A BARREN POLITY: The Future of the City Is Childless: America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.

Related: Birth rates hit record low for women in teens and 20s: ‘That’s a lot of empty kindergarten rooms.’

Until the 1960s, pretty much every successful society actively pressured people to have kids, and rewarded them for it. Since then, we’ve reversed the incentives. It’s not clear that this has made people happier. One of my colleagues, who has a bunch of kids, said that when he and his wife were first married they asked a lot of older couples what they liked and didn’t like after years of marriage. Nearly all of them said their biggest regret was not having more kids.

Related: The Parent Trap.

QUESTION ASKED: So Why Have Democrat Leaders Defended the Squad?

STEVE HAYWARD ON THE MOON AT 50:

But we shouldn’t underestimate how dramatically liberals turned against the Apollo project at the moment of its triumph—a sign of the larger collapse of liberalism in the 1960s.  The moon landing had been set out as a lofty goal by the liberals’ hero, John F. Kennedy, and the moon landing was an occasion of national pride and celebration for most Americans. Here, amidst the rubble and gloom of the 1960s, was something that had gone splendidly right.  Many leading liberals, however, could only sniff that while the moon landing was undeniably impressive, the money for the moon landing would have been better spent on social problems on Earth.  The popular cliché of the time went: “Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank].”  (The total cost of the decade-long moon landing project was less than three months’ worth of federal spending for social programs in 1969.)

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said that “The needs of the people on earth, and especially in this country, should have priority.  When we solve these problems, we can consider space efforts.” Even the brother of the man who issued the call to go to the moon, Sen. Ted Kennedy, expressed weariness with the space program: “I think after [the moon landing] the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

This may have been the moment when liberalism certified that it had become a crabbed and negative force in American life. It has never recovered.

It’s no coincidence that even as JFK’s vision was being made a reality in 1969, that the left were morphing into Progressives Against Progress: “Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.”

OPEN THREAD: Go.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Stand-Up Comedian Gets #Cancelled for Making Joke About Dead Rapper XXXTentacion.

You might think that in 2019, only white males like Louis CK and Johnny Depp can get #cancelled. But a young stand-up comic named Dina Hashem is proving that women of color can also be targeted by the roaming outrage mob. And she didn’t even sexually harass anybody. She just told a joke that hurt some people’s feelings.

Recently she made this joke about the rapper XXXTentacion, who was shot and killed last year:

“Is anyone still mourning XXXTentacion? He’s a rapper who was murdered. He’s dead now. He was shot. He was on his way to buy a car with $50,000 in cash and somebody shot him and took the money. Which is very tragic… but I also think it would be a very good Venmo commercial. That’s the first thing I thought when I heard that. Like, ‘I don’t have Venmo, I should get Venmo.'”

Now XXXTentacion’s fans and colleagues are angry, and they’re doxing Hashem and sending her death threats.

All comedy is conservative, to coin a phrase.

LIKE A LOT OF COLD WAR ERA SOVIET PROPAGANDA, IT’S WELL-CRAFTED: Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theory Lives On. Why?

It’s all Gramscian Damage. And by the way, if you’ve never followed the link and actually read the Gramscian Damage piece, you really should. It explains so much.

IT’S PARODY, OR IS IT REALLY? Least Masculine Society In Human History Decides Masculinity Is A Growing Threat.

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THOSE WHO ARE NO LONGER OUR COUNTRYMEN.

GROUND GAME: Trump campaign, RNC training army of volunteers in key 2020 states.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Good economic news is awkward for Democratic candidates.

RADICAL CHIC: THE GERITOL YEARS. Why is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture honoring Angela Davis?

HEALTH: Space research helps patients on Earth with low blood pressure condition.

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SHE’S A NEW AGE ZELIG: That time Marianne Williamson officiated Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding.

As People magazine noted, Michael Jackson attended; Larry Fortensky’s best man “was Taylor’s hairdresser, José Eber.”

TAR, FEATHERS. School district warns parents their kids could be put in foster care unless lunch debt paid. People are amazingly docile — or, if you prefer, law-abiding — given that threats like this almost never get the threatener killed or beaten to within an inch of their life.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who Is Boris Johnson?

VIDEO: Friedrich Hayek Educates A Young Jeff Greenfield on the Mirage of Social Justice.

GREAT MOMENTS IN VIRTUE SIGNALLING: Elizabeth Warren Announces Her Pronouns.

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SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Caffeine may cause problems for people with anxiety.

‘HOPE DEMS RUN ON THIS!’ California Democratic Party regional director says rural white Americans are just ‘not grateful enough’ in lengthy Twitter rant.

To paraphrase another famous California leftist, they hate us. They really hate us.