Conservatives and liberals alike denounced a Trump administration proposal to extend federal childcare subsidies to stay-at-home moms.

If you think of childcare subsidies as a way to make sure children are cared for, the reaction seems odd: If we’re subsidizing some forms of childcare, why are we excluding the single best model?

The objections make sense, though, if you see childcare policy the way Washington sees childcare policy: Not so much family policy as labor policy. That is, the U.S. subsidizes childcare primarily to promote employment.

The intention and effect of most federal and state support for childcare is to induce more mothers — single and married — into the labor force.

There are plenty of arguments for this sort of thing. Some arguments are feminist, some are purely economic. One is downright conservative, and several are tied up with welfare reform.

Before we can understand the debate that seems to pit stay-at-home moms against working mothers, we need to understand how and why our policymakers have tried to get so many moms out of the home and into the workplace.

How we talk about childcare subsidies

President Joe Biden regularly touted childcare subsidies and universal pre-K subsidies, not primarily as ways to raise and educate children, but as ways to boost the employment of mothers.

“Nearly 2 million women in our country have been locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home,” Biden declared in late 2021. “My Build Back Better Act will make caregiving accessible and affordable and help them get back to work.”

Heather Boushey, a top economics adviser for Biden, argued that Americans should see childcare subsidies “as things that make it possible for family members to go out there and get a job. It’s really about enabling people to work.”

“The Care Economy is Critical for Supporting Labor Force Participation,” the Biden White House wrote on a rare occasion when it addressed falling birthrates. “Accessing dependent care is an example of one particularly severe constraint to labor force participation.”

The Trump administration, likewise, describes the Child Care Development Fund this way: “CCDF provides financial assistance to low-income families to access child care so they can work or attend a job training or educational program.”

In decades past, these programs were justified on broader terms. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, when the HHS childcare subsidies were created, lawmakers mostly cited children’s safety and development, but also touted their policies as ways to get women into work.

The Child Care Improvement Act of 1989, for instance, included this clause justifying its subsidies: “Because of the lack of affordable child care, a large number of parents are not able to work or to seek the training or education they need to become self-sufficient; making adequate child care services available for parents who are employed, seeking employment, or seeking to develop, employment skills promotes and strengthens the well-being of families and the national economy.”

This is where most of the energy for childcare subsidies comes from today: getting mothers to work.

How childcare subsidies work

You can see this intention in the design of today’s subsidies, many of which will not subsidize childcare for any purpose besides paid work.

Consider the Child & Dependent Care Tax Credit, which gives parents up to $1,050 per year per child (up to two) to cover a portion of childcare costs. The only childcare that counts for this credit, though, is childcare needed so that a parent can work.

If a stay-at-home mom needs a nanny for the baby so she can homeschool the older kids, she cannot access the CDCTC. If a mother pays for daycare so she can volunteer or go to the gym while her husband works, or if a couple wants a babysitter for a night out, the tax credit is unavailable. In this way, it’s not a family subsidy, it’s a work subsidy.

The Child Care and Development Block Grants, likewise, are only available for those who hire professional childcare (different states have different rules on how formal the childcare must be) while all parents do paid work. It would break the rules were a mother to use the voucher to hire daycare for, say, volunteer-teaching at a co-op, making dinner, or taking the baby to a doctor’s appointment.

These policies then subsidize work rather than familial, personal, or community activities. The next question is why.

Married moms and single moms

Economists and policymakers often focus narrowly on economic measures, ignoring cultural goods or other less quantifiable goods. As a result, they seek policies that will maximize economic transactions and minimize non-economic transactions.

A stay-at-home Mom is bad for Gross Domestic Product insofar as she doesn’t pay for childcare, she doesn’t earn income, is less likely to order takeout, or hire a house cleaner.

“We are clearly leaving GDP points on the table,” fretted liberal economics columnist Jordan Weissman in a 2019 column. We ought to be “reserving more child care for professional centers that can do it a bit more efficiently,” he wrote. Even after factoring in “rent and other overhead, it’s probably more cost-­effective for one caretaker to watch over four infants than it is  to have every parent looking after their own.”

Biden argued that expanding federal subsidies for childcare would put millions of “women back in the workforce” and “would increase the GDP —­ to sound like a wonk here —­ by about eight-­tenths of 1 percent. It would grow the economy.”

Feminism is also behind the public policy efforts to induce mothers into paid employment. On the opinion pages of our major newspapers, the suggestion of a mom staying home is denigrated as “retrograde,” causing moaning and groaning.

