On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to a massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy: Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high. In aggregate, hundreds of thousands of man-hours would be squandered. But Musk wasn’t putting a stop to this wasteful time suck of a requirement. He was the one imposing it.

“All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted around noon on his social-media platform, X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Soon afterward, the Office of Personnel Management sent such an email to all federal agencies. The subject line: “What did you do last week?” Workers were told to respond by tonight with five bullet points “of what you accomplished.”

As someone who hates government waste, I sympathize with any Americans who are cheering this initiative because they believe it will expose workers who accomplish nothing. But those Americans are cheering, albeit unwittingly, for massive inefficiency—just the latest example of the chaos DOGE has created across the federal government, undercutting its own aims.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

Consider America’s roughly 14,000 Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers. If each of them spends just 10 minutes opening their work email, finding this request, drafting a response, proofreading it, and sending it off, that adds up to 2,333 hours of work. Can you think of a more cartoonish example of government waste than using 292 workdays’ worth of man-hours to clarify that, last week, air-traffic controllers monitored airplanes?

I actually can think of a more cartoonish example, in that it is even bigger in scale: Some 74,000 U.S. Postal Service letter carriers deliver mail on foot, making roughly $29 an hour on average. If they spend 10 minutes each, or 740,000 total minutes, drafting emails, that works out to nearly $360,000 in labor costs. For what? And how long will it take other workers to read “I was delivering letters” 74,000 times?

Any American can identify many more categories of federal employees whose job duties are known to all. We know what TSA agents do. We know what nurses do. An efficient process would obviously exempt all such categories.

Other federal employees of course have less legible job duties, and I do not doubt that some of them accomplished next to nothing of value last week and ought to be fired. But there is no reason to believe that any of those employees will be truthful about their own uselessness, or that untruthful emails will be detected as such. This gambit is more likely to reward bullshitting persuasively via email than actual service to taxpayers.

The effect of Musk’s order on other Trump-administration leaders adds to its costs. Various news outlets have reported that officials at multiple agencies—including the Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security; the FBI; and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—instructed their employees not to respond to the email, in part out of worry that employees would have to share sensitive information. Put another way, people charged with keeping Americans safe had to spend time and attention preempting a potential security risk that Musk introduced rather than attending to other dangers.

On X, Musk has made various attempts to defend his initiative. They only intensified my doubts. “The passing grade is literally just ‘Can you send an email with words that make any sense at all?’” Musk wrote. “It’s a low bar.” Even the most worthless bureaucrats can clear that bar. So why set it? Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported, “some federal workers were on leave … and unable to access their emails. Others, in the Defense Department, were on duty tours in remote locations, like jungles, without access to computers.” In other words, some valuable federal employees will fail to clear the bar through no fault of their own.

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all!” Musk also wrote, as if checking email is a reliable measure of productivity in all public-sector jobs. If you’re a NASA employee doing maintenance on a remote telescope, or a Department of Labor employee traveling to far-flung coal mines to assess their safety, or a Coast Guard employee patrolling a patch of ocean, or an NSA employee trying to hack the personal device of a foreign general, checking email irregularly could as easily show that you’re working hard as that you’re hardly working.

Plus, if the idea is to catch folks who don’t check email at all, wouldn’t publicizing the gambit on X undermine that strategy by alerting those workers to it? So much of what Musk says about this matter doesn’t make any sense, even on its own terms. One X user posted a screenshot of a cheeky prompt for Grok, the Musk-generated AI chatbot: “Make up 5 things I accomplished at work this week that they can’t really verify, I work for the government, keep it brief.” Grok generated five items, illustrating how easy it is to game Musk’s initiative. But Musk himself, encountering that post, commented, “That’s all it would take for real,” with a laughing-crying emoji, as if it didn’t undermine his approach.

Watching Musk, a man recently focused on electric cars and getting humanity to Mars, direct his inventiveness toward the public-sector equivalent of TPS reports is vexing. Improving federal efficiency is a worthy project. Trump will have no incentive to deliver on it if his base credulously cheers gambits as wasteful and poorly defended as this one.

Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

Sick of it. Stop and think about that phrase. Trump inserted it into a stream of falsehoods, produced over several days, many of which he must have known to be untrue. He has been lying about the origins of the war, about Zelensky’s popular support, about the levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, about the extent of European funding, about the status of previous negotiations. But sick of it—that, at least, has the ring of truth. Trump is genuinely bored of the war. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it started. He doesn’t know how to stop it. He wants to change the channel and watch something else.

