A Kazakh mining company merged with an American developer called Skyline Builders Group in April. Among Skyline Builders’ largest investors are President Donald Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric.

That Kazakh mining company was itself created in a 2025 deal facilitated by Trump and Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. The Trump administration greased the skids of this 2025 deal with a $900 million taxpayer-backed line of credit from the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. companies’ overseas dealings.

That is, a company the Trump sons are invested in merged with a company the administration helped create. Don Jr. and Eric say they had no knowledge or influence over the Ex-Im subsidy, but it’s one of many deals where Trump administration policy seems to profit Trump’s family business.

Every few weeks brings news of another crypto deal, Gulf State partnership, or Chinese venture involving both a Trump-connected company and a Trump administration policy.

And the president thinks this is all fine.

American ventures

Skyline Builders, which invested in the Trump-subsidized Kazakh mining project, is a project of a larger investment fund, American Ventures, which is in turn owned by a financial group called Dominari Holdings. Eric and Don Jr. reportedly own about 12% of Dominari.

The family ties run deeper. The parent company of American Ventures, Dominari Holdings, is headquartered in Trump Tower in Manhattan, and American Ventures itself is headquartered in Palm Beach near the Trump sons’ business headquarters.

Eric and Don Jr. sit on Dominari Ventures’ advisory board.

American Ventures’ whole play is betting on an “America First” turn in the economy. The fund is targeting “new technologies that create American jobs and reduce US dependence on foreign resources.”

Specifically, “drone manufacturing, crypto and AI” are among the fund’s target sectors according to the Financial Times.

Trump has worked to put the U.S. government behind all of these sectors, where his sons are investing millions.

For example, Trump issued an executive order titled “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” in 2025. “It is the policy of the United States to ensure continued American leadership in the development, commercialization, and export,” the executive order reads. The order instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to accelerate federal funding on commercializable drone technology, and to prop up the “American Drone Industrial Base.”

Likewise, Trump is propping up cryptocurrency. He signed the “GENIUS Act,” which creates a regulatory framework for some cryptocurrencies. Experts describe the law as something of a giveaway to the issuers of these stablecoins.

Crypto schemes and Gulf states

Cryptocurrency is famously a playground of fraudsters and money launderers because crypto has no underlying value. For that reason, the Trumps’ dalliance in crypto deserves scrutiny and skepticism.

After his election but before his inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency — the Trump coin, which goes by the ticker symbol $TRUMP. $TRUMP is not really a currency. It’s called a “meme coin” because it’s mostly a souvenir or pure speculation.

The coin is not backed by anything. You cannot pay your taxes in it. You cannot redeem your $TRUMP in exchange for anything with the Trumps. And whenever someone buys $TRUMP, the company CIC Digital charges a transaction fee of sorts. CIC Digital is owned by Trump.

So every buyer of $TRUMP was enriching Trump.

The one thing of real value $TRUMP provided its top buyers? Access to the president. Trump hosted a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin in May 2025, and a VIP reception for the top 25. Given that $TRUMP had no underlying value, these people were paying Trump simply for access to him.

This is different from the ordinary Washington corruption, where contributing to a politician’s reelection buys access. These donors weren’t funding a campaign: they were directly enriching Trump.

But this wasn’t the Trumps’ only cryptocurrency.

In late 2024, Eric Trump announced the creation of World Liberty Financial, a “DeFi platform.” The company is something like an online bank, but without all the regulations.

The Trump family, through a corporate entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC (DT for “Donald Trump”) back then owned most of World Liberty Financial. WLF issued its own cryptocurrency, which goes by the ticker symbol $WLFI.

$WLFI is not a memecoin. It’s also not exactly a cryptocurrency. It’s a crypto-token that gives its holder a vote in the governance of World Liberty Financial. It’s something like a voting share in a bank, but not exactly.

