, now me personally, I just don’t believe people get a pass because they have honest beliefs in evil things.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
THAT’S THE WHOLE FUCKIN’ POINT OF WHAT WE’RE SAYING HERE.
The Audacity of Krope
You can’t even convince most people who act on their racism that it is, in fact, racism.
Well that’s the Republicans’ argument, see Trump’s felony charges.
And Martin’s apparently….
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: I see *white supremacy,* the force behind the Enslslavement and Jim Crow, as inherently EVIL.
It doesn’t mean I go around shooting the devils, but it also doesn’t mean I try to justify their evil.
But you’re here explaining why they’re not. Not far from there to justifying their position. To approving of it.
different-church-lady
Babies are evil. Fight me.
Martin
@Baud: The point is that them being evil won’t give you the opportunity not to (or the social equivalent thereof – exile, permanent imprisonment, etc.) You can’t reform someone who is evil. And if you believe a substantial subset of voters are evil, that’s kind of what this will come down to, for the same reasons we fought a civil war once before.
And if you don’t think that’s the path, then you don’t really think they’re evil.
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: Confession… I’ve been on a flight— a LONG flight— with a crying baby.
The grandfather in me was sympathetic.
The tired business traveler was thinking “will someone please stuff a titty in that child’s mouth?”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
I assume people back then tried. And obviously, they clearly failed, for one reason or another.
We should try to convince people we can reach, but not calling the Trump Admin/GOP or groups like these so-called “pronatalists” evil for it’s actions or beliefs is a non-starter
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: So since I adopt a “don’t start none won’t be none” attitude with these evil fuckers I’m what… accepting that they’re not really fucking evil?
Baud
@Martin:
You’re just relying on an idiosyncratic definition of evil and what that means.
You clearly shouldn’t call anyone evil because it will lead you down a bad path. The rest of us will be ok.
Martin
Ok I guess we’re back to accepting that voters cannot be won over, Democrats keep running perfect campaigns with great messaging and policies. Since voters are inherently racist and sexist, let’s run back Biden in 2028. That’ll solve it.
I’m done arguing.
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: I think this is just a rephrasing of “we should be more tolerant of their intolerance.”
different-church-lady
@Martin:
Promise?
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Europe’s success was based on robbery and enslavement.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne: Lots of societies engaged on robbery and enslavement. Europe learned to do the most with it because their own internal societies embraced liberal ideas.
different-church-lady
Not sure exactly what this means in the context of this discussion, but I do recall that when the camps were liberated the Americans forced the German citizenry in the vicinity to see the horror with their own eyes, because the evil was so great they thought the average German wouldn’t believe otherwise.
Professor Bigfoot
@Martin: You’re justifying white supremacy, white man.
That’s all.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
Yeah, if you look back far enough into history, everybody has blood on their hands
Lyrebird
Thank you Anne Laurie!! Once again you said what I might have wanted to say, only better.
Good thing about one of the abducted foreign students, Mohsen Madawi – FREE! (DKos link) Now let’s get the other two freed pronto… but I had to chime in to this thread with some good news.
Professor Bigfoot
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Few of them have founding documents that talk about how “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” while building a slave state.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: They were not more “liberal”, they were greedier and more violent, and basically stumbled into exploitation opportunities in Africa. I suggest reading Howard W. French’s book Born In Blackness.
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot: Define Africans as “not men”. Problem solved.
Interesting Name Goes Here
Hey, what’s going on in–
–oh. Someone’s actually trying to argue that evil people (especially card-carrying evil people) aren’t actually evil.
…Tell you what. I’m gonna follow the example of Jeffrey Donavan’s character in Sicario and just ease my black ass right back out the door.
The Audacity of Krope
I know people can be persuaded. I’ve been persuaded on things. Successful persuasion requires a common set of facts and at least some degree of common goals.
The crux of Republican politics, basically my entire life, has been to deny all of us that. They redefine words and rewrite history, they deny reality whether the matter at hand was caught on camera or understood through rigorous expert study. They do all this to further and agenda of raising a preferred small group to rule recklessly over all of us and go after their perceived enemies.
A lot of these fuckers are evil. A lot more are ignorant. But pretending like the evil fucks aren’t the ones leading their movement, is just helping the evil fucks.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
European society between the Renaissance and modernity absolutely because increasingly liberal.