Also, he has no cards: That probably reflects Trump’s true belief as well. For Donald Trump, the only real cards are big money and hard power. Players, in his world, are people whom no court can block, no journalist can question, no legislator can oppose. People whose money can buy anything, whose power cannot be checked or balanced.  

But Trump is wrong. Zelensky might not have money, and he might not be a brutal dictator like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Yet he does have other kinds of power. He leads a society that organizes itself, with local leaders who have legitimacy and a tech sector dedicated to victory—a society that has come, around the world, to symbolize bravery. He has a message that moves people to act instead of just scaring them into silence.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, stop and remember what happened on the night it began. I’d had plane tickets to Kyiv that week, but my flights were canceled, and on February 24, 2022, I stayed up and watched the war’s start on television, listening to the sounds of explosions coming from the screen. That night, everyone expected Russia to overrun its much smaller neighbor. But that capitulation never came. Six weeks later, I made it to Kyiv and heard and saw what had happened instead: the hit squads that had tried to kill Zelensky; the murders of civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb; the Ukrainian journalists who had driven around the country trying to tell the story; the civilians who had joined the army; the waitresses who had started cooking for the troops.

Three years later, against all obstacles and all predictions, the civilians, journalists, soldiers, and waitresses are still working together. Ukraine’s million-man army, the largest in Europe, is still fighting. Ukraine’s civil society is still volunteering, still raising money for the troops. Ukraine’s defense industry has transformed itself. In 2022, I saw tiny workshops that made drones out of what looked like cardboard and glue. In 2024, Ukrainian factories produced 1.5 million drones, and this year they will make many more. Teams of people in underground control centers now use bespoke software to hit thousands of targets every month. Their work explains why Russia has taken territory only slowly, despite being on the offensive for most of the past year. At the current rate of advance, the Institute for the Study of War estimates, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine.

Russia doesn’t have the resources to fight indefinitely against that kind of organization and determination. Putin’s military production is cannibalizing his country’s civilian economy. Inflation has skyrocketed. The only way Putin wins now—the only way he finally succeeds in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty—is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war.

He wins by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine, because Zelensky has no cards, and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either. That’s why Putin’s money bought American influencers in Tennessee and probably many other places, too, and it’s why his propaganda supported the pro-Russian far right in Germany’s elections yesterday, along with other pro-Russian parties across the continent. Putin can’t win on the ground, but he can win in his enemies’ heads—if we let him.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Europeans and Americans, Democrats and Republicans, can resist the temptations of boredom and distraction. We can refuse to give in to the cynicism, nihilism, and lies of Russian propaganda, even when they are repeated by the president of the United States. And we can refuse to believe that Ukraine has no cards, that we have no cards, and that the democratic world has no sources of power other than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Three years into this war, the stakes are the same as they were on the night it began. Putin, who yesterday launched one of the largest attacks of the entire war, still seeks to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty, civil society, democracy, and freedom. He still wants to show the world that the era of American power is over, that America will not defend allies in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. He still wants to nullify the rules and laws that kept Europe peaceful for eight decades, to create instability and fear, not only in the countries that border Russia but across the continent and even around the world.   

The war will only end, truly end, when Putin gives up these goals. Don’t accept any peace deal that allows him to keep them.

Last week, between posting photos of himself and slashing the federal bureaucracy, Elon Musk found the time to make some penis jokes. The world’s richest man briefly changed his display name on X to “Harry Bōlz,” apparently after learning that USAID had spent millions on circumcisions in developing countries. “Circumcisions at a discount, now 50% off!” he posted. “Judicial dicktatorship is wrong!" he added, the same day that a federal court ruled against the Trump administration’s chaotic federal-funding freeze.

Musk didn’t mention why USAID had paid for circumcisions: They were part of a program to reduce the spread of HIV, which, if anyone needs to be reminded, kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. Who knows how he arrived at “Harry Bōlz” specifically as a response. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) But it certainly fits a pattern. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old hired at Musk’s DOGE, has gone by the pseudonym “Big Balls” online. Coristine is reportedly now a senior adviser within the Department of Homeland Security.

