Left Jabs

   I admit, I’m obsessed. It’s summer, I thought about taking the week off, then decided to write about what’s really interesting me these days. That would be the World Cup. The decline and fall of Western civilization can wait a week or two. I have no wish to talk down to my readers, some of whom are quite soccer-savvy, but most are casual viewers at best. It’s those ambivalent Americans that I’d like a word with. I’ve been watching World Cups every four years since the nineties, which for an American in my age group has been, shall we say, lonely. But this time it’s happening in this country, and the country seems to be responding. We’re looking at a genuine multicultural phenomenon, Trump-free so far. But I’m more interested in the games themselves, and World Cups past have tended to be more about the theatre than the soccer. Not so this time. The matches so far have been as good as the theatre, and there’s no shortage of theatre, right on the field. ...

   You'd think there might be a certain tension between Fox News and Fox Sports. Yes, they inhabit the same headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Near Times Square, the facade boasts a garish outdoor digital display, a giant chyron wannabe, permanently circling the building, shouting the latest headlines. It can be read for blocks. But the same building is not the same universe. At Fox News — still a misnomer — the universe is one of perpetual danger. Their evening lineup of propagandists provides their reprogrammable viewers with an endless succession of warnings about the perils of white replacement, open borders, and the erosion of European Christian values. At Fox Sports, on the other hand, the universe is a showcase of diversity, a place where multiracial, multicultural, immigrant-flavored competition is a simple fact of life, worth no more notice than air. The disconnects abound. Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are avatars for the Great Replacement...

   If you’re watching any of the World Cup, but don’t generally follow soccer, you might sense a certain cultural disconnect between the names on the backs of the jerseys and the countries they play for. Bukayo Saka and Eberechi Eze, for example, are big stars playing, not for the Nigeria of their parents, but for the England of their birth. Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams are young but already iconic figures, and — their names notwithstanding — they play for Spain. Alexander Pavlovic and Nathaniel Brown are not typical German names. You wouldn’t assume Ousmane Dembele and Rayan Cherki are French, or that Manuel Akanji and Granit Xhaka are Swiss. Anthony Elanga and Dejan Kulusewski play for Sweden. You get the idea. This is diversity with a higher profile than usual. But it’s also diversity with an element of subversion. For the next month, an untold number of Americans will be tuned to an open celebration of some of the very people their government is te...

   There’s a slow-motion panic brewing around the declining birth rates of wealthy nations. The replacement rate of a population — commonly understood to be a minimum of 2.1 children per woman — is indeed plummeting across the industrialized world. It’s being felt most acutely in Asia, particularly in Japan, South Korea, and China, where the replacement rate hovers around 1.0, and where the respective governments are actively alarmed. All sorts of incentives are being tried to get couples to have more babies — generous childcare, parental leave, cash bonuses — but with little success. There is some urgency. As a society gets older, its resources grow increasingly strained. The young have always subsidized the old, but when there are too many old and not enough young, the healthcare and pension systems get overused and underfunded. When there aren’t enough people to supply a workforce, industry moves elsewhere. Schools get shuttered, towns get hollowed out,...

   This is a re-run of a piece I wrote in March 2024. While it cites some news that is now old, it speaks of conditions and policies that only grow worse. Some of it is now, in retrospect, chilling. When I wrote of “forensic gynecology” and how “incarceration and execution are not off the table,” I had no idea how soon they’d actually be on the table.   In a red state, it’s no great privilege to be born. Certainly not from a legal standpoint. Republican-run governments are highly protective of the unborn, and are now extending legal protection to frozen embryos, at least in Alabama. If you happen to be one of those far-from-born organisms, you now enjoy all the rights of a living child. It’s when you get yourself born that things get complicated. Not that you would then lose those rights, just that they’d be widely ignored, poorly enforced, and cynically violated. But as long as you stay unborn, you’ve got lots of rights you don’t need. In Alabama —...