Stay-at-home moms are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, many argue, because they lose professional connections and skills, and thus cannot easily re-enter the job market. Equality and emancipation require more women in the workforce throughout their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Some scholars argue that children do better when both parents work. “Kids benefit from having a working mom,” declare researchers at Harvard Business School. Dozens of studies have explored this question, and many of them have found better outcomes for the children (especially the daughters) of employed mothers.

But one meta-study in 2012 found an interesting pattern: Some studies found no benefit from a working mother, and those studies looked mostly at married mothers; the studies that found a benefit from an employed mom? They examined mostly unmarried mothers.

So here’s how to make sense of this all: Children benefit from having a parent who holds down a full-time job. This isn’t just about the family having resources. This is about a child growing up with the example of full-time employment and building a career.

Poverty gets passed from one generation to another largely because children grow up raised by a single mom on welfare.

STAY AT HOME MOMS ARE GOOD AND AMERICA NEEDS MORE OF THEM

This is one reason policymakers want to subsidize daycare in order to subsidize work: A single mother cannot work without childcare, but cannot afford childcare on her own; subsidizing her childcare will give her a chance to work a job, get off of welfare, and give her children a positive example of hard work and self-reliance.

That is, sometimes Washington has ideological or purely fiscal reasons to try to subsidize employment for moms, but sometimes it’s the best way to help a family that finds itself in a bad situation.

This logic doesn’t justify our policies, like the CDCTC, which subsidize dual-income families, but it does apply to the block grants being debated today, because those overwhelmingly go to single moms.

Right across the river in Brooklawn, New Jersey, where the boys and girls of Alice Costello Elementary School play dodgeball at recess, sits a slightly humbler venue: the ShopRite of Brooklawn Gymnasium, so named back in 2001. Brooklawn was perhaps the first public school district to sell naming rights to a corporate entity. It wasn’t the last.

The school board in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., is currently drafting an official district policy on selling naming rights to businesses. Maybe the Langley High School Saxons will soon be playing field hockey on Blackwater Field (or whatever that company is named now).

Trying to paint this as something other than a pure economic transaction, the school board is framing this new policy as a continuation of its ongoing practice of naming schools and facilities after honorable figures.

The proposed rule change states, “the School Board shall also have the responsibility to authorize naming rights for portions of school facilities in order to provide recognition for private or corporate entities that make a significant contribution to benefit Fairfax County Public Schools.”

This isn’t limited to stadiums and gyms, but could also include “laboratory spaces, auditoriums, and other facility areas that the board may contemplate as part of a comprehensive naming rights program.”

But this is where politics enters. School board member Ricardy Anderson worried about some potential corporate sponsors being “offensive to my community.”

Ricardy continued: “Even though we have these guardrails, I’m going to put it out there — everybody loves Chick-fil-A, but not everybody wants to have their politics be stuck in their faces every day.”

This is Northern Virginia, where one soccer field is already named after defense contractor Boeing, but the liberals on this school board aren’t worried about the Minuteman Intercontinental Global Studies Classroom or the Lockheed Martin Desert Hawk Robotics Lab — they’re worried that second graders might put on a spring concert in an auditorium named after a fast-food joint owned by Christians.

THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES

Would Tesla or SolarCity be more acceptable sponsors for the politicians of Fairfax? Is the Washington Post now too right-wing to be allowed to sponsor a lecture hall?

Mixing corporate America with K-12 education was always going to be fraught, but inside the Beltway, this comes with an unhealthy dose of politics.

Heroism, patriotism, and moral clarity often arise out of war. But war produces mostly evil.

War means death. War makes people homeless, and it levels cities. War also causes moral harm — it destroys innocence and turns young men into killers. It also causes rashness and error.

The terrorist attacks of 25 years ago were the most evil acts of our lifetime. They also launched the United States into the “Global War on Terror,” which would last for more than two decades. Much of that war was just. It produced some good fruits. But it produced many evils, including costly, lasting mistakes by the United States government.

And those mistakes began before the dust had settled at Ground Zero.

Most disastrously, the march to war in Iraq began immediately.

Claiming that Osama Bin Laden’s “Afghan-based al-Qaeda organization does not really have the organizational capabilities to carry out such well-coordinated attacks,” uber-Hawk Laurie Mylroie argued Sept. 13, 2001, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iraq was behind the attack.

A few days later, Richard Perle, a top Bush adviser, was telling Bob Novak (my old boss) that the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had harbored al Qaeda, should not be our prime target because “there aren’t that many interesting targets in Afghanistan.” The “interesting” targets were in Iraq.

