Welcome to the Reality Taboo, where no topic
is off limits. It's February 21st, 2026. It's
useful to define terms, and a la Mike Huckabee
talking about the importance of... defining terms
ahead of answering or obfuscating an answer to
Tucker Carlson's question about what the definition
of Christian Zionism is, I'm going to address
a question Jeff asked in absentia about what
we mean by the term managerial state. Uncle Ted
Kaczynski called it the system. One of the tragedies
of Ted Kaczynski is that, of course, he is a
murderer, but a sympathetic one in some ways,
in that he used those mail bombs as a way of
drawing attention to something he felt he could
in no other way draw attention to. And in that
regard, he was just a few years too early because
his actions came on the eve. Of the internet
revolution that would have facilitated Ted getting
the ideas that he had out to the country, out
to the entire world, that technology came on
the scene during the latter part of Kaczynski's
terrorist campaign in the late 80s and early
90s. But had he come a decade later, then he
would have been able to participate in the Gen
X dream of the internet as being something where
ideas could be exchanged freely and openly. The
dream that was still motivating Jack Dorsey when
he famously called Twitter the free speech wing
of the free speech movement. In any case, what
Kaczynski called the system maps well onto the
idea of the managerial state or what... Thomas
Saas called the therapeutic state. Tom Woods
calls the blob. Curtis Yarvin called the cathedral.
And parenthetically, yes, Yarvin is Jewish. He
could have called it the synagogue, but chose
instead to call it the cathedral. Though in fairness
to him, the idea of a cathedral as having an
elaborate, inspiring, and somewhat intimidating
edifice is part of what allows the... cathedral
to do what it does that allows the managerial
state to do what it does is that it is draped
in ornate Fixings, whether they be physical or
rhetorical in the sense that they self -justify
themselves as democratic or whether it be by
way of credentialism. These are studies and pronouncements
made by the expert class who has gone through
the academic institutions. Paul Gottfried and
Sam Francis called it the managerial state. That's
probably the phrase used most frequently here,
although it's not my personal favorite. James
Wilson called it the bureaucratic state. Jack
Donovan, riffing from the never -ending story
book and movie from the 80s, called it the nothing,
the great nothing. The King James Bible called
it the powers that be. And my personal favorite
comes from Hartiste, who called it globo homo.
It's my favorite because it's that trademark
trenchant innuendo and double meaning that Hartiste
became so famous for because, of course, globo
homo evokes the all -purpose slur of homo that
was common in childhood parlance a generation
ago. But more significantly, it comes from the
Greek... prefix homos which means same and it
is similar to the great nothing the process of
vacuuming up all of the variety of expressions
of human action through culture and politics
and religion and turning them into a globally
homogenized enlightened hedonism devoid of anything
more than the immediate avoidance of discomfort
and the continual stream of pleasure. That is
fed to the masses. This is Aldous Huxley's idea
of Soma in Brave New World. It's fed to the masses
so that the elite institutions, the members,
the ruling class that controls through a sort
of committee. what the system or the managerial
states, bureaucratic states, globo -homo does,
the decisions that it makes. As to those decisions,
whatever term is used, what it is getting at
is the confluence of institutional forces that
seem culturally and politically totally impervious
to challenge, whether it be financial or political
or cultural. No matter how much these institutions
seem to fail objectively, think of the Iraq War
or the response to covid the financial crash
of 2008 or the migrant invasion of europe no
matter how often and continuously the managerial
state fails by any sort of objective metric well
other than the objective metric of sustaining
their own ability to continue to control and
direct events other than that metric they seem
to continuously fail on all fronts and yet undeterred,
roll on like a juggernaut. And one of the things
that unites all of these critics, Kaczynski,
Saas, Wood, Jarvin, Gottfried, Francis, Wilson,
Donovan, the Bible, Hartiste, and so many others
offering critiques, whether they be of the neo
-reactionary variety as these are, or from other
angles, no matter what the critiques are, they
all are quite uniformly impotent when it comes
to... having any impact, any effect on how that
system operates. This is going to be a bit of
a potpourri recording. That is a good enough
segue into one thing that might potentially disrupt
Globo Homo's vice grip on everything, and that
is artificial intelligence. This week, C -Dance
2 .0 has been made available to the public and...
