This is a painful piece to write. I have been a guest on Tucker Carlson’s program, invited on to talk about China’s human rights abuses and the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States and its neighbors.
In fact, it was on his FOX show that I first blew the whistle on the Wuhan lab as the source of Covid. There is nothing good to say about a regime that released a deadly pandemic on the world, and which for decades has crushed the people of China under one-child edicts, forced abortions, surveillance, and political terror.
For a long time I thought Tucker agreed. He once treated CCP tyranny as something sick, not something to hold up as a model. Not anymore, apparently. And that is a sad thing to watch.
On his network a couple weeks ago he published a morning note titled “China Moves to Expand Childcare for Working Families,” asking whether the United States could do the same. He summarized Beijing’s latest 15th Five-Year Plan pitch: Invest in pediatric care and childcare so that working families will marry and have more children after the wreckage of the Mao-era one-child policy.
He added the usual disclaimer that this is “not an endorsement of the CCP,” then immediately treated the Party’s announcement as a serious lesson for Washington.
American leaders, he wrote, including Donald Trump, “openly say that Washington cannot focus on things like daycare because it is too busy fighting globalist wars.” Imagine, he added, caring that little about constituents.
The trouble is, Trump didn’t say this.
Tucker’s source was GBC Press, an anonymous X aggregator whose account data and posting pattern tie it to the radical Houthis in Yemen. It presents itself as news, but it is not a newsroom. It is a high-volume “BREAKING” mill with a consistent anti-Israel, pro-Iran, anti-Trump slant. A radical Islamic propaganda feed, in other words.
Trump’s actual remarks were blunt—what else is new?—but they were not a confession that he “cares that little” about families. At an Easter luncheon he said the federal government cannot run daycare as a national program; those functions, he said, should be left to the states, which would have to pay for them. “You got to let a state take care of daycare.”
That is a federalism argument, not a declaration that children do not matter.
A great many conservatives oppose federal daycare for a different reason: They do not want Washington in charge of the first years of a child’s life. That suspicion is old and well founded.
The socialist project has always wanted the state in the nursery. That’s why Lenin called kindergartens “germ cells of communism.” If you like teachers’ unions, wait until you meet the national union of federal daycare workers.
It is true that Beijing has announced more “inclusive” childcare, pediatric clinics, and subsidies as part of a campaign to build a “birth-friendly society.” What is not true is that a CCP press conference is evidence the program will work, or that it is something decent people should envy.
The same Party that herded women into state-run abortuaries and runs the world’s most sophisticated propaganda machine is now telling the world it will make child-rearing easy. Taking that at face value is, to put it gently, a disappointing lapse of judgment from a man who once knew better.
Whatever Beijing builds will be rife with the usual graft, empty buildings, and padded enrollment numbers that its schools and hospitals already are. Anyone who has watched American subsidy programs in Blue States knows the pattern.
Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program has already produced centers collecting millions while investigators found almost no children on site, fake employers on eligibility forms, and guilty pleas for millions in stolen funds. Imaginary kids in imaginary daycares are not a Chinese monopoly.
Tucker is also wrong on his fertility claim that state daycare is how you raise the birthrate. The Left likes to spout this slogan, but the evidence shows it is simply not true. Studies—including U.S. evidence on the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit and Vermont’s universal pre-K—find little or no rise in births, even as mothers’ labor force participation goes up.
China itself is the exhibit. After the one-child catastrophe, Beijing has tried modest cash subsidies, fee waivers and, of course, more childcare. The fertility rate has continued to plummet, and is now less than one child per woman. The Party is finding out that it was far easier to destroy newborns than to manufacture them.
What might move the needle is the pro-family agenda Vice President J.D. Vance has actually been pushing: make the medical cost of birth as close to free as possible; stop punishing stay-at-home parents in the tax and subsidy code; and give the same help to a stay-at-home mom that goes exclusively to those in the work force and commercial daycares.
The administration has even drafted a rule that would let a married parent caring for a child at home draw from the existing Child Care and Development Fund—roughly $9,000 a child—while a spouse works. That is the opposite of Lenin’s nursery. It treats parental care as care.
Working mothers deserve respect—God love them—but the evidence does not show that parking their children in a state facility will induce them to have more. They are already stretched. Helping the parent who stays home is the more honest pro-natal policy.
So Tucker is wrong twice. He is wrong to treat anything the Chinese Communist Party does as a model for America. He is also wrong on the facts about daycare and births.
I have told him so. Waiting to hear back.
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An earlier version of this article appeared in The Times.
