The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population
The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.
“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.” …
‘But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”’
‘More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”’