If you haven't seen what CDance is capable of,
I encourage doing so. There's a link in the show
notes that provides a menagerie of different
things that CDance has been able to do just in
the first week of being open to the internet
using public. And it has blasted through the
uncanny valley that has characterized AI. video
productions over the last couple of years where
it is really the untrained eye can detect almost
immediately that what is being presented is not
live action. It's comparable to CGI and in a
lot of cases, quite bad CGI, especially on particular
aspects like human movements, mouth movements,
and the coordination between sound and the movement
of lips, hands, walking, a lot of the subtle
things that have to do with human movement in
particular, that up until Seedance were clearly
not real humans operating in real space, but
that is gone with Seedance 2. It looks and sounds
just like actors and actresses you'd be familiar
with. There are a series of AI -generated scenes
riffing off of... Breaking Bad that look like
they could have come directly from a cut from
the show. I've not seen it, but I've seen clips
here and there. And so the redone versions of
scenes take place from a little bit of a different
angle and a bit of a different spin on the event.
So this isn't just directly copying something
else that was already produced. This is creating
something that could have been included in the
show series production to represent various scenes,
but wasn't. And of course it wasn't because it
wasn't actually recorded this way when the show
was made over a decade ago. But now, from the
footage that exists from the previous show and
the capacity of the C -Dance 2 .0... underlying
its operations that creates new video and audio
effects that look like they could have come from
the exact time that the actual thing that is
being impersonated or that is having a new reimagined
spin on it presented, that you would be totally
unaware of that if not for having previous knowledge
of the show that is being riffed off of. And
one of the criticisms of AI is that it's putatively
can't come up with anything new. It's just remixing
things that already exist. But while that might
be in some sense tautologically accurate, it
doesn't really what critics insinuate that it
means. Because, of course, the same criticism
could be made of any author who is writing some
new novel or some... new piece of non -fiction
unless he is coming up with neologisms that are
literally words that have never been used before
he's just recombining words that already exist
out there but the output i don't think people
would say well there's nothing new in here because
we have definitions for all of these words and
phrases and terms being used ergo this isn't
anything new But by taking the collective output
of humanity that is recorded in some digital
form and remixing it in effectively infinite
different ways that can be guided by simple prompts,
input prompts from users, that is every bit as
novel as a new show or movie or book or... Soon,
computer game being created. What CDance 2 .0
shows is that big budget action slop, romantic
comedies, anime, horror, all of the different
genres of film are going to be trivially easy
to produce. What CGI did to Claymation is going
to be what AI is going to do to CGI. Not just
CGI, but the entire... The entire edifice that
surrounds video production and audio production
now. The studios and the sets, the actors, the
agents, the stunt people, the years it takes
on sites to cobble together these big budget
Hollywood productions that have production costs
running into the... hundreds of millions of dollars,
it is very little, if any, exaggeration to say
that that is, we're on the cusp of that being
able to be done by a single person sitting on
a personal computer in his basement. That person
sitting in his basement coming up with things
via prompt for CDance 2 .0 to create isn't as,
of course, easily able to take advantage of the
network effect that Universal Studios can. But
that was the same type of argument that was made
when YouTube was in its seminal stages. Sure,
people could broadcast themselves on a screen
just like ABC or CBS, NBC, Fox, whatever did,
but they don't have any network effect. Nobody's
going to go seek them out, and if they do, they're
not going to be able to share their experience
with anyone else because there isn't that shared
social and cultural experience that people have
by watching the NBC nightly news. Well, here
we are today where the largest YouTube creators
get orders of magnitude, literally hundreds times,
not hundreds more, hundreds of times more views
than any of the old network stations do. And
unlike the YouTube versus TV network battle.
yesterday. Seedance versus the old studio production
battle is one in which the old studios have an
additional major weakness that the networks didn't
have and that the network Model was a free one,
subjected to some advertisements, but it didn't
cost anything to partake in what the networks
were putting out. But of course, to watch studio
productions, especially when they first come
out, requires an expenditure of resources. And
so not only are the network big budget productions
going to be almost indistinguishable in terms
of the... on -screen product they're also going
to take years instead of hours to produce and
they're going to ask you to fork over a bunch
of money to have access to them while cdance
will be free or will operate on a sort of freemium
model where people if they want to be patrons
can but the general public will be able to watch
these see dance productions for free. There is
also the sense among critics of AI that humans
aren't going to go for this artificially generated
cultural content, even if it is indistinguishable
to the naked eye and naked ear from the cultural
production of individual humans or committees
of humans in the past. But the practical problem
aside of being able to distinguish what's what.