That gave them power to do some of the worst things in history. But if they had stayed with a Middle Ages mindset, they probably would have failed.
BellaPea
I am so, so, so fucking tired of this pronatalist propaganda. It seriously worries me that the young women are being exposed to this “tradwife” nonsense and other online commentary that implies that they are responsible for the mess this country is in because they won’t automatically reproduce. I don’t have kids, I don’t apologize for it, and I’m almost 70 years old. My husband and I have had a great life. Kids were not what we wanted, and we should be able to have that position without a bunch of crap thrown at us that we are selfish or unAmerican because our two educated white asses didn’t bother to do our “duty.” This is technically a free country (for now) and people should be able to live their lives the way that they want to without a bunch of crap. As Governor Walz so aptly put it, “Mind your own business!”. Yeah.
Steve LaBonne
There was nothing remotely “liberal” about the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella.
The Audacity of Krope
Certainly economic liberals.
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: Yeah, sounds like someone who thought Dred Scott was correctly decided.
different-church-lady
Being butt fuckin’ stupid and casually hateful is a kind of evil…
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
It’s not “liberal” compared to today. But it was liberal in its embrace of exploration compared to Christian Europe of the Middle Ages. Liberalism is a step wise process. Spain took some initial steps. Other countries ended up surpassing them, mostly those that embraced science and secularism more fully.
MagdaInBlack
Wow, this comment thread sure got …..interesting.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: But not compared to a variety of non-European civilizations over many years. I would respectfully submit that you need to learn more about non-European civilizations.
Hoodie
Amusing how these dipshits square wanting to rebuild manufacturing while at the same time wanting to apply AI to everything and, in the same breath, wanting higher birth rates. My Cajun MIL grew up on a sugarcane farm in southern Louisiana. Her parents had 12 kids partly because they were Catholic but also because they needed labor to run the farm. They didn’t eat if they didn’t raise or kill their own food and couldn’t buy the staples they couldn’t grow if the sugarcane didn’t come. You needed a certain amount of manual labor to do that. These assholes can want to produce all the theoretical Social Security paying worker units imaginable, but they’ll still produce nothing if they have nowhere to live and nothing to do. This leads inescapably to the conclusion this is just about which babies are being born and which babies will get the benefits of this technologically advanced society. In this sense, it’s no different than their attitude about abortion where, as Barney Frank said, life begins and conception and ends at birth – if you have the wrong parents. And it won’t stop just with differentiation based on race. They want everyone but their self-defined club to be expendable. Musk wants his genes propagated, not anyone else’s. As if anyone of these absently fathered kids is intrinsically more worthy than the 2 and 4 year old Americans just deported by Trump’s goons. There’s a nonzero chance that, even with all the material advantages they might have, they’ll be so fucked up by their ridiculous parents that they be a net drain on humanity.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think it was at Wonkette, but some Investment Banker created an AI Investment Group, and shortly after, started sexually harassing his female AI CFO. Needless to say, his AI Investment Group did not generate profit. Not sure how many had 3 legs or 6 fingers.
Starbucks CEO has reversed course from the previous CEO. The previous CEO’s brainfart was that if they cut staff, automated production, etc, they would make up the loss in sales and profit since Covid.
That would be a nope.
The new CEO is restaffing, selling off the automation (at a loss), and trialing moving some outsourced stuff, (baked goods, breakfast sandwiches) into the store. While profits are not yet back up, foot traffic and stays are.
While AI, or LLM’s can write code at this point, it’s not functional code. It needs a coder to actually go through, line by line, rewriting or removing to make it work, which take more experience and time than just writing the code from scratch.
The CIO of the Tech Company I worked at, back in the day, used to boast that our Automation Software had 2 million more lines of code than the Space Shuttle and it did.
7.6 million lines of code were just “nulls”, turned off lines of code supplanted by new code just added on.
We tripled the speed on a 4.0 release, not by adding new code, just rewriting the code to remove all the nulls.
A Silicon start up was in the news recently. 2 years in, they fired all their programmers and replaced them with AI. Their entire project then crashed, they tried to hire programmers, but their rep was dirt, and then, tits up. $7.2 billion in Venture Capital gone, burned up by AI.
different-church-lady
I’ve heard evil can be quite banal. Fight me.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Professor Bigfoot:
True. Add “hypocrisy” to the list of the Founders’ flaws
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
There’s always more to learn. I’m aware that there have been ebbs and flows of liberal progress throughout different civilizations in history. But in Europe it was sustained and pervasive for a long period of time, partly because of the lack of external invasions.
