Even in these days of hotter summers and disappearing traditions, a few fall rituals remain reassuringly predictable: back-to-school sales, postseason baseball, and the annual uproar over an offensive Halloween costume.

This year, it was Target's turn.

For generations, poverty among rural Southern whites had been treated not simply as an economic condition but as evidence of something wrong with the people themselves.

A screenshot circulating on social media showed a child model wearing a “circus clown” getup from the retailer's Hyde and EEK house brand. Critics said the face mask, miniature top hat, and gloves — not to mention the child's pose — evoked blackface and 19th-century minstrelsy. Target quickly pulled it.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant, the Georgia pastor who spent the previous year leading a boycott of Target over its retreat from DEI initiatives, called it “a profoundly harmful symbol of racism.” Target followed with a corporate apology: “As a company, we know we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. The costume is offensive and should never have been part of our assortment.”

The resemblance to Jim Crow-era imagery was vague enough to give Target the benefit of the doubt. The individual elements of the costume have lost enough of their original meaning that a designer could plausibly assemble them without recognizing that they once belonged to a caricature of a particular people.

But the cultural memory of minstrelsy remains strong enough that once the connection was pointed out, the resemblance was clear enough to make pulling it the right call.

We retain a similar sensitivity to the old caricatures of most ethnic groups, even when the stereotypes themselves have receded from everyday life. But there is one old American caricature that has become so detached from the people it once mocked that most of us no longer recognize it as an ethnic caricature at all.

Hillbilly Highway

Walk into almost any big-box store or scroll online retailers this month, and you will find it: the frayed overalls, the missing front tooth, the corncob pipe, and a jug of moonshine. A quick Google search shows that “trailer park,” “redneck,” and “hillbilly” costumes abound. You can even dress as Joe Dirt, Ricky from "Trailer Park Boys," or Joe Exotic from "Tiger King."

No corporate statement has ever called such costumes “especially hurtful.” No brand has ever pulled any one of them and promised to look closely at how it happened. It's simply a costume built on the presumed backwardness, dirtiness, and moral degeneracy of the people once called “hillbillies,” sold with little awareness of the history behind the stereotype.

That history includes a largely forgotten mass migration — and the prejudice and discrimination that followed it. At roughly the same time that millions of black Southerners were heading north and west in the Great Migration, another vast movement was under way. Historian Max Fraser estimates that as many as 8 million whites left the Southern countryside for the factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest, along what became known as the “Hillbilly Highway.”

And that was only part of a much larger exodus. Historian James Gregory estimates that nearly 20 million white Southerners left the South over the course of the 20th century, compared with close to 8 million black Southerners. Yet while the Great Migration became a familiar part of the American historical narrative, the parallel movement of white Southerners largely faded from national memory.

Southern man

My own family were part of that migration, moving from Western Kentucky to Gary, Indiana, in the 1950s. They weren’t hillbillies, technically — Western Kentucky sits roughly 300 miles from Appalachia — but that distinction meant little once they got north. To the people already there, a Southern accent did all the sorting a map wouldn’t.

That the migration was remarkably successful seems hardly to have mattered. Chad Berry’s oral histories of the Southern whites who migrated to Midwestern mill and factory towns found that most achieved the economic stability they had sought, even as their new neighbors continued to stereotype them as violent, drunken, lazy, unclean, and sexually dissolute.

Richard Dorson captured the prejudice in "Land of the Millrats," his study of the industrial communities around Gary. Driving through nearby Whiting with a local man named Ed, Dorson was told why trailers carried a particular stigma: “This is a Southern white area. Hillbillies live in the trailers. So there's prejudice attached to trailers, 'cause that was the first housing available to Southern whites in the community. So trailer equals hillbilly.”

The prejudice could have more tangible consequences. Historian Anthony Harkins found that job listings announcing “No Southerners need apply” and restaurants refusing to serve “hillbillies” were not uncommon in Northern cities receiving Appalachian migrants.

Gabriel Gigliotti

White trash

But the contempt those migrants encountered in the North had much older roots. For generations, poverty among rural Southern whites had been treated not simply as an economic condition but as evidence of something wrong with the people themselves.

