Free Republic

A new poll shows patriotism in dramatic decline. The WSJ-NORC poll found that only 38 percent say patriotism is very important (down from 70 percent in 1998 and 61 percent in 2019). It also found that 39 percent say religion is very important (down from 62 percent in 1998 and 48 percent in 2019),and 30 percent say having kids is very important (down from 59 percent in 1998 and 43 percent in 2019). The number of Americans saying community involvement is very important has plummeted from 62 percent to 27 percent in just four years. The only thing more Americans...

The Israelis are constantly told that one reason they need to accept a “two-state solution” is so that they can preserve a state that is “both Jewish and democratic,” which will not be possible if the Arab citizens outnumber the Jews. There is a need, so they are told, to create a new state where not only Palestinian Arabs, but also many Israeli Arabs, will want to live. They are assured that otherwise, if they hold onto all of Judea and Samaria, they will soon be swamped demographically by the Arabs – both Israeli and Palestinian — who, it is...

Not long ago, Japan stood where China does today: top threat to America’s title as the world’s preeminent economic power. In the 1980s and 90s, Japan even appeared likely to succeed, with books such as Japan as Number One: Lessons for America becoming best sellers.Then, in a blink, Japan’s economy collapsed with the bursting of a massive asset bubble from which it never truly recovered. Overnight, the Empire of the Rising Sun became a setting one.Analysts have recently taken to highlighting stark similarities between Japan before its fall and China now. Begging the question of whether Japan’s fate foreshadows China’s...

A man who posed on Instagram with two Rolex watches was killed after two women used the date rape drug GHB in an attempt to rob him. Saul Murray, 33, had been set up in a honeytrap by Surpreet Dhillon and Temidayo Awe, who seduced and stripped him. He was found naked in a pool of blood in the communal entrance to his flat in New Town Street, Luton, after their male accomplices, Ikram Affia and Cleon Brown, had been summoned because the drug had not knocked him out.

The following is an overview of Law & Liberty's January forum on the question of demographic decline.Birth rates are falling across the developed world, and China recently joined the list of countries with a declining population.These trends have many governments worrying about shrinking workforces and unsustainable elderly entitlements. In Law & Liberty’s January forum, Lyman Stone argues that those concerns are relatively trivial, compared to the loneliness, infertility, suicide, and addiction that are ravaging American society today.Stone sees strong connections between these maladies and the failure of so many people to marry and have children.Family life can be a source...

American conservatives love to imagine immigrants as secret Republicans desperate to flee the Democrat barrio. The fantasy goes something like this: “Immigrants are hard-working, God-fearing people who love America more than any native! We just need to stop being bigoted and speak to these people in Spanish.” This line has been propagated for as long as I’ve been alive. Despite the billions Republicans have spent on outreach, they only started doing well with immigrant communities when they were led by a guy who called them criminals and rapists. Can immigrants save America? The answer is obviously no. By any metric,...

Poverty is often associated with unemployment—however, millions of working people around the world are living in what’s considered to be extreme poverty, or less than $1.90 per day. Thankfully, the world’s population of poor workers has decreased substantially over the last few decades. But how exactly has it changed since 1991, and where is the majority of the working poor population living today? This graphic by Gilbert Fontana uses data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) to show the regional breakdown of the world’s working poor, and how this demographic has changed in the last few decades. From Asia to...

Japanese Prime minister Fumio Kishida pledged on Monday (Jan 23) to take urgent steps to tackle the country's declining birth rate, saying it was "now or never" for one of the world's oldest societies. Japan has in recent years been trying to encourage its people to have more children with promises of cash bonuses and better benefits, but it remains one of the most expensive places in the world to raise a child, according to surveys. Births plunged to a new record low last year, according to official estimates, dropping below 800,000 for the first time - a watershed moment...

By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, up from 54 percent in 2020, according to a new report by the Institute for Economics & Peace. This increase is being driven by both population growth and a continued shift towards urbanization, particularly to so called ‘megacities’ - metropolises that have a population of 10 million or more.As Statista's Anna Fleck details below, urbanization takes place because of both push and pull factors. The IEA describes how in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital of Kinshasa, factors pushing people away from rural areas include issues of violence...

On November 15, the United Nations (UN) estimated the world’s population to have surpassed eight billion. This week, new demographic statistics from China show the country’s reported population decline throughout 2022 has resulted in India now taking the top spot as the world’s most populous nation.A country’s development and demographics tend to follow a familiar pattern. As a nation gets richer, improvements in healthcare see mortality rates fall and population growth accelerate. Eventually, as women are empowered to enter education and the workforce, and as the cost of raising children rises, fertility rates – the total number of births in...