Because undoubtedly, and it's probably already
happened, undoubtedly, once it becomes impossible,
effectively impossible with the naked eye or
ear to detect what's AI and what's not, what
people are going to create, and I use that term
loosely to refer to simply putting in prompts
into these AI systems to, quote, create, unquote.
movies and songs and books, and that are going
to, to the extent that they're able to, going
to market those productions as not being AI,
as being things that they produce the old -fashioned
way, at least until the threshold for tolerance
of AI gets on an equal footing with the old -fashioned
way of making movies or writing books. And not
surprisingly, there is a generational component
to this. The Economist YouGov In a poll conducted
this week, asked respondents how much they trust
artificial intelligence, those under the age
of 30, 12 % said a great deal. Among those aged
30 to 44, 11%. And then between the ages of 45
and 64 is 3%. And among those 65 and older, 2%.
So Zoomers and millennials. about five times,
five to six times, is likely to express a great
deal of trust in artificial intelligence compared
to Xers and Boomers. From the digitally artificial
to the analog artificial, YouGov also ran a recent
survey questioning respondents on their views
of foreign leaders, and this is among Americans,
people in the United States, U .S. citizens,
presumably. and actually looking at the technical
notes explicitly, U .S. citizens, they were asked
about 25 world leaders and asked to rank them
as those that they have the most favorable view
of and those they have the least favorable view
of. And in terms of net favorability, the one
who came out on top among those 25 world leaders
that were asked about is the president of our
greatest ally. And I don't mean our oldest ally,
although Macron does do pretty well coming in
seventh place among the 25. world leaders and
i'm not even talking about our greatest ally
in the 20th century in the early part of the
21st century benjamin netanyahu in fact he does
quite poorly coming in at 17th out of 25 coming
in below donald trump but no number one is the
man who before becoming president was famous
for playing a piano with his penis and that is
zielinski of ukraine And it's not even particularly
close. He beats the second place, who is Mark
Carney of Canada, by eight points. Donald Trump
comes in at 16th out of 25. Rounding out the
very bottom of the list is Kim Jong -un of North
Korea at 25th, but just behind him. Only beating
him by a single point is Vladimir Putin of Russia.
And so the most favorably viewed world leader
among Americans is Zelensky, and the second most
poorly viewed leader among Americans is Putin.
And so here, with everything that was promised
about Ukraine falling through and being... unequivocally
now at this point shown that Ukraine cannot win
this war with Russia, that it never had a chance,
that the only reason it's been able to limp along
is because of perpetual infusions of support,
military and financial support from the West.
While Russia, which unlike Ukraine, is a real
country with a real leader who is popular among...
the Russian citizenry who has put the country
back together and who has managed in the face
of a war on the border that has cost Russia a
lot in terms of blood and treasure, has strengthened
the Russian economy and has done so in tandem
with a reclamation back to... traditional Russian
culture, both secular and spiritual, in terms
of the embrace of the Orthodox Russian Church.
So here is yet another example of where the managerial
state or the system, the blob, the nothing, globo,
homo, whatever term you want to use to describe
it. Here is another example where since 2022,
it has just fallen flat on its face and failed
entirely. All of the objectives that were put
out have not been reached. All of the promises
made have not been kept. Hundreds of billions,
if not trillions of dollars at this point have
been siphoned off from the West into this corrupt
money laundering pit of lies and death and destruction.
And yet through all of that, the unstoppable
juggernaut maintains its control and has even
managed to convince if this polling is to be
believed. And as we've discussed previously,
there is plenty of reason to put a lot of stake
in these polls. Economist YouGov is a very reliable
polling operation that has shown impressive predictive
power in the past. And so if we take this seriously,
as we should, we see that, again, the global
homo, the system, the managerial state, it gets
what it wants. And even though it loses objectively
in terms of all the things that it promised on
the eve of this latest debacle that it forced
the world kicking and screaming into, that even
after failing, it continues to chug along, not
much worse for the wear. And it even gets the
assent of the people who have suffered because
of what the Western world has done over the last...
four years in funding and impoverishing its own
citizenry to money launder and prop up this proxy
military regime to engage in a hopeless struggle
against russia just to enfeeble russia i guess
at least ostensibly that's the reason i think
that real reason is more A mix of glee and seeing
the bloodlust of a bunch of Slavs killing each
other and also the money laundering opportunities
that Ukraine has afforded members of the managerial
elite. But whatever those confluence of reasons,
the result is, while the Ukrainian population
lost, the Western system, of which Zelensky is
part of, won. And speaking of winning... Contra
Candace Owens, who asserted that the TPUSA put
on, quote, all -American halftime show, unquote,
that was to compete with the Bad Bunny Super
Bowl halftime performance that featured someone
who didn't speak or doesn't speak English, putting
together a halftime show that featured a bunch
of Central and South American countries' flags.