Saddam’s face adorned the cover of the Weekly Standard, in a “WANTED” poster alongside bin Laden, in the magazine’s second issue after 9/11.

Hawks who already wanted a regime-change war in Iraq used the 9/11 attacks to begin building momentum for that war. The Bush administration and its allies seized on a totally unconfirmed claim that hijacker Mohammed Atta had met up in Prague with a lieutenant of Saddam. Not a single shred of reliable evidence corroborated this, and all logic and evidence undermined the claim. Nevertheless, the Bush administration clung to it.

Iraq had no connection to 9/11, yet hawks paved a war in those first days that led to the U.S. regime change war there in 2003. The war proved a disaster on a dozen levels.

Our post-9/11 problem was bigger than just an obsession with Hussein: The attacks convinced too many people in or close to power that America could and should eradicate extremism and terrorism from the world.

The hawks transformed our war against al Qaeda into the impossibly broad “Global War on Terror.” Hezbollah somehow moved to the top of the enemy’s list. When Novak suggested in a column that we ought to focus squarely on al Qaeda rather than Hezbollah, he was called “unpatriotic” and accused of “terror denial” for this.

We needed to knock the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan in order to defang al Qaeda. But perhaps infected by a post-9/11 messianic fervor, the Bush administration was convinced we could replace the Taliban with a liberal democracy. The nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan both failed.

When we finally left Afghanistan nearly 20 years after the attacks, the country immediately fell back into Taliban hands. This was inevitable. Our 20-year occupation never established, and never could have established, a solid foundation for a free and prosperous Afghanistan. The project was a folly from the start.

And we made plenty of errors at home after 9/11. In October 2001, Congress expanded federal surveillance powers and curbed civil liberties with the USA PATRIOT Act, and then, in November, they created the TSA and the new airport security regime — with all its intrusive security theater.

These laws have made Americans poorer, angrier, and more frustrated. More importantly, they have habituated us to being treated as de facto criminals.

What’s more, the intrusions into our lives, in the name of security, justified future intrusions. Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security, months into the COVID-19 pandemic, took to the airwaves to criticize anti-lockdown protestors as selfish, using our post 9/11 “sacrifices” as an example of how we need to trade freedom for security.

STAY-AT-HOME MOMS ARE GOOD, AND AMERICA NEEDS MORE OF THEM

And tragically, there’s no reason to believe we learned many good lessons from these early mistakes. Barack Obama was right to call the Iraq War a mistake, but then he went ahead and did regime change in Libya, with predictably disastrous results that are still flaring up. Donald Trump was right to attack Bush’s war, but he nevertheless decided to launch whatever it is we are doing in Iran.

The evils of that war, which the terrorists began 25 years ago, continue to this day.

Some people denigrate this old-fashioned model as oppressive. Some just say it’s unrealistic. Some don’t like to praise this model for fear of implying some slight at those who choose, or are forced into, another model.

But it’s good when a family can get by on a single income. It’s good when Mom (and in some cases, Dad) stays at home with the kids — whether full-time, or by working a part-time job from home.

It’s good for the couple, good for the kids, and good for the community.

I wrote about this in my 2024 book, Family Unfriendly: “One parent staying home is good for everyone in the family, because having two parents with varying schedules helps avoid burnout, increases mutual support, and encourages the sort of habits that make life better for the whole family, like cooking at home.”

Also, having a breadwinner and a homemaker allows for specialization and division of labor within marriage, which can create efficiencies and enhance marital peace.

Children thrive when they spend time with their parents, and it’s easier to get more time when one parent’s job is taking care of the household. Many studies suggest that kids fare better, emotionally, academically, and behaviorally, when they have a stay-at-home mom.

And communities benefit from having stay-at-home moms around. They function as an unofficial police force and support system, making it easier for all working parents to let their children roam free. Also, a community’s volunteers are typically made up largely of stay-at-home moms. Emma Green in the Atlantic wrote about this:

“Women have long formed collective organizations intended to improve American society. They volunteered their time, waged political campaigns, and advocated for the poor and elderly. They organized voters, patronized the arts, and protested the government. In the years since women’s liberation, this kind of civic engagement has dropped precipitously. The kind of community involvement that has replaced it, where it has been replaced at all, is a weak substitute: When women advocate, it’s often on behalf of their own kids or families. And when they get involved in causes, they tend to cut checks rather than gather in protest. The most vulnerable members of society have lost their best allies—women—partly because those women are too busy working.”

As Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians debate amongst themselves whether federal childcare benefits should be made available to stay-at-home moms, it’s important to recognize that stay-at-home moms are good.