World Liberty Financial also issues a proper cryptocurrency called $USD1, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The most important purchase using this Trump-connected currency was when MGX, an investment fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi, invested in Binance, a crypto giant whose founder was pardoned in 2025 by Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Kessler reported earlier this year something that had been a secret for the first year of the second Trump term: Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of Abu Dhabi’s president, bought 50% of the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial stake just days before Trump’s inauguration.

As with the investors in the $TRUMP coin, Tahnoon’s major investment seems to have bought him access to Trump and his inner circle, including a White House meeting in March 2025.

Abu Dhabi at the time was lobbying to gain access to U.S.-made advanced microchips. The Biden administration had barred such sales, worried that China could subsequently gain access to this sensitive technology.

The Journal reported: “Two months after the March meeting, the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

Again, Trump thinks this is all fine.

‘Nobody cared, and I’m allowed to’

In his first term, Trump announced that he would bar his sons from doing business with foreign governments so as to avoid conflicts of interest. He now believes this slight nod to ethics was a mistake.

“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” Trump told the New York Times. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”

In a sense, Trump is right that he “didn’t have to do that.” Ethics rules and conflict-of-interest law generally do not apply to the president. Most presidents avoid such dealings out of an inner moral sense or at least political concerns. Trump apparently decided that there was no upside, because people didn’t sing his praises for this first-term sacrifice.

“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to,” he said.

A YEAR OF CRONYISM AND SELF-ENRICHMENT FOR TRUMP

Democrats are likely to take over the House of Representatives in the next election. They will undoubtedly launch a series of investigations into the Trump family and the Trump administration.

If Democrats follow their pattern from Trump’s first term, they will waste their time on liberal-media fever dreams. If, instead, they want to expose real impropriety and corruption, they will look into the intersection of Trump family business dealings and the Trump administration’s official actions.

Mini-golf places, for instance, typically charge per golfer. Campgrounds, on the other hand, charge per site.

An amusement park will charge per head, making a family of eight twice as expensive as a family of four. Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park-and-hotel, includes a water park pass for everyone in the room, making a family of eight only about 25% more expensive.

Family pricing isn’t always possible — at a restaurant, for example, it might be hard — but at a museum or a park that doesn’t have massive crowding issues, family pricing ought to be the norm.

Bethany Mandel, a mother of six, wrote about this last year after finding a local children’s museum was very expensive for large families: “Family-friendly institutions that make their mission to serve children are quietly discouraging large families from walking through the door.”

Mandel, like me, is a conservative. But it’s not only conservatives banging the drum for more family pricing.

Left-leaning Middlebury professor Gary Winslett wrote an article this week calling for more family pricing: “Encouraging more businesses and institutions to adopt family pricing would be a useful boost to affordability for those families and would be a positive signal about how much we as a society value families of all sizes.”

Winslett suggests the federal government provide a tax credit to institutions that provide family pricing: “At the federal level, the most straightforward mechanism is a tax incentive for businesses that adopt certified family pricing tiers. The model already exists in other contexts like energy efficiency where the government effectively says: we won’t make you do this, but we’ll make it easier for you if you choose to do it.”

I don’t know if I would make a family-pricing tax credit a priority, but I totally endorse the general approach: If we can do it for climate or the environment, we can do it for families. We are facing an unprecedented Baby Bust and an epidemic of childhood anxiety. This is the biggest story of the next 30 years. Let’s find as many tools as we can to send the signal that we want more families and bigger families.

The most obvious change is this: State and local governments, whenever possible, should have family pricing as aggressive as possible.

Ideal family pricing is simple: Your children are free. Two adults pay the same to get in, whether they bring kids or not.

Sometimes, though, kids add a significant marginal cost, or create acute crowding problems. In such cases, kids should be heavily discounted — say, 25% the cost of an adult. That would make a family of six cost the same as three adults. Also, as part of family pricing, babies should be free, and probably toddlers, too.

Then, governments should say that every non-profit (such as a museum) that gets government support should adopt full-family pricing, or, in cases where that’s unfeasible, at least 75% discounts for children.

UNIVERSAL FAMILY PRICING

Finally, as a culture, we should apply pressure to businesses and other organizations to offer family pricing.

