Americans will welcome immigrants less warmly if we know Democratic prosecutors give them special immunity for even their worst crimes. Americans will balk at clemency for good behavior if Democratic governors and judges repeatedly send dangerous men back onto the streets. They will also demand the death penalty more if they have no confidence that a murderer will be kept in jail.

Last week produced three clear demonstrations of recklessness from pro-crime Democrats: a congressional report on a George Soros-funded prosecutor in the suburbs of Washington, parole decisions from the administration of Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), and a decision by a liberal judge in Washington state not to jail a shooting suspect awaiting trial.

The House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration released a report Tuesday laying out how one Soros-funded prosecutor in Virginia, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, turned one of the nation’s largest suburban counties into a de facto sanctuary county where illegal immigrants who repeatedly committed violent crimes were set free again and again until they murdered.

Stephanie Minter was stabbed to death in February, allegedly by Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant who had been arrested on charges of at least 40 crimes. Descano’s office dropped almost all of them. Police told Descano’s office that Jalloh would do worse if he was not locked up, but Descano did not listen, and Jalloh is now accused of killing Minter.

Descano’s explicit policy was to go lighter on noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, who commit crimes.

“Steve’s office will take immigration consequences into account when making charging and plea decisions,” Descano’s website reads. “Wherever possible, Steve will make charging and plea decisions that limit or avoid immigration consequences.”

In other words, he would not prosecute criminals for offenses that might result in their deportation for being in the country illegally.

Fairfax County ignored nearly 1,700 ICE detainers between 2023 and 2025, according to the committee’s preliminary report. At least 100 illegal immigrant criminals got their charges reduced.

Every day he is in office, Descano endangers the people of Fairfax County and surrounding areas. We would call on Spanberger to force Descano out of office, but unfortunately, she shows a similar disregard for justice.

The Washington Examiner’s Mia Cathell studied Spanberger’s parole board and found a shocking increase: “In only half the calendar year, Spanberger’s 13.89% release rate is more than 10 times [former Gov. Glenn] Youngkin’s annual parole-approval numbers,” Cathell wrote.

Spanberger granted geriatric release to a repeat rapist named Eugene Billups, who served three years for the rape of a child under the age of 13. “Parole records show that Billups, 71, was convicted in 2023 of raping the child while out on parole for two prior rape convictions,” Cathell wrote.

It’s not merely a Virginia thing. Last week in Seattle, a liberal judge named Veronica Galvan released a 15-year-old shooter charged in the killing of three people at a food festival this summer. The defense doesn’t deny that the shooter fired into the crowd, yet Galvan ordered him removed from juvenile detention and set free to await trial. Notably, Galvan is also the author of Emerging Through Bias: Towards A More Fair And Equitable Courtroom.

AOC’S GENDER WARMONGERING

Leftist judges, prosecutors, and parole boards are less interested in doing their jobs than in modeling their ideology. Ironically, they thus undermine their other progressive goals: more legal immigration and more mercy. When noncitizens are held less accountable than citizens, it’s hard to argue for more immigration. When parole boards free child rapists after only three years, it’s hard to stomach progressive calls for compassion.

For their own good as well as America’s, leftists in the legal system should enforce the law and punish criminals more. Only when we have law and order can we have openness and compassion.

The two most common explanations are that young people are too selfish and lazy, or that having children is too unaffordable.

Those who blame unaffordability for the Baby Bust don’t have a lot of data on their side, but they do have a lot of solutions, mostly universal daycare.

These responses are both errors. When you pin the Baby Bust on selfishness, you cast family formation as an individualistic undertaking. When you propose universal child care as the solution, you make it into a governmental matter.

Both views are wrong.

Raising kids is not something that parents can do on their own. Parents need support and always have, but the proper source of support for most parents is not the government. It’s the community: Extended family, friends, neighborhood, church, and school.

New research confirms this: People are much more likely to get married and have kids if their family and friends support them and are happy about their kids. Government support, meanwhile, does very little to prod people to have more children.

The new findings corroborate and elucidate old findings about peer support and about the “contagion” of birthrates, both high and low. The findings also point towards the root cause of our Baby Bust: A hyper-individualistic culture where extended family is derided, organized religion is struggling, and community institutions are withering away.

New findings

Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies and BYU’s Wheatley Institute conducted one of the largest ever studies on what drives people’s decisions to have children, have more children, or have no children.

Specifically, the authors knew that culture determines birthrate, and they wanted to get to the bottom of that. Politicians and most journalists offer purely materialistic and economic explanations for birthrates, but these explanations do not withstand scrutiny: Birthrate changes do not correlate very well with the economy (Americans had many more babies during and right after the financial crisis than in 2019), with household incomes (all five income quintiles have the same low and falling birthrates), or with the generosity of government benefits.

Culture, then, is what is left to explain why some groups and some times and some places have higher or lower birthrates. But culture can be a hopelessly vague term. Attributing any phenomena to culture can sound like giving up on an explanation. The researchers, Lyman Stone, Peter Brookes, and Jason Carroll, say culture can be a “black box” explanation, meaning the mechanism is totally invisible.

So Stone and colleagues tested some possible mechanisms by which culture affects the birthrate.

They started with a survey of nearly 10,000 adults worldwide, and found that one of the biggest predictors of having more babies was receiving support from friends and family. “Across cultures, perceptions of peer support for childbearing matter a great deal,” the authors concluded.

Cultures where new parents are more likely to expect help from their own parents — such as the United States and Israel —have higher actual birthrates, and the people there intend to have more babies than in cultures (such as Japan) where there’s less expected grandparent help.

Here’s an even stronger correlation the authors found: People have more babies in cultures where friends are expected to be happy for expectant parents.