Of course, one factor is that the state of technology was such that Europe could expand its reach globally, which in turn led to unique opportunities for exploitation. But exploitation of others doesn’t guarantee long term success, which is what Europe achieved. I think a retrograde society would have have been as successful.
On a shorter timespan, it’s why Republicans can’t make things better for the US.
kindness
I’m OK with a population decline. Call me a Luddite.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
I think babies are banal. Fight me.
schrodingers_cat
Biden is no longer the President but I see that the self proclaimed progressives are still shittting on his time in office and want to woo racist kooks.
schrodingers_cat
Is it me or these racists covered in AL’s post look like Bond villains with fake glasses.
The Audacity of Krope
@schrodingers_cat: ???
U been drinkin’?
MagdaInBlack
@schrodingers_cat: They do look like they’re straight out of “Hunger Games” elite, don’t they?
schrodingers_cat
@MagdaInBlack: Not watched Hunger Games. They look pale and unhealthy.
Jay
@Martin:
Re. EVIL,……………
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida-gwaii-death-justice-4-luke-1.7523097
Eyeroller
@Jay: Most AI code is totally functional at this point. That’s not the issue. The problems are that it’s generally bloated, doesn’t take advantage of built-in libraries if available in the language (because it doesn’t know about them), can be.a security risk, and usually doesn’t handle edge cases well. But for run of the mill applications it absolutely does work. It can just have hidden bugs that can be difficult to track down, because it’s hard enough to find bugs in another human’s code and it’s worse for AI code.
Another Scott
I’m guessing Philip Bump is a man??
This whole topic is a deliberate category error on the right and we shouldn’t accept that framing.
It’s not a tragedy or huge societal problem that US women are having fewer children on average. It’s the natural course of development.
As Dean Baker points out, zero or negative growth in the population of large modern countries is not a sign of impending doom. The quality of life of the average person in Tokyo will not decline – in fact, it will be enhanced – if growth slows or reverses. (That’s Cheaper rents is not a terrible problem.
(Even if one can somehow set aside the racist aspects of it, for the sake of argument…) The folks on the right are screaming about lack of white babies because:
If they want more babies, they need to make it easier, cheaper, and more rewarding for women to decide for themselves to go through all sorts of well-known physical, emotional, societal distress, in addition to putting careers on hold for months or years to do so. If they were really worried about some crisis about lack of domestic workers, then they would advocate increased wages and benefits and status to attract domestic people to those segments affected. Or they would advocate increased R&D in automation to replace those people that genuinely cannot be found.
As usual, they are hiding their real agenda…
Grr…
My $0.02.
Best wishes,
Scott.
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: I had an ancestor transported from England to America in the mid 1600s as an indentured prisoner, probably a debtor. Seven years later he was freed with the basic supplies and clothing to get on. And he did. He died a rich man with 200 slaves (and as an indentured servant he had a taste of slavery on the other side.)
I do not need much convincing to think that man was evil.
His grandson was first president of the Continental Congress. Did a poor job as president.
I know my family’s prosperity was based on these men’s ruthless evil choices.
Jay
@Eyeroller:
It’s part of the “Go Fast, Break Things” culture.
I had two decades of NPI’s, where in we had the hardware ready in 3 months, and then sat around for 19 months waiting for the first successful 100 hour test of the software. We rented warehouses to store the hardware.
Of course, we were different. A bug in our software would kill people.
My ex-brother was high up in the Software side. Program would start at 8 hours a day, become 12 hours a day, then napping at desks 24 hours a day.
I was the MPS, and eventually got the hardware side to realize that when the CIO said 3 months, they meant 19 months, so don’t order any parts or start building hardware until 16 months had passed.
Gin & Tonic
@Martin: Don’t know what it’s like in SoCal, but with the dry weather we’ve had in New England lately, these straw men are pretty dangerous.
Professor Bigfoot
@Eyeroller: Massively obsolete developer here and that makes perfect sense to me.
“Back in MY day” it was almost customary, when working on legacy code, to “toss it all and start over,” because it’s a pain to follow someone else’s code, especially if there’s no other documentation.
