The Dictatorship

How the far-right Heritage Foundation keeps accidentally proving liberals right

Published

1 year ago

April 27, 2025

How the far-right Heritage Foundation keeps accidentally proving liberals right

America is experiencing a baby slumpand the MAGA pro-natalist movement claims to have just the solutions for it. But they’re not what you might expect.

According to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Wednesday, the American fertility rate currently sits at around 1.6 per woman — a rate just 1% higher than the record low set in 2023, and significantly lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. The U.S. birth rate, which has been on a steady downward slide since 2007, has the Trumpist right worried about the fall of “Western civilization.”

At one of his first appearances after being sworn in as vice president, JD Vance stated, “Very simply, I want to see more babies in America.” At the same event, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis awkwardly quipped, “Florida is not just the place that woke goes to die, it’s the place that babies go to live.”

Elon Musk has characterized the drop in birth rates as a catastrophe leading to civilizational ‘collapse.’

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine, issued a memo shortly after being confirmed by the Senate stating that his department would be prioritizing federal transportation-related funding to states and districts with marriage and birth rates above the national average. (How are highways made? Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…)

Elon Musk has characterized the drop in birth rates as a catastrophe leading to civilizational “collapse,” warned that it “will lead to mass extinction of entire nations” and claimed on Fox News that unless the birth rate increases, “civilization will disappear.” The father of at least 14 children by at least four different women, he’s maybe joked, maybe bragged about “doing his part” to rectify the global fertility rate.

In recent years, natalism has made cultural inroads as well. Simone and Malcolm Collins seem to pop up everywhere in the pro-natalist space, from the baby-fever-afflicted White House to a recent annual conference on natalism known as NatalCon. (They’ve been profiled by major media outlets so many times that Slate felt the need to run an article on them titled, “For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!”) The Collinses say they have relied on a sort of Gattaca-adjacent technology to screen all of their embryos before choosing the strongest ones to implant in Simone, thus ensuring their children will be “highly intelligent.”

And no social media feed is safe from the deluge of tradwife and big-family content that makes it look like the only thing standing between ennui and a full life is a brood of four to eight children.

Many have described the new MAGA-spiced “pro-natalism” as just old-fashioned American eugenics in a Tesla. But there’s something else going on here. A recent New York Times piece details some of the new ideas MAGA pro-natalist thinkers are batting around as a way to goose the birth rate, and, well, they sound a little familiar.

According to the Times’ reporting, the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation think tank has formed its own natalist task force — the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family.

Heritage’s “newest and boldest” (their words) policy idea is … a tax credit for married couples with children that increases the more children the couple has. That would have been a new and bold idea in 1991, when 16-term Connecticut Democrat and longtime Child Tax Credit advocate Rep. Rosa DeLauro entered Congress. Heritage’s bold new idea is to do a version of a law that’s been on the books since 1997, except it would only benefit married parents, who typically are in a higher income bracket than single parents and thus don’t need as much help.

Columbusing — the act of ‘discovering something that is not new’ — is happening in abundance among the pro-natalist MAGA right.

Another pro-natalist pitch put forth in the Times article is to pay women a $5,000 bonus to have babies. Which, again, sounds like a rehashing of the Child Tax Credit, this time increasing the size of the cash payout and making it single-use. By the way, in recent years, Republicans have had opportunities to permanently expand the child tax credit that already exists — and have blocked it at every turn.

Columbusing — the act of “discovering something that is not new” — is happening in abundance among the pro-natalist MAGA right. They’re taking long-held center-left policy proposals, throwing a Western-centric, nationalistic sheen on them, and acting as if they’re newly discovered innovations in good governance.

One Heritage Foundation thinker suggested that rather than prescribing IVF as a panacea, Trump’s pro-natalists should invest in getting to the bottom of what causes infertility. “The idea, called Restorative Reproductive Medicine, revolves around treating the ‘root causes’ of infertility, and leaving IVF as a last resort,” the Times reported.

Great “new idea,” but it’s also well-trod territory.

In 2010, for example, pre-eminent American scholar Greta Gaard wrote that reproductive technologies like IVF “medicalize and thus depoliticize the contemporary phenomenon of decreased fertility in first-world industrialized societies, personalizing and privatizing both the problem and the solution when the root of this phenomenon may be more usefully addressed as a problem of PCBs, POPs, and other toxic by-products of industrialized culture.”

The Heritage Foundation seems to have somehow stumbled into embracing an idea rooted in ecofeminism.

And scientists have been looking into the root causes of infertility for quite some time. Much of the research has found that, as insinuated by both Gaard and memes shared by Maha moms on Instagram, environmental factors like air and water pollution are at least partially to blame. For example, a handful of studies have linked exposure to polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to both male and female infertilitywhich makes the Trump administration’s recent move to withdraw limits on PFAS allowed in industrial wastewater — and the other myriad rollbacks to clean air and water standards — counterproductive to the natalist cause.

