Steve Deace unveils the ONE statistic that proves we’ve lost our culture



Americans are increasingly worried about skyrocketing housing costs, declining birth rates, and a generation of young adults struggling to reach traditional milestones. But according to BlazeTV host Steve Deace, those problems are merely symptoms of something much bigger.

“There’s a lot of things that we are pointing to in our culture right now as symptoms, and we’re at many times trying to do symptom masking,” Deace says on the “Steve Deace Show.”

While the reaction to a symptom is often just to treat it and “provide a patient or in this case a culture immediate relief,” the issue is that the underlying disease is not actually being treated.

One symptom America is facing is that the percentage of men and women getting married and owning a home by the age of 30 has declined from more than half the country in the 1960s to just 12% today.


“In 1950, that was half of the country. In 1962, the number actually went up to more than half. That was 52%. 1970, relatively stable, 48%. 1980, we start to see a little bit of slippage now, 45%. But the 80s held things still,” Deace explains. “The ’80s did a great job of treating symptoms.”

While Deace notes that he loves Ronald Reagan, “the ’80s gave us amnesty.”

“And the immigration policy that is threatening to wreck America today ... its origin, its genesis, is the Reagan amnesty of ’86,” he says, explaining that Reagan also signed the 1986 vaccine indemnity act.

“That put us on the very path we’ve been on with Big Pharma ever since,” he says.

And now, only 12% of Americans are getting married and buying homes by the age of 30.

“You could get a $500,000 mortgage, 30-year fixed rate, for $2,100 bucks a month in America in 2021. Today that amount is $3,200 a month on average,” he says.

But it's not just housing costs and immigration.

“It’s more likely that a woman in her 40s will be married and pregnant than a woman who is 19 for the first time in American history,” Deace says, explaining that this “sadly fits into the overall trend line.”

“Fifty years ago in this country, it was way more likely a 19-year-old woman was going to be married with a kid than a 42-year-old woman was going to be having a kid. Way more likely. And when you throw in these other cultural trends now, it is more likely a 30-year-old man will still be living at home with a parent than living in a home with a wife and a kid,” he says.

“This is death-of-a-culture stuff,” he continues, adding that this is the “disease.”

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Fertility has a silent assassin — and it’s everywhere



After a decades-long decline, America is now in the throes of the worst fertility crisis in our nation’s history. A record number of people are not having children.

The big question is why?

Certainly the answer is multifaceted, but there’s one undeniable driver behind America’s as well as nearly every other country’s declining birth rates, says Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies: the iPhone.

On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman speak with Stone about how our most pervasive technology is wrecking the world’s fertility numbers.


While there are many drivers behind globally declining birth rates — infertility issues, financial difficulties, a genuine desire to have fewer children, and even a desire to have no children at all — iPhones, says Stone, are “little sterilization boxes that we all carry in our pockets.”

But it’s not a literal sterilization — “The research suggests that the radiation from them is actually harmless,” Stone says — but rather a social sterilization.

“[Smartphones] change how we socialize together. ... Social media replaces in-person interaction; reading stuff online replaces in-person interaction, replaces intermediation in the physical world,” he explains.

“Increasingly, it's not just that people have fewer babies; they have fewer first kisses; they have fewer one-night stands; they have fewer dinner parties; they have fewer every kind of social interaction ... and so as social media and cell phones are just killing life together,” he adds.

This isn’t just speculation either. The data shows a major decline in face-to-face interaction starting in 2008 — just one year after the first iPhone hit the market.

Before 2008, fertility rates across the world would ebb and flow depending on a variety of circumstances, but following the invention of the iPhone, they’ve stayed consistently low, Stone explains.

The social isolation caused by the iPhone has resulted in a decline in marriage rates, which directly impacts birth rates.

Interestingly, statistics show that people who do marry young are having the amount of children they desire.

“There's no gap between desired fertility and actual fertility on average for people who marry before age 26,” says Stone.

Further, countries that have “religious prohibitions” on iPhone usage for extended periods of the day have also maintained higher birth rates.