Penis jokes are the kind of juvenile humor that Musk is known for. After all, this is the same billionaire entrepreneur who began his ownership of Twitter by posting a video of himself carrying a sink into the company’s headquarters with the caption, “Let that sink in.” He has named Tesla’s vehicles so that the lineup spells “S3XY,” as in “sexy.” In 2018, he posted that he would take Tesla private at $420 a share (which he maintains was not a cannabis joke). I could go on.

Still, something else is up with Musk’s trolling. His jokes, terrible as they are, are indicative of a new sensibility taking hold on the right—one that Musk himself, in his rightward shift, has played a role in shaping. Trolling in its various forms (posting about balls, trying to offend, making political opponents squirm) has gone from an occasionally used tool to a unifying touchstone of an entire political faction. Call it a coalition of the crass.

Right-wingers getting kicks out of “triggering the libs” is hardly novel. The practice has existed since at least 1947, when a 21-year-old William F. Buckley and some of his friends showed up at a rally for the left-wing presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, wearing ironic bohemian getups. Rush Limbaugh built his career on delivering a steady stream of trolling sound bites on his radio show. But trolling has become more integral to the right in the Trump years. Trump himself loves to troll—addressing posts to “haters and losers”—and the Pepe the Frog meme blew up during his first term as the go-to way for the MAGA faithful to troll the left.

As Trump has returned to power, though, another wave of trolls has risen—this time with much more power and prominence. His victory has unleashed a coalition of the crass that encompasses a growing number of Americans who are excited to be able to call things “retarded” and “gay” again, joke about deporting people, and delight in the performance of saying things that are “not PC.” Some longtime trolls on the right have grown more aggressive and offensive as their ideas have made their way closer to the party’s mainstream. These include Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who celebrated Trump’s victory by proclaiming, “Your body, my choice,” as well as Bronze Age Pervert, the popular right-wing influencer who shitposts about killing political adversaries in between lewd posts about the superiority of the male figure. Ambiguity about whether he’s joking about any of this is precisely the point. (Bronze Age Pervert, whose real name is Costin Alamariu, did not respond to a request for comment.) Among the prominent trolls is also Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser: After Trump installed himself as chair of the Kennedy Center, Bannon  said that he wants the president to replace the internationally recognized opera singers and orchestras that typically perform there with a choir of January 6 rioters.

[Read: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Bannon and Musk have been at odds since Trump’s victory: Bannon detests the influence that tech billionaires have on this administration. On Tuesday, Bannon called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” But it’s not a coincidence that they both want to troll the left. They seemingly hate each other, but they hate the other side more. Trolling—whether it’s “Harry Bōlz” or a January 6 choir—has become the right’s most consistent manner of communicating. “Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite,” Bannon fantasized about his Kennedy Center idea on an episode of his podcast, Bannon’s War Room. “Culturally, you would break them.”

Writers who study the right in the age of MAGA, including Corey Robin and John Ganz, have argued that what binds the right together is a belief that politics is fundamentally a zero-sum game. To win, you must accrue power and use it to bludgeon your political adversaries and any other group that is not aligned with your own. To the right-wing troll, there is no common good, or “universal interest,” as Ganz puts it, but simply different groups attempting to dominate one another. Politics is a war with clear winners and losers.

Crass jokes are the logical base expression of that political framework. Notable people on the right don’t want to just end gay marriage; they are calling people “faggots” again. They aren’t just banning the small handful of trans athletes who compete in women’s sports; they are bringing back “tranny.” At best, trolls don’t care if they cause pain to the people targeted, and at worst they want to cause pain.

Musk, too, has belittled the marginalized: Just this week he ridiculed a blind person, and in the past has mocked a disabled X employee (which he later apologized for), and rolled back protections against anti-trans harassment on Twitter. No one is hurt because of a joke about balls, but such jokes are still a middle finger to Musk’s intended audience of liberals and government workers. The point is to laugh in their faces as he dismantles the things that they care about, in an attempt to break them. It is not enough to beat your adversaries. They must be humiliated.

LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

A vocal group of conservative intellectuals really, really wants Americans to have more babies. The movement is small, but it doesn’t lack for high-profile adherents. Vice President J. D. Vance, a father of three, recently proclaimed, “Very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.” Elon Musk, a father of at least 12, posted in 2022, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” A recent Department of Transportation memo even instructed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” It was signed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine.