China’s population fell for the first time in six decades last year as the nation’s population of 1.4 billion declined by about 850,000. Short term, this is just a blip on the radar. But China also is afflicted with a rapidly aging population, which means that China is very likely to get old before it gets rich. “China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies,” said demographer Yi Fuxian. “Economic growth will have to depend more on productivity growth,” added Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint...

(The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.)I remember being on a golf course talking politics and a friend “jokingly” called me a “breeder.” I have four kids; he’s chosen to forgo parenthood altogether.After a moment of stunned silence, I realized two things: one, that there are plenty of folks who think that having children is evil, and two, that this person was not in fact my friend.He’s not alone in his thinking though: a survey by Veolia, an environmental utility firm, reveals that a quarter of respondents described “not being...

HARRISBURG — The American population might be growing, but Pennsylvania remains a leading state for Americans to flee, rather than stay. The commonwealth is one of 18 states to lose population in 2022, according to new data from the Census Bureau, and one of the worst performers. The data is confirmation of a long-running trend: Pennsylvania has a population problem, and the end isn’t yet in sight. The latest Census data shows the American population grew by 1.26 million (0.4%) since a year ago, with the primary growth being more than 1 million immigrants landing on American soil. Natural change...

England, once the bastion of Western liberty, is rapidly becoming a Muslim-dominated nation, which bodes ill for all who live there. The seeds for this, believe it or not, began with America’s revolution when Parliament rejected inherent rights. Beginning in the 1760s, as the British began to clamp down on Colonial America, Americans complained that it was denying them their rights under the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which contains ideas many will find familiar (separation of the executive and the legislative, the right to bear arms, free elections, etc.). Parliament, however, was so intent...

The secretary of the United Kingdom’s Home Office, which regulates immigration, recently caused a scandal by referring to the nonstop immigration of mostly Muslim migrants as an “invasion.” On Oct. 30, 2022, Suella Braverman said:The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not… Some 40,000 people have arrived on the south coast this year alone, many of them facilitated by criminal gangs, some of them actual members of criminal gangs. So let’s stop pretending that they are all refugees in distress: the whole country knows that...

For the first time since 1801, when the United Kingdom took its first census, less than half of the population identify as “Christian,” while the share of individuals who say they have no religion has swelled by millions, the latest data from their census show.The data published Tuesday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics show that only 46.2% or 27.5 million of the country’s more than 67 million people say they are Christian. In 2011, when the last census was done, 59.3% of the population or 33.3 million, people described themselves as Christian.For individuals in the U.K. who are...

As workforces shrink and opting out becomes increasingly attractive, Global Growth implodes on both the production and consumption sides.A funny thing happened on the way to permanent global growth. Actually, three funny things happened. One is the cheap, easy-to-access materials that enabled a vast expansion of consumption have been pulled out of the ground and what's left will cost more going forward, meaning there will be less to squander on consumption.True Believers are confident that some Savior Technology will emerge and scale up globally to save us from any nasty reduction in consumption, but they overlook the inconvenient fact that...

Governor Ron DeSantis is poised to be the first Republican to win Miami-Dade County, FL in decades, which includes a heavy Hispanic-voting presence. During an appearance on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” DeSantis discussed this potential outcome, saying that his success there was proof you did not need to “move left” on borders and amnesty to win the Hispanic vote. “So I once saw Frank Luntz, who is a famous Republican pollster, tell Republican members of Congress that if they wanted to win Hispanic votes, they had to move left,” host Tucker Carlson said. “You’re saying you’ve won those votes by...

President Xi Jinping recently vowed to launch comprehensive initiatives to address China’s rapidly declining birth rate.Behind the bombastic rhetoric, however, there lies a truly sobering fact: new policies probably won’t be enough to arrest China’s demographic decline. Here’s why.In China, a hyper-traditional society, having a child out of wedlock is still frowned upon. Childbearing and childrearing are synonymous with marriage. Last year, the communist nation saw marriage rates hit a 35-year low. The sharp drop in marital vows comes at the same time China faces an impending demographic crisis. 2021 saw 7.6 million marriage registrations, the fewest since 1986. With...

"Where have all the flowers gone?" asks the famous 1960s antiwar song. In Moscow today, The New York Times reports, the question is: Where have all the men gone? The answer to both questions is, in part, the same: To the graveyards of soldiers. But a lot of the missing men of Moscow have also fled Russian President Vladimir Putin's draft for his war in Ukraine. In fact, demographers say Russia may not recover for generations, if ever. "Putin spent years racing against Russia's demographic clock, only to order an invasion of Ukraine that's consigning his country's population to a...