In her book "White Trash," historian Nancy Isenberg traces that tradition from colonial descriptions of the poor as “waste people” through the antebellum contempt for the supposed moral failings of “poor white trash” and into eugenic theories that treated poverty and “feeble-mindedness” as hereditary defects.

Appalachian journalist James Branscome made this case explicitly more than 50 years ago, in a 1971 manifesto called "Annihilating the Hillbillly." By portraying Appalachians as backward, ignorant, and responsible for their own poverty, he argued, coal operators, government agencies, and the national media diverted attention from the economic arrangements that had enriched outsiders while leaving much of the region poor.

The hillbilly, in other words, provided a convenient explanation for poverty: The problem was the people. And when millions of those people left the rural South, found industrial work, and built more prosperous lives elsewhere, the stereotype followed them anyway.

Yokels only

Today the hillbilly survives mostly as a seemingly harmless comic trope. The caricature migrated from comic strips like "Snuffy Smith" and "Li'l Abner" to television's "Hee Haw" and "The Beverly Hillbillies." More recently it was "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" and "Duck Dynasty." Cletus and Brandine Spuckler are still turning up on new episodes of "The Simpsons," more than 30 years after Springfield introduced its "slack-jawed yokel."

It might be harder to laugh if we still connected those characters to the people the caricature once described.

The history isn't particularly ancient. In 1958, Time quoted sociologists describing poor Southern whites as “vicious” and more difficult to assimilate than other minority groups. A Wayne University survey of Detroit residents published in 1952 found “poor Southern whites; hill-billies” the second-most frequently named group when residents were asked which people were “not good to have in the city.” Twenty-one percent named them, compared with 13% who named black residents; only “criminals and gangsters,” at 26%, ranked higher.

These were the people who left Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for the mills of Gary and East Chicago and the auto plants of Detroit. They didn't bring backwardness north with them. They brought labor. Many found the economic security they had gone looking for and became part of the working class that built the industrial Midwest.

Eventually, they also became less visible. Their children and grandchildren lost the accents, left the trailer parks, moved into the middle class, and blended into the rest of America. The people disappeared into the country while the character remained behind.

That is the history the Halloween costume no longer evokes.

None of this requires another corporate apology. But corporate sensitivity reveals something in what it notices — and what it doesn't. Some old caricatures still carry a social cost. Others remain fair game.

I don't know what my own family heard when they migrated more than 300 miles north to Gary. They're gone now, and they didn't leave that part written down. That's part of the point. The costume survived. Their story didn't.

REVIEW: 'The Color of Money'

The Color of Money is not the best film in its three leads' bodies of work (meaning costars Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, alongside director Martin Scorsese). That would be—reader objections expected—The Sting for Newman, Collateral for Cruise, and Goodfellas for Scorsese. Nor is it the most impressive entry in each man's catalogue: Newman's alcoholic ambulance chaser in The Verdict and Cruise's pickup artist-slash-motivational speaker in Magnolia represent two actors at the peak of their powers, while Raging Bull is Scorsese's true technical masterpiece. But The Color of Money occupies a genuinely important place in each of their careers.

The post REVIEW: 'The Color of Money' appeared first on .

Director finds faith in the wild with Brad Pitt’s ‘Heart of the Beast’

David Ayer took a Zen-like approach to his canine lead actor.

The veteran director behind “Fury,” “End of Watch,” and “The Beekeeper” worked extensively with Uber, a German Shepherd at the heart of his new film.

'I feel like traditional storytelling is going to have its place more than ever now, in values and ways of living that bring hope. I think audiences really respond to that.'

Uber plays a wounded combat dog named Odin fighting for survival alongside fellow veteran Brad Pitt in “Heart of the Beast,” which hits theaters today. And making sure Uber hit his marks took the patience of Job.

'Trained' actor

“The dog’s wonderful and capable and trained and really in his own way a character actor ... but not necessarily the most cooperative,” Ayer tells Blaze News. “You learn to accept the dog as a dog is ... it’s a real lesson in patience and also acceptance and surrender to the situation.”

