Over the past few years, the biggest knock you’ve heard against the field of public health is that they completely mismanaged COVID, mainly by exaggerating its impact. They told us it was a potentially civilization-ending epidemic — one that justified lockdowns, mandatory shots, et cetera. In the end they were wrong, of course, and for that reason no one will ever trust one of these supposed experts again.
But the really extraordinary thing about the field of public health isn’t the epidemics they fixate on. It’s the ones they ignore. In particular, there is one ongoing public health crisis that these experts really don’t want to talk about — even though, if it continues for much longer, it will quite literally bring about the end of humanity.
I’m talking about collapsing fertility rates all over the world, which is a problem you really have to put in context if you want to understand how dire things are.
Right now, Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, Greece, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Qatar, the UAE, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK, Germany, and the United States — and many others — have birth rates that are well below replacement level.
The U.S. fertility rate is at its lowest point in nearly a century. What that means is that people aren’t having enough children to sustain the population. But not every country is affected by this crisis. There are countries where fertility is much higher than replacement level. They include such esteemed locations as Niger (one of the poorest countries on the planet), Chad, Somalia, Angola, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Zambia, Cameroon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and of course Haiti.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is heading. Third-world hellholes are reproducing, while first-world countries — the ones that sustain the global economy that keeps billions of people alive — are not reproducing. As this goes on, and third-world inhabitants continue to pour into the first-world, the distinction between these two parts of the world continues to blur until they’re completely irrelevant. Eventually everywhere will be third-world.
This is not a new problem. But to the extent political leaders have tried to solve it, by and large, they’ve failed.
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A decade ago, for example, China eased its barbaric one-child policy. They expected millions more births as a result. But the following year, the country saw only an additional half-million births. And the country’s birth rate has remained below replacement level ever since.
Beginning in the 90s, Japan undertook its own efforts to raise the birth rate, including offering more parental leave, more child care services, et cetera. The result? Nothing has improved. It’s only gotten much worse. Last year, Japan’s birth rate was the lowest on record.
It’s the same story in Hungary. Starting with Orban’s government in 2010, Hungary doubled its spending on families. And yet, last year, Hungary, like Japan, recorded its lowest number of births in history.
So whatever the problem is here, it’s clear that it cannot be resolved solely through more spending or government intervention. Simply providing some ad hoc economic incentives isn’t cutting it — although those policies are good, they aren’t sufficient. So what is the solution? You can say that the broader economy needs to improve, which is obviously a big part of it. But the declines I’m talking about have been in progress for decades. Singapore’s birth rate has been dropping since the 1980s, and their GDP per capita grew dramatically in the new millennium. It’s a similar situation in Taiwan. And birth rates in the U.S. were declining pre-pandemic, for more than a decade — even throughout periods in which median household incomes were setting new records.
What this means is that figuring out the root cause of this problem is more complicated than looking at economic indicators alone. It means analyzing culture, and in particular, taking a close look at prevailing attitudes towards children and families, and trying to change them. That was the main goal of the Natal Conference, which took place at the end of last year in Austin, Texas. Speakers from all over the country gathered to assess what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.
One of them was Kevin Dolan, an organizer of the event. And he made it clear that, whether you personally like the idea of having kids or not, the collapse of fertility rates will have devastating effects on you and everyone you know. Watch:
Whether you agree with him or not, one of the first things you notice about Kevin Dolan is that he’s not a demagogue. He didn’t hold this conference to berate anyone for not wanting to have kids. He’s not some kind of cult leader who demands that everyone sign a pledge to create a certain number of children. He’s a normal guy. And he’s trusting, too, which is why he allowed a Politico reporter to attend the event to write about it.
How did that turn out? Predictably, Politico published a hit piece that’s so bizarre, and so totally disconnected from the event, that it verges on self-parody.
Here’s how Politico wrote about the conference on Twitter: “The far right is so obsessed with making babies, they just held a whole conference about it.”
Yes, you heard that right. Politico has uncovered the sinister Right-wing plot to have babies and ensure the survival of the human species. They caught us. We are anti-extinction. Much to our shame.
Then if you click through to the article, you’ll find this sinister-sounding headline: “The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.”
It’s not hard to see what Politico is getting at. Basically, they’re saying that anyone who wants Western societies to produce children — which is to say, anyone who wants Western societies to continue existing — must be “far Right.” It’s reminiscent of how “freedom” has become a dirty word in Canada. The people who want to destroy Western civilization aren’t doing a great job of hiding it anymore.