Also, they are undersupplied today. Here are numbers I reported last year:

“Gallup this Spring found that 22% of women would prefer to be at home full time, while another 38% said they ideally would have a part-time job, giving the rest of their time to the homefront. That means only a minority of U.S. women prefer full-time paid employment.”

“Two-thirds of mothers with minor children say that the best child care arrangement before children are in kindergarten involves one or both parents working less so as to care for their children themselves.”

FORGET UNIVERSAL DAYCARE. JUST GIVE NEW PARENTS CASH.

“A 2015 poll by Gallup found that most mothers, 56%, would ideally stay at home, including 54% of currently employed mothers.”

Does this mean we should subsidize stay-at-home moms? Maybe not. But surely it means we should question whether our policies and rhetoric should privilege getting moms into the labor force.

Enrollment across all of academia has been dropping for years, and starting now, there will be fewer and fewer college-aged people every year for the forseeable future.

Colleges are scrambling for a way to survive. Big schools are slashing their course offerings. Small schools are making desperate plays to find a niche in a shrinking market.

The bitter irony is this: American colleges and universities brought this crisis on themselves.

The Baby Bust has a thousand causes, but some of the most significant anti-natal cultural and economic trends were created by America’s colleges and universities.

From anti-family feminism to extended adolescence, through unreasonable expectations and mountains of debt, colleges created conditions that put their own survival at risk by turning out graduates who were indisposed to creating the next generation.

Postponing life

In 2007, the public had 4.32 million babies, and a Total Fertility Rate of 2.12 babies per woman — right about the “replacement level” at which a population can hold stable. Since then, the number of babies born has dropped nearly every year, reaching 3.61 million in 2025, giving us a Total Fertility Rate of 1.79.

As a result, there are fewer Americans under 18 than there were a decade ago. We’ve passed Peak Child as a country.

The Baby Bust began 18 years ago, which means that last Spring’s high school graduating class was the largest one for the foreseeable future. Basically, every year for at least the next 18 years, the number of potential college freshmen will fall. The high school class of 2044 will be about 16% smaller than the class of 2026 was.

What has caused the Baby Bust? A thousand factors, including the financial crisis, the iPhone, and secularization. But some of those causes came out of academia itself.

Most obviously, young people are starting their adult lives — and their families — later and later every year. The biggest reason is higher education.

In 1990, about 24% Americans aged 25-34 had a college degree. Now it’s more than 42%. That’s a 75% rise.

Increasingly, a white-collar job seems to require an advanced degree, which pushes folks into their late 20s before they even enter the workforce.

Colleges (outside of BYU and a handful of others) make it very clear that one is not to get married or even consider having children until after graduation. As a tangible sign of this norm, only about 8% of colleges and universities offer housing for students who are parents, according to the Campus Family Housing database.

As a result, Americans are getting married later. In 2006, before the Baby Bust, the average age at first marriage was 25 for women and 27 for men according to Census data. Now it is nearly 29 for women and 31 for men. That number moves later as educational attainment increases.

These numbers are medians, which indicates that most Americans make it into their 30s never having been married. That majority is larger among college grads, and much larger for those with graduate degrees.

Waiting longer before starting a family increases the odds that one might never have children (especially because fertility declines throughout one’s 30s), and it mechanically reduces the birth rate simply by spacing out the generations.

Also, college graduates enter adulthood with significant debt. A majority of people with a bachelor’s degree borrowed to pay for it, and the median amount of debt among that majority is over $25,000.

All of this leads to later — and thus less — family formation.

Resort life

Follow the cultural debate on social media, and you will get an insight into the mind of a Gen Z’er who sees family as out of reach.

You will see them complain about a budget that includes food delivery, and then defend themselves by saying that the ability to cook oneself dinner is a privilege, and that it is oppressive to suggest one rely on store-bought Ramen noodles for dinner sometimes.

You will see them react with horror to the idea of sharing a room with a friend or even a sibling.

And you will wonder where they got the idea that a normal American in his or her 20s should live a comfortable life.

The answer, for many, is college.

If your idea of college is rubber chicken on Wednesday nights and chipped linoleum floors in a drafty dorm room, you should update that picture for today. Elite schools and large public universities often look like resorts rather than upscale prisons. Subsidized heavily by the federal government, there’s only so much these schools can spend on instruction, so they compete with one another by making the experience more pleasant.

One result is 22-year-old graduates accustomed to luxury. If they grew up middle-class or above, they never experienced the temporary poverty that defined college for Gen. X, and defines the years of being newlywed with children in one’s 20s.