Pitt’s character, seeking solace after years in combat, crashes his small plane in the Alaskan forests. That leaves him and his faithful companion struggling to survive in inhospitable terrain.

“I’ve always been inspired by Jack London and tales of wilderness and survival,” he says of his initial reaction to the script. “This had something deeper, the connection with the dog ... these parental relationships. This idea is that no matter what, I’m going to protect you and keep you safe."

The story struck something within Ayer.

“I lost my father at a young age. Something in the script brought up that grief, allowed me to look at it in a different way. ... It really broke my heart open in a way it hadn’t been before,” he says.

Spiritual endurance

“Heart of the Beast” isn’t a faith-based movie, but the director sees the story in deeply spiritual terms.

“These things we carry in our hearts, the damage that life and the world that it is can do to us ... it’s important to have hope, important to have faith, something outside of yourself. If you sit in your pain, it can overwhelm us,” he says, adding the film is a “simple portrait of spiritual endurance.”

To get there, Pitt met with military veterans to prepare to play his character, a soldier adjusting to civilian life on his own terms.

“He sat there with a notebook, hearing their stories ... what they felt and what they carried, the successes and the loss and the wisdom, the life wisdom they gained from these experiences,” Ayer says. His star, who he previously collaborated with on “Fury,” didn’t put on any A-list airs.

“There’s movie stars who are movie stars. Brad’s an actor first ... he was throwing himself down on the ground again and again [for select scenes] ... shivering on set, refusing to warm up so he could stay in it. He became a leader for us,” the director recalls.

Faith forward

Ayer’s work reflects a complicated bond with law enforcement (“Dark Blue,” “End of Watch”), but it’s also impressively diverse. Think vigilante romps (“The Beekeeper,” “A Working Man”), Superhero fare (“Suicide Squad”), and sci-fi adventures (“Bright”).

He sees his film choices as an evolution, showing people who are “broken in the world and how we fix that in ourselves.”

“In order to heal, we have to move heart first,” he says. “One of the most important things to have in our hearts is faith, that becomes the mechanism through which we can really endure everything.”

Ayer is one of Hollywood’s busiest directors, and he suspects he’ll soon have company in the filmmaking space.

“As technology evolves, it’s going to give more people access to tell more stories,” he says, a change that could bring mid-level movies back in vogue. The industry currently binges on big-budget IP films and micro-indies, but he envisions a return to the “amazing middle ground” of movies like “Pretty Woman” and “Jerry Maguire” that once captivated audiences.

That, in turn, could spark another positive trend.

“You look at the success of Hollywood, and for 100 years, we were really a great cultural ambassador to the world and showing an aspirational lifestyle, an aspirational way of being in the world,” he says. “If you look at the current slates ... not everything has been in that more traditional vein. I feel like traditional storytelling is going to have its place more than ever now, in values and ways of living that bring hope. I think audiences really respond to that.”

Don’t Bring Iced Coffee To A Job Interview And, Men, Don’t Order Fruity Cocktails On A Date

What a person drinks, and when he drinks it, says a lot. For men on a date or with friends, it's either bourbon or beer.

The last mile of a Wisconsin trucker

On July 31, 2026, a buddy of mine whom I’ve had on my podcast, a fellow trucker who really put down the miles and kept this country fed, turned over his last mile and passed on to the great truck stop in the sky.

Kevin Kenneth Koehnke died as he lived, out on the road and working, a lifestyle he hardly strayed from in his four decades over the road. Kevin had some kind of health episode immediately after completing a delivery in San Jose, California. An ambulance came to get him from his customer’s driveway, and he didn’t make it to the hospital. Kevin was only 64 years old.

'Awww, when I got to the yard, they had a hot load going down to Pennsylvania and they asked me to go, so I took it. Sorry, Gordo.'

Man of many hats

I came to know Kevin, like so many other people in my life these days, from the internet. At some point a few years ago, selfies Kevin was posting on Facebook began to be copied and were circulated around various corners of the internet, often with commentary attached written by posters who were imagining what someone who looked like Kevin would say, and were congruous with the custom-made trucker caps that Kevin had become known for.