The authors put it this way: “When people feel supported by friends, they desire, intend to have, and actually have more children. Likewise, when people feel encouraged to have children by their parents, they also desire and intend to have more children. Believing one’s friends would celebrate a new baby is associated with a 10% increase in desired number of children and a 20% increase in the likelihood of intending to have another child, while parental encouragement to have children is associated with an 11% increase in desired number of children and a 30% increase in the likelihood of intending to have another one.”

Also, adults who grew up in larger families tend to want more children (and end up having more children).

These findings reaffirm what prior studies had found: Real, human-level support is what drives people to want more kids and have more kids.

Pregnancy is contagious

“Most people that I know in our age group have three or four,” Ava, a Jewish mother in Maryland, told me. “And then there’s another group, and they all have five, and they’re all friends with each other, and five is a great number. Five is just what they do.”

Ava lives in Kemp Mill, a neighborhood anchored by two orthodox synagogues. Because the congregants at these synagogues do not drive on the sabbath, Kemp Mill is absolutely packed with Modern Orthodox Jewish families. And they have a lot of babies.

“There is an element of contagiousness,” admitted Yair Treister, a young dad in the same neighborhood.

Pregnancy is not literally contagious, but the questions Stone and colleagues probed point to how it can seem so. If your friends have kids and want kids, and if your extended family is pro-family, then you are more likely to have children. You could imagine a hundred reasons for this.

New parents’ social lives are often built around their kids: 4 p.m. backyard get-togethers are after nap time, and can easily end by bedtime. Nobody is having four-hour Sunday brunches at a restaurant if they have toddlers.

Also, getting support from friends and extended family in raising your own kids makes you feel like family-formation is a grand joint undertaking. It’s something difficult and important that you’re doing together with others. Past research has found this, too.

“Do Grandparents Really Matter?” was the title of a study published in the European Sociological Review in 2024. The author, Roberta Rutigliano, found “a strong and positive effect of regular grandparental childcare on women’s likelihood of having a second birth.”

In other words, if your parents helped you raise your first child, you were more likely to have a second. Rutigliano, though, cast this conclusion in more neutral economic terms: “These results highlight the importance of the affordability and the availability of childcare for the decision to have a second child and the need for more supportive childcare policies.”

The assumption implied there is that grandparents can be replaced by formal, government-funded childcare. The evidence suggests otherwise.

The IFS/Wheatley study also asked respondents if they received meaningful government support for raising their family. The results showed no correlation between government support and ideal or intended family size, and a very slight positive correlation with actual family size.

Last decade, economist Angela Luci-­Greulich and demographer Olivier Thévenon reported similar findings. They found that government subsidies for child care had no effect on birthrates, and that the availability of childcare had a very small effect on birthrates that mostly amounted to parents having children earlier, not parents having more children.

Bowling Alone

The data in the IFS/Wheatley study helps explain why some cultures have more kids than others, and it also helps explain why the whole world is having fewer and fewer kids: We are less connected to community and family.

Robert Putnam’s 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone laid out how Americans belong to fewer things, go to church less, know their neighbors less, and engage with their community less.

OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE, OUR 60-YEAR MISTAKE

This alienation has many costs, but the most important is probably the reduction in family formation. Without supportive friends, family, and congregations, Americans perceive (correctly) that raising kids is very hard and expensive. Governments attempt to replace community and family with funding and child care, but the results are unimpressive.

Nothing actually can replace the support of true community and tight-knit families, especially when it comes to an undertaking as grand as raising kids.

The last time I played the course, I hit a perfect 6- or 7-iron—I can’t remember now—that landed on the green and rolled to within a few feet of the hole. I took my hero walk, lined up the putt, and sank it for a birdie, tying me with my competitor at 6 over par after 4 holes.

A translation for the non-golfers out there: I am not very good at golf, but once in a while, I do hit the occasional good shot. And a couple times a year, I play a great hole.

For these reasons, I have long loved Washington, D.C.’s East Potomac Park, colloquially known as Hains Point.

President Donald Trump has plans to totally overhaul Hains Point and build “a world-class championship golf course.” It would become “one of the best and most spectacular Golf Courses anywhere in the world,” Trump proclaimed.

Trump has hired Tom Fazio, a renowned course architect whose portfolio of 200 courses on two continents includes the PGA National Members Club. Trump himself has obvious success in building and running golf courses, and it would be awesome to play at a world-class golf course at the confluence of two rivers, in view of some of the capital’s great monuments.

And yet, Trump’s vision for Hains Point is a mistake. East Potomac Park is good enough, and the president ought to leave good enough alone.

Sure, fix up the park. Improve the courses a bit. Replace diseased trees. Add some more parking. But like most grand plans out of the federal government, Trump’s great makeover is folly.

A new spending project is irresponsible during record deficits and persistent inflation. Also, there’s plenty of reason to doubt this low, flat, small island could handle the sort of course Trump is planning.

But more importantly, the current use of the island — three low-priced, fairly easy, modest golf courses, plus bike trails, a waterfront park, mini golf, and more — is better than Trump’s dream.

If you don’t live in D.C., and even if you do, you might not know of all the non-golf functions of Hains Point. Families picnic on the south end of the island for the district’s best river view and a great view of planes taking off and landing at Reagan National Airport. Cyclists enjoy the 4.5-mile waterfront loop around the perimeter of the island.

And the golf? It’s perfectly acceptable, and that’s good enough.

I didn’t normally play the 18-hole Blue Course, preferring the 9-hole White Course, which has a more interesting layout and can be played in under two hours. The White Course has only berms and swales, no rolling hills or undulating greens. There aren’t water hazards, unless you hook your tee shot something fierce on 7 and land one in the Washington Channel.