If messages like these somehow do not get you in the mood to procreate, well, that’s precisely the problem.

It’s a problem, specifically, for the pronatalists: a group whose members are overwhelmingly conservative, usually religious, and almost always the parents of three or more children. They espouse the view that America’s declining birth rate is an alarming trend we ought to try to reverse. Seventeen years ago, the national birth rate was at the minimum level for a society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Since then, it has fallen well below that, with no signs of bottoming out. In response, a loose cohort of intellectuals, writers, thinkers, and policy makers are doing their best to make friends in high places, get a policy agenda together, and make Americans make families again.

This won’t be easy. The pronatalists combine conservative social nudges (get married, start a family) with liberal policy objectives (give parents more money, upzone the suburbs), which makes for tricky politics. At a time of increased abortion restrictions, many liberals find them creepy—busybodies at best and eugenicists at worst. And many conservatives think they’re Trojan horses for socialism, cloaking their desire to spend taxpayer money in family-values rhetoric. Like parenting itself, giving birth to a broadly popular pronatal movement will take a lot of hard work.

Until recently, the idea that humanity might be growing too slowly would have seemed absurd. During the second half of the 20th century, experts—many swayed by the book The Population Bomb—were far more worried about the opposite problem. They feared that overpopulation would lead to widespread famine and potentially even societal collapse.

Something strange happened next: None of those predictions came true. The population continued to grow, but famine was not widespread, and collapse did not come. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, fertility rates steeply declined, most dramatically in rich countries. Rather than exploding, the global population-growth curve began to level off. At first, few noticed. After all, the birth-rate decline came on gradually. A decade ago, the U.S. total fertility rate was only slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Now, however, that number is 1.6 and falling fast, even as polls show Americans believe that the ideal number of children is two to three. This poses a dire economic problem. Social Security, Medicare, and other old-age programs can’t survive at their current generosity if the number of tax-paying workers continues to decline. Even economic growth itself becomes challenging once a low enough fertility rate is reached; fewer workers means a smaller economy. In East Asia, where the worldwide birth-rate drop has been most pronounced, every country faces serious economic challenges resulting from low fertility; all are now furiously trying to encourage birth. In South Korea, where the total fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.68, every 200 fertile-age adults can expect to give life to 68 children; those children will produce 23 grandchildren, who will result in only eight great-grandchildren. That’s a 96 percent population decline over the course of three generations, and that’s if fertility stops decreasing and finally holds steady.

The negative effects of low fertility at home can be mitigated to some degree with immigration, but birth rates are plummeting all over the world—Mexico’s is 1.8—and the amount of immigration sufficient to outweigh the local birth dearth would be a political nonstarter, a kind of Great Replacement theory come to life. To avoid becoming South Korea someday, America needs more babies.

Making that happen is the task the pronatalists have taken on. The effort is new, but beginning to get organized. As of 2023, there’s an annual Natal Conference, and last week, there was a panel at the U.S. Capitol featuring Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a member of the Republican leadership. Every conservative think tank seems to suddenly have an “expert” on birth rates. (Liberal and centrist pronatalists exist, too, but they’re less numerous and less vocal.)

The intellectual force behind the movement lies mainly in a cluster of culturally conservative writers. These include Bethany Mandel, a writer and homeschooling mother of six; Tim Carney, a father of six who wrote Family Unfriendly, a recent book about society’s hostility toward big families; Patrick T. Brown, a father of four and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank; and Daniel Hess, a writer more commonly known by his X username, MoreBirths. The informal ringleader is Lyman Stone, a 33-year-old father of three who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

[Lyman Stone: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?]

They generally advocate for a three-pronged approach to lifting the birth rate. First are cultural nudges, which mostly entail spreading the word that kids are more blessing than burden. Second are supply-side housing-reform policies, intended to make it easier for would-be parents to afford a place to raise a family. (“Want fecundity in the sheets? Give us walkability in the streets,” Carney writes in Family Unfriendly.) Finally, there are economic incentives, which resemble the types of family-friendly welfare-state policies familiar to Northern Europeans: child allowances, baby bonuses, long parental leaves.