Kevin Koehnke

There was an incongruity to Kevin’s habit of printing these hats, which come off as abrasive and unnecessarily inflammatory to some; by all accounts, Kevin was a very warm and talkative guy who really liked people and had friends all over the country. There is an innocent quality to these photos that Kevin took of himself that I believe connected with people at a deeper level than the sort of online meme legend that grew around him. That said, the memes followed the messaging on the hats, and once unleashed on Twitter, they touched a particular nerve.

x.com/Tha_Big_Dog

Conversation with a 'Bub'

I’m a follower and friend of the poster "Big Sib," who first introduced me to these images of Kevin, and I became intrigued by the guy. Being a trucker myself, I’m familiar with the type that spends a lot of time on the road and, in times past, perhaps consumed a little too much AM radio, which provided a weird mental placeholder for the "normal" lives one cannot live while out over the road. Sib seemed to channel a particular "Bub" working-class outlook in the commentary he added to Kevin’s photos, especially those of Kevin enjoying a hard-earned meal, and it all sort of worked. Sib was one of the guys who helped Kevin become somewhat infamous online.

At some point I decided to try to seek Kevin out and invite him on my podcast, and sure enough, his contact details were found on a Facebook post he had made of his business card. I made a few phone calls and got in touch with him, and he agreed to come on my show, which you can listen to right here or on most podcast players of your choice.

Kevin Koehnke

Kevin had stopped at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop to call in and speak with me, and he filled my listeners in on much of his life story, from working on his parents' cabbage farm in Wisconsin as a kid, where he came into contact with the type of truckers made famous in films like "Smokey and the Bandit," through his life on the road, to various adventures and misadventures with police, abusive employers, and friends along the highway who helped him out when times were tough. It’s a fun listen and one of the most downloaded episodes of my podcast. You will also hear a lot about truck stop food and the types of freight Kevin hauled.

'Just like his dad'

When I received news of Kevin’s passing, I asked to be put in touch with his family by the folks at the Konrad-Behlman funeral home, who have been helping them along at this time. I’ve had a couple of phone calls with his mom, Pat, who is pretty spry and a great conversationalist at the ripe old age of 86. She had listened to the podcast at some point as well and got quite a chuckle out of it.

”Kevin told some pretty tall tales,” she said, laughing. “He certainly was not born in the cab of his father’s dump truck. I spent 24 hours in labor trying to push him out.”

Pat did mention that much of Kevin’s career was spent away from home and family and that he was indeed a very high miler. When Kevin’s father died, Kevin couldn’t be there and was a day and a half late getting home.

”Kevin was just like his dad — loved being on the road. Before we bought the farm, his father would drive the dump truck all day and then hop in an 18-wheeler at night for another company and run up to northern Michigan and back overnight. He often only lived on two or three hours of sleep.”

Pat tells me that Kevin worked for about 10 different companies throughout his career, and a certain pattern emerges from her confirmation about things he told me on the show. Kevin is what we in the industry call a "runner," a guy who basically lives in his truck, works his tail off, and almost never goes home. As of 2023 when Kevin came on the podcast, he told me that he had worked for 17 years straight, mostly only ever taking the mandatory 34-hour reset periods truckers are subject to under Hours of Service regulations. So no weekends, no going home, living in the truck, putting miles behind him as he crisscrossed the nation he loved so much.

The problem with "runners" is that trucking companies become dependent on them, reliable as they are, but often do not return much in the way of gratitude for all that hard work and sacrifice. Kevin told me he was fired from one company after requesting four days off to go visit family, being told he could take it, but when the time came, they wanted him to keep going. He had put over 1 million, 300,000 miles on one truck for that particular outfit and was thrown out the door as replaceable. This in an industry that has been whining about a supposed shortage of truckers since the mid-1980s. The real shortage, in Kevin’s case, was making it home for Christmas or almost anything else important.

Anadolu/Getty Images

No days off

I invited Kevin to join my friends and me at the Mid-America Trucking Show in March 2024 and even managed to get him a media pass, which comes with access to a room with catered breakfast and lunch, something he would have taken full advantage of. I told everyone that he was coming, and there was quite a bit of anticipation about "Uncle Kevin" or "the Big Dog" coming to MATS. Having never met him in person, I was pretty pumped about getting to meet the guy myself.