At times and in some places, there are signs of disrepair: water pooling in the sand trap, or dead brown grass on the edge of the green. But for a municipal course, the play was perfectly average, and a perfectly average golf course is a perfect setting for a great time.

My buddies and I would tee off at dawn, as a fox dashed behind the first green towards the high grass around the second tee box. When you tee off on 2, the dome of the Jefferson Memorial is the backdrop. On 8, the pin is silhouetted against the Washington Monument.

You got all this for about $20 on a weekday.

But for the president, this isn’t good enough, and many of his supporters agree.

“Why would anyone ever settle for average in anything when great is an available option?,” Republican lawyer Evan Berryhill asked me on X. “I’m sorry that’s your mindset,” he lamented.

It’s a fair question, which one could answer on many levels.

We could begin with the political concerns mentioned above: The deficit and the tendency of government projects to go over budget and behind schedule.

Then there’s the elitist problem: This course is surely too easy for Trump, and maybe for Berryhill and my other online detractors. But it is just right for the kind of guy who can’t play golf multiple times a week, but instead hits the driving range after putting the kids to bed and sneaks in 9 holes before work on a Monday. What makes a course great and challenging for a scratch golfer, and worthy of a PGA Tour stop, makes it too hard for a working dad who also coaches Little League.

Then there’s the cost: At a bare minimum, a round at Trump’s envisioned course would be $70 if the course were to break even. If Dad brings his three sons, that’s $280, compared to the $36 it costs a family today to play Hains Point’s Par 3 Red Course. This brings up the other massive tradeoff: Trump would replace three courses and 36 holes with one course and 18 holes. That’s cutting by at least 50% the number of possible players on a given day.

And it’s not as if the capital region lacks a top-tier golf course. Congressional, TPC Avenel, the Washington Golf & Country Club, Westwood and Columbia Country Clubs, and Trump’s own Trump National are all within 30 minutes of Georgetown.

But working-class guys deserve a place to play. Busy dads, families, ladies in their 60s, and yes, bad golfers like me deserve a place to play.

Not everything in the world needs to be world-class. The American Dream isn’t just about George Washington, Andrew Carnegie, and Donald Trump. It’s also about Joe Sixpack, a stay-at-home mom, and the guy who runs the gas station in Bowie, Maryland.

THE LOOMING SOCIAL SECURITY CLIFF

American success doesn’t demand fortune, fame, or power. Success in the Land of the Free has always included a family, a hard job, and a modest place to call home.

Yes, America is full of luxury and grandeur and high hopes, but sometimes one good tee shot and a lucky putt is enough to make a man’s day.

If these are your problems, the Major League Baseball playoffs are your solution.

During every pitching change and between every half inning, the playoffs sold sex, gambling, and hairless private parts by means of famous actresses, widely admired professional athletes, and a creepy guy in silk robes.

It was bad enough that complaints about the raunchy ads escaped the baseball-dad group chat and made it to the pages of major newspapers after a retired major leaguer raised a fuss.

“Can we please get the soft porn ads off playoff broadcasts, TBS, Fox, NBC, @MLB?” Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Alex Call posted on Twitter. “My son wants to watch baseball with Dada, but how do I justify that when a half-naked women (sic) could come on screen anytime?? This is America’s Pastime. Parents shouldn’t have to worry about this.”

Call made his comments above a complaint by another dad: “Watching the playoffs tonight with my kids and here’s the rundown: Megan Fox selling ED pills in a red bodysuit; The scariest movie trailer you’ve ever seen; Sydney Sweeney in zero clothes promoting betting on sports.”

These were the ads on during the National League and American League Championship Series. Earlier, during the Division Series, one constant ad presented the idea that a man ought to shave his nether regions as perfectly normal.

MLB playoffs have been family-unfriendly for years. The normal game time is 8 p.m., and sometimes 9 or 10 p.m. Eastern. The ads — regardless of the time of day — have been going all in on sexualization for a while. Even a car commercial might be filled with gratuitous sex.

The message to parents is clear: Your children are like the Los Angeles Angels — the playoffs are not for them.

A sports league disregarding its young fans is like a farmer selling his topsoil at market. It’s selling the future for short-term gains.

BASEBALL SHOULD BE PLAYED OUTDOORS

In the same vein, getting your young adult fans addicted to gambling and making them more porn-brained surely reduces marriage and so further shrinks the future fan base.

MLB and the broadcasters who carry its biggest games ought to be embarrassed. The odds are, they’re not.

To address this problem, Congress may raise taxes, change the formula that determines benefits, or simply add to the federal deficit and national debt.

This Social Security cliff is a flashpoint in the clash of generations bubbling up in policy circles. Given the emotions and the stakes, it’s no surprise that some errors, confusion, and misinformation have crept in.

Some blame Congress for “raiding” the Social Security trust fund. Others believe that there never was a trust fund. Many near-retirees believe that they have “paid in” to Social Security and that their past tax payments are (or should be) waiting for them at retirement. All of these claims have grains of truth, but all are fundamentally wrong.

There are three roots of Social Security’s fiscal problem: The basic design of the Social Security program (in which today’s workers pay the benefits of today’s retirees), the over-generous inflation formula it has used for the past few decades, and the decades of low birthrates, particularly since the advent of the sexual revolution and the birth control pill.

To have a healthy debate on how to fix Social Security, and which tradeoffs to make, we need to better understand the program.

Social Security’s design

Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935 as a solution to poverty among elderly citizens, the number of whom was rising thanks to industrialization.

The basic system is still in effect today.

First, the federal government takes a chunk out of every worker’s paycheck. Half of that cut is visible to the worker, as a 6.2% Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax. The other half of the cut is invisible to the worker, an equal amount paid by the employer.