This is the sort of undertaking that could get serious momentum and become a national norm within a year. Let it start this summer.

Make people pay the fare on the subway, treat parenthood as a uniquely important relationship, pay parents straight cash when they have a baby, and don’t let boys compete in girls’ sports.

The latest: Reliable electric street lighting can reduce crime. Check out this new article in the Atlantic:

“Over the past 15 years, researchers have made a big push to test these hunches in a systematic way, and the data on lighting proved significant. Darkness is indeed a good cover for crime, so better lighting can make streets safer, not just by deterring misdeeds but also by encouraging others to fill the streets with activity…”

One researcher studied “a plan in Philadelphia to upgrade about 34,000 streetlights citywide with brighter LED bulbs” and found it “correlated with a 15 percent drop in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21 percent drop in outdoor nighttime gun violence. Local residents told interviewers that the lights made them feel more comfortable inhabiting public spaces because their neighborhoods felt safer.”

This is total vindication for Rick Perry. You see, this same magazine, the Atlantic, carried an article in 2019 attacking the Republican Party for being in love with fossil fuels — he calls it “carbonism.” The piece attacked Perry, who was Trump’s former energy secretary, as a “carbonist.”

“Carbonists become desperately anti-progress, or they reuse old arguments in bizarre new ways,” the article reads. “Hence Perry’s 2017 claim that fossil fuels somehow reduce sexual assault in ‘those villages in Africa.’”

Yes, for the avant-garde in 2019, it was anti-progress, bizarre, and outdated for Perry to defend natural-gas drilling on the grounds that crime, including sexual assault, was curbed “when the lights are on.”

CITY LIGHTS AND CRIME

Perry’s argument — reliable lighting reduces crime — is now accepted as the one easy trick for reducing urban crime, was roundly mocked by an incurious and partisan media.

If you think I’m skipping a step in the argument, try to find someone who will argue that wind and solar are as reliable and continuous as fossil fuels in providing electricity. What’s more, the intermittence of these energy sources has a much bigger effect in poorer places than it does in wealthier ones. So if you want cities in Africa or Southeast Asia to be safer, you want coal or natural-gas-powered electricity.

Rick Perry was right all along. Oops!

He made purchases of at least $1 million in a few dozen companies, including government contractors, companies to which he granted regulatory relief, and companies affected by his fickle on-again, off-again tariffs.

For instance, Trump purchased at least $1 million in Nvidia stock on Feb. 10, the day Vice President JD Vance, while meeting with Armenia’s prime minister and Nvidia executives, announced a massive AI project in the Asian country.

Firebird, the infrastructure company involved in the deal, explained in a press release that Nvidia was “securing U.S. export licensing and regulatory approvals for the sale and delivery of an additional 41,000 Nvidia GB300 graphics processing units (GPUs) to Armenia.”

Trump also invested at least $1 million in Boeing in February. This past weekend, Trump returned along with Boeing officials from a diplomatic and commercial mission to China, announcing that the country would buy at least 200 Boeing jets for its state-owned airlines.

REMEMBER WHEN TRUMP COULDN’T BE BOUGHT?

So Trump is expending U.S. diplomatic capital to help a company in which he recently invested at least $1 million. Even if Trump didn’t give up much to secure this agreement with China, and even if this sale is a net positive for the United States, it’s still a conflict of interest for the president to be pushing trade deals that enrich him personally.

Even if Trump believes he is making decisions in the best interest of the country, it’s hard to be confident that he isn’t weighing his own personal stakes when he is constantly buying and selling millions of dollars in stocks.

When a court ordered the federal government to release an unindicted U.S. citizen, Lincoln simply ignored the order. The Bill of Rights and the courts were now null and void. Such niceties could not be indulged when the very existence of the Republic was at stake.

Democrats today think they are the Republicans of 1861. They may not be fighting a literal war against secessionist slave states, but they have been delayed in their efforts to draw a mid-decade partisan gerrymander. In their mind, they are now justified in using any means necessary to gain and keep power — anything less is bowing to autocracy.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) won last year after saying she opposed mid-decade gerrymandering. She and her party promptly voted to replace the sensible, balanced, non-partisan congressional map with a shameless gerrymander.

