A new study claims smartphones are the main driver of the collapsing U.S. birth rate, which has fallen by one-quarter since 2007. So did the iPhone eat the kids, or is there another reason Americans aren’t having kids anymore? To answer that, let’s look at the study in question. It basically argues that technology has had a physically isolating effect on young people, so they don’t hang out anymore and get the chance to form relationships. It’s a pat hypothesis, but it doesn’t align with the fact that the fertility collapse is almost entirely among Democrats, who are down to 1.4 kids per mother, while conservatives are having the same number of kids they did in the 1980s, 40 years ago. Since conservatives also use iPhones, there goes the hypothesis. Where did the study go wrong? First, it used the natural experiment of the original iPhone rollout, which went city-by-city. The researchers correlated fertility with iPhone penetration, and voilà. The problem, of course, is that the iPhone didn’t roll out randomly, but started with cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In other words, they weren’t measuring smartphones and fertility. They were measuring blue cities and fertility. This is disappointing if you were thinking about throwing away the iPhone to get that baseball team. But it’s interesting — and encouraging — to suggest that the decline in fertility is not fate but culture. Specifically, it’s the culture of women. A recent Pew survey found that a majority of young liberal women think limiting children is good for careers, while nearly 70% of conservative women think you can have a good career even with kids. This matters because over the past 20 years, young women have swung hard to the Left, rising from 28% to 40% self-identified liberals, and, according to Gallup, now line up with liberals over conservatives on 87% of issues. Another survey found the most important life goals of young women who voted for Kamala Harris were career and spending money on luxuries — having children was almost dead last. Conversely, the most important goals of men who voted for President Donald Trump were getting married and having children. The longitudinal IFS survey asks women by birth cohort how many kids they’re having, and in recent trends, conservative women are unchanged: 2.1 per woman. But Democrats are dropping one-fifth of a kid per decade: 1.7 for mothers born in 1987, 1.5 by 1997, and likely 1.3 by the time today’s 19-year-olds have their turn. Interestingly, conservative women want even more kids — between 2.5 and 3 — suggesting economic conditions such as housing costs and wages may be their limiting factor. Just as interesting, the survey data indicate that better economic conditions wouldn’t improve fertility among Democrat women, who don’t want more kids, and would likely just fund more girls’ trips to France. And it’s not just kids: liberals and conservatives also have radically different priorities in marriage. In short, conservatives — and especially conservative women — see marriage as a good thing and something towards which they aspire, while liberal women see it as a mixed bag that slows their careers. Considering marriage makes having kids much easier, that means not only do liberal women not want kids, but they also don’t want the pathway — marriage — that takes the economic edge off having kids. In short, it’s not smartphones that ate the kids. It’s smartphones that found the ones eating the kids: liberals. Now, without a doubt, the iPhone and social media have had an isolating effect. Gen Z is having fewer relationships and a lot less sex than Gen X. But the fact that conservatives are apparently immune to the baby-munching effect of new technologies suggests the problem is liberal ideology — namely, the feminist reframing of marriage and children as prison rather than fulfillment. Reinforce that mentality through 12 to 16 years of left-wing schooling, and it apparently leaves a mark. Ultimately, it’s culture and not economics or smartphones that are dictating the terms here. Policy levers are limited, at best. You can protect free speech so conservatives can share the joys of family. You can implement school choice so parents can free their kids from a liberal education. But the Left has so completely captured the cultural institutions — especially media — that it’s the mother of rear-guard battles. It’ll take a cultural overhaul to reverse the decline in fertility. *** Peter St. Onge, Ph.D., is senior economist and E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.