That money is collected from basically all workers in the U.S., including many who will never collect a dime in benefits, such as foreign guest workers. The tax dollars go into the Social Security trust funds, of which there are two funds — one which covers retirement and the other that funds disability payments.

Here’s one thing many don’t understand: The Social Security trust fund is not mostly a savings vehicle, and the money today’s workers pay in is not earmarked for them. The money paid into the trust fund today goes out to current retirees at the beginning of next month.

Not every retiree gets the same retirement benefit. The formula calculating benefits is complex, but in general, those who worked more and paid more in Social Security taxes get higher benefits in retirement.

Beneficiaries can claim Social Security starting at age 62, the “early retirement age,” but the monthly benefit will be reduced compared those who retire at age 67, the “full retirement age.”

The medium earner received about $29,800 in benefits, according to Social Security Administration data. Higher earners bring in more, and lower earners bring in less.

Your Social Security statement estimates your benefits based on this formula, but that depends on the Social Security trust fund having enough money to pay everyone their promised benefits. Under current law, Uncle Sam cannot borrow to pay Social Security benefits, nor shift money from general funds to do so. It can only pay out from current revenues (what today’s workers paid in FICA last month), and any accumulated surplus.

It’s the trust fund surplus that is running out in 2032, which will require reduced benefits unless the law changes.

Nobody raided the trust fund

One of the most common false assumptions about Social Security is that Congress “raided” the trust fund, or spent past surpluses on things other than Social Security. That is simply false.

Here’s a brief fiscal history of the Social Security trust funds:

For most of Social Security’s history, FICA tax exceeded Social Security benefits. As a result, the trust fund slowly built up surplus reserves. For instance, from 1983 (after the two Reagan reforms improved the fiscal balance of Social Security) to 2010 (when the financial crisis hit just as the bulk of baby boomers hit retirement age), Social Security ran a surplus each year.

In 2010, the reserves in the Trust Fund hit $2.6 trillion. Those reserves were, by law, invested in U.S. Treasury bonds (that is, lent to the U.S. government), and the interest paid by these bonds provided a second source of income for the trust fund.

Thanks to interest payments from U.S. taxpayers, the trust fund actually grew for another decade, even as benefits exceeded tax revenue. The fund didn’t start shrinking until 2021, and it still stands close to its historic highs, at $2.56 trillion.

The problem is that the shortfall is getting greater every year (the annual Social Security deficit increased from $67 billion in 2024 to $160 billion in 2025). By 2033, that $2.56 trillion in reserves will go down to zero because for the next seven years (as for the last five years), the benefits paid out will exceed the fund’s income.

The fund’s solvency has nothing to do with Congress’s overspending. The reserves were never drawn down by other spending or borrowing.

Those Social Security reserves have been lent to other parts of the federal government because that is what the law required. By definition, investing in Treasury Bonds means loaning money to the general fund. Money borrowed by the U.S. government will always be spent by the federal government, either on federal spending or on paying down the portion of the national debt held by the public — there is nothing else that can be done with it.

So if the Social Security Trust Fund wasn’t raided, why did it go from a massive surplus to insolvent?

Social Security and the birth rate

Demographics are the culprit.

From 1975 to 2005, there were about five working-age Americans (ages 20 to 64) for every person 65 and over. Since then, the ratio has gotten worse every year, and now there are only three working-age adults for each retirement-age person.

Also, Americans live much longer than we used to, meaning seniors spend more time collecting Social Security benefits. In 1935, the average American at age 65 could expect to live another 12 years. Today, that number is 20 years.

Longer life spans aren’t a bad thing, but having fewer workers is. The main reason we have fewer workers is that for decades, we have had fewer babies. In the 1950s, American women had an average of 3.5 children. With the advent of the birth control pill and the sexual revolution in the 1960s, the birth rate plummeted and has been below 2.0 for most of the past 50 years.

If our birth rate had been 3.0 babies per woman (still 14% lower than the peak of the Baby Boom), our working-age population would be about 40% higher today, and Social Security would not be facing insolvency.

Generous benefits

One problem with Social Security is that the benefits are so generous.

The maximum monthly Social Security benefit is more than $5,000 per month. A couple, both earning, would be pulling in $120,000 a year in benefits. And such a couple would, by definition, have been high earners for decades, meaning they had the opportunity to build up massive 401(k)s and IRAs.

So for many, Social Security is a very generous subsidy to already wealthy retirees.

Also, the inflation measure used to adjust Social Security benefits every year is one of the more generous measures, which many experts say overstates actual increases in the cost of living. In 1972, Congress passed a law setting the official growth rate of Social Security as the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners, abbreviated CPI-W.

The end result: Every year, Social Security benefits get a bit more generous.

Here’s another way to look at the generosity of the benefits: A medium-wage worker who retires at 67 and takes Social Security for the average 18 to 20 years will get more money in benefits than he paid in, even adjusting for inflation.

What happens now?

So what happens in 2032?

Retirees already receiving benefits will see their monthly checks get smaller. Current workers will see their promised benefits shrink.

With no reserves left in the Social Security trust fund, it will only be able to pay out each month what it brings in. For the time being, that would mean a 22% cut in benefits.

As Washington Examiner‘s commentary editor Conn Carroll explained in a 2024 op-ed, the president in 2032 will have a few options as to how to make that cut.

SOCIAL SECURITY GETS 3.6% COST-OF-LIVING ADJUSTMENT FOR 2026

But Congress could always pass a law to prevent or limit any benefit cut. Congress could shrink the shortfall by increasing Social Security taxes, transferring in general revenue, or just borrowing.

What is certain is that Social Security, as it currently stands, is unsustainable.