Most young women know how to get pregnant, despite a decadeslong fight from the right to keep sexual and reproductive health information away from them. But another Heritage source featured in the Times piece wonders: Could the issue be that women simply don’t know how to get pregnant? Their solution to this imagined problem is also a rerun: teaching young women about their bodies and menstrual cycles, perhaps in a classroom setting.

Like, say, a school sex education program.

I see no evidence that anybody in pro-natalist MAGA land bothered to ask reproductive-age American women why they don’t want to have as many babies as previous generations did.

There are myriad factors that contribute to a country’s birth rate rising or falling, and researchers still haven’t nailed down how, exactly, to convince women to have more children when they’d rather not. A Pew study released last year found that 64% of American women under 50 who don’t have any children say they simply do not want to have them. That leaves the Trump White House with an ever-shrinking pool of potential willing mothers to make up the difference.

Which might necessitate some kind of incentive for those patriotic birthers willing to get in the birthing stirrups over and over again for the good of their country. Might I suggest, perhaps, a medal for women with six or more children?

Most young women know how to get pregnant, despite a decadeslong fight from the right to keep sexual and reproductive health information away from them.

This idea also has a precedent, although it’s older than the proposals that have been basic Democratic fare for four or five decades. In 1927, a program started in Italy called “Battle for Births,” which aimed to increase the population from 40 million to 60 million by 1950. The state would award women with five or more children a medal for bravery, among other measures designed to reward reproduction and punish childlessness. The most prolific birthers would even have a chance to meet their country’s leader — Benito Mussolini.

Sadly for the medal winners, the Italian Battle for Births was a failure. The population only increased 7.5 million by 1950. The Italian birth rate is currently among the lowest in Europe, at 1.24. But it might work for us.

Goosing the birth rate has flummoxed policymakers for generations. But one factor that’s been shown — over and over again — to make women in industrialized countries actually want to have more children was their male partners doing more around the house.

One potential solution to raising the birth rate in the U.S. is not handing out medals or writing checks. It’s for men to evolve. Let’s see how long it takes the Heritage Foundation to come up with that one.

Erin Gloria Ryan

Erin Ryan is a writer and podcaster. She’s the creator, cohost and executive producer of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast and a frequent contributor to other Crooked Media podcasts and video series. She’s written for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and other TV shows and publications.

The Dictatorship

You asked, Joe answered

Published

6 hours ago

July 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 24, 2026, 12:14 PM EDT

Thirty-eight thousand people packed Fenway on Wednesday night — the biggest crowd in a decade. The Red Sox lost. Such a Red Sox thing to do, but as I’ve always said to my long-suffering Sox friends, baseball season doesn’t really begin until after the All-Star break. This year’s Red Sox team proved that again, with a dismal spring and early summer. But a historic run in July put them back in the pennant race.

Baseball is life. A long season. Head down. Learn from your mistakes. Burn the bridge behind you. Win the next tonight. Take the next series. And then focus on the game after that.

As I told my daughter as she went off to college, don’t get overwhelmed at everything coming at you at once. Eat the elephant one bite at a time.

The Sox play the Blue Jays tonight. Tomorrow doesn’t matter. One bite at a time.

Here are some fun events you can have a taste of this weekend:

In Queens, MoMA PS1’s “Warm Up” returns today, the courtyard dance party that’s been a summer institution in Long Island City for more than two decades. Six Fridays, all summer long.

In Newport, the Folk Festival takes over Fort Adams this weekend, with three days of music at the grounds that gave us Bob Dylan’s historic move of going electric and Joni Mitchell’s return to the stage. An American original since 1959, and it still sells out for a reason.

In the nation’s capital, Poet’s Homecoming wraps this weekend with its “Big Old Kids Party”: part poetry brunch, part indie wellness fair, all of it free.

In Chicago, Double Dutch Fest takes over South Shore all weekend with jump-rope workshops, breakdancing and old-school lawn games. Seasoned or still learning the ropes, everyone’s welcome.

In New Orleans, the X Games take over the Caesars Superdome for the first-ever XGL Championship. Three days of skateboarding, BMX and Moto X, with Metro Boomin and JID closing out the nights.

Out west, it’s San Francisco Marathon weekend. Check the route map, whether you’re running, cheering or just trying to cross the street. I pray for the runners’ joints that Lombard Street is not on the route.

In Miami, the county is holding its final Adopt-A-Tree event tomorrow at FIU’s Biscayne Bay campus — firebush, pigeon plum, cinnamon bark, all free, all yours.