AI generated code would seem to be all of that– bloated and utterly impenetrable to human understanding.
(of course, if you have enough processor power and enough memory that may not really matter, but still)
Jay
@Professor Bigfoot:
Or it’s not that important.
Make the monkey jump and throw a barrel code,
is way different than the fire control software for a Trident sub.*
*Yes, we made that, the hardened computers that ran it, and the LAN network hardware.
dnfree
@Jay: Clearly you know the maxim of estimating the timeline for software development: multiply the quantity by two and move to the next higher unit of time. Hence, an estimate of 2 days should be translated as 4 weeks, or 3 weeks is actually 6 months.
prostratedragon
Men at Bluebonnet Detention Facility (immigration prison) in Anson, TX form an S.O.S. with their bodies to signal to a drone overhead.
This is the facility from which the Trump Administration appeared ready to fly another planeful of men to El Salvador last weekend
https://www.reuters.com/pictures/sos-migrants-held-texas-fear-notorious-el-salvador-prison-2025-04-30/
dnfree
@Professor Bigfoot: When I was trained in software development in the 1970s, we learned to document EVERYTHING and I did that throughout my career. Every program started with a descriptive flowchart, and anything that would appear counterintuitive or just plain wrong to a programmer following me was thoroughly documented.
After I left one job the system was converted to a new one, and a former co-worker told me the conversion team was amazed by my documentation. They could follow the documentation, didn’t need to go line by line through the code.
Professor Bigfoot
@dnfree: Compared to one outfit I worked for where their very first instinct was to “go into the code.”
There was no design. There was no concept of a design. There was no documentation except whatever comments were inserted into the code.
“The answers are always in the code!” they’d say…
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Steve LaBonne: wait until you get to Black Athena:https://web.physics.wustl.edu/alford/reviews/athena.html
I agree with Gandhi: asked what he thought about Western civilization, he replied that he thought it would be a good idea.
Jay
@dnfree:
I was the Master Production Scheduler, managed what we would make over the next 3 months, 6 months, year, 5 years. I was also the Chair of the ECIB, Engineering Change Implementation Board. Change had to be seamless, no obsolete parts, all change happening at the same time.
If it was just a hardware change, it was a 15 minute meeting when I started as chair. 2 1/2 hours if software was involved.
I got to the point of being curt and dismissive.
So, you are at 86 hours, bug free testing, so the groundhog has seen it’s shadow, so, 3 more months?
They Call Me Noni
@dnfree: My COBOL (done on punch cards) teacher would tear up whatever you were working on if you didn’t have a flow chart.
BellyCat
Y’all flogged Martin pretty good for arguing the historical definition of evil, an incontrovertible state which must be eradicated for societal benefit.
His argument, as I understand it, is that the problem with the label of “evil” lies in *who gets to decide*. As this label has “justified” mass murder of innocents for ages, I, too, find its use ultimately problematic. That said, the need for a potpourri of undesirable descriptors in its stead, while more accurate, is… awkward. “Fucktard” gets closer.
Does he not get points for pedantry?
Professor Bigfoot
As Pastor Niemöller warned 80 years ago or so.
Sooner or later, they will get to you, regardless of your race, your religion, your creed, your anything.
Jay
@BellyCat:
Nobody, (not the commenter of that nym) get’s points for pedantry except Steve in the WTF is he now.
RevRick
@ExPatExDem:
@Jay:
The birth rate has been declining for two centuries now. The Baby Boom was an aberration in the long term secular decline. It’s been declining, because it can decline. It’s declining worldwide. It’s declining fastest in East Asia. It’s declining in Western Europe. It’s declining in Latin America. It’s declining in Africa, though there the birth rate still exceeds the replacement level.
These discussions often suffer from a U.S.-centric perspective that leads to bullshit conclusions.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: A reminder. Pastor Niemoller spoke those words after he himself was caught up in the Nazi persecution of dissidents.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Hoodie: amen
@Professor Bigfoot: evil is an ancient concept that takes many forms, and I think that focusing on institutional evil, such as Jim Crow, distracts people from realizing how common it can be.