Virginia Democrats pointed to similar Republican mid-decade gerrymanders to justify their act of vandalism. To this point, they could argue that turnabout is fair play, even if it means effectively disenfranchising your own people for partisan gain.

But Virginia Democrats didn’t follow the state constitution in their gerrymander. The proper procedure would have been (1) to vote in the legislature to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot, (2) to vote again after the next election, and then (3) to hold a popular vote on the ballot measure.

But the Democrats held their first vote during the 2025 election (after early voting had started), rather than before it. Nevertheless, state officials placed the proposed amendment on the ballot in April.

When Republicans sued, Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones (who is most famous for repeatedly wishing death on Republicans for the crime of being Republicans), argued that the state Supreme Court should not rule until after the public voted on the measure.

The court obeyed Jones. After the ballot measure passed, the court ruled, with a Democrat-appointed justice writing the opinion, that it was invalid.

That’s when Democrats went wild. They decided to not only assail the state Supreme Court’s ruling, but to disregard it.

Members of Congress started planning to remove the entire Virginia Supreme Court, not through impeachment but by legislating a new mandatory retirement age of 54 with no grandfather clause. Democrats could then pack the court with only partisan Democrats who would then overturn the recent decision and reinstate the Democrats’ illegal gerrymander.

Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias, presumably aware that liberals in recent years have tried to assassinate Republicans (including justices) in order to secure favorable policy, nevertheless posted on X that the justices “need to go.”

Marc Elias is the Democratic Party’s premier elections attorney. He was the top lawyer for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and he worked for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Elias proposed that Democrats simply abolish the government of Virginia.

None of these Democrats had a substantive critique of the Virginia Supreme Court. They just thought the court should have allowed the Democratic power grab because Republicans are really bad.

The Democrats in charge of Virginia are now filing a laughable appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The only reason to do this, when their defeat is guaranteed, is to give them grist for attacking the Supreme Court.

If you spent the last decade listening to Democrats call themselves the defenders of democracy and the Constitution, and watching the legacy media nod in agreement, you might be surprised to see their behavior these days. But there’s no inconsistency. The Democrats have been pretty clear.

President Joe Biden made it clear that “MAGA Republicans” were a threat to democracy, and that by “MAGA Republicans,” he basically meant Donald Trump voters and conservatives. Thus, “saving democracy” was never about preserving norms or democratic procedures. It was always about defeating the threats to democracy: the Republicans.

Trump is, in fact, extraordinarily corrosive of our politics and government. He’s as bad as Joe Biden and Barack Obama in arrogating power to the executive. He’s worse than any previous president in loudly demanding loyalty from the justices he appointed. And to his eternal shame, he refuses to accept his loss in the 2020 election, and in his temper tantrum, he spurred a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Democrats clearly have decided that they will respond to Trump’s power grabs and norm-breaking by grabbing power and breaking norms. They justify their attacks on the rule of law by claiming such attacks are necessary to save the rule of law.

But nobody who has been paying attention should assume this Democratic fervor will die off when Trump is gone. Every single Republican will be dubbed worse than Trump. We know this because they already said it.

Biden declared in 2012 that Republicans would reinstitute slavery. That same election, once-and-future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared “democracy is on the ballot,” and adopted that as the central slogan in the final weeks of the election. If Romney wins, she was clearly asserting, democracy is done.

In 2016, the liberal commentariat argued that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were worse than Trump. Later, they argued that former Vice President Mike Pence was worse than Trump. They’re already arguing that Vice President JD Vance is worse than Trump.

Republicans could nominate Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) for president, and MSNow would spend three months convincing viewers she is Mussolini in heels.

Democrats speak as if they must gain power by any means necessary.

VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED

Republicans spoke this way very recently. In 2016, many conservatives, including most conservative intellectuals, were wary about voting for Trump, even in the general election, because he was so clearly unfit for the job and unconcerned with the Constitution.