But if you go online to the Natal Conference’s website, you can find a bunch of speakers explaining very clearly what they think is happening in this country. They talk about everything from divorce laws to common fears people have about parenting, and the impact these considerations are having on fertility rates. None of this is a “Right-wing conspiracy.” That’s the familiar terminology they trot out whenever the Left knows that something is really happening and they want it to keep happening.
And indeed, there’s a very active anti-natalism movement right now. Spend any time on the darker corners of the internet, and you’ll find quite a few people who fully embrace depopulation as a positive good. It’s grim stuff.
In fact, mainstream media outlets routinely run stories about young people who don’t want to have kids because it will hurt the planet somehow. Watch:
That’s the more socially acceptable form of the depopulation agenda, and it’s being promoted by corporate media. But the anti-natalism movement gets more organized, and more explicit, the deeper you look.
One of the leaders of this depopulation agenda is Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Here’s footage of one of his recent conferences. As you watch this, compare Knight’s presentation with the one you heard earlier at the Natal conference, just in terms of the general sanity of the speaker. Watch:
That’s the first land acknowledgement you’ll hear that doesn’t just acknowledge some of the tribes or whatever, but also acknowledges some of the wildlife. This is as cultish and as creepy as it gets, but you won’t see Politico running any articles on this guy being “far Left.” They’re not smearing Les Knight. Instead, quite the opposite.
The New York Times recently published a glowing profile of Knight: “For the sake of the planet, Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, has spent decades pushing one message: ‘May we live long and die out.’”
In that clip you just saw, you heard Knight mention that no one ever talks about the fact that world population is increasing, even as birth rates plummet. But there are a couple of obvious explanations for this. One is that — as I mentioned earlier — not all countries are experiencing plummeting birth rates. The most dysfunctional countries on the planet are actually reproducing at extremely high rates. Additionally, just from a statistical perspective, it takes time for lagging birth rates to show up in world population figures. There might be a lot of young couples now having kids in some places. That doesn’t mean those couples will be around in 20 years, still having children. Birth rates decline first, and then population declines. When you get to the point where the population itself is starting to decline, that’s when the catastrophe has really hit. The goal is to prevent that from happening.
Reversing this decline should not be a “Right-wing” project. Yet there are very few prominent people outside of conservative circles who are willing to talk about this at all. Elon Musk is the only notable exception. In fact, it should tell us something that Musk — one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet — considers depopulation to be the greatest existential threat we face as a species.
This weekend I engaged in a back-and-forth with Musk on Twitter about the causes of this existential threat. The conversation started when someone posted this chart on social media. It shows that the number of men under 30 who report having zero sexual partners since turning 18 has increased from 8% in 2008 to 27% in 2018.
Holy hell, this is unbelievable pic.twitter.com/uR48n6KPRx
— Sean Tuffy (@SMTuffy) April 26, 2024
That’s obviously a striking chart, and it demands an explanation. I responded by saying:
A lot of theories to explain this but it’s very clearly like 98 percent because of porn.
I made that observation because the iPhone and Pornhub were both born in 2007. Male virginity rates skyrocketed pretty much from that very moment, as birth rates plunged the opposite direction.
In reply to my tweet, Musk wrote this:
It’s not porn, which has been readily available from the days of VHS tapes, but rather the general temptation of the online world, if you’re going to blame it on anything electronic. Sex is not what matters. Lots of people are having sex that have no kids. Population implosion is what will end civilization.
What Musk is saying about pornography is obviously true. Pornography clearly pre-dates the year 2007. But it was nothing like the pornography that’s been available in the past decade or so.
Here’s one small data point: Playboy at its peak sold around 7 million copies a month. Pornhub — just one site — gets something like 15 times as many visitors per day. Way more people are consuming porn today, way more often, starting at way younger ages. And on top of that, the porn itself is way more graphic and debased. This isn’t the whole reason that birth rates are declining. But it is a major plank in the depopulation platform.
That’s a strong argument for continuing to ban young people from accessing online pornography, which several states have already done. It’s also a good reason for parents to limit or even eliminate their kids access to electronics. And that should just be the beginning. If all of this sounds drastic, it’s probably because you haven’t been fully informed about the scale of the problem that Western civilization is now facing. And that’s by design.
A few months ago I did a whole monologue on the Jaffe Memo, and the origins of Planned Parenthood’s very comprehensive campaign to depopulate the planet. Very powerful “nonprofits” and political organizations in this country don’t want you to reproduce. That’s not conspiratorial; it