And wherever you are, it’s National Tequila Day. If life hands you lemons, skip the lemonade. Add salt and tequila. Here are 10 cocktails to shake up at home.

MAILBAG

Do you believe that this administration will move forward with ground troops in Iran where we will experience another Vietnam war?

— Paul C., New Bedford, Massachusetts

Paul, there is no way to predict exactly what this president will do. But everyone close to him is certain that he will not commit ground troops to Iran.

When you look at his approval rating on the war, and especially the economy, the last thing Republicans want Donald Trump to do is double down. The sight of more Americans coming home in coffins is a tragedy this country does not want to endure. That said, the president has few good options and no one can predict exactly how this will end.

Please explain where we get all these billions of dollars Trump is spending like a drunken sailor, while taking food and healthcare away from Americans. I worry we are borrowing it and paying a very high interest rate.

—Linda K., Spring Grove, Illinois

Linda, more Americans need to be concerned about the issue you have raised here.

The national debt is about to hit $40 trillion. When I entered Congress a generation ago, it was at $4 trillion. That was even too much for the members who came into the House of Representatives with me.

We fought hard over our first few years to balance the budget for the first time in a generation. We went on to balance it for four years in a row.

That is the only time it has happened in 100 years.

Today, the Republican Party keeps giving tax cuts to billionaires and trillionaires, passing out corporate welfare breaks to multinational corporations, spending your tax dollars on bloated and outdated weapons programs, and are now paying more of your tax dollars for interest on the U.S. debt than for America’s national defense. Because of the GOP’s failure, this is an existential crisis that needs to be addressed at once by both political parties in Washington, D.C.

Because gifts to the president require Congress’ approval, does that mean that next year’s Congress can take away the plane and other excessive gifts in the future?

— Mike B., Arlington, Texas

If Democrats take control of Congress, they need to work first on issues involving affordability. But they also must look at their options and address the unprecedented grift and corruption that has taken place in the first two years of the Trump administration. The plane from Qatar should be at the top of the list, but they should also work to pass legislation that will stop all future presidents, and their families from benefiting financially because of their positions of power in Washington, D.C.

Not only have many of these sleazy schemes warped American foreign policybut they have also undermined citizens’ confidence in their own government.

That must change.

You and Roger Bennett complained about how the U.S. doesn’t have a good men’s soccer team. We have had amazing women’s soccer teams. What are we doing right with women’s soccer that could be applied to men’s soccer as far as training up the young?

— Carol P., Denver, Colorado

Carol, that is a great question, and neither Roger nor I have the answer. It is something we’ve been discussing since the end of the 2010 World Cup, and we agree that one of the biggest problems is our approach to developing players.

In Europe, talented, young soccer players are paid to join an organization and develop their game. In America, parents usually pay tens of thousands of dollars — and travel long distances — to have their sons participate in a higher level of competition.

The goal for most young players in the U.S. is to make a college soccer team and have their education paid for by colleges like Tufts, Pepperdine, or Dartmouth. In Europe, young players train with the goal of joining clubs like Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Liverpool.

By the time they reached the World Cup, the gap becomes painfully obvious. That said, this U.S.A. squad was easily the best I’ve seen. They should have gone further in the tournament, but their exciting run got tangled up in politics. And yes, like manyI blame Donald Trump’s clumsy intervention in the red card controversy with getting our players off their game during the first half of the Belgium match.

We’ll get ‘em next time.

Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls “revolutionary.” In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is “The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again.”

The Dictatorship

Friday’s Campaign Round-Up, 7.24.26: Mark Sanford launches comeback bid in South Carolina

Published

6 hours ago

July 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Friday’s Campaign Round-Up, 7.24.26: Mark Sanford launches comeback bid in South Carolina

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* In South Carolina’s Republican Senate primarythe late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s younger sister, Darline Graham, is an appointed incumbent seeking a full term with President Donald Trump’s blessing, but she hasn’t cleared the GOP field ahead of the state’s Aug. 11 special primary.

Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman have launched campaigns for the seat, and this week, a third high-profile contender threw his hat into the ring: Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford joined the race Thursday afternoon.

Sanford brings one of the more unusual resumes of any politician in the country. He served a few terms in Congress in the late 1990s, before serving two terms as South Carolina’s governor — a tenure that included the infamous “Appalachian Trail” sex scandal. The Republican nevertheless returned to Congress for six more years before losing in a GOP primary in which he was accused of being insufficiently loyal to Trump.

Sanford then lost an ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign, before launching a congressional comeback bid earlier this year, which only lasted a few weeks. Now, evidently, the South Carolinian is launching yet another comeback bid.

* In Georgiaa new bipartisan poll from AARP found Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff with a relatively comfortable lead over Republican Rep. Mike Collins, 52% to 43%.