Writer Michael Anton penned a famous essay urging conservatives to discard all considerations besides power, because we conservatives were in the same position as the passengers in the back of the hijacked Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.

Anton was wrong in 2016. Liberals are wrong today to emulate his desperate disregard for norms and standards. This won’t end well.

Consider the Salon.com classic, “Why I Hate Mother’s Day.” Why? “It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. Meanwhile, we know the worst, skeeviest, most evil people in the world are CEOs and politicians who are proud parents.”

We’ve turned a corner, it seems. On Mother’s Day this year, not only were husbands and sons fawning over mothers, but also Uncle Sam. Specifically, Republicans and conservatives, who traditionally would laud motherhood but fastidiously keep government out of it, tripped over one another to offer policy solutions for Mom.

Moms.gov launched on Mother’s Day this year, promising “Resources, Information, and Help for New and Expecting Mothers.” The website, published by the Trump White House, focused on those mothers in the most distress.

Pregnancy centers, not abortion providers, got top billing on Moms.gov. The website also provided sound nutrition information for expectant mothers and, of course, a link to create a Trump Account — a tax-privileged savings account for children to which the federal government will contribute $1,000 for every newborn.

President Donald Trump and members of his inner circle held a Mother’s Day Oval Office press conference to announce the website and a handful of policy changes, tweaking various maternal benefits.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is divorced from the mothers of his six children and who once allegedly told a paramour by text that he wanted to “impregnate” her, put a modern twist on the Oval Office event, calling Moms.gov “a one-stop shop for IVF.”

Mother’s Day affected both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, as some pro-Mom legislation was conceived on Capitol Hill.

A bipartisan group of congressmen proposed a $2,000 “newborn credit.” This is a partially refundable tax credit delivered to parents around the time their baby is born. Unlike the standard childcare subsidies, parents could use this cash however they want: an au pair, a plane ticket for grandma, or to offset lost wages for staying at home.

THE PRO-FAMILY CASE FOR WALKABILITY

And because some moms on Mother’s Day just want their alone time, Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT), one of the sponsors of that newborn credit, also introduced a bill to get the kids out of the house: The “Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act,” would try to establish a nationwide norm that setting your children free to roam the neighborhood is not criminal neglect.

Sure, Mother’s Day 2026 included an unusual amount of content for “dog moms,” but it should be cheering that more and more folks are deciding that moms matter.

If you hear a politician or commentator mention “walkability,” that person is probably a Democrat or a liberal.

That’s a shame, because walkability should be a conservative concern. Specifically, conservatives ought to help parents have more kids and help kids have lower-tech childhoods with more freedom. Neighborhoods where kids can walk around are neighborhoods where families will flourish and civil society will blossom.

On the flipside, those who work on walkability ought to think more about children and parents. You could spend all day reading urbanism and walkability literature and come across a hundred mentions of commuting to work or walking to a cocktail bar without ever seeing the word “child.”

We need to fix these problems.

America has an epidemic of childhood anxiety rooted in a lack of freedom. Birth rates are collapsing, and parenthood seems more daunting. We desperately need a world where kids can be let loose in a neighborhood and told to come home for dinner. That requires more walkable places, which in turn requires a fuller and smarter discussion about walkability.

Freedom for kids, relief for parents

American children walk far less than they used to, largely because American parents give them far less freedom to roam. Less freedom and less walking means more scrolling, less exercise, and less socialization, leading to more anxiety and probably fewer babies.

Most American 11-year-olds are not allowed to leave their property without supervision, according to a recent poll by the Institute for Family Studies. Most 14-year-olds may not leave their street. Most 17-year-olds may not leave their neighborhood.

Forty percent of American high schoolers walked to school in 1969. By 2016, only about 10% walked, according to the Transportation Department.

These trends harm parents and children both.

When kids walk less, that often means parents drive more. Modern suburban parenting means hours and hours stuck in car hell: buckling and unbuckling the baby so you can pick up the toddler on the way to dropping off the oldest at her friend’s house.