Stone argues that implementing such policies in the U.S. would have a significant effect. He estimates that pronatal economic policies in France, including maternity leave, child allowances, pregnancy protections at work, and higher Social Security payments for parents, have boosted the French population by 5 to 10 million people. Policy matters, he argues, not just culture.

You might expect such a progressive-sounding agenda to have attracted an enthusiastic liberal following. Not so much. In fact, left-of-center Americans are more likely to be anti-natalists. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many people who identify as liberal, and four times as many people who identify as very liberal, think too many children are being born than think not enough are.

To the extent that they’re even familiar with the pronatalist argument, liberals seem to find it creepy and off-putting. The main cause of the global birth-rate decline was women’s growing autonomy and access to contraception. Liberals understandably fear that trying to reverse the decline might involve undoing the progress that triggered it. (This is more or less the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Atwood novel in which right-wing theocrats revolt over low fertility, and institute sex slavery and totalitarian patriarchal rule.)

Some liberals also pay attention to the context in which pronatalist messages are transmitted and who is embracing them. Vance’s “I want more babies” quote, for example, came at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Liberals might even know that the birth rate is still far above replacement in much of sub-Saharan Africa and wonder whether pronatalists are worried specifically about a lack of white babies. “For many progressives and liberals, this conversation is tainted by a sense of it being reactionary, conservative, even sort of fascist,” Rachel Wiseman, an “anti-anti-natalist” leftist writer told me.

Then, as one former senior policy aide to a Republican lawmaker told me, “there’s the Elon of it all.” (He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash for criticizing fellow Republicans.) Musk, the most well-known pronatalist in the world, is also perhaps the most disliked person in liberal America after Donald Trump. Musk is known to have had 12 children with three partners. (Last week, a conservative influencer claimed to be the mother of his 13th child, born five months ago, though Musk has neither confirmed nor denied that he is the father of her child.) He had twins via IVF with an executive at one of his companies while a surrogate was pregnant with the child he was having with his longtime partner Grimes, who was reportedly furious when she found out. Having a dozen kids is good for the birth rate, but making big families look messy and dysfunctional is probably not.

The conservative pronatalist intellectuals, who seem to crave the ideological embrace of liberals, are self-conscious about their creepiness problem. Moore, who last month introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the child tax credit, told me, “Any effort to make this a right or left issue is nonsense and counterproductive.” He and his allies go to great lengths to clarify that they aren’t into eugenics or patriarchy and that they want more babies of all skin colors. “The people who give pronatalism a bad name care for it for reasons that I think are rather unseemly,” Brown told me. “And so it becomes icky because, well, those bad people are very concerned about it.”

Women of childbearing age skew liberal, so liberals’ distaste for pronatalism is a long-term problem. But, at a moment when Republicans have a trifecta in Washington, pronatalists face a more immediate issue on their own flank: Most Republicans still want to slash government spending, not increase it.

[Read: The coming Democratic baby bust]

“There’s a lot of headwinds to a pronatal conservative policy because Republicans have long distrusted urbanist talk, or talk of government supporting people in need,” Carney told me. Many traditional Republicans look at the pronatalist policy agenda (give money to parents, loosen suburban zoning rules) and wonder what happened to the party of fiscal restraint, anti-welfare politics, and the strictly zoned Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Stone told me that many old-guard Republicans are worried about incentivizing single motherhood. “On some level, we have to be able to say, ‘Look: Supporting people having families is worth it,’” even if that means money flows to unwed parents, he said.

Anti-welfare Republicans aren’t the only intra-coalitional enemy. Pronatalists also face resistance from the so-called Barstool Right, the class of epicurean, anti-woke young men, usually thin in ideology but thick in leftward-pointing resentment. “This is fucking idiotic,” Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder, wrote on X above a video of Vance clumsily arguing for lower tax rates on parents. “If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.” (Neither Vance nor Portnoy signaled any awareness of the fact that, thanks to the child tax credit, the tax code already favors parents.)

Still, the pronatalists think they are winning, if slowly. Stone told me he understands there to be “a few” Vance staffers tasked with getting Congress to raise the child tax credit in this year’s reconciliation bill. Whether or not that happens, the pronatalists feel they are operating on a longer time horizon.

“Short term: maybe; long term: yes,” Brown told me when I asked if he was optimistic. But they had better not move too slowly. If convincing people takes too long, there might not be enough people left to convince.