- The families conservatives want;
- Heather Cox Richardson on the Republican motives to strike down the Fourteenth Amendment;
- Brief items about mandating the Bible in class; yet another study finds no link between Tylenol and autism; a conservative wants to sterilize foreign visitors; how the Qatari-gifted Air Force One was, actually, built in America; how MAGA takes the SCOTUS loss as an existential crisis;
- And David Wallace-Wells on the need to retrofit the planet.
For all that conservatives resent big “nanny state” government, they’re eager to micromanage social trends when they don’t align their expansionist, tribal values.
NY Times, Jessica Grose, today: The Gap Between the Families We Have and the Ones Conservatives Want [gift link]
The panic about Americans having fewer babies continues unabated. But we know this: Marriage and fertility rates in this country and across much of the world have been declining for years, with no signs of reversing. Prominent American conservatives keep saying that the problem is that it’s not 1950. That’s when it was typical to get married in one’s late teens or early 20s, to someone only of the opposite sex, and a majority of families had a male breadwinner with more legal rights than his wife.
(The answer, of course, is that for hundreds of thousands of years, humanity was tribal and suffered high infant morality rates. Now, just in the past century or two, infant morality rates have dropped, due to science and technology, and so women realize they don’t need to keep churning about babies in order to ensure that a couple of them survive until adulthood. The tribal survival urge is still there, but the strategy has changed.)
The article goes on citing Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk, and JD Vance. Blaming the decline on religiosity, homosexuality, and gay marriage. Thus the recent articles about red states celebrating “nuclear family” month in June, in opposition to gay pride month. It’s all about tribal survival, not individual freedom, never mind the Declaration.
Much more, at the gift link.
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Heather Cox Richardson on the Fourteenth Amendment.
Letters from an American, yesterday: June 30, 2026
As usual, she summarizes the current situation and provides much historical background. But here’s the third paragraph, which spells out Republican motives:
Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.
But, as Richardson goes on, there was much backing-and-forthing between support for civil rights, and between the two parties. (Which, again, shifted radically in the 1950s and ’60s.)
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Briefly noted.
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Texas Republicans may regret mandating Bible in classes, subtitled “Debating Christianity in class will likely create more non-believers”
- Especially if they read more than the cherry-picked passages meant to support reading modern literature.
- Also, David Barton was involved! Which sorta discredits the entire enterprise.
- Ars Technica, Beth Mole, today: Scientists find no link between Tylenol and autism, again, after Trump warning, subtitled “After Trump’s claims, Tylenol usage dropped during pregnancies.” (Via JMG)
- How do we know what’s true? Via intuition and fear of bodily contaminants? Or via rigorous examination of the real world?
- JMG, today: Federalist Co-Founder: “Sterilize All Foreign Visitors”
- This is insane, of course.
- CNN, today: Trump says US ‘couldn’t build a plane like this’ as Qatari-gifted Air Force One embarks on inaugural flight
- But the US *did* build the plane. Boeing did. All Qatar did was gussy it up.
- This is an example of another trend in recent days — Trump’s corruption. How he’s made so much money during his presidency. Which I’m not tracking today.
- Salon, Sophia Tesfaye, today: MAGA is turning SCOTUS loss into the existential crisis it needed, subtitled “The Court’s birthright citizenship ruling is fueling the right-wing media machine ahead of the midterms”
- Once again, they’re not responding to a challenge to Christianity, they’re responding to a challenge to their xenophobic tribalism.
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How much more evidence do climate change deniers need? There will never be enough. I think their denial is evidence of the limitations of human cognition.
NY Times, opinion by David Wallace-Wells, today: We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.
Ending:
And one lesson of these pummeling, sequential extreme temperature events — one heat dome after another after another — is that we’re going to have to do an awful lot to make a future punctuated by so many more of them manageable. Air-conditioning is not a cure-all for the problems of extreme heat. It does not address crop losses and the mass deaths of animals, as we’ve seen in Europe, let alone evaporative damage to soil and waterways or the effects on outdoor labor and infrastructure designed and built under entirely different climatic regimes. But presumably we need a whole lot more of it — not just in Europe but in the hotter parts of the world, as well.
That’s what climate experts mean when they say, as they have said for more than a decade, that warming not only changes everything but also requires that so much be changed. To pretend adaptation is simple is to live in denial of the pace and scale of warming.