These expectations set by colleges probably delay family formation, because having kids entails financial sacrifices, especially if one has those kids in one’s 20s.

Feminism and workism

Finally, colleges have fueled the Baby Bust by peddling anti-family ideologies.

While some strains of feminism seek to uplift motherhood, the feminism of modern academia is more individualistic and dedicated to gender symmetry — that is, trying to erase differences between men and women.

A feminism that seeks to dismantle the “systems of oppression,” including the patriarchy, is always going to be an anti-feminism. A feminism that worships individual autonomy is going to steer women away from the self-giving involved in marriage and motherhood. And a feminism that bristles at “traditional gender roles,” is going to fit awkwardly, at best, into the nuclear family grounded and lifelong monogamous marriage.

More importantly, though, colleges and universities wordlessly preach the religion of workism.

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?

Colleges market themselves to applicants as the best path to a successful career. They provide career preparation. If you are in college and an adult is helping you “think about your future plans,” they are almost solely talking about grad school and a job. The other major part of one’s potential “future plans” — getting married and having kids — is an afterthought at most.

In short, college trains young adults to worship at the altar of career, and that set of values is surely reducing marriage and birth rates. Combine this with anti-family feminism and accustoming graduates to luxury, and college looks like a machine built to eliminate the norm of getting married and starting a family.

“Climate models have been extremely accurate, even going back to the 1970s,” states left-of-center writer Noah Smith. Smith posts a chart showing what various climate predicted (red dots) as far as temperature increase, comparing that to actual recorded temperature increases (blue dots).

But “one- or two-degree increase in temperature” wasn’t the climate prediction people cared about. What mattered to the public were all the promised effects of this warming.

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” promised Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently, in a typical instance of insane, demagoguing hyperbole. But the world is not going to end, and everyone knows it. Everyone especially knows it because of the long record of bad predictions about the results of warming.

“Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Will ‘Disappear’ Within Two Decades With No Intervention,” Agence France-Presse promised in 2014.

Coral now covers much more of the reef than it did in 2014, including three times as much on the northern portion.

“Going to Glacier? You Should Hurry,” a New York Times reporter warned in 2004 about Glacier National Park. “The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting, and not at a glacial pace, but so quickly that scientists from the United States Geological Survey predict that there won’t be any left by 2030.” The culprit: “Global Warming.”

Soon, the official prediction was more dire:

“It’s an oft-repeated statistic that the glaciers at Montana’s Glacier National Park will disappear by the year 2030,” reported National Geographic News in 2009.

“But Daniel Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who works at Glacier, says the park’s namesakes will be gone about ten years ahead of schedule….”

Today, both glaciers are still massive, and the National Park Service reports that Jackson Glacier underwent “little change between 2009 and 2020,” and basically no change in the past few years.

We could find 100 predictions like this. These were efforts by climate activists to make us understand the consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions caused a temperature rise, which caused bad things we could comprehend.

When those bad things that we could comprehend never appeared, folks started doubting the rest of the story.

As toddlers toddled around us, our grade-school daughters walked and talked in laps around the village square, and middle-school sons played cornhole, my new friend — let’s call him Patrick — laid out his approach to saving Western Civilization. It was compelling. He called it the Mullet Approach: Business in the front, party in the back.

The “business in the front” was, as Patrick put it, “AI dominance and supersonic fighter jets.” The “party in the back” was, well, what we were doing: A bunch of large Catholic families coming together in community to raise our children in the faith.

Attending Mass, teaching Latin, and taking care of toddlers may not be most people’s idea of a party, but I knew exactly what Patrick meant. We enjoyed a good life that was dependent on a very different sort of life and, arguably, a different set of values. It wasn’t just that we both draw our livelihoods from Beltway Bandits. We were all subsidized by the Pentagon and Northrop Grumman, he argued.

To exaggerate the case: We get to play RETVRN behind a high-tech wall.

This idea echoed in my head after I got the news that Wendell Berry died. Berry was a formative writer for me — one of the most formative. After I spent freshman year of college studying Plato and Aristotle and Euclid, I lined up a job as a farm hand in Vermont. In my downtime, I mostly read Berry.

I dreamed of being a farmer, but instead I was playing at farmer during a break from college. I returned to my parents’ suburban New York home partway through the summer.

The parallel here is not so much that my play-farming was “party in the back.” The parallel is that my upper-middle-class college-educated life was the party in the back. The business up front was actual farmers who grew enough food that it was easy for Americans to get as many calories as we could possibly need for a small fraction of our income.