Kevin told me months prior that he had booked the time off and that he was most likely going to rent a car and drive down to Louisville from his company's yard up in Michigan. When I arrived at MATS, Kevin was nowhere to be found, and it took me a little while to get ahold of him on the phone.

”Awww, when I got to the yard, they had a hot load going down to Pennsylvania and they asked me to go, so I took it. Sorry, Gordo.”

He sounded almost embarrassed on the phone, as if he knew he had let me down.

”But they knew you were coming here. What the hell, man?”

”You know how it is. No one wants to work, and I couldn’t say no.”

No one wants to work. An eternal Boomerism.

I’m not sure if his excuse was true or not, but it followed a pattern set by himself and his previous employers. Being a runner becomes a lifestyle for a certain kind of trucker, a badge of honor for being institutionalized to the truck. Kevin was 61 years old at that time and had never been married, no kids, and he didn’t see his family much.

Kevin’s mom, Pat, was not surprised by the MATS story.

”I haven’t seen Kevin in 15 years. He doesn’t come home.”

Heavy load

On my podcast, Kevin relayed the story of how he hurt one of his big toes, but didn’t think too much of it and kept on working. Eventually it got so bad that he had to stop and have surgery to prevent gangrene at a hospital near Atlanta, Georgia, pretty far from Wisconsin. He took a couple of months off afterward to recover at his friend's place in Michigan, and that may have been one of the only, if not the only, vacation the man ever had.

Kevin turned 64 on June 13 of this year, and Pat tells me that four days later, Kevin was in the hospital with pneumonia, having water in his lungs. The type of trucking lifestyle he led was clearly not good for his health. Once he recovered, he went straight back to work, taking little oxygen bottles in the truck to help him breathe. Pat is not sure whether Kevin lied to his employers about being fit to return or if they looked the other way, or perhaps failed to engage in any due diligence on a driver returning to duty. I contacted them to ask a few questions about what went down, and their head safety guy said it was "not their place to discuss a personal matter."

Well, a man died on the job under their employ, and I doubt they would give a stock answer like that to an investigator from OSHA or the Workers Compensation Board.

It seems to me that Kevin Koehnke was one of these guys who had some kind of hurt deep inside him and either ignored it or escaped it by just staying on the road. Many Old Hands know such a person, and to be honest, its an easy way out that I myself have undertook in the past. Always working long hours away from home is a good way to let the sleeping dogs lie, but a bad way to manage your own mental health. This scheme is then compounded by employers who take full advantage of the situation, almost like a drug dealer who is always there with the next hit to soothe the pain.

The trucking industry makes a good show of highlighting health and safety, managing hours of service, trying to color between the lines where so many shady operators do not, and end up as part of the steady stream of collisions and chaos on our newsfeeds. But it strikes me that the business is also opportunistic in its use and abuse of runners like Kevin and failing to ask why such a nice man would just keep on working like that, never saying no, always getting it done no matter the cost to his own health — mental and physical — or the cost to relationships with family.

"Having an intervention" is a phrase often tossed around for those with serious problems like addiction. Maybe interventions are needed for the runners like Kevin.

Save me a seat at that truck stop in the sky, Kevin. I’ll be there sooner or later, too, and I’ll be darned if you won’t need a hug.

*******

Pat Koehnke tells me they have yet to see any of Kevin’s personal items returned to them, including his phone or his wallet with all of his ID. If anyone has intel on Kevin’s things, please email me at gordilocks@protonmail.com, and I will see to it that you are connected with his family.

He was cremated in California and thus made easier to ship home, obviating the need for assistance from an organization like Truckers Final Mile, which assists families in retrieving the bodies of loved ones who pass on the road but whose companies refuse to help with getting them back home. It tells you something about certain players in this industry that such an organization exists at all.

You can read Kevin’s official obituary here. There are links to leave a message about Kevin or purchase a memorial tree at the link above.

And make sure you reach out and say hello to someone distant. You never know what they might be going through or how much it would make their day to hear from you.

This essay originally appeared in the Autonomous Truck(er)s Substack.