and celebrated that culture not just in Latin
America, but inside of the United States as well,
most iconically with a bodega storefront, La
Marquita, with a neon sign in the window that
says, We Accept EBT. As an alternative to that,
TPUSA put on what was styled an all -American
halftime show featuring Artist without the mainstream
popularity today of Bad Bunny, who is allegedly
the most downloaded musician in the history of
the world. The headliner of that TPUSA show being
Kid Rock, and that is the only name I'm familiar
with at all from the lineup. Kid Rock was a pretty
big name from about 20 years ago in the aughts.
But even in his heyday, the toppy wasn't equivalent
to a Taylor Swift today. And yet the All -American
halftime show was, by any objective measure,
quite a success. In the first day after it was
played, TPUSA claimed that it had something like
20 million total views across all platforms,
and Candace Owens came out scoffing at that,
saying that that had to have been based on the
comment ratio on the YouTube page, that that
had to have been artificial. And there are ways
to goose those numbers through bot farms and
the like, but to such an enormous scale, it would
have required YouTube being an accomplice who...
through the platform itself, artificially boosted
the numbers without users, whether they be real
people or bots, clicking on the link, or it would
have required a bot farm push, the likes of which
have never happened up to this point with such
rapidity. And while that, I suppose, wouldn't
be impossible, given the enormous amount of money...
the hundreds of millions of dollars that TPUSA
has made in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death,
that wouldn't be impossible. But the simpler
explanation and the one that is backed up by
this Economist YouGov poll that was conducted
this week that asked respondents if they had
watched the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Super
Bowl halftime show, or the All -American halftime
show, well, this pool of respondents, some 24
% say that yes, they did. quote, watch the All
-American halftime show featuring Kid Rock and
Brantley Gilbert, unquote. And that broadly checks
out. The poll also asked respondents what percentages,
these are adults over the age of 18 in the United
States, watched the Super Bowl this year. The
figure that Economist YouGov found was 53%, and
the official... TV rating for the Super Bowl
was 128 million viewers in the United States,
and that comes to right about exactly at 53 %
of adults in the United States, about half of
them. If there's 128 million who watch the Super
Bowl, well, that's among about 250 million adults
in the United States. And so that 24 % of all
adults watching the All -American Halftime Show
comes to about 60 million people. Now, not all
those people watched it live. which is where,
and I need to make a quick addendum looking here,
I said that that was 20 million viewers. That's
what TPUSA claimed among all platforms. I misspoke.
That is just on TPUSA's YouTube channel. And
so across all platforms and all iterations, the
Economist YouGov survey suggests that about 60
million people have seen it in one form or another.
And so while it might be gay, the numbers there
do not appear to be fake. And apropos of not
a lot of anything, the Economist YouGov poll
posed the question of support or opposition to
the death penalty. Just 29 % of respondents said
that they are opposed to the death penalty. 47
% were in favor and 24 % not sure. That is a
figure that hasn't moved much at all in the last
generation. It's not one I track particularly
closely, but there is a general sense that the
cultural ratchet always shifts to the left and
support for capital punishment tends to be associated
with right -wing political beliefs. And in fact,
that's the case with this poll, with 73 % of
Trump supporters favoring the death penalty compared
to just 24 % of Harris voters in the 2024 election.
But where the pro -capital punishment side really
gets the advantage is among political independents
who 41 % to 29 % favor the death penalty for
convicted murderers. Also included was a question
about legal immigration. Most of the attention
and the ICE deportations and everything surrounding
that that has been part of the... National conversation,
as they say, over the last several weeks. That
all has to do with illegal immigration. The question
of legal immigration, which by the numbers now
on a year -over -year basis is the more significant
form of immigration in terms of the raw numbers
of people coming to live inside the geographic
boundaries of the United States. To the question
of whether legal immigration should either be
reduced or halted entirely, among Trump supporters,
49 % want it reduced or stopped compared to just
8 % of Harris voters. And so that breaks down
to an overall population support for reducing
or eliminating legal immigration of 29%, a little
less than one in three Americans want to see
a reduction in legal immigration. One interesting
thing that distinguishes immigration restrictionist
sentiments by whether the immigration in question
is legal or illegal is that the... the question
of illegal immigration is less racially divisive.