Put another way, the Good Life — whether the upper-middle-class suburbia of my youth, or the traddish-but-normie big-family-Irish-Catholic suburbia of my adulthood — seems to depend on an abundance that most of us are not actively providing.

I’m fine with this idea, though not totally comfortable. In part because I wonder what Wendell Berry would say.

In a 2008 essay in Harper’s, Berry wrote about mankind’s need for limits. It’s not merely that we need to remember our limits. Limits shouldn’t be thought of as a necessary evil. Limits literally define who we are.

“As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as ‘earth’ or ‘ecosystem’ or ‘watershed’ or ‘place.’ But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.”

That is, the Good Life is fueled by self-imposed limits. The awkward question is whether we should celebrate how technology (whether in weapons, AI, or modern farming) makes the natural limits seem so much further away from us and makes our culture’s wealth and power seem nearly limitless.

Part of Berry’s argument is that one day we will pay the price for today’s abundance, like a farmer who spends down his topsoil for a more lucrative harvest today. That’s a pragmatic, ultimately materialistic argument for limits and restraint.

The deeper part of Berry’s argument is that we humans actually suffer moral harm when we try to live without limits. Yet so much of the modern project is about destroying those limits.

I searched the New York Times archives for the words “limits” and “tradition,” and two of the first headlines were what you would expect: “What is a family? Traditional limits are being redrawn” and “A nun not content to observe traditional limits.”

The sexual revolution and modern capitalism were both supposed to tear down limits. Maybe that’s good, because it creates a safe space (to borrow a term) where families and communities can erect their own limits.

But maybe the limit-destroying urge is not so easily contained. Berry, in his essay, makes it clear that this grand limit-destroyer is the devil.

The limit destroyer on my mind Sunday night — and again on Monday night when I learned Berry died — was artificial intelligence.

Patrick, at another point in our conversation, made me realize what AI will do to the algorithm that feeds us short videos. Currently, if I watch a video on YouTube, the sidebar is trying to feed me stuff about retirement income. On Facebook, the algorithm sends me golf videos and woodworking shorts.

“Right now,” Patrick said, “the algorithm tries to read your mind, and then it scrapes the internet for any existing video that might be relevant to your interests.” I instantly knew where he was going with this: Soon, the algorithm won’t be limited by the corpus of existing videos. The internet already seemed like a bottomless well of brain-numbing videos, but your possible content was always limited by what other people had already created.

The future of the algorithm has no limits, thanks to AI. I’m not worrying that human videomakers will create a ton of AI videos. I’m saying that once the algorithm senses you like watching a woodworker use a lathe on red oak, the algorithm’s own AI will custom generate for you an oddly satisfying lathe video. It might be 100 hours long.

“Have you read Infinite Jest?” Patrick asked me. I haven’t, but I know the premise: Someone has created a video so entertaining that people simply watch it, not wanting to do anything else, until they die. That idea was always too ridiculous to me in the 1990s. Now it’s not.

DC’S SPEED CAMERAS ARE CASH GRABS, NOT SAFETY DEVICES

Immediately gratifying video content is no longer limited by what someone thought to create. It’s not limited by anything but bits and data centers.

Limitless energy. Limitless military power. These aren’t just fictions. They are dangerous promises. Sometimes it feels liberating when the limits recede beyond the horizon. But then we come face to face with the abyss.

The debate reveals not so much differences in ideology as differences in political philosophies and even psychologies or anthropologies.

Here are some representative posts from the pro-speed camera position:

There’s a very interesting debate to have here. Some hyper-rational folks believe that if something is a law, it ought to be enforced in every circumstance.

I think the “it’s simple” position is dead wrong. I think flexibility in the enforcement of speed limits (and some other laws) is a good thing. It would be hard to write down every single exception and nuance into a law, and so instead we rely on humans to interpret the law and discern the circumstances. Speed cameras remove the human element.

That said, I really hate speeding, especially when pedestrians are nearby, and I really want to slow cars down in pedestrian areas. So I’m not anti-speed camera. I’m pro-speed cameras in a lot of places. I know some residential streets that serve as good cut-throughs when traffic is bad. I would put up speed cameras on these streets. If I ran a town, I would want every driver to think and tell his friends, “Do NOT speed on the residential roads in that town. You WILL get a ticket.”

The District of Columbia takes a different approach to its speed camera placement. At least some of their speed cameras are deployed not to reduce unsafe speeding (that is, reduce danger to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers), but to maximize revenue. On X, I cited the two speed cameras in a tunnel on K Street in Northwest D.C.