It has become an unfortunate habit of some on the Right to blame our failures on an overly idealistic youth. Our country’s history tells a different story. Audacity and idealism in young people are features, not bugs. As a matter of fact, it’s baked into our national identity. The Founding Fathers were, for the most part, young men in their 20s and 30s. In the year 1776, Alexander Hamilton was the age of a college junior. Instead of trigger warnings and safe spaces, he dedicated his energy to the nuances of nation-building. Not long after, he went on to craft the greatest financial system the world has ever known. James Madison at 25 wasn’t focused on “work-life balance” or “finding himself” like much of today’s youth. He was framing the Virginia State Constitution and would soon author the Bill of Rights. It was a young man’s world. A far cry from today’s Washington, D.C., which can at times be difficult to distinguish from a nursing home. Even the oldest among them, Mr. Benjamin Franklin (age 70), would be a veritable spring chicken in today’s political landscape. They weren’t waiting for permission from the grown-ups. While the average life expectancy was only around 35-40, this figure is widely misunderstood. Extremely high infant mortality rates drove the average down vastly. The life expectancy for adults who survived youth was closer to 70. Today, a healthy 21-year-old can expect to live to about 78-82. In other words, the change in life expectancy does not explain why our politicians have doubled in age. The same youthful energy exists today. You can find it in college protests. You can find it in the endless online crusades and political activism. With some exceptions, I tend to believe that these rowdy youth are well-intentioned. The difference is that the Founders were driven by a deep understanding of history and the world around them. Today’s youth are predominantly driven by catchy slogans and bumper-sticker logic. Robert A. Heinlein once said that “Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.” Even in the days of the American Revolution, there were two versions of youthful idealism: one disciplined by history and the other intoxicated by utopian rage. Only a few short years after the American youth had crafted the republic, the French youth had brought chaos and mayhem into their society. In their case, the consequence of reckless idealism was the Reign of Terror. While experience is the best teacher, there is also something to be said for action. The Founders chose not to wait for permission. They ferociously educated themselves in philosophy, history, and economics. The Founding Fathers didn’t have access to Google. Their education paled in comparison to ours when you factor in the modern world’s vast resources and democratization of information. True, there may be a wash of underqualified teachers and liberal orthodoxy in the public education system. But this problem has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years. The great minds in our history didn’t wait for world-class education to drop neatly into their laps. Thomas Jefferson was known to devote 15 hours a day to his personal studies. What’s your excuse? We cannot be so lazy as to blame partisanship for the prevalence of a destructive disposition. The disagreements between the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans were no less fierce than those today. Think Jefferson didn’t view Hamilton as a tyrannical threat to Democracy? Think Hamilton didn’t view Jefferson as a radical extremist with no grasp on reality? Think again. They compromised with their enemies not because they wanted to, but because it was necessary. They rose to the occasion because young didn’t have to mean stupid, and idealistic didn’t have to mean immature. Perhaps young people governed differently when they had to live in the world that they built. It is a lot less appealing to plug your ears and pretend that snappy rhetoric is a substitute for pragmatic action when you have to face the consequences. Our debt crisis is indicative of politicians who are much more comfortable hitting the snooze button on today’s issues than facing them head-on. It’s a lot easier to kick the can down the road when you’ve got one foot out the door. Hamilton and Jefferson had to reap whatever they sowed. Bernie Sanders, not so much. It is both futile and foolish to try to suppress the youthful spirit. It should be nurtured and directed towards positive ends. It is time we teach our children to be a little more like the Founding Fathers and a little less like the French. 