“So Israel with Shabbat or Muslim countries, where we know from cellphone data everybody turns off their cell phone for 20 minutes five times a day ... still have high fertility,” says Stone.

iPhones, he explains, essentially turn off “the part of our brain that's supposed to know your tribe and recognize your tribe and really want to have sex with your tribe.”

Simultaneously, it supplies “an endless stream of porn” to keep people sexually satiated without producing children.

To hear more about the factors behind the world’s declining birth rate, watch the full interview above.

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Want to improve the birth rate? Stop being so harsh on mothers.



In their quest to make motherhood great again, conservatives have set a very high bar for those wanting to make a go of it. Enter the all-or-nothing mother.

She must breastfeed baby, and if she’s unable to produce milk for whatever reason, she’s just not trying hard enough. She can’t leave baby in a crib, or sleep-train baby, or leave baby alone with his father or extended family, because Mama must be with baby at all times, lest she give baby a lifetime of attachment-related trauma.

Rather than purity-spiraling and leading the birth rate into further decline, conservatives could simply tell women the truth: that they can relax, because there are a thousand different ways to be a good mother.

She must feed baby exclusively organic food, but she can’t have a job to help her afford it — that might require the ultimate dereliction of maternal duty: day care.

Not that preschool, full-day kindergarten, or half-day kindergarten is much better. Come to think of it, homeschooling is really the only path for any mother who cares about her children. And so on and so forth.

Domestic girlbosses

In theory, such all-or-nothing motherhood applies the tightly wound, busy-busy-busy culture of high-status, white-collar professions to the domestic sphere — where the stakes are the lives and souls of one’s own children, far greater than corporate presentations and spreadsheets ever could be!

And yet, in practice, this vision of motherhood makes it seem intolerable — not to mention impossible — to the only audience that matters: impressionable young women and girls. Far from convincing them of the value of motherhood, making motherhood out to be an all-or-nothing ordeal makes young women wonder if the feminists really were right, if being a mother is incompatible with being a full person.

I say this as a member of that demographic: I’m 23 years old and single, and while I am quite conservative and have always wanted children, I’m surrounded primarily by moderate to liberal, professional-class women my age who don’t know what they want.

Child-hating hags?

My peers, for the most part, aren’t the child-hating, travel-obsessed hags they’re all too often made out to be by conservative media — they happen to actually like children, sometimes in spite of themselves.

While some of their apprehension toward motherhood is absolutely driven by a culture that eggs on adult narcissism and extended adolescence, much of it is driven by the opposite extreme: the expectation that not only will they have to give up their friends, their hobbies, and their careers when they have children, but they will have to become completely dependent on their husbands for their financial and social life and will spend every moment hovering over their children with no self left besides “mother.”

When young women feel like motherhood is all or nothing, that either you stay “child-free” and keep yourself or become a mother and lose yourself, is it any wonder they’re choosing to keep themselves in greater numbers?

More time to spare

While this failure to create tolerable motherhood norms is nonpartisan — it’s telling, for instance, that conservative mothering and hippie mothering have basically become one and the same — conservatives have a special responsibility here.

After all, unlike liberals, conservatives are interested in getting more women to have more children. Instead of tilting at the windmill of middle-class maternal neglect, conservatives should acknowledge the reality that working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago, and yet children today are more anxious and less self-sufficient than ever before.

Conservatives would do well to keep in mind that women in traditional cultures have the proverbial village to help them raise their children, something American women, even those with traditional values, usually lack.

As a result, while many of the demands conservatives make of mothers ostensibly resemble traditional culture, they deviate from traditional culture in the one way that counts: Rather than enmeshing mothers in the fabric of society, over-intensive conservative mothering norms often alienate mothers from everyone else.

Love's legacy

Why drive mothers crazy — and deter would-be mothers from having children — all for the sake of what is essentially a neurotic, individualistic ideology that doesn’t even seem to improve children’s outcomes — and might actually make them worse?