These cameras have been notorious for a decade because they seem like predatory cash grabs rather than public safety measures.

The speed-camera lovers, though, defend these underground cameras with every imaginable defense. My favorite was “Why can’t you people just comply?” But here’s where the defenders tried to argue that the underground tunnels really did have to do with safety.

There are many problems with this argument. For starters, if you were concerned about the speed of folks coming out of that tunnel, you would put the camera near the exit of the tunnel. The K Street cameras are closer to the exit than the entrance, but they catch people on the flat part, not on the uphill. Why?

Well, the uphill naturally slows cars down through both physics and human behavior: drivers slow down, knowing they are exiting a tunnel onto surface streets where they will encounter pedestrians, cyclists, and intersections. That’s good news if you care about safety. But you don’t want your camera pointed at that exit ramp if you want to maximize revenue.

Also, you can check the accident data at the intersections at either exit of the tunnel. For a car going into downtown (eastbound), the first intersection is at 21st St. In the last 10 years, it appears, there has been exactly one accident involving a bicyclist, and it resulted in minor injuries. There have been no accidents involving pedestrians.

If you’re leaving downtown, 25th Street is the first intersection and crosswalk you encounter. D.C.’s data show no pedestrian or bicyclist accidents there. As far as car-only accidents, they are lower at those intersections than at the average intersections along K Street.

Before you say, “Oh, the camera must be working,” keep in mind that last month, these two cameras gave out more than 55,000 tickets — or 177 per day — and that was a light month.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: WHEN A CHRISTMAS VISITOR IS A RACCOON

That is, every day, dozens and dozens of cars exceed 35 miles per hour before hitting the ramp back up to street level, and every single one of them emerges safely onto the surface road.

The bottom of this tunnel is not where you would put a speed camera if you were concerned with pedestrian safety. This is where you would put a speed camera if you wanted a way to extract revenue from drivers who are behaving reasonably (going a bit faster on a grade-separated intersection-free segment of road), but who are not Washington insiders and so don’t know where such reasonable behavior will cost them.

Doing unto others as you would have done unto you, or loving your neighbor, those are now derided as old-fashioned. At best, they’re bad business. At worst, they’re oppression or something.

American Airlines began a system of grading its flight attendants, which might sound to a passenger like a tool for accountability. But the airline’s grading rubric was different from what yours might be. It was largely about cost-savings, it seems, and so 81% of attendants said they feared “criticism or discipline” from management if they were “to go above and beyond for customers.”

That is, give the customer what he paid for, and not a pretzel more.

This misanthropic attitude has spread to the customers, if social media is to be believed.

A viral video from an Instagram user depicted a particularly fitting (and odd) flare-up from a recent Delta flight.

A window-seat passenger returned from the bathroom and found to her displeasure that her middle-seat neighbor had opened the window shade. When she shut it, her neighbor pleaded with her to open it, explaining that she gets anxious during takeoff and needs to be able to see out the window.

The lady at the window explained, “I’m just looking at her, trying to process what that has to do with me.”

You see, we live in an age where individual autonomy is king. The window passenger never consented to being nice to the middle-seat passenger, and as the window sitter, she had unofficial property rights over the window shade. Can you imagine the nerve?! Asking a favor?!

LOVE ONE ANOTHER? THAT’S UNPAID DOMESTIC LABOR

“Her peace does not matter to me,” the window passenger explained. “All of her tears and all of her complaining, and however entitled she feels, none of that has anything to do with me.”

Keep in mind that the window passenger was the narrator, filmer, and poster of this video. She thought this made her look good. She had been asked to do uncompensated care work, and she had preserved her own peace and power.

And these days, it seems, everything is all about power.

Wielding fear, torture, and public executions, Kim demands complete, slobbering loyalty. North Koreans have no freedom of speech, no access to outside information, and they are subjected to a state-run system of brainwashing.

Kim starves his people to death and sends them off to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine. He bars his people from fleeing this prison nation. He tortures anyone who tries, and kills and imprisons the families of those who succeed.

And President Donald Trump says, “I get along with Kim Jong Un very well. He’s going to be fine.”

Shocking on one level, this is also standard fare from Trump, who regularly expresses friendship with authoritarians, warmth toward strongmen, and admiration or envy for dictators.

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Erdogan, and Rodrigo Duterte are all recognized as oppressors of their own people, and all seem just fine in Trump’s book.