* Speaking of the Peach Statethe same AARP poll found former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms with a smaller lead over Republican Rick Jackson, 48% to 46%, in Georgia’s gubernatorial race.

* In Michigan’s closely watched U.S. Senate raceformer Republican Rep. Mike Rogers held a recent private call with supporters in which he said his candidacy will be in “pretty good shape” if Democrats nominate former public health official Abdul El-Sayed in an Aug. 4 primary. “I think we’ll do well if he in fact is the nominee,” Rogers added.

* In Florida’s gubernatorial raceRepublican Rep. Byron Donalds just received a major financial boost from billionaire megadonor Ken Griffin, who’s investing $10 million in support of the congressman’s candidacy.

* As if gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx weren’t already one of the nation’s most controversial statewide candidates, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office is now seeking penalties against the candidate for accepting illegal campaign contributions.

* And as MS NOW’s Jordan Rubin explained this week“A new court ruling approving Tennessee’s congressional map that dilutes Black voting power is the latest example of how the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority is helping Republicans win elections.”

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Dictatorship

Supreme Court signals Trump’s E. Jean Carroll rehearing bid could fail soon

Published

7 hours ago

July 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Supreme Court signals Trump’s E. Jean Carroll rehearing bid could fail soon

President Donald Trump has been trying to get E. Jean Carroll to return the $5 million (plus interest) that she finally received this month from the case in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump argued for clawing back the funds because he has a pending rehearing petition at the Supreme Court, where he’s again trying to convince the justices to take up his appeal in the case that resulted in that jury award.

After the justices declined to review his initial petition in June, the federal judge in New York who presided over the case ordered the funds released to Carroll earlier this month. Trump’s attempt to halt the judge’s order is pending in a federal appeals court.

But the Supreme Court just signaled that it could soon issue an order that brings a truly final resolution to the matter.

The Supreme Court docket shows that, on Thursday, the court “distributed” Trump’s rehearing petition to the justices, which is a routine step before they decide whether to grant or deny review. Though the court is on a summer recess before the next term starts in October, the justices publish order lists over the summer that mainly contain petition denials. They issued such a list earlier this week.

According to the court calendarthe next list is scheduled for release on Aug. 17, so we could see action on Trump’s rehearing petition then.

That action would most likely be a denial.

As the trial judge noted in his July 8 ruling rejecting further delay, successful Supreme Court rehearing petitions are “rare birds.” On that note, Carroll’s lawyers said thatas far as they knew, only once in the last 75 years has the court agreed to straight up reconsider its denial of a petition, and that was in the landmark case of Boumediene v. Bush about the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. They said more recent reconsiderations — the latest one being in 2018 — involved the justices sending cases back to lower courts for further review, rather than the justices taking up full review themselves.

“If successful petitions for rehearing are ‘rare birds,’” then Trump’s pending rehearing petition “cannot possibly get off the ground,” Carroll’s lawyers said in their opposition to Trump’s claw-back motion in the circuit court.

We may learn Aug. 17 whether the justices agree. They haven’t requested a response from Carroll and, under court rulesthey won’t grant a rehearing petition without first doing so, unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” It’s unclear what those circumstances would be here.

In the meantime, we could hear before that from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on Trump’s motion to force Carroll to return the funds. The long-shot nature of his Supreme Court rehearing petition is only one of her arguments against that temporary relief in the circuit court, another one being that a prior stipulation between the parties said that she gets the money upon the denial of Trump’s petition, which already happened in June, not his rehearing petition.

Whatever happens with his circuit motion and high court rehearing petition, there will still be the separate matter of his appeal in the other case Carroll won against him that resulted in an $83.3 million defamation award. Unlike the $5 million case, that one stems from Trump’s defamation of Carroll while he was president (during his first term), and he is pressing claims of presidential immunity in that appeal. One of his lawyers said he will be filing that new petition by July 28.

In the pending rehearing petition, Trump said his forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case gives the justices a good reason to reconsider the $5 million case denial, because he said his presidential acts were wrongly used as evidence against him in the $5 million case, too. Therefore, he argued in the rehearing petition, resolution of his forthcoming $83.3 million petition will “bear on the proper disposition” of the $5 million case because of the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity rulingin Trump’s favor, which curbed the use of official presidential acts as evidence to impose liability for other conduct.

Of course, the justices knew about the forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case when they rejected his $5 million petition in June. So it’s unclear what new information has come to light that would warrant reconsideration. But we should learn soon enough, possibly Aug. 17, whether the court will finally put an end to the litigation in the $5 million case, though that would still leave open the question of how the litigation over the much larger award will conclude. We might not know whether the justices are interested in reviewing that second case until the fall, at least. Even if they deny Trump’s rehearing petition in the first case, they would still be free to review the second one.

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.