Among whites, 31 % support a reduction or elimination
of legal immigration. That figure for blacks
is 25 % and for Hispanics is 28%. The reason
it is less racially divisive is because unlike
illegal immigration, which is largely coded as
Hispanic migration or black migration in the
case of haiti legal immigration is largely thought
of as pertaining accurately thought of as pertaining
to asia in general and subcontinental indian
immigration in particular and Blacks and Hispanics,
what we used to call NOMs, non -Asian minorities
in the United States, are not as concerned about
the prospects of Asian aspiring migrants to the
West as they are about Blacks and Hispanic migrants
to the United States. The YouGov Economist survey
doesn't break out responses. among Asians, but
I suspect if it did, that there would be the
strongest support for legal migration would be
found among Asians living in the United States.
The CDC has released preliminary numbers on births
in 2025, and a talking point on the heritage
American right has been that non -Hispanic white
births actually ticked back up to just barely
constitute a majority of recorded births in the
United States in 2025. And that is not a function
of the white birth rate going up. The white birth
rate in 2025 among non -Hispanic white women
came in a little under 52, whereas when Biden
was on his way out, it was over 53. And so it
continues to drop. or in the last couple of quarters
of Trump's second term, it has stayed steady.
But the reason it has now, at least for 2025
preliminarily, represented an outright majority
at just a hair above 50%, up from 49 % the year
before, is because Hispanic and especially Black
fertility has dropped, and that really is remarkable.
For the first time possibly in all of U .S. history,
certainly the first time in the modern age, black
fertility in the United States is lower than
white fertility, and that's among non -Hispanics.
The most recent figures for white fertility is
52 births per thousand women, whereas for blacks
it is just under 50 at 49 .6. To reach a total
fertility rate of which is about what is required
for replacement, requires a birth rate per 1
,000 women in the 70s. And unfortunately, what
the CDC reports data in primarily is birth rate
figures, whereas for the sake of clarity, total
fertility rate is a lot easier to understand.
It's hard to conceptualize what does 50 live
births per 1 ,000 women in a year mean compared
to 70 live births. among 1 ,000 women in a year,
whereas total fertility rate gives you what the
expected total number of children a woman will
have over her lifetime at any given point, and
that's a lot easier to grok because if it's less
than two, then it's below replacement, and if
it's above two, then it's above replacement.
And just intuitively, you can sense that if a
woman has one child over the course of her entire
life, that's below fertility, whereas if she
has three, that's pretty high fertility. But
that corresponds to a birth rate of 30 and a
birth rate of 90 per 1 ,000, respectively. That
is harder to intuitively make sense of. And we'll
bookend this with a look at the total fertility
rates by race in the United States. But to get
back to the birth rate, among whites, it's gone
from 53 in 2023 to 52 now in 2026, presumably,
the end of 2025, which is a decline in the birth
rate of about... 2 % in the last two years. By
contrast, among blacks in 2023, it was over 56,
and now it's under 50, which is a decline of
about 12 % in the black fertility rate in just
the last two years. The Hispanic birth rate has
declined at a rate about in between those two,
going from 66 a couple years ago to 63 now, which
represents a decline of about 5 % in the Hispanic
birth rate in the United States. I'm not sure
exactly how to interpret this. It's significant,
and not just statistically significant, but also
culturally. Is it Roe versus Wade being overturned,
playing into this in some way? The thought was
that that would boost fertility, especially on
the lower end of the socioeconomic status ladder,
since in some states abortions couldn't happen,
so the thought would be that the people with
the lowest conscientiousness, the lowest... capacity
for forward planning would be the ones who would
end up having more children than would have otherwise
been the case if Roe versus Wade hadn't been
overturned and abortion protections were kept
in place in mostly red states where the populations
didn't want abortions occurring. but maybe even
in the case of the lower end of the socioeconomic
stratum, that without the abortion backstop,
or at least the sense that there is an abortion
backstop, of course abortions can still be obtained
in most places in the country, but with the idea
that that is more difficult to pull off, there
is less unprotected sex going on, especially
among blacks. Taking a look at the total fertility
rate by race from the CDC, this data is from
the end of 2024, so the preliminary data from
2025 is out, but it won't be completely formalized
and cleaned up for a few months. This is the
latest annualized data that is available. The
overall total fertility rate in the United States
is 1 .63. Again, replacement is a little bit
over 2%. It's often referred to in the shorthand
as being 2 .1. That's misleading with... infant
death being as low as it is, it's probably closer
in the developed world to something like 2 .02,
but I think just using two as a mental benchmark
is a perfectly fine and intuitive way of understanding
whether fertility is below, at, or above replacement.