As America marks its 250th birthday, the country is asking some necessary questions: Who built this nation? What ideals are worth celebrating? And what does it mean to be truly American? Part of the answer is with the Jewish people, who have been there since the very beginning. Jews have been part of the American story since the nation’s infancy: helping to finance the Revolution, defending religious liberty, building its economy, advancing its science, and strengthening its democracy. The story of the American Jew is not separate from the story of America. It is woven into it. That’s why I closed my speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention with a line I believe more strongly today than ever: Jewish values are American values, and American values are Jewish values. I did not say it to flatter the audience. I said it because history proves it. I am a proud Orthodox Jew, a first-generation American, and the lead plaintiff in a civil-rights lawsuit against Harvard. The university settled with me, but not before I saw firsthand what institutional silence on antisemitism looks like. So when I hear that standing with Israel is a foreign entanglement, or even a betrayal of American interests, I know the claim is not merely wrong. It is backward, and the whole of American history says so. When the Continental Army was broke, and the cause was nearly lost, a Polish-born Jewish immigrant named Haym Salomon brokered the funds that kept George Washington’s war effort alive. He was not a bystander to the American founding; he helped pay for it. A year after the Constitution was ratified, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new American government gives to bigotry, “no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” That was not a throwaway courtesy. It was a promise, from the father of the country to a small Jewish congregation, that in America they would be citizens and not guests. Jews took that promise seriously. Look at what came of it: Jewish Americans are roughly 2% of the U.S. population, yet they have earned a wildly disproportionate share of this nation’s Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. They helped build industries, split the atom, cure diseases, launch companies, and make the American dream a reality. A people Washington welcomed as equals repaid the country a thousandfold. That is the American promise working exactly as designed. Israel is that same promise projected outward. It is the Middle East’s only enduring democracy and a major non-NATO ally of the United States, a partner that shares our commitment to the rule of law, free markets, and innovation. We do not stand with Israel out of charity or because there’s a nefarious conspiracy afoot. We stand with them because it is the one country in a hostile region that holds the values we hold, and because a strong Israel keeps Americans safer and American principles respected abroad. Reinforcing that alliance is not a gift to a foreign government; it is an investment in the kind of world America wants to live in. That is not an abstraction. Israel stands on the front line of a war the free world would otherwise be forced to fight closer to home, absorbing the aggression of Iran and the terror network it arms and funds, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis. For more than four decades, the same regime that chants “Death to America” has counted on Americans to look the other way. Israel does not have that option, and neither, in truth, do we. Every rocket Israel intercepts and every plot it dismantles is a danger that never reaches an American city. A partner that meets our enemies before they meet us does not drain American strength; it multiplies it. The Anti-Defamation League counted 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the most in its history, and for the first time, a majority were tied to Israel or Zionism. The movement that brands support for Israel as un-American is the same one tearing at the actual foundations of America: free inquiry, equal citizenship, the simple idea that a Jewish student can walk to class without being told his loyalties are suspect. They have it backward: it’s patriots who are the ones defending the alliance, not the ones torching it. I know what that costs, because I have paid it. I wrote to Harvard’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times and never received a reply. I testified before Congress about what I had witnessed. I have lost most of my friends. I did none of it because it was easy or popular, but because the country that gave my family refuge is worth defending, and the alliance that carries its values into the world is worth defending too. We will not apologize for loving this country, and we will not pretend that standing with the world’s only Jewish state is anything other than deeply, proudly American. The synagogue in Newport still stands, and the synagogue of the American Revolution in the heart of Philadelphia attracts thousands of visitors a year. Washington’s letter still means what it said. American Jews helped build this nation into the freest and most prosperous on earth because of our undivided commitment to the values that made America worth loving in the first place. *** Shabbos Kestenbaum is a PragerU political commentator, Harvard Divinity School alumnus, lead plaintiff in the landmark civil-rights lawsuit against Harvard University for antisemitism and a 2024 Republican National Convention speaker. He was named one of the Jerusalem Post’s 25 most influential Jewish voices of 2025.