Nick Vujicic: A living refutation of abortion's culture of death

There are some people whose lives make you reconsider the way you’re living your own.

Nick Vujicic is one of them.

We live in a culture increasingly comfortable deciding which lives are worth living.

Born in Australia without arms or legs, Vujicic faced challenges few of us can imagine. Even with the love and support of his family, bullying, loneliness, and depression took a heavy toll. By the age of 10, he had sunk so deeply into despair that he contemplated taking his own life.

But Nick soon found something stronger than despair: hope in his Christian faith.

He came to understand that his life was not a mistake and that his disability didn’t rob him of meaning or purpose.

Vujicic went on to become an international best-selling author, husband, father, and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the world. His 2013 appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s "Lifeclass" introduced his story to a global audience. To date, he’s spoken in person to 11 million people across 87 countries.

Now his journey comes to theaters Friday in the documentary "No Limbs, No Limits: The NickV Story." The film traces Nick’s struggle with anger, depression, and hopelessness — and his discovery that life is worth living because every person has value and purpose.

That message could hardly come at a better time.

Search for meaning

Across the Western world, we are living through a crisis of loneliness and a search for meaning. Young people are more connected technologically than any generation in history, yet many feel profoundly isolated.

Who am I? Why am I here? What difference can one person make?

Nick has spent much of his adult life answering those questions.

His answer is simple: You matter. Your life has value. You were made for a purpose.

Our limitations, disappointments, and wounds do not determine our worth. The challenge is to recognize our value and decide what we will do with the life we have been given.

That’s one reason Nick’s story resonates so deeply with me.

Redefining perseverance

I first heard of him in 2009 when he co-starred in "The Butterfly Circus," a short film starring and produced by my friend Eduardo Verastegui. I was intrigued by this young man with no arms or legs who could swim better and faster than I could.

And I say that as a marathoner.

Running marathons has taught me something about perseverance, but watching Nick navigate life without limbs quickly puts my own physical challenges into perspective.

I began following him on social media. Over the years, I watched Nick marry, become a dad, and continue showing millions of people that what we lack does not define who we are.

His life declares that no human being is a mistake. No life is disposable. No person should be judged by what they cannot do or whether that life meets somebody else’s definition of “quality.”

Every person is unique and unrepeatable.

And every person can make a difference.

That message desperately needs to be heard today.

Culture of death

We live in a culture increasingly comfortable deciding which lives are worth living. Nowhere is that more apparent than with abortion, particularly when an unborn child has been diagnosed with a disability or genetic condition.

A troubling prenatal diagnosis can be devastating, as it was for Nick’s parents. In that moment, fear can quickly take over: This child’s life will be difficult. The family will suffer. Perhaps it would be better if this life never began at all.

Nick Vujicic is a living refutation of that philosophy.

Imagine trying to measure the value of Nick’s future before he had even been born.

No arms. No legs. What could he possibly accomplish?

The answer: more than most of us could have imagined.

That question has particular urgency for me because I live in Virginia, where voters this fall will consider a constitutional amendment expanding the so-called right to abortion. The truth is that our broader abortion culture too often treats disability, dependency, and difficult circumstances as reasons to question whether a life should continue.

Against that backdrop comes Nick Vujicic.

Some ask whether a life will be too difficult, too dependent, or too burdensome.

Nick’s life asks a different question: What if we give that child a chance? A chance to surprise us. A chance to love and be loved. A chance to become a husband or wife, a father or mother — or someone whose words might one day save another person’s life.

Joel Nito/Getty Images

Finding purpose

That is why "No Limbs, No Limits" arrives at precisely the right moment.

The film doesn’t pretend Nick’s journey was easy. He knew rejection, anger, depression, and loneliness. He knew what it was to wonder whether his life was worth living.

Then he discovered that suffering did not have the final word.

Faith did.

Purpose did.

Love did.

Nick’s story makes me admire human life more deeply — disabled and able-bodied alike. It also makes me examine my own.

I run marathons. I have arms. I have legs. I have opportunities Nick could only have dreamed about as a boy.

Am I using them?