I helped some Black shareholders in a NYC low-income co-op (HDFC is the legal term) keep other black shareholders from tanking their investment by stopping their illegal behavior, and one of my clients kept saying, “isn’t there some discrimination in here somewhere? Because this sure feels like discrimination.” What she meant of course was that it was complete & utterly unfair for some shareholders to risk the investment of all just for an illegal short-term profit by imperiling the tax status of the housing co-op by renting apartments at market & pocketing the money when they should have been selling vacant apartments to other qualified low-income shareholders. I told her, “this isn’t discrimination – this is older than discrimination. This is Cain & Abel. Some people just feel like they ought to have more than their fair share, that’s all.”
BellyCat
@Jay: Heh…
brendancalling
I hate people who hit kids. That Malcolm person looks like a fucking weenus. I hope someone he winds up in a fistfight with someone his own size. If anyone do needs a beating it’s him.
RevRick
@Suzanne: Yes, the pro-natalist gang is not only racist, but also deeply misogynist. They effectively consider women as no more than two-footed livestock, brood mare factories.
It kills them that women have the audacity to say, “Hell, no.”
Jay
@RevRick:
It’s an agenda.
Every place that has had a better increase in life, has a lower birthrate.
The thing is, in the US the WhiteSupremacists are pushing The Great Replacement Theory,
and in reality, the Youtes are having less kids, because:
less income
less job security
more expensive housing, ( here, going from a 1bdr to a 2 bdr is another $1k a month)
no childcare,
etc.
In 1970 the cost of a kid, in 2023 dollars was $81K, (to 17 years of age). 2023, $300K plus.
BellyCat
FIXED by adding legal fees for divorce!
satby
@Martin: Yeah, we’re all fine with that.
RevRick
@Jay: The Baby Boom halted in 1964, because the Pill became available in 1963. The birth rate plummeted that year. But the birth rate soared in the late 40s and 50s compared to the 20s and 30s. If capitalism is responsible for the decline in the birth rate, it also must be credited with the explosion in the birth rates and population that coincided with the Industrial Revolution.
satby
@MagdaInBlack: Weird. I’m thinking weird. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin” weird.
Jay
@RevRick:
It is, but you know, that’s birth rate, not a measure of those who survived into adulthood.
My great grandparents had 14 kids on my Mom’s side. Only 4 lived into their teens, only 2 made it into adulthood.
As it is in the most impoverished areas of the world, it still a numbers game, DJTdiot and DOGshit has made it much worse.
Gretchen
Talia Lavin’s book Wild Faith, about the rise of Christian Nationalism in the US, spends a lot of time detailing how ubiquitous physical punishment is among those folks. They enforce their hierarchy: children under parents, mom under dad, dad under pastor – and feel obedience is the highest value and must be enforced with punishment. We see it bleeding into our civic life now.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Edit…
“(That’s” should be “(That’s from 2010.)”
Sorry.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
Brad Delong in his book on the Long 20th Century has a lot of details on this. There were periods of time in the early modern era, when literally people -in the West- were so starved for protein that their brains did not properly develop. Adult humans with undersize brains due to malnourishment. In the West. That’s how malnourished they were. Industrialization (and also of agriculture) is what fixed that.
Shorter: indeed you are right about that.
Chetan Murthy
Bump asks why Hispanic women have more children than White mothers. My understanding is that within a couple of generations of becoming Americans, immigrants start reproducing like the rest of the native-born. So my mom is one of 6 children; she had 4. One of her children had 3. One. The rest of us? Zippo. And whlie I’m the outlier (b/c single), the rest of my sibs were/are in long-term relationships. So it’s not that.
ETA: that is to say, there’s so much more out there in life, than just pushing out babby and feeding, changing it. So much more. The children & grandchildren of immigrants, raised to expect their American birthright, aren’t gonna forgo all that.
BellyCat
@Chetan Murthy: This explains some vegetarian/vegan behavior. //
bluefoot
@Martin: come to Boston and you’ll see how to ensure it’s only white people getting housing. It’s easy as hell. Having just gone through finding a new place to live, I can tell you Boston realtors and landlords are definitely reverting to the Boston of old.
Jackie
@MagdaInBlack:
Yah, I’m done, too.
Gvg
@Martin: no. Why do you say once you call them evil, you do not engage with them?
Why do you say it corrupts you?
I don’t follow or agree with your logic. You are making some assumptions that you think are universal, and they aren’t.