Then Cunningham stated an obvious truth that everyone in the world believed until the day before yesterday: that men who identify as women are not, in fact, women.

Cunningham became public enemy No. 1 among sports media and in other progressive circles, leading to a thousand attacks on everything from her looks to her skills. One of the attacks is weirdly revealing of a certain, perhaps surprising, strain of left-wing ideology.

“Until she spoke out of the trans issue in sports, nobody cared who she was,” wrote left-wing sportswriter Jason Page. “She’s a role player. That is disposable.”

This is a bizarre thing for a sportswriter to claim. Some role players in basketball history include Dennis Rodman, John Havlicek, and A.C. Green. They were hardly disposable. Nobody claims Cunningham operates on that level or ever did, but Page was making an absolute claim: role players are disposable.

When and why did “role player” become a term of derision?

There’s a deep, dark ideological — even anthropological — foundation to this belief. Christopher Lasch diagnosed the problem: the culture of narcissism. Michael Sandel more recently wrote of the “unencumbered self.” These pathologies have led us to believe that it is a sin to be a role player.

Modern man has come to understand himself as fundamentally an atom — an individual whose identity is determined only by his own will and self-understanding. We reject the older idea that we find our identity in relation to others.

The older idea that we are the roles we play within various institutions clashes with this newer self-image. Cutting off friends and family is emancipatory. Marriage and parenthood are to be avoided, if you listen to the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Describing someone as a “wife” and a “mother” is somehow diminishing the person.

This manifests itself in a way that might surprise the casual observer of American leftism: a hyper-meritocratic careerism.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: BASEBALL SHOULD BE PLAYED OUTDOORS

Recently on Bluesky, the liberal bubble’s own little social media platform, lefties swarmed over an X post of mine because I lamented that our culture was devaluing relationships too much. “‘Relational’ means ‘good old boy network,’” objected one feminist tech worker.

When individual autonomy is your god, then relationships are oppression. If we reject the relational, then we cannot accept the idea that we ought to play a role within an institution. Then nothing becomes more demeaning than being a role player.

The intellectual foundations of the sexual revolution are beginning to crumble after two generations of reifying autonomy, vilifying taboos and tradition, and insisting that consent was the only thing that mattered.

But the ethics of the sexual revolution persist as dogma among the elites running academia and the media, and so our culture is failing to make sense of what seven fraternity brothers and one female classmate did on a drunken, drug-fueled evening two years ago at Cornell University.

The woman involved is filing suit, saying she was raped even though plenty of evidence indicates that what went on that evening was consensual by normal understandings of that word. Her contemporaneous sworn statements to the district attorney and her texts to the boys at the time all indicate that she saw the whole thing — sex with six men, plus alcohol and ketamine — as consensual, and she didn’t regret it in the immediate aftermath.

Most tellingly, Jane Doe wrote in one text message, “Our Bodies, Our Choice,” with the implied conclusion: thus nobody else’s business. She defended her orgy by chanting the mantra of the sexual revolution.

Yet some commentators find it impossible that this could have been consensual.

“Here’s one thing I’m confused about re: the Cornell rape case,” feminist commentator Jill Filipovic commented. “The DA says that the reason his office didn’t bring charges is that Jane Doe told police that what happened was ‘voluntary, conscious, and consensual.’ But like … who is going to the police station to report voluntary, conscious, and consensual group sex? Obviously that’s not what she thought it was.”

You can see the sexual revolution crumbling in this one social media post: If it was consensual, it must be good. This wasn’t good, and so it must be nonconsensual.

The logic is sound. It’s the major premise that is flawed. So to save the premise that consent means good, they need to change the definition of consent.

“The definition of non-consent has similarly expanded,” as the Manhattan Institute’s Christina Buttons put it. “Once understood in terms of force and incapacity, it began to change with the rise of ‘affirmative consent.’ … Today, nonconsent can cover silence, insufficient enthusiasm, any level of intoxication, or feeling pressured, deceived, or influenced to engage in sexual activity.”

The Obama White House claimed that 1 in 5 women is sexually assaulted in college but acknowledged that many “don’t call what happened to them rape.”

The steady shifting of the definition of consent is an attempt to bolster the crumbling foundation of the sexual revolution, which lacks the language to discuss an encounter that was consensual yet harmful.

This category doesn’t exist in the dogma of the sexual revolution, but it obviously exists in reality. It obviously happened at Cornell.

It is denigrating to be treated as an object. Also, sex makes one inherently vulnerable, especially the woman, and so sex outside the context of a loving, committed, exclusive relationship is naturally unnerving.

The pill was supposed to remove most of the vulnerability. Any feelings of regret or shame after a consensual encounter were surely just the fault of nagging old repressive taboos, right? And any connection between sex, commitment, family formation, marriage, and love — those were also mere social constructs. Tear down the social constructs, we were told for two decades, and we’d have true emancipation.

“Everyone needs to grow up cause sexuality and sex is changing, and stuff like this is going to become more common,” Jane Doe wrote in a text message to one of the men involved. “I’m also really open minded tho. I luv you king.”

She is right that the norms and beliefs around sex have always changed, but it turns out the nature of sex hasn’t really changed.

The traditional Western social constructs around sex, it turned out, weren’t mere social constructs. They weren’t structures of oppression or anything. They weren’t religious superstitions. They were reflections of human nature, and that’s not changing.

The old-fashioned ideas about sexuality were offensive to our progressive elite because they posited a fundamental difference between men and women, violating the feminist doctrine of gender symmetry — that any differences between the sexes are culturally conditioned.