Am I loving enough? Serving enough? Am I grateful for another morning, another mile, another opportunity to make a difference?

In an age of loneliness, Nick Vujicic reminds us that no one is unnecessary.

In an age of despair, he reminds us that circumstances are not destiny.

And in an age searching for meaning, he offers an answer our culture badly needs to hear: Your life has value. Your life has purpose. Now go find it.

Is college even fun any more?

The day I left for college was easily the most exciting day of my life.

First, I was going to the East Coast. I had been raised in Portland, Oregon, which was a pleasant, normal town to grow up in.

I think of my own parents watching me board that airplane in 1979. How excited I was. How bittersweet — and yet satisfying — for them that I was getting this incredible opportunity.

But to be back east! Near Boston and New York! To live where it snowed in the winter and the leaves turned colors in the fall.

East Coast people were smart and sophisticated. The men wore suits; the women wore high heels. People took trains from city to city, like in the movies.

A big music fan, I imagined myself hanging around at CBGB or Newbury Comics in Boston.

Everything about the East seemed intellectual, fashionable, advanced and elevated. I couldn’t wait to get there.

The Prestige

Secondly, the school I was going to was highly rated! It would be full of smart and interesting students from all over the country. Hopefully, I could keep up or at least wouldn’t embarrass myself.

But when I arrived — in 1979 — I found I wasn’t as lucky as I thought. My particular college was at the vanguard of pre-woke “political correctness.”

The professors were all former 1960s radicals. Feminism was on the rise. Activist students were constantly “outraged” by the most insignificant things. Anything non-PC was “abhorrent” or “egregious.”

Classic American college

Fortunately, there were some normal kids there too. I joined a popular campus band my freshman year and traveled to less-annoying colleges to play dances and parties.

Just being that age and being part of that East Coast collegiate culture was incredibly fun: exploring this older, more historic part of the country. Meeting all kinds of people. Making all kinds of friends.

As people were fond of saying: “College is the best four years of your life.” Which at the time seemed undeniable.

The anxiety of higher learning

Because of this, at the end of every summer, I watch various friends and acquaintances prepare to send their kids to college.

But I can tell by their faces and the way they talk that this is not the experience it once was. The parents are worried. The kids seem hesitant. Everyone is thinking about rising costs, scholarships, loans, and career considerations.

Going to college is not the freeing and exhilarating experience it once was. Now it is a business decision. A risk vs. reward scenario.

Strong and wrong

Besides being insanely expensive, most universities have become strongholds of leftism, feminism, and DEI sensibilities. Censorship is rampant. Woke-ism is brutally enforced.

Now, the main goal of college life is to avoid “harm,” prevent “trauma,” and create “safe environments.”

College is no longer a chance to spread your wings. It’s not about intellectual exploration and personal growth. For most people, it is a pathway to a career.

For men, that means studying engineering, computer science, and math. So they can build things.

For women, it means gender studies, sociology, and whatever ideological subjects are trending at the moment. So they can manage people.

98 Degrees

College is now a slog. Something to get through. “A degree” is the main objective. A bigger paycheck is the ultimate goal.

If you’re a white male, your college will likely find you guilty of something. You will be forced to acknowledge that guilt and show repentance.

You will also be expected to step aside to let disadvantaged groups go ahead of you, to make up for your sins of the past.

If you don’t step aside, you will be run over. Or reported. Or #metooed.

L-R: The author in East Berlin, 1984; Cuba, 2007. Blake Nelson; Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Demography is destiny

Rapid demographic change is also reshaping higher education. College is no longer a gathering of young people who share a similar culture and background.

Now, every culture in the world is at your school. And often in the same or greater numbers than you are.

At the same time, your own traditions are devalued. Core Western civilization courses are now considered problematic.

As a consequence, many people advise high school graduates to reconsider a liberal arts education altogether. They urge young men to go to trade schools or other specialized forms of practical education.

Thank you, Mom and Dad!

I don’t know what I would do if I had a child just graduating from high school.

I think of my own parents watching me board that airplane in 1979. How excited I was. How bittersweet — and yet satisfying — for them that I was getting this incredible opportunity.

