One of the easiest forms of journalism is nut-picking.

Go to a protest and find the 20-year-old or the 70-year-old with the dumbest sign and write an article about him or her. Or go online and find a horrific tweet and thus paint an entire half of the country as clowns.

It takes a bit more effort, and a modest expense budget, to pick on the speakers and attendees at fringe conferences. The fringe-conference report is a venerable genre in journalism, and well done, it can be literature. But often the purpose of a fringe-conference report is to gather readers into a point-and-laugh session — or maybe to terrify the reader about some rising menace to democracy.

Politico magazine has a large feature story this week on a fringe conference of pro-natalists. There are interesting details in the story, and at times, the writer draws out nuances in the pro-natalist mindset. But once you know that the writer describes her beat as charting “the rise of the New Right,” you can guess what’s going on here.

Documenting the supposed rise of new threats from the Right is a booming business. Very few things get clicks and subscriptions as much as promising your heavily educated liberal reader that a dark cabal of theocrats, authoritarians, or white nationalists is rising right under their noses.

The specific fear this Politico piece tries to stoke is that “the far right” wants to set back “gender integration” and “explode the population.”

Without getting past the headline, this is already a silly and ungrounded scare story. The idea that increasing birthrates in the United States might explode the population is an absurdity that no honest and intelligent person believes.

The total fertility rate (the most widely known measure of the birthrate) in the U.S. is at 1.62 babies per woman and falling. Even if that birthrate stopped its decline and grew by an unfathomable 25%, it would be below replacement level, which means it would be inadequate to even maintain our population in the long run — much less explode it.

Scaring readers that America will be overpopulated by the far Right isn’t a new angle. It’s a bit dated, but it resonates with a certain class of readers, satisfying their prejudices and justifying their fears.

Again, nutpicking is a tried-and-true genre, and Del Valle isn’t extraordinarily unfair in her treatment of her subjects. The real problem with this Politico article is that it implies that only “the far Right” cares or should care about low and falling birthrates, and she never once tells her readers the basic facts of our low and falling birthrates.

In 3,000 words on birth rates, Del Valle never once mentions that the U.S. birthrate is at its lowest level in recorded history. She never mentions that the country has had fewer and fewer babies nearly every year since 2007 and that births (and the birthrate) were lower in 2023 than they were during the pandemic. She doesn’t mention that America has fewer children (in number, not merely percentages) today than we did at the last census or that we have more people in their 60s than we have under the age of 10.

That is, we really do have a demographic problem, and making a family-friendly America wouldn’t “explode the population” — it might slow the decline.

All sorts of people well outside of the far Right care about low and falling birthrates, from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Goldberg. The New York Times has been covering this demographic trend for years.

One of the worst things the liberal media could do right now is try and convince their readers that there’s no good reason to worry about the baby bust.