Trump’s fondness for strongmen is one of his most baffling traits. The liberal media has often misread this vice as something more dangerous or salacious than it actually is. Still, it’s a disturbing characteristic for the elected leader of a free people.

The men Trump admires

In his first term, Trump fell head over heels for Kim. “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” Trump said. “We fell in love.” 

The hard-line communist leader of China, Xi Jinping, was also “a very good friend of mine,” Trump said. Trump called him “a man who truly loves his country.”

Specifically, Trump praised Xi for his absolute political power: “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great,” Trump said before joking, “maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.” 

 “I love China,” Trump said in 2024. “I respect China greatly. I very much respect President Xi. I got to know him very well and I liked him a lot. He’s a strong guy.”

“The press hates it when I call President Xi ‘brilliant’,” Trump said on another occasion. “Well, he’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. He’s a brilliant guy whether you like it or not.”

Trump’s fondness for Russia’s Vladimir Putin has long been obvious. He calls Putin “a great guy” and a “terrific person.”

“You look at Putin, who is absolutely having a great time,” Trump said once. “Russia is like, I mean, they’re really hot stuff…. what he’s done for Russia is really amazing.”

In 2015, Trump said of Putin, “in terms of leadership, he is getting an ‘A.’”

Trump has made dozens of comments like this about Putin, going back decades. And he’s regularly defended Putin by denigrating his own country.

Trump’s Putin Apology Tour began during the Super Bowl halftime interview in Trump’s first weeks in office. Bill O’Reilly asked Trump why he was so bullish on improving relationships with Russia, given that Putin was “a killer.”

Trump replied with an answer befitting an Ivy League professor: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

In Helsinki in July 2018, Trump said he gave no more credence to the FBI’s accusation of Russian election meddling than he did to Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denials.

“I think the United States has been foolish,” Trump also said, to explain poor U.S.-Russia relationships. “I think we have both made some mistakes.”

Trump praised Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte specifically for his brutal war on drugs that included total disregard for basic human dignity. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump said. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

Likewise, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a “good friend” and a “great leader,” according to Trump. Trump called Erdogan “strong,” as well.

Diagnosing Trump

It’s not easy to explain why an American president would talk this way.

In 2017, in the depths of the Russiagate hysteria, the liberal media decided Putin had kompromat on Trump. That is, they assumed Trump was being so nice to Putin because Putin was blackmailing Trump, probably with information about Trump and Russian prostitutes. (This really was the theory.)

While all such conspiracy theories are difficult to disprove, it seems like a good place to apply Occam’s Razor: One ought to gravitate toward the simplest account that explains all of the available evidence. The Russia theory would require not only Putin to have a “pee tape” of Trump, but also Duterte, Erdogan, Xi, and Kim to hold compromising information on the president.

The simpler explanation is a nearly psychological one: Trump is simply fond of strongmen and dictators.

At campaign rallies, especially in 2016, Trump advocated police violence against protesters who disrupted his rallies — telling the cops they should be rougher on arrestees. He said libel laws needed to be stiffened, essentially cracking down on public criticism of people in power.

In a perhaps telling moment in 2016, Trump called the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests “a riot.”

Put it all together, and the pattern is that Trump admires and even envies national leaders who rule with an iron fist, and he disdains dissidents.

If you understand Trump as a man with idle daydreams of being a dictator, you can reconcile a lot of the contradictions in the image of the man.

Resistance liberals still paint Trump as an “authoritarian,” who will end democracy. The liberal media dropped that portrayal long ago. After all, what sort of dictator gets impeached twice, loses reelection, gets challenged by his own party, wins the popular vote, has his signature policies struck down by Supreme Court justices he appointed, and is undermined by both bureaucrats and his own appointees?

What’s more, Trump’s actual record is not really more authoritarian than that of other presidents or the opponents he faced. Joe Biden’s administration leaned on Big Tech companies to silence unapproved opinions and facts about COVID and the vaccines, while creating a special division in the Justice Department to persecute pro-lifers.

Barack Obama smashed precedent and used the Espionage Act dozens of times to go after journalists and their sources. His Director of National Intelligence explained, “My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others.” The Bush Administration created and implemented the PATRIOT Act.

TRUMP IS BLINDED BY HIS PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH KIM

When it comes to infringing on civil liberties, Trump is in the same league as his predecessors, not the same league as the foreign dictators he admires. Where he is extraordinary is his rhetoric and his apparent desires.

Trump isn’t Xi, but he envies Xi. He isn’t Erdogan, but he likes to talk like Erdogan. He certainly isn’t Kim, but he understands where Kim is coming from. And that should be disturbing enough.