They are evil, or doing evil. They are also people and a mixture. Sometimes I would engage, sometimes not, depending. Other people who also think they are evil would make different choices. Other factors would be ourselves. I do not seem to have a knack for persuading people and I have always been indifferent to religion which tends to leave me with no tools to persuade most of these people most of the time. But if I see a chance, of course I need to take it. Other people would access themselves and chances differently and possibly engage more or less. Then there are the personal connections to consider, not to mention employment and social considerations.
Some things are really evil no fooling though. Child separation at the border, torture, or executing someone who is likely innocent for reasons I have never understood.
Jay
@RevRick:
BTW, one of T’s coworkers just had a baby, and moved.
Why?
The LLC “managing” her 1 bdr apartment, wanted another $1K a month for a 3’rd person.
It used to be, you rented an apartment, that was it.
1 person, 2 person, 3 people. etc, did not matter. Now it’s a legal head count.
You were renting X square feet at X price.
Those were the day’s my friend.
Wizened_guy
If this country were truly serious about increasing the number of births it would make it easier for people to have and raise families. Affordable and well regulated day care, universal pre-k, extended paternal leave, with pay. But it’s not serious. This is about controlling women’s bodies, reducing them to chattel to increase the herd.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jackie:
“Done” in what way?
BellyCat
@Jay: SRSLY?!?! How is that not discriminatory?
I mean, that would be totally reasonable if the baby cries a lot at night, but they could at least wait to find out!
Gvg
@Jay: no. Burned up by people, who are using AI as an excuse for their own idiotic greed mistakes. They thought they could get something (profit) for nothing(spend less on labor). It was an illusion they could only be fooled by if they really wanted to believe in magic beans. AI is a myth generated by wishful thinking of people who want to win the lottery. My father the programmer insists that AI can actually do specific things and is getting better, but he has the background to know about real AI and does not see that that is not what most of the rest of the planet thinks AI is, nor what harm it’s doing.
LAC
@different-church-lady: Agreed. A long one.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jay:
I don’t know if I’m missing anything, but that’s not right for those people to do that to Young’s family. They’re not the ones who allegedly drove that vehicle into Luke Pearson
Gvg
@RevRick: if you look at world population lines it stayed almost level for thousands of years, until medicine got good enough for vaccines and a few other things like better agriculture and transportation fast enough to feed a larger population. Then it increased dramatically for a couple of centuries. Now we need to level off. We do not need the workers.
They just are nostalgic for the imagined past and bad at coping with the present. They blame that on modernity but I suspect they would be bad at coping with the past too.
RevRick
@Jay: I don’t want to give the impression that economic stresses have no effect, because of course they play into it.
What I am arguing is that presentistic (is that a word?) and US-centric arguments fail to take into account the long-term and global realities. And focusing our attention solely on the recent past in our country leads to some bogus conclusions.
I could easily argue that the roots of the distress in the housing market is largely due to racist zoning regulations enacted in the heyday of housing. The costs of apartments in desirable cities are soaring, because the supply of new housing has been lagging since the Great Recession.
Case in point, we have a shortage of 7000 units here in the Lehigh Valley. Why? Because zoning laws don’t allow the density to address it, so builders can only afford to build high-end houses.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The Young Family and associates are all drug dealers.
And not pot.
Years ago, had a crack house on our street.
Bust after bust, after bust. 3 years of that. All the other associated crime.
It only ended when somebody, (more than one), burned the house down.
It is traditional in Indigenous Communities and others to exile people. That’s where “outlaw” came from
Outlaw came from Saxon law
If you were “outlawed”, I as a Saxon in good standing, could kill you on sight.
This is just shunning.
The Indigenous Communities, rely on community. Excommunication.
Jay
@RevRick:
In 2008, a coworker bought 8 houses in the US, Detroit, Phoenix, Chicago. $160K.
Crazy right?
The houses were never rented. The assayed value year after year was way more than rent’s would have returned, and then there are the costs of rent. You have to fix stuff.
So he paid a company to cut the lawns from time to time.
In 2022, he sold them to an LLC. $8.6 million.
Still never been rented.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: There are voters that cannot be won over. Let’s flip it. Can the fascists win you over? If not, why not?
