This AI-generated picture on X is causing a lot of “butthurt” (as the kids say).  And it is illustrative of a larger cultural and political pattern.

Scott Coley, author of Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right, wrote:

The fondness for artificial images among accounts that promote trad sentiment merely underscores the fact that they are nostalgic for a moment in American history that is, in fact, completely imaginary… the problem with such images isn’t the number of children.  (I know plenty of families this size.)  It’s an absurd pastiche – ages of the subjects, facial expressions, coloring, gratuitous appendages, etc.  It’s entirely divorced from reality, not unlike the ideology that inspired it.

An anonymous account (“Alex”) added, “It’s the ‘lebensraum’ vibe this garbage AI picture is giving that’s the problem.”

I could not help but be amused by all of this, especially the Lebensraum Vibe.  I couldn’t decide whether this better fit as a brand of an energy drink, or the name of a corporate boy-band.  Come to think of it, it could also be a country music dance craze, like the old Watermelon Crawl.

One person said that the picture is unrealistic because the fertility rate “in the Rockwell era” (that would probably be Norman, not Lew) was “2.0.”  No evidence for this was cited.  Not even CNN makes such an argument. And indeed, the actual statistics tell a different story.  The current American fertility rate seems to be about 1.66, which doesn’t bode well for future generations of people who would like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social welfare policies to continue, and perhaps even be expanded.

Another person, Andy Mattson, opined: “If the only examples they can find of these large, happy old-school ‘family values’ families have to be artificially generated by AI, then it suggested that you can’t find real examples for society to offer.”  This is an interesting conclusion to draw based on the existence of art (even if it is art created by Artificial Stupidity).

It is not uncommon to read younger people expressing their disdain for children, if not outright rage against those who choose to have larger families.

The takeaway from this interesting exchange (along with the conclusion that “reverends” don’t have “reading comprehension”) is that the Left is simply triggered by large families – especially if they are white.  For that is simply what this picture is.  Granted, there is a certain creepiness factor of all AI-generated depictions.  AI computer software (and their corresponding NPCs in the real world) can’t even seem to get the most basic realities right.  How hard is it for a program to not generate extra fingers?  And this is the technology that is supposed to enslave us.

What I found most interesting is the “Lebensraum vibe.”  It is just that: a vibe, a subjective emotional response.  It is triggered by seeing a fictional happy large family consisting of a father and mother (who is pregnant) who happen to be white.  Another critic sniffed that the parents had brown hair, but the children were blond.  Of course, people with large families get to see genetics at work.  It is not uncommon for two brown-haired parents to have children who are tow-headed in their youth, or even for red hair to pop up in the genetic scramble (which is, of course, more likely in larger families).  Someone else said that blond children were “improbable.”  I suppose it would also be horrific given the au courant vilification of white people.  And following this theme, the lowest hanging fruit is to dig up a sinister Nazi-era German term and put it to use against those who disagree with the Leftist antifertility agenda.

German is apparently a scary language.  If one wishes to vilify someone, use long, exotic German words – hopefully with umlauts and in the fraktur font.  It sounds funny, but it works.  I’m reminded of the recent remarks (hopefully fictional) of the young woman who was scandalized that the Germans still employ the term Luftwaffe, since that is a “Nazi word.”

There is nothing in the AI picture to suggest that this family depicts Germans, let alone advocates of the Third Reich in those few years when the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was in power.  In fact, such a scene (minus the AI inability to count fingers) could well depict a family in London during the Blitz, or perhaps a postwar American family.  With the right number of digits, it could even be a rosy-cheeked Norman Rockwell creation.  My mother was born after Word War II, and she was the eighth of ten kids.  While this was a statistically large family even for those days, it was not outrageously unusual.  This AI picture could have been an idealized picture of her own family.  As hard as it is for moderns to believe, ordinary people used to have larger families before the advent of the contraceptive pill.  What is causing the Lebensraum trigger?  Where are their indicators of the Nazism in this picture?  They are in the minds of the ones feeling the “vibe,” since they have been programmed to do so.

Ask any young married couple with many children how often people make snide comments or give them the stink-eye.  There is a fear and loathing of large families, because there is a cultural bias against children and traditional families.  And in spite of the onslaught (Britzkrieg?) of rhetoric championing non-traditional families and the mimicking of nature by those who are not equipped to procreate, the future belongs to traditional families who ignore the critics, have lots of babies, and raise them in their faith tradition and educating them classically.

There is an old military saying to the effect of receiving flak shows that you are over the target.  Maybe they even say such things in German among members of the Luftwaffe.

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