Now what does that scene look like? Anxious parents. Stressed-out kids. More pressure. Less adventure. All of it heartbreaking.

The future belongs to people who believe in one

The future will be different from today.

The cars will be different. The clothes will probably look worse. Our phones might still be little black bricks with touch screens, but there will be new applications and new platforms for the dissemination of information. Some cities will grow, some will shrink, new suburbs will be built, and already dying small towns will finally collapse.

There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop.

We have a tendency to imagine the future as essentially the present but a little farther away, with some higher numbers at the end of the date.

But nothing stays the same forever.

People grow old and die. New people are born. And the people who inhabit the future won't simply have different names from the people alive today. In some important ways, they will be different kinds of people, because they will disproportionately be the descendants of the people who chose to have children now.

The end of the something

We are, in some way, at the end of something, even though we can't clearly see it yet.

The fertility collapse is too big, includes too much of the developed world, and is happening over too long a period of time for us to perceive the whole thing at once. The world's population is still growing, but fertility has fallen below replacement level across much of the world, and dozens of countries have already reached their peak populations.

People aren't having kids like they used to. Or, more precisely, certain people aren't having kids like they used to.

In America, liberals are having fewer children than conservatives. A 2026 study using decades of General Social Survey data found a widening fertility divide by political orientation, with the difference becoming especially pronounced among more recent generations.

Another recent survey found conservatives reporting 1.40 children on average compared with 1.09 for liberals. That sounds like a small gap until you realize it amounts to nearly 30% more children — and demographic differences compound with every generation.

Running on empty

The average secular, centrist Democrat Boomer might have had two kids in 1982 because that's just what you did. Today, his kids might have dogs.

We don’t yet see the impacts of the asymmetrical population collapse because we are still at the very tail end of secular liberals reproducing. But eventually the tail will disappear, the gas will run out, the engine will slow, and we will see a future of different people.

Sometimes I meet with older people who never had children or older secular centrist Democrats who had two kids but whose children haven’t decided to do the same. I wonder if they are able to see the self-eliminating tendencies of their general worldview or if they give any thought to why exactly their children haven’t chosen to become parents as they did and if, perhaps, in hindsight they might reflect that there were flaws in raising them the way they did.

Sometimes I find myself someplace where the average age is 64, and I wonder if the people realize what that means. It’s not that they should be lying awake at night sweating bullets because they aren’t replacing themselves. We can only do so much in this world, and some problems are bigger than us. But I do wonder if they realize that the future will be different in part due to their choices regarding procreation and child-rearing.

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Why bother?

There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop. So we who have children today have them for deeper reasons. Sometimes they are outwardly religious ones, like the imperative to be fruitful and multiply. Sometimes they are less religious ones based loosely on culture or love of family. And sometimes it’s just hundreds of little signals that add up gradually to form a general attitude toward family life.

“We’d love to have more.”

If you are in the conservative world in any way, this is a phrase you are well acquainted with. You have heard it said too many times to count, and you have probably said it quite a few times yourself. It’s just what you say after a conversation about a baby, a new car to accommodate another kid, or any other funny story about family life.

It’s a short little sentence, but it being a sort of default thing to respond with very acutely illuminates the difference between the liberal world and the conservative one in 2026.

In the liberal world, this is not a phrase that is uttered naturally. There is no presumption that (of course!) you want more children. At best, children are viewed neutrally, and at worst, they are considered kind of a buzzkill for what could be a life of “freedom” and higher earning potential. On that side of the political world, it is simply not a cultural assumption that children are a blessing and the more the better.

Betting on the future

But that attitude is dying, literally. It doesn’t seem like it yet, I know. It’s slow. We are still over-saturated with young people born to the types that wouldn’t have kids today. We are still in the middle of that very long population bottleneck, and the ship is still coasting though the gas has just about run out.

But over time — a very long period of time — the attitudes of those who don’t care for a world of children will slowly dissipate and become less potent. They are self-eliminating, after all. That’s not opinion; it’s a cold fact of reality that we all see clearly now. The only people who will exist in the future will be people born to those who believed children are good, that the more life there is, the better, and the future should be one that is full of humans.

I’m optimistic.