If you can bring anyone, take me through how you persuade Stephen Miller. There are people who are unreachable. Call them stupid, evil, or whatever. We have to defeat them not persuade them.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jay:
I didn’t realize they were all apparently drug dealers
Kayla Rudbek
@Gvg: yeah, I’m in patent law and I see a lot of this AI talk as hype at best. As I put it, the summary of AI for laymen is “that we have taught computers how to steal and how to lie”. And when you’re losing someone like me, the average non-techie is going to be more hostile to AI than I am.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: Long ago I read Michel Foucault’s _Discipline and Punish_ about the invention of modern penology and criminology. In that book, he argues that before modern penology, punishment was basically visited in a somewhat random manner: at the behest of the monarch (basically, his rage visited upon the body of the perpetrator), or at the behest of communities who really didn’t have access to the kind of justice we expect today.
Foucault argues that in order to make punishment ….. less brutal (e.g. “razing the homes of anbody in the perp’s family”), it was necessary to make it also more -certain-. From what I read in Jay’s posts and the linked-to article, what these communities were most definitely not getting, was justice. And so when that happens, eventually, they return to older norms.
I’m not defending it, just -describing- it. It is what it is.
ETA: I read a story about a guy — a real asshole, really bad guy — who was basically a terror in this small town. And nobody could stop him. And the law was afraid to arrest him. Or maybe he got arrested, but the courts were too afraid to convict him. In any case, one might he was basically shot to death in the local bar, with something like 20+ local worthies in attendance. Nobody would confess as to who did the deed.
A real-world version of _Murder on the Orient Express_.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yeah, they are.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t have an issue with it.
Indigenous communities have a whole restorative justice thing.
To be exiled, is a BFD.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: I also have no issue with it. Indigenous communities in North America don’t get the services from the state they ought to.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
A lot of the “Butquis” stories, (scary person in the woods) are about people excommunicated, still preying on locals.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: The stories I’ve read about the epidemic of Native American women in both the US and Canada who disappear (and then turn up dead) …. are pretty shocking. And nobody’s doing jack-shit about it, it seems.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
Sadly, yeah
They make mouth noises.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
When working at Home Depot, because they should get all the fucks over this,
I built a chair. red kids shoes to memorialize the children, (Residential schools),
a red dress, to memorialize the MIGTOW, bolted it to the wall above the cash.
F’n bolted, right into the concrete wall.
Stayed up through “Orange Shirt Day”
Some how “fell down” the day after.
Took it up for nada up the food chain, Fahad got me security video of my DS ripping it off the wall.
Nada, just a target on my back.
Chris T.
@Professor Bigfoot:
I once had a set of comments I wrote thrown out because (the other guy said) “this code will change in the future and then the comments will be wrong”…
Jay
@Chris T.:
Yeah we can write you custom code.
Oh. 3.2 and now the custom software is useless?
Sucks to be you,
Unkown known
I’m sure this is a dead thread now, but there’s been a lot of places working on increasing birth rates because declining fertility happens everywhere as development happens (i.e., countries get richer, women get more choices and control over their lives). It’s happening now in China (they used to have a coercive one child policy, now they are trying to get birth rates up).
It turns out that almost nothing works. Baby bonus payments, good child care, etc, house ownership, they don’t get fertility rates up. They’ve all been tried in different places at different times. People with control of their lives just don’t have a lot of babies, on average.
Baud
Not stupid or evil
no body no name
@Baud:
Comedic?
Furries have a long known pedo and Nazi problem.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/11/nazi-furries-deradicalization-efforts.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/does-the-furry-community-have-a-nazi-problem-194282/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/review/2024/06/10/fur-loathing-an-unsolved-gas-attack-on-a-hotel-and-the-rise-of-nazi-furries/
This isn’t a community they want to be drawing attention to.
Baud
Not stupid or evil
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: Most of the Germans who had supported Hitler went to their graves thinking he was a good guy who’d done great things for Germany, just made a few mistakes during the war, and the Holocaust was a bunch of exaggerations and the Jews had been a real problem, etc. etc.
They just weren’t allowed to say it out loud in public.
Most of modern US history can more or less be explained as the same thing but with regard to the US Civil War–and with much, much more public tolerance for neo-Confederatism.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris T.: There’s a whole school of thought that code comments are harmful and you should almost never use them because they get out of sync with the code: instead, you should write “self-documenting code” whose operation is obvious on inspection, with meaningful variable and function names, proper coding style, etc.
It sounds great, but the problem I’ve found is that every developer thinks their own code is self-documenting. They understand how it works! Today, at least!