Also, when every get-together needs to be scheduled, and when free-time isn’t spent wandering, kids end up less well-adjusted.

“A primary cause of the rise in mental disorders,” concluded a 2023 paper in the Journal of Pediatrics, “is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”

Parental fear is a major cause of decreased childhood mobility, but the built environment is surely a factor. At the very least, a more walkable neighborhood can be part of the solution.

The ‘official’ measure is dumb

“Want Fecundity in the Sheets? Give Us Walkability in the Streets.”

That was the title of one chapter in my 2024 book, Family Unfriendly, on the cultural forces arrayed against parents and kids. My argument: Parents will have more kids if they’re not forced to drive them around as much. More broadly, when childhood is more fun parents will enjoy it more — and maybe have more kids.

I haven’t proven that walkability yields fecundity, or even childhood flourishing. Admittedly, the famously walkable cities of Mediterranean Europe have shockingly low birthrates, and U.S. birthrates are higher in rural areas, where a car or truck is mandatory.

Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies denies that walkability even affects children’s freedom to roam.

Stone relies on the “Walkability Index” published by the federal government. That’s an official measure, but it’s also an awful measure.

The index comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, which measures some concepts of “urbanism,” but doesn’t even try to measure the ease of walking.

The EPA lays out its methodology in a brief paper whose cover is illustrated with a photo of a D.C. intersection. The photo has almost everything: A Metro stop, a car, crosswalks, racial minorities, a woman with a cane, a man in a wheelchair. What you don’t see is any children or even one parent pushing a stroller.

Inside this paper, the words “child” and “parent” appear only once each, in a quotation from the AARP.

More importantly, playgrounds and parks go totally unmentioned.

These omissions reflect the poor methodology. The EPA calculates the walkability of every “block group” in America (which, in the suburbs and cities, is a handful of blocks) with four measures:

1. “Intersection density”
2. “Proximity to transit stops”
3. “Employment Mix”
4. “Employment and household mix”

In other words, smaller blocks and a grid design are rewarded along with bus stops and subway stations. Also, the EPA calls a neighborhood more walkable if homes are near businesses, and especially near a bunch of different kinds of businesses.

These factors are not uncorrelated with actual walkability, but they shouldn’t define walkability.

The EPA doesn’t care if there are sidewalks or walking trails in a neighborhood. Crossing a six-lane road with a 50-mph speed limit is just as “walkable” in the EPA’s methodology as crossing a small, 20-mph street with bumped-out curbs.

When talking about walkability, one needs to ask “walkable to what?” The EPA measures walkability to places of employment, ideally, places of many different types of employment. This isn’t merely a measure of can you walk to work? It also indirectly measures can you walk to the store, the restaurant, and the concert hall?

These are fine considerations, but they are too adult-centric. Kids mostly need to walk to school and the basketball court. A playground or park counts for nothing in the EPA’s measure. In fact, a park is a negative in the EPA’s calculus because it offers neither employment nor road intersections.

Also, kids mostly need to walk safely to their friends’ houses.

Studies have consistently found two factors affect safety for children walking: The volume of car traffic and the speed of car traffic. As one recent meta-study put it: “The two most common traffic variables that have a negative relationship with traffic safety for children, and thus a positive relationship with collisions involving children were high traffic speed and high traffic volume.”

When kids are less at risk from getting run over, parents give them more freedom, and they walk more: Slower and fewer cars yields more children walking.

Nevertheless, these factors are totally absent from the EPA’s Walkability Index

Trump should fix it

The Trump administration can fix this, and can make walkability great again.

The first step is moving this index from the EPA to Department of Transportation (currently headed by father of nine, Sean Duffy).

The second step is putting children and families first rather than last. The volume and speed of traffic should be the most heavily weighted factors, along with the presence of sidewalks and trails. Proximity and accessibility of schools and parks should be next. Finally, commerce and short blocks matter, so they should be included.

