Ben Domenech is someone very much enmeshed in what the political right would usually disparage as the mucky swamps of official Washington. His wife is the family’s celebrity: Meghan McCain, a daughter of the late Arizona senator. He’s bounced around the conservative media and think-tank worlds for a while, (including an unexpectedly truncated stint here at The Washington Post). He’s a co-founder of a right-wing website that is, at this point, heavily centered on presenting culture-war fights with the sheen of traditional conservative rhetoric.
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Domenech is also one of a rotating set of conservative figures who have been tapped to host Fox News’s 7 p.m. opinion slot, an hour that was filled with news programming until January. That perch has allowed Domenech lots of opportunities to interview staff members from his website. It has also allowed him to present remarkably strident rhetoric to a much larger audience.
On Wednesday, he picked up a recent theme in conservative circles: Actually, liberals hate American children.
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“Their problem,” Domenech said of the left — or, perhaps, “the left” — “seems to be that there are American kids at all. Radical environmentalists regard children as enemies of the climate. Corporate elites see babies as expensive competitors for the time, attention and creativity of professional women, which they apparently feel should belong exclusively to them. Critical-race-theory con men suggest that babies become racist as early as three months old.”
This mishmash of bizarre claims doesn’t deserve much energy, nor did Domenech spend much on validating them. Instead, he noted that he became a parent last year, which opened his eyes.
“I finally realized progressives hate babies because they are crying, drooling, pooping refutations of everything woke leftists believe,” he said. “Boys and girls are the answer to every argument and the antidote to every poisonous lie.”
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What followed was an articulation of all the ways that the purity of children challenged the fervent views of various straw men. It was part audition to be the permanent host of the hour, showing how much sand he could kick in the face of those scrawny libs. And it was part smooshing together as many triggering concepts as he could think of to add himself to the current clamor of pro-family rhetoric on the right.
That rhetoric was more explicit in the hour that followed Domenech’s show. Host Tucker Carlson is broadcasting from Hungary this week, where he’s been explicitly praising the country’s authoritarian regime. If viewers cared about “Western civilization and democracy and families and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions,” he said Monday, they should tune in.
He has in the past praised Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government for its policies encouraging Hungarians to have more children. During a segment in July 2019, he described the country’s policies, then framing them as object lessons for America.
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“Hungary’s leaders actually care about making sure their own people thrive,” he said. “Instead of promising the nation’s wealth to every illegal immigrant from the Third World, they’re using tax dollars to uplift their own people. Imagine that.”
That is the crux of Carlson’s endorsement of Orban’s policies: They are a bulwark against rising hordes of immigrants. From Hungary on Wednesday night, a bit after Domenech’s “the left hates kids” rant, Carlson focused heavily on how that nation — a “serious country,” in Carlson’s breathless articulation — kept dirty foreigners at bay.
“Because the example of Hungary is so powerful — not just in Europe, but to the world, to the entire world, not simply the West — what you can do with a relatively small economy and not many people, if you’re just serious about keeping your nation from being destroyed,” Carlson said, “because the lessons are so obvious, and there’s such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government, have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked. It’s authoritarian. They’re fascists.”
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Well, no. Orban’s government has been attacked as authoritarian and autocratic because he has encouraged and instituted policies that explicitly move the country away from democracy, a slide that’s been well-documented. In fact, Orban has overtly used his anti-immigration policies as a way to consolidate authoritarian power, something that Carlson forcefully bolsters through his unqualified praise of what Orban is doing.
Again, Carlson celebrates Orban’s pro-family policies not because he is such a champion of children but because he sees Americans having children as offsetting the arrival of new immigrants and the children those immigrants might have. This is the link that explains why children are such a focal point of the right’s attention at the moment. Just as the boogeyman of “critical race theory” is incessantly and hyperbolically invoked as polluting children’s minds about the glory of the American experiment, Carlson is using the hard-to-disagree-with argument that Americans should have children as a way to amplify his rhetoric about how real Americans are being deliberately “replaced” by immigrants.
This has become increasingly common on the right, thanks in part to Carlson. On Fox Business on Wednesday, former House speaker Newt Gingrich made a similar claim.
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“I think what’s hard for most of us to accept,” he said, “is that the anti-American left would love to drown traditional, classic Americans with as many people as they can who know nothing of American history, nothing of American tradition, nothing of the rule of law. And I think that — if you go and you look at the radical left, this is their ideal model to get rid of the rest of us because we believe in George Washington or we believe in the Constitution, and you see this behavior over and over again.”
Traditional, classic Americans.
One of the most vocal proponents of this call for more children is author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, who’s seeking the Republican nomination for Ohio’s soon-to-be open senate seat. He’s disparaged liberals who don’t have children as somehow therefore disinterested in America’s future — though his framing of the left as disproportionately childless doesn’t actually overlap with reality.
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In an interview with conservative media personality Charlie Kirk earlier this year, Vance was insistent on the importance of having children as a response to immigration.
“There’s just no comparison between the positive effects of children and the positive effects of an immigrant,” he said. He added that “you can’t have so many people coming to the country at a time when our own families aren’t replicating themselves,” clearly echoing the same point Carlson and Gingrich were making, and said that “the idea that you can just replace children with immigrants is — it’s a sociopathic way of looking at the future.”
This is the context for Domenech’s effort — successful, obviously — to inject his own frame on how the left hates children and the right celebrates them. On Tuesday, his exaggerated rhetoric was more direct in casting his political opponents as dangerous. It was a stunning riff that, again, centered on immigration.
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“On one side, you have the enemies of everything this nation has ever been and meant. And on the other you have the patriots, the Americans, the men and women who will do anything to preserve it, because they know what civilization requires,” Domenech said. “You are the heart of a nation that has slept for so long. But now at last, you are wide-awake. So now I ask you again. What are you willing to do?”
All of this folds together: the left as enemies who hate America and who want to undermine Americans; the right as champions of the urgent need to protect American values, including by making more Americans. It’s not new that children are a focus of political moralizing, but this argument that the left hates and fears real American kids is a disconcerting evolution. If Hungary needs to protect itself by becoming an autocracy, well, what’s wrong with that? Don’t you recognize the stakes?
At a different point in his show, Domenech turned his attention toward another popular idea on the right, that overly generous government benefits are keeping people from seeking work. (Actual data paint a different picture.)
Among the benefits Domenech criticized? Child tax credits.