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
The fascists’ secret weapon is their ability to support their leaders.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: I think there’s actually been research done on the effectiveness of various crime-deterrence approaches, that determined that making punishment certain is far more effective than making it harsh.
They can’t substitute freely for one another, because potential criminals are not doing a probabilistic expectation-value-of-utility calculation in their heads. If it’s unlikely they’ll get caught, you can jack up the punishment to the death penalty and beyond and a bunch of them will still figure they probably won’t get caught. And relatively mild punishments actually have effectiveness way beyond what the American penal system paradigm would imply, if people are sure they are going to get caught.
This is kind of orthogonal to “liberal” or “conservative” takes on the subject. But it often seems like the right-wing “get tough” attitude toward crime involves theatrically jacking up punishments while not making enforcement any more consistent, because that’s an easier thing to do and more emotionally satisfying if you’re a sadist or have been pumped up to a high level of outrage.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
They also don’t want the law applied to them. So consistency is out.
prostratedragon
@Matt McIrvin:
👇👇👇
Matt McIrvin
@dnfree: Early software development techniques were driven by the compile/test/debug loop being very slow and very expensive. If you were submitting your program to an operator on a deck of punch cards, you wouldn’t find out if it worked until the next day, and you’d monopolized the entire system of operator and computer while this was happening, it really paid to get it right the first time, so everything was organized around getting as much as possible right the first time before a machine even touched the code.
When systems became interactive, so that the developer could edit their code on the machine and run it immediately, that was the beginning of the end of things like flowcharting, though not everyone immediately realized it. With more power devoted to interactive development it became possible to develop software by poking around experimentally and making mistakes. Which often led to worse code.
Now, there’s the possibility that the source code itself may have been spat out by an LLM as the first stage of development, so maybe nobody even understands how it works.
BellyCat
@Baud: The law should be applied solely to evil people.
ETA: The corollary is if the law is applied to a person, they must be evil. Why can’t people understand the simplicity of these MAGA maxims?
ETA2: And if the law is applied to a MAGA person —especially in the donor class — the court has erred because, by definition, this person can not be evil. That’s why pardons exist and judges should be impeached or arrested.
Matt McIrvin
@BellyCat: Conservatives tend to think of judicial due process as some kind of privilege or reward given to people who deserve it, rather than the method by which we figure out whether you did it and what you legally deserve.
So how do they determine who did it and what people deserve? Their operating theory is that they just know (what Jacob Bronowski, talking about the Nazis, derided as “the knowledge of gods”–no need to check anything; it’s always obvious; your heart will tell you). Usually it depends on who you are. Bad things are done by bad people and you can tell who’s bad just by looking at them.
BellyCat
@Matt McIrvin: Adding a Yellow Star to wardrobes helps, too. (JFC..)
I will say that Judge Luttig is the bravest person in the judiciary right now on the GOP side. Too bad that he talks at 1/4 speed and I find it very difficult to listen to him speak live. But his writings are fire.
terraformer
If I saw man slap a 2 year-old baby in the face it would be very difficult for me to not deliver a beatdown on the mtherfcker
WTFGhost
@BellyCat: Random thought, but, I saw someone point out in an essay (might have even been a lawyer!) who said, “when a judge has made a ruling, that *is* Federal Law. No lawyers opinion trumps it; no policy desire can violate it. It is the law.
And the President has a duty to see that the law is “faithfully” executed. When the courts issue a ruling, impeaching the judge is never, ever, the right option, unless the judge is reversed on appeal en banc or to a higher court, and even then, unless the judge ignored binding precedent, the judge is likely to have been seen as “making a mistake,” at best.
(With today’s SCOTUS, being overruled hardly means one made a mistake; it probably means the SCOTUS wants to write new law.)
Anyway: the Trump administration is in direct violation of Federal Law, since it’s refusing to facilitate the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia. There’s no question about it – the Office of Legal Counsel can issue opinions that are considered the ultimate federal law, *UNTIL* the courts weigh in, at which point an OLC memo is useless as a guideline for behavior, except insofar as the courts left it intact.
If Republicans cared about Freedom, not Privilege, Abrego Garcia would already be at home, having proven that the word of an informant is not sufficient evidence to throw a man’s life away. But Republicans like to hurt people, so they won’t rein in the President.
BellyCat
@WTFGhost: Good points. Judges err. Appeal corrects error or validates opinion. Usually.