Also, the Transportation Department should actively work to make more places kid-walkable. DOT should steer state walkability initiatives towards considering families and kids first.

Any federal road spending should be made in the light of whether it makes a walkable place less walkable, especially for kids. Any federal spending for bike and pedestrian trails should also explicitly aim for kids’ safe passage around neighborhoods.

Two shifts of mindset are needed here: First, the people who think about walkability need to think about family and children before they think about workers or shoppers.

Second (and this may be a more difficult shift) conservatives need to start thinking about walkability, even when that means inconvenience for drivers.

WALKABLE TO WHAT?

Where people, especially children, would want to walk, cars should go slower and roads should have fewer lanes. This is a sacrifice for drivers.

Don’t think of this as a sacrifice for the sake of lycra-clad bicyclists. Instead, it’s for the sake of an 8-year-old walking to her friend’s house, a 12-year-old walking to Little League practice, and a few 14-year-olds wandering the neighborhood until the street lights come on.

The less you trust and depend on your fellow man, including your family, the more you rely on the government. And the more intrusive the government, the less room there is for family and community.

These days, the individualistic collectivists are targeting marriage. Economists in two recent studies make the case for individualizing families and diminishing marriage.

A husband and wife shouldn’t be considered a unit, argue economists from the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. In 2023, the trio argued that everyone would be better off if the IRS treated a married couple as two different adults.

The economists think they are just being clear-eyed analysts, but they are unwittingly preaching a particular notion of marriage and even a hidden anthropology.

It’s easy for them to miss, because these are the dominant assumptions among today’s elite. They see humans as fundamentally atomized individuals and marriage as a bilateral contract for the advantage of each individual.

A “family” is just an accounting fiction in this mindset.

Their reason for the IRS to pretend marriage doesn’t exist is almost as perverse: “When married couples are taxed individually, a more progressive tax system leads to higher labor force participation and thus more labor market experience (higher human capital) in the economy.”

That is, the economists think that too many parents are spending too much time with their children, and changing the tax code will push more couples to adopt the dual-income model (and probably have smaller families).

The secondary benefit, to the economists, is that this will make it easier for the government to increase tax rates and thus increase the size of government.

More time in the office, less time with children, bigger government: win, win, win!

But that’s not the weirdest recent study along these lines. Cambridge University Press’s journal Politics and the Life Sciences published “Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men.”

The three psychiatrists behind this paper urged governments to launch “large resource transfers … to motivate sufficient individualistic reproduction.” That is, get rid of sex and marriage, and subsidize in vitro fertilization and single-motherhood-by-choice.

MAGAZINE — MEDIA BUBBLE-THINK: SEX IS ANTIQUATED

The common theme between these papers: have the government intervene to break up the natural bond between men and women (and baby-making) so as to make us all more autonomous individuals, disconnected from one another.

That doesn’t sound great, unless you think the problem is too much family and cohesion, and not enough government and individualism.

The new sod needs watering. If the various experts on the internet, and YouTube, and the gardening store, and the cabal of professional garden experts, and the capitalists of “Big Sod” are all to be believed, that watering must be done first thing in the morning. Like the HomeGoods mother whose painted wooden sign reads, “But, first, coffee,” my sod demands its morning beverage with the impatience of a suckling.

The mourning doves and their eggs also must come before me. When I come back a bit drenched from my battle with the sprinklers, I hit the brew button on my Keurig and then go to the doves and their eggs.

You may wonder why mourning doves need human assistance in incubating their eggs. After all, birds, along with bees, are the poster-creatures for animal reproduction. These lovebirds were no exception, but they needed me to do one specific task: open the garage door to let them out in the morning.

You see, for the second year in a row, mourning doves have built a nest in my garage and laid their eggs there. Last year, we doomed three tiny doves to die in ovo. The parents had nested on top of our garage-door opener, and my wife — fearing that the bird dropping would gum up the works of this contraption — tried to slide some cardboard under the nest. This proved deadly.

