I just returned from covering President Trump’s summit on what he calls “Trump Accounts.” Each American baby born from 2025 through 2028 will receive a $1,000 deposit that can grow and receive annual matches by both families and employers, up to $7,500 total and tax-free invested in a market-tied, brokerage account. These children can eventually access that fund at age 18 for a down payment on a home or for education. Better still, they can leave it untouched and learn how compound interest can make them millionaires well ahead of the typical retirement age.
It’s an innovative new way to tackle two huge problems in the country. Economic illiteracy which has allowed socialists and Marxists to pollute the minds of young people against the free market while attempting to reverse a stunning decline in Americans having babies.
Mark Steyn warned us years ago: “Demography is destiny.” Elon Musk repeats the alarm almost daily: restoring birth rates should be the West’s top priority.
They’re both right.
Birth rates are collapsing across the developed world. The United States is well below the 2.1 children per woman needed for replacement. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and China face even sharper declines. The consequences aren’t speculative—they’re unavoidable: aging populations, shrinking workforces, overwhelmed entitlement programs, weakened cultural cohesion, and economies that gradually lose the energy and innovation only young families provide.
A nation that stops having children eventually stops being a nation at all.
And this decline isn’t simply happening to us. We are participating in it—often without realizing it—through habits, incentives, and expectations that quietly erode our capacity to build families in the first place.
Men face a physiological and cultural trap.
Chronic cannabis use depresses testosterone significantly. Add sedentary lifestyles, ultra-processed food, digital addiction, and the isolating effects of pornography, and the result is a generation of men with diminished energy, confidence, and purpose. These aren’t small choices; they directly undermine the biological and emotional foundation required for fatherhood. Strength—physical, mental, and spiritual—has always been a prerequisite for building families. Habits that weaken men weaken society.
Women face a different but equally destructive pressure.
Women now make up 58 percent of college students and hold nearly two-thirds of student-loan debt. That burden delays every major life decision: marriage, homeownership, and children. Meanwhile, on many campuses, the messaging runs counter to what once grounded communities—faith, family, and merit. Instead, young women are steered toward politics of grievance and careers as identity, with motherhood treated as optional rather than essential. The result is a generation unsure whether family even fits into the future.
These aren’t problems Washington can legislate away. They are cultural choices—and cultural corrections.
The path forward is clearer than it feels.
Men can reclaim vitality through disciplined training, real food, rejecting drugs, and rediscovering purpose in building rather than escaping.
Women can shed the debt-driven treadmill by rooting themselves again in community, church, virtue, and the long-term rewards of marriage and motherhood.
A healthy society is not an accident. It is built—intentionally—by men and women who understand that strength, virtue, marriage, and children are not relics of the past but the pillars of any civilization that hopes to endure. Every faith tradition that shaped the West, especially the Judeo-Christian one, taught this plainly: families are the first schools, fathers the first protectors, mothers the first nurturers, and children the first inheritance.
When those foundations crack, nations crack with them.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s the oldest truth in human history:
Strong families are how a civilization survives time.
Demographics is destiny. If we want a country worth inheriting, we must begin living like heirs—and builders—again.
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