Gender symmetry was always absurd, and in sex the inherent differences between men and women are most obvious. The sexual revolution, though, had to deny those differences, and so it created a lie, whereby men’s base sexual proclivities — men freed from the oppression of tradition and religion to pursue their desires — became the governing sexual norm for both sexes.

The result was disaster.

“Consensual hookup culture often feels predatory to women because it is,” conservative writer Emily Jashinsky noted. “It preys on women’s desire for monogamy and coupling and love, which many believe there’s a chance of receiving even after casual sex.”

“Hookup culture,” Jashinsky wrote, “demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to meet the male demand for no-strings-attached sex. Some women are quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even distressing.”

Jashinsky is right, and this is becoming obvious to everyone whose vision is not clouded by ideology. If you shed the pieties of the sexual revolution, the Cornell situation becomes easy to understand: Ketamine-fueled drunken orgies are bad.

IN DEFENSE OF LEVITTOWN

The students involved all treated one another as objects rather than as humans. The sex was not love-giving — it was pure self-gratification, and thus the participants were debasing not only the others, but themselves.

The problem, it turns out, is not that we were defining “consent” wrong. It’s that we tried to balance something as monumental and important as human sexuality on such an inadequate foundation.

LEVITTOWN, Pennsylvania — Quiet Road curves three times along its full third of a mile length that runs from Quincy Drive back to Quincy Drive.

Nearly 40 homes line Quiet Road, most of them were built in 1955 and are identical in build — called the “Jubilee Model” by developers William, Abraham, and Alfred Levitt. These are two-story houses that are a variation on the Cape Cod.

Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Quiet Road are the quintessence of the mid-century suburbia that has spurred seven decades of derision by urbanists and elite commentators.

Conformity, sprawl, TV dinners, stay-at-home moms, 2.5 kids, cookie-cutter houses — largely, the elite critiques of Levittown are cultural-aesthetic objections by highly educated creative-class types. “American suburbia reduced to its logical absurdity,” one critic called Levittown in the Atlantic Monthly.

The more practical objection, and the one that probably bears most directly on human flourishing, is this: Levittown, and the 20th-century sprawling suburb, was built for cars rather than for humans; they are unwalkable, and foster an unhealthy dependence on cars.

“Levittown initiated the major shift to automobile-centered urbanism,” the Society of Architectural Engineers stated.

Based on this reputation, I came to Levittown in early October to catalog modern family life in a car-dependent suburb. Car dependence is one of the things that makes middle-class parenting such a drag in the U.S. today. It even drives down the birthrate.

But instead of Car Hell, I found a sort of kid heaven Levittown: An oasis of childhood freedom and an extraordinarily tight-knit community.

If you believe the attacks on Levittown, you should come check out the Cobalt Ridge and Quincy Hollow sections of Levittown at about 3:30 p.m. on a school day. Yes, at Walter Miller Elementary School, you will see the familiar and dreadful long line of cars snaking through the parking lot for pickup. But you would also see dozens of solo elementary-school kids walking or scooting home, like a bunch of Gen Xers.

A teenage older brother crosses Queen Anne’s Creek on a footbridge to pick up his 10-year-old little sister and walk her home through the long and wide swath of green that runs on either of side of the creek. This greenbelt is dotted with benches, tree swings, and basketball courts, where other teenagers are shooting around idly.

Between the footbridges are a few spots where stepping stones have been laid, by which any kid willing to get his soles a bit wet can cross from Cobalt Ridge to Quincy Hollow.

By 4:30 p.m., the soccer fields adjacent to Miller Elementary are full with teams of all ages. In off-peak hours, though, you’ll find a dozen neighborhood kids joined up for pickup football. T.J., a dad who raises two kids across the street from the soccer fields, points to the little backstop there and tells me his son taught his daughter to hit a baseball there.

T.J. grew up in a different section of Levittown and says his childhood was idyllic. His dad grew up here in Cobalt Ridge. Why would this family stick around for three generations? Ask the urbanist critics, and you’ll assume he was stuck here. But T.J. will tell you he just wants to give his kids the childhood he had.

There was “always somebody’s grandparents that were two, three, four doors down from you, and they were just sweet, loving people. There was always stuff going on. There’s always kids around.”

Every single parent I interviewed in Levittown praised it as a great place to raise kids, and the presence of other kids was the most common reason.

“Lots of kids,” says Jen, walking her kids across the footbridge after school. Specifically, Jen points to the freedom and the outdoor life Levittown gives her children. “My kids don’t have electronics,” she tells me. “They go play outside. They ride their bikes. They run around.”

That density of families, combined with greenbelts, basketball courts, creeks, and baseball backstops, is worth a fortune to any parent.

The critics of suburbia are correct to hate car-dependence. When kids can’t have fun without being driven to their friends’ house, or when the only activities available are across town, the kids have less fun and are less active. Also, the parents spend more time as their kids’ chauffeurs.

In Levittown, the parents have to drive to the supermarket, to the hardware store, and to work. But the kids can go all week without getting in the car.

“I grew up in Thornridge,” T.J. says, referring to another section of Levittown. “There was a little church at the bottom of the section. All the kids used to get together, and we played football and baseball in the churchyard.”

“There’s ball fields up here. There’s the greenbelt here,” Carol, on the other side Quincy Hollow, tells me. “There’s fields down at Walter Miller across the bridge… [Children] can get all kind of places.”

One urbanist attack on Levittown is the pattern of the roads — the streets are winding, and there’s not much of a grid. Urbanists love grids, because grids minimize walking distance between any two points, and they create more unplanned encounters. This is a good argument as far as it goes.

But the winding roads in Levittown have a purpose: They slow down the cars. And without a grid, most roads are only driven on by the residents, which reduces both the speed and volume of traffic.

