Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”
Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.
It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.
But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?
Yeah, I’ve done a turnaround on this, as well. The numbers are there and respected researchers that aren’t known for right wing bias/eugenics shit are starting to talk about it more and more.
I can’t remember the name of the guest, but she appeared on Adam Conover 's podcast and made some amazing points about destabilizing societies. It’s hard to agree with the jackasses sounding the alarm, but I definitely don’t agree with their racist great replacement BS. But broken clocks and all
Yeah, there’s an extremely unfortunate intersection with a very bad line of thinking, polluting the argument.
If those eugenics guys really cared, they wouldn’t be trying to firebomb immigration, parent welfare, or wealth redistribution to young people. They just want to purge ‘others’ like a WH40K meme.