This year’s dove nest sits on a brick pillar in our garage, and so Katie thinks everything might work, as long as each morning we open the garage to let the parents in and out. Each night, to assuage her guilt from last year, we are to shut the garage doors to keep out the raccoons.

I do not know whether eggs are a raccoon’s preferred breakfast, but Katie is right to expect these furry carnivores in our garage. One raccoon took up lodging on this same brick pillar during our first winter here.

That particular raccoon, I should be clear, is no longer a threat, having been extinguished by my two dogs in a memorable and bloody Christmas morning. Those same dogs, on this self-same morning in fact, had already exterminated another raccoon, wetting my dirt with blood while I wet the sod with water.

In this column, someday soon, I hope to give proper attention to these raccoons with which we share our property. But for now, I tell of the recent April morning when I helped my dogs dispose of a raccoon before letting out the mourning doves, to illustrate how unexpectedly full my tidy suburban life in Fairfax County is of wildlife — birth and death, feather and fur, predator and prey.

Your columnist spends his 9-to-5 hours interviewing members of Congress and voters, poring over campaign finance records, and opining on politics in these pages — quite the contrast to the more elemental concerns of his early mornings and his weekends. It’s reminiscent of the shock felt by the fictional columnist William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Boot is a gardening columnist sent off to cover an African coup. As a political columnist who is now asked to cover gardening, I’ve named this space after Boot’s column, “Lush Places.”

Just this spring, we have had a fox on our back porch, white-tail deer families in our yard, a mockingbird trapped in our screened porch, and a nightly show of circling bats. Last year, we were visited by an extended family of mice and a colony of kudzu bugs. I have been stung by yellow jackets in my yard and a European hornet in my kitchen. In our first days here, we had approximately 44 goats and one llama in our backyard — a moment that has led the locals to call ours Goat Hill.

DC JUDGE WARNS OF ‘SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES’ IF EAST POTOMAC GOLF LINKS CLOSED WITHOUT PROPER NOTICE

On this dawn, as I finally grabbed my coffee once the raccoon was discarded and the doves liberated, I joked to Katie that we were operating “a wildlife refuge up here on Goat Hill.”

Reflecting on the fate of the raccoons, the grim conditions of the dove nests two straight springs, and the discourtesy of the uninvited mice and hornets, Katie offered her concurring opinion: “The worst wildlife refuge ever.”

Tim Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Legalizing, subsidizing, and spreading abortion is a cause inextricable from the Democratic Party. At times, the Democratic Party looks like an arm of the abortion lobby.

I wrote an article this past weekend on how the Biden Justice Department became the prosecutorial arm of the National Abortion Federation. I wrote, “There may be no relationship more intimate in all of Washington than the affair between the Democratic Party and the abortion lobby. Democrats’ one non-negotiable stance is their defense of abortion.”

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE DEMOCRAT-ABORTION AXIS

My article focused on the prosecution of pro-lifers at the request of the abortion lobby, but I wanted to flesh out how broad the connection is between the lobby and Democrats.

Here are some points:

• Democrats are absolutists on abortion. You will not find a Democratic presidential or Senate candidate, or a House leader, who is willing to tolerate any limits on abortion in any case.
• There are no pro-life Democrats in Washington at all. The last one, former Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, was knocked out in the 2020 primary.
• When Democratic governors get to fill Senate vacancies, they have twice in recent years chosen abortion lobbyists.
• Abortion groups make up a huge portion of the Democratic fundraising base. For instance, EMILYs List PAC has averaged about $70 million over the past three election cycles. For comparison, that’s quadruple the spending by the National Rifle Association’s PAC.
• Subsidizing Planned Parenthood with taxpayer money is one of the Democrats’ chief crusades. In the 2011 budget showdown, it was Barack Obama’s one non-negotiable item.
• To keep abortion legal is the main reason they want to expand the court.

It’s possible to be a tax-cutting Democrat, a pro-war Democrat, an immigration-restrictionist Democrat, and these days, Democrats are allowed to oppose boys in girls’ sports. But a pro-life Democrat, in Washington, would be a contradiction in terms.