Pope Leo XIV took the most significant disciplinary action of his young pontificate on Thursday, formally excommunicating the breakaway Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) after the group ignored his personal plea not to consecrate bishops without papal approval. One day after the radical traditionalist fraternity ordained four new bishops in Switzerland in direct violation of canon law, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree declaring the SSPX to be in schism with the Catholic Church. The decree declared that the two bishops who performed the consecrations, along with the four newly ordained bishops, had incurred automatic excommunication under canon law. The Vatican went further still, warning Catholic clergy and lay faithful not to formally adhere to the SSPX’s schism, stating that those who do likewise risk excommunication. In an accompanying explanatory note, the Vatican also reversed pastoral concessions previously granted to the society under Pope Francis, declaring that confessions heard by SSPX priests and marriages performed by them are now invalid. The decision came after Pope Leo made a final personal appeal to the society not to proceed with the illicit ordinations. “In this spirit, and filled with Christian affection, I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: Please turn back,” the pope wrote before the ceremony. The SSPX ignored the warning and proceeded with a five-hour ceremony in Écône, Switzerland, attended by roughly 16,000 worshippers. The confrontation marks the most serious internal crisis of Leo’s pontificate thus far, but it is also the culmination of a dispute stretching back more than half a century. The Society of St. Pius X was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to reforms adopted after the Second Vatican Council. While best known for celebrating the Traditional Latin Mass, the society’s objections extend well beyond liturgical preferences. The group has rejected aspects of Vatican II concerning religious liberty, ecumenism, and the Church’s relationship with other faiths, while frequently accusing modern Church leaders of doctrinal error. The conflict first boiled over in 1988 when Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the permission of Pope John Paul II. The Vatican immediately declared him and the newly ordained bishops excommunicated. Subsequent popes sought reconciliation rather than permanent separation. Pope Benedict XVI lifted the bishops’ excommunications in 2009 as part of an effort to heal the divide, while Pope Francis made extraordinary pastoral concessions by allowing SSPX priests to validly hear confessions and assist at marriages despite the society remaining outside full communion with Rome. Those efforts ultimately failed to bring the fraternity back into the Church. The Vatican noted Thursday that decades of theological dialogue dating back to Pope St. Paul VI had not resulted in reconciliation, and that the SSPX’s latest decision to consecrate bishops without papal approval constituted a definitive schismatic act. The decree also makes clear that the sanctions do not apply broadly to Catholics attached to the Traditional Latin Mass. Rather, they apply to the Society of St. Pius X and those who formally adhere to what the Vatican now describes as its schism. Many traditionalist communities remain in full communion with the Holy See while continuing to celebrate the pre-Vatican II liturgy under the Church’s authority. Even as it imposed the Church’s most severe canonical penalty, the Vatican left open the possibility of reconciliation. The decree states that “the Church, as a caring mother, will welcome with sincere affection and lively solicitude all those who wish to return to full communion.”

Police arrested a heavily armed transgender-identifying man who they said had a history of threatening mass violence after he parked a car loaded with firearms outside a Las Vegas-area casino. Andrew Walsh of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department said Tuesday that law enforcement arrested 36-year-old “Allison” Howlett on Saturday on multiple charges, including “threats related to an act of terrorism.” Howlett was arrested outside of the Sunset Station Casino in Henderson after police received a phone call from his spouse claiming that he had stolen a vehicle full of weapons and had previously threatened “to commit suicide by cop and carry out a mass shooting.” Howlett faces charges including gun theft, theft of a car, resisting an officer with a gun, and making a threat of terrorism or false information about an act of terrorism. During a Tuesday briefing on the case, officers played a recording of a person purported to be Howlett making threats of mass violence.  “I swear to God, if the FBI doesn’t come f***ing arrest me, there’s gonna be a f***ing mass shooting,” a person reportedly identified as Howlett said in the recording. “There’s one day you’re gonna be pissing me the f*** off, and it’s gonna be the last f***ing straw.”  Howlett has denied any accusations that he wanted to hurt anyone or made previous threats of mass violence.  “Allison denied wanting to hurt anyone and denied making any prior threats to commit a mass shooting,” a police report obtained by the Las Vegas Review Journal said. “Allison stated that everyone is out to get her and are setting her up.” Henderson Police Department Chief Reggie Rader said that Howlett was found in a vehicle outside the Sunset Station Casino on June 27 with music loudly blaring and refusing to leave the car.  “The quick-thinking officers developed a plan to take her into custody as an opportunity arose when she reached for the water. Officers used that moment to gain control over her hands and remove her from the vehicle,” Rader said, using female pronouns for Howlett, who is listed as a male in booking records.  Rader played footage showing several police officers surrounding the car and pulling Howlett out. Rader said that Howlett had been sitting on a handgun and had access to a fully automatic machine gun in the back seat of the vehicle.  Investigators recovered 22 firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, including multiple handguns and rifles, in the car. Later, they found an additional 30 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition at Howlett’s residence.  A judge has set bail for Howlett at $500,000. A preliminary hearing date is set for July 15.