Because on an individual level, the procreative
question is one in which if you have one or zero
children, you are losing ground. If you have
two, you're treading water. And if you have more
than two, then you are expanding. And so at 1
.63, the total fertility rate of the United States
is well below replacement. The lowest fertility
rate of any measured... Racial or ethnic group
in the United States is among American Indians
at 1 .37. Next is Asians at 1 .46, followed then
by blacks, again, below white replacement at
1 .52. Whites are at just a hair higher at 1
.53. Hispanics at 1 .95 are just a hair below
replacement in the United States. And then Native
Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders come in at 2
.22, the only group in the United States that
is above replacement currently. Another continuing
trend in the nature of natalism in America, the
only age range where birth rates are growing.
is among women aged 40 and over. That has continued
to increase over the last couple of years. It's
a trend that has been in place for decades now,
but that increasing modest uptick is from a very
low base to start with. The CDC breaks down birth
rates by five -year age ranges, the highest birth
rate range currently. and these numbers again
are from 2024, is among women aged 30 to 34.
Having in the last couple of years surpassed
what used to be the highest, which was among
those aged 25 to 29, and that continuing increase
in the median maternal age surely has something
to do with the rise of attendant health problems
in kids, including things like an increase in
early -term births. which is another thing that
the CDC monitors. Early -term births are on the
rise. Expected -term, normal -term births and
late -term births are both on the decline. More
C -sections, more gestational diabetes and the
like. The healthiest age, that is the most nubile
age, which is something men can assent to if
they have a pair of eyes that work, is in the
age range of 20 to 24. But the birth rate for
women in that age range is 54 .2, which is actually
marginally lower than the birth rate for women
aged 35 to 39. So women in the United States
are more likely to have children in their late
30s than they are in their early 20s. If American
total fertility is below replacement, and it
has been since the 90s, then why does the U .S.
population keep growing? One major reason, of
course, is... Immigration, net migration to the
United States is positive. That is, there are
more people coming into the country than leaving.
But another reason is because the average age
has to go from low in a population up to high
in a population before absolute numbers. And
a generation that helps make that easy to understand
are the baby boomers in the United States, where
there was a... post -war population boom, a bunch
of babies being born in the late 40s and the
50s and into the early 60s before the continued
secular decline in fertility took hold in the
70s, that bulge of baby boomers meant that in
the 70s, the median age of an American was 28.
If you were in the 70s, 28 years old, which is
about where the boomers would have been in 1975,
Donald Trump and Joe Biden were 29 and 33 respectively.
If you were 27 in the 1970s, there were as many
Americans younger than you as there were Americans
older than you. But as subsequent generations
had fertility below replacement. The population
was still growing because the boomers weren't
dying off. They were just getting older. And
so the median age continued to increase and increase.
And now the median age in the United States has
gone up more than a decade on average from the
1970s with the average American now. little over
39 years old 39 .2 as of 2024 and so if you are
39 now in America there are as many people younger
than you as there are older than you and so what
happens to a population that's on the decline
is first it's it's young then it becomes old
then it begins to shrink and so most of the country
is still in the going from young, getting older
stage, but there are several states that are
now in the not just old, but declining because
more people are dying off than being born. Those
states as of 2024 are Delaware, Rhode Island,
Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, New Mexico,
Vermont, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Michigan,
Florida, Oregon, Maine, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
The Rust Belt states are definitely overrepresented
there, as is New England. This doesn't tell the
whole story, of course. Net migration matters,
too, in terms of births and deaths. It's not
as though New York is some bastion of fecundity
in America. Its fertility is well below replacement,
and its fertility rate is actually lower than
Florida, but Florida... is experiencing more
deaths than births in large part because a lot
of people live in New York, you get old, and
then go down to Florida to die. But it is the
old white, and also to a significant degree black,
but not... immigrant -heavy states where deaths
are outstripping births because those states
have already moved past the aging process to
one in which people are dying off faster than
they're being born. But those states are just
cars farther along on the... same train that
is heading the same direction because there is
not, as has been mentioned before here, there
is not a single state in the United States where
fertility is at replacement, let alone above
replacement. And on that sterile note, we'll
end it for this week. Thanks for listening. Talk
to you next time. Thank you.