Rather than purity-spiraling and leading the birth rate into further decline, conservatives could simply tell women the truth: that they can relax, because there are a thousand different ways to be a good mother. And that, when we think of our mothers as adults, we don't remember the lifestyle choices they made — day care or not, organic or not, home birth or not — but rather the love they gave us — the deep, unconditional love that only a mother can give.

Pope Francis compared to JD Vance after warning about declining birth rates: 'Law of death'



Pope Francis sparked criticism and comparisons with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance after commending Indonesians for continuing to have large families.

The pope has been touring southeastern Asia this week and made a stop in the cathedral in the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta on Wednesday to meet with outgoing President Joko Widodo and to address a crowd filled with nuns, clerics, lay Catholics, and others.

In 2020, America averaged just 1.6 births per woman, down significantly from an average of 3.6 births in the 1950s.

During his remarks, Pope Francis praised Indonesians for having families with "three, four, or five children." He called babies "the greatest richness that a nation can have" and slammed countries that effectively imposed "a law of death ... by limiting births."

The pontiff also lightheartedly insisted that Indonesia could serve as an "example" to other countries around the world, where some "families prefer to have a cat or a little dog instead of a child."

Pope Francis did not name any particular country that implicitly or overtly encourages pet ownership over parenting, though birth rates in Western countries have dropped sharply in recent decades. The United States, for instance, averaged just 1.6 births per woman in 2020, down significantly from an average of 3.6 births in the 1950s, the World Bank reported.

Additionally, fully 62% of Americans own at least one pet, and more than half of those pet owners believe their pets are as much a part of the family as human members, according to a Pew Research Poll published last year.

The pope has data on his side, but his comments nevertheless reminded some of the "childless cat ladies" comments previously made by Sen. Vance of Ohio.

In 2021, Vance, who is Catholic, told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the U.S. was under the control of Democrats, big corporations, and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too," per NPR.

In reporting on the pope's recent comments, The Hill published an article entitled "Pope Francis enters 'childless cat ladies' debate, praising Indonesians’ large families."

Other, less prominent individuals have made similar remarks on social media, the Daily Mail reported. A quick X search indicates that some users have indeed linked Pope Francis and Vance over their respective comments regarding children and cats, though X posts on the subject have remained almost completely obscure, receiving little or no interaction from other users.

The relevant clip of the pope's speech in Jakarta can be seen here.

Wednesday was not the first time Pope Francis spoke out against declining birth rates. At a conference in Rome back in May, he said, "Homes are filled with objects and emptied of children, becoming very sad places. There is no shortage of little dogs, cats, these are not lacking. There is a lack of children."

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has also sounded the alarm about low birth rates. In April, he tweeted that "if birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end."

Reuters noted that while Indonesian birth rates do surpass those of most Western countries, its birth rate is still declining.

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Elon Musk Finally Shares the Fear That Keeps Him Up at Night
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Elon Musk Finally Shares the Fear That Keeps Him Up at Night

PLUMMETING birth rates keep Elon Musk up at night



How do we solve the crises that are currently burdening America?

While Dave Rubin knows there are “some political ways,” like how “a certain orange man would be better than a certain man with dementia,” there are some more important, more tangible ways that are in your control.

“It’s find a mate and have a family. Start the basic building blocks of society, bottom up. The way your parents did it and your grandparents did it,” Rubin explains, adding, “the way civilization has done it for millennia.”

“If you start building a good family, you might be able to save civilization,” he says, and he’s not alone in his belief.

Elon Musk recently explained a similar concept to the Milken Institute after being asked what brings him joy and what keeps him up at night.

“I probably get the most joy from my kids, and I’m not saying that’s the reason to have kids because we should have them anyway, but certainly kids are the greatest source of joy in my life,” he answered.

“In terms of what keeps me up at night, I guess it’s anything that’s, like, I think a civilizational risk,” he said, adding, “The birth rates continuing to plummet. I do think about the birth rates plummeting as being a civilizational risk.”



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