Speed and volume of traffic are the two most important factors that affect kids’ ability to walk around a neighborhood, because getting run over by a car is one of the biggest threats to children’s safety. That’s another reason Levittown swarms with kids.

But if you trust the most official walkability index in the U.S., the one kept by the Environmental Protection Agency, you would think Cobalt Ridge is very unwalkable — it ranks below average on the EPA’s measure. Why? The section has low intersection density (it’s not a grid), and very little commerce in walking distance.

By comparison, check out a wealthy older neighborhood 20 minutes away, Newtown Borough. The historic part of this Borough gets the most-walkable designation from the EPA. When I drive down Jefferson Street on Monday afternoon, though, I see a couple pushing their infant in a stroller and walking their pit bull on the pavement on the edge of Jefferson Street, thanks to inadequate sidewalks. Almost everywhere in Cobalt Ridge and Quincy Hollow, and in many of Levittown’s sections, for that matter, there are sidewalks, separated from the street by a strip of grass.

Newtown is walkable in a different way — and the way urbanists care about.

Council Rock North High School is steps from State Street. During lunch, or right after school, the high schoolers can walk to Wendy’s or 7-Eleven.

For the adults, there’s a ton to do as well. Walk up and down State Street, and you’ll pass two clothing boutiques, a bookstore, a hardware store, two home-goods stores, a Starbucks, a tea house, and a local coffee shop — plus multiple lunch spots. Neighbors bump into each other at lunch or on the sidewalk.

As Jody, a local mom, gushes about walkable Newton, I notice a pattern: Much of the civil society here is built around the stores. It’s not that everything costs money — there’s a state park nearby, and Porchstock is an annual, roving, walking, free music festival. But Newtown’s commerce is a pillar of the local civil society.

The boutiques are locally owned. You’re happy to spend a bit more at Newtown Hardware, because you’re paying for the experience, you’re paying for a clerk who knows you and looks you in the eye, and you’re paying to subsidize a lovely business that makes State Street look beautiful and where you can run into your neighbors.

In Levittown, commerce is much more utilitarian. No Main Street runs through the sections. The supermarkets are on New Falls Road, Veterans Highway, or one of the other car-focused thoroughfares with multiple lanes in each direction and 45-mile-per-hour speed limits. Most of the businesses in Levittown are in strip malls on the edge of the sections. Many store chains, including Dollar General and Family Dollar. A tiny minority of them are “third places” built for serendipitous neighbor encounters.

And that’s fine. The parents in Levittown are not doing civil society by going shopping. They’re taking care of human needs and then coming back to the place where civil society happens: The bicycle-littered and playset-laden front yards on Quiet Road, and the parks and schools of Levittown.

WALKABILITY, BUT FOR CHILDREN

The urbanists have a lot of good points. It is ideal to have work, your local cocktail bar, and your bookstore within walking distance. Strip malls and county highways are less social, less-human forms of commerce.

But too many urbanists are dead wrong about Levittown and the suburbs.

This is a great place to walk, run, and scoot around — if you’re a kid. And if you’re a parent, and your kids are free and safe, then life is good.

You can still get food at Sparky’s — you just can’t buy food. There’s a popcorn machine in the corner, and the bartender brings me fresh batches every 30 minutes or so. On the high-tops in another corner sit about seven slices of pumpkin pie and two cans of whipped cream, the leftovers from an anniversary celebration a local motorcycle club just held here.

I’m in Levittown not to sample the wares at Sparky’s, but to study one of the most important battlegrounds in the 2026 elections — and probably 2028, too.

Two of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House are just a bit north of here, also along the New Jersey border: Ryan Mackenzie, defending his Allentown-based 7th District, and Rob Bresnahan, in the Scranton-based 8th. Finally, all political watchers should keep an eye here, on Bucks County, where 1st District incumbent Brian Fitzpatrick ought to be safe but could get washed away if a blue wave grows into a tsunami.

Meanwhile, this portion of the state also offers Democrats three pickup opportunities in state Senate races — enough to take a majority of that chamber.

In other words, if Democrats take the U.S. House and gain a governing trifecta in Pennsylvania, the eastern part of Pennsylvania may be the reason. And this ought to give Republicans a lot of reasons to worry about the future of their party, post-Trump.

Specifically, the realignment over the last 30 years, which was accelerated by President Donald Trump, may result in a structural advantage for Democrats in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

Bucks County sits just north of Philadelphia. Lower Bucks is the blue-collar part of the county. Back in the day, residents of Levittown worked at the industrial plants in Northeast Philly or at the old U.S. Steel mill in neighboring Fairless Hills.

When Trump won Bucks County in 2024, it was because he picked up voters down in Lower Bucks.

In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 20 points in Levittown. Trump cut that loss to 10 points in both 2016 and 2020. Then, in 2024, Trump effectively tied then-Vice President Kamala Harris in Levittown, getting 48.5%. That’s a nearly 20-point swing toward Republicans in this blue-collar, working-class area in Lower Bucks.

But that swing in Lower Bucks was mostly offset by the opposite swing in Middle Bucks.

Newtown, Pennsylvania, looks nothing like Bristol, the part of Levittown where Sparky’s operates. Instead of Miller Lites, video slots, and Marlboro Menthols, the clientele at the Capital Grille in Newtown partake of old-fashioneds, golf stories, and filet mignon sliders. The median home value in Newtown is double that in Bristol.

Multiple Porsches park on Newtown’s State Street — one in front of the Starbucks and another near the cozy local cafe, which is near two locally owned clothing boutiques.

Romney won Newtown (combining the township and borough) in 2012 by 128 votes. Harris beat Trump here in 2024 by more than 1,800 votes.

Bucks is a microcosm of the national realignment that started before Trump: working-class voters are going from the Democratic to the Republican side, and upper-middle-class suburban voters are swinging the other way.

Trump massively accelerated this shift. “I think he actually wants to make the country better,” Jim tells me between drags of his menthol. “I know he’s an asshole, but you look at what the Democrats are doing…”

Jim’s father was a steamfitter. Jim used to operate a forklift. He grew up in Levittown. His father used to tell him that “Democrats were the party of the little guy,” Jim says, but it doesn’t look that way to Jim. It never has. Jim isn’t a former Democrat. He was a politically disengaged working-class white man for most of his adulthood — the “Missing White Voter,” to whom pollster Sean Trende attributed Romney’s 2012 loss.

I ask Jim if he votes. “Since Trump, yes.” Before Trump? “Nope.”

Up in Newtown, Jody, a middle-aged, college-educated mother, is meeting with a friend for lunch or a midday walk on a Tuesday. She has noted the shift: “Levittown is surprisingly becoming more Republican, although it’s more blue-collar. Meanwhile, the more affluent parts up here are becoming more Democrats.”

Why is this happening? “I think some people were just looking for something to believe in, whether or not it’s true,” Jody says.

Rob, an old-school liberal in his 70s who used to work in Newtown, describes the realignment differently. “This whole Democratic Party has changed so much that at this point I don’t even know where I am anymore,” Rob tells me from a bench on State Street.

“At some point, the Democratic Party got its money base from Wall Street, and it just went that way.… It used to be a middle-class party and a lower-class party. It just isn’t anymore because the money comes from Wall Street and the influence comes from Hollywood. And Joe Blow, you know, Joe the Plumber just isn’t in there anymore.”

Joe Blow is drinking at Sparky’s and voting for Trump.

This trade-off — Newtown for Levittown — worked out for the Republicans in 2024 and, to a lesser extent, in 2016. But in the long run, it’s a bad deal.

I ask Jim about the elections next month. He has no idea who’s running or for what offices. Despite the ubiquitous TV ads and road signs, Jim certainly can’t name his congressman, Fitzpatrick, who first came into office with Trump in 2016. He can’t even name his governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro. Any Republicans he would vote for in 2028? Jim can’t name any.

Trump handed Democrats the high-frequency, highly educated voters and won over the low-frequency voters.

Consider this down-ticket math: In Newtown, the total number of votes for Congress dropped by 11% from 2016 to 2018. In Levittown, it dropped by 17%. In Bristol Township, Levittown’s most working-class municipality, the drop-off was 21%.

That’s why Fitzpatrick might lose this year: voters like Jim aren’t going to show up.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: PENNSYLVANIA’S VICE ECONOMY

But the Republicans’ problems go beyond the midterm elections. The problem isn’t simply that Jim and the millions of other formerly “Missing White Voters” are low-frequency voters. The bigger problem is that they’re not really Republicans. They aren’t socially conservative, churchgoing pro-lifers. They aren’t fiscal hawks or libertarians.

Jim and his fellow patrons at Sparky’s, his fellow sons of steamfitters, and his fellow forklift operators are not Republicans — they are Trump voters. And Trump won’t be on the ballot ever again. So Jim might never vote ever again.

Now you can add playoff baseball to these lists.

In two separate Major League playoff games over the course of three days, high fly balls were deflected by the roof structures of two different stadiums. In both cases, an outfielder deftly judged the diverted ball and caught it for an out. These high-altitude caroms sparked cries to ban indoor baseball.

Baseball is supposed to be played outdoors, on real grass. The traditionalists are correct about that. But in the vast geographical expanse that is North America, there is so much climatic variation that nearly a dozen Major League clubs have put roofs over their fields at some point.

The Houston Astros, not wanting to subject their fans or players to summer humidity, opened the Astrodome in 1965, where AstroTurf made its debut.

Toronto, with the opposite problem — snow and frigid weather in April and October — built the first retractable dome. Many other teams have followed suit, including the Tampa Bay Rays with a dome over Tropicana Field (which feels like a large, soulless warehouse), and the retractable dome at Milwaukee’s American Family Field.

Domes for soccer and football don’t pose the same problem they do for baseball: In baseball, you see, balls are often hit very high in the air.

Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt was the first major leaguer to hit a ball off the roof in a game, according to most accounts. More precisely, Schmidt’s fly ball hit a speaker hanging from the roof of the Astrodome. It bounced to the ground, and he got a single.

Different stadiums over time have had different ground rules. For instance, when Mets slugger Darryl Strawberry hit the Olympic Stadium roof in Montreal in 1988, it was ruled a home run.

On Saturday evening, Oct. 3, it was below 60 degrees in Milwaukee with light rain in the forecast, and so the Brewers had their dome closed for the first game of their playoff series against the Padres. Ty France of the Padres came up in the ninth inning with a chance to be a hero — the tying run was on first base, and he was the potential go-ahead run.

France hit a sky-high bomb to left field, which looked like it might go out. That’s when it hit a wire and dropped toward shallow left, where the Brewers’ Jackson Churio made the catch. Under the ground rules, the ball was live off the wire, and so France was out. The next batter made the final out, and the Brewers won by one.

PENNSYLVANIA’S VICE ECONOMY

The Monday night event in Tampa was a bit weirder but less momentous. The Yankees’ Spencer Jones hit a pop-up that landed on a catwalk 142 feet off the ground. Had it stayed up there, Jones would have had a ground-rule double, but after rattling around a bit, the ball came down in shallow center, where Rays right fielder Victor Mesa had come over to help and recorded the out.

It’s quite the trade-off: Fewer rainouts. Fewer 100-degree or 30-degree days. But more fly balls that are more befitting of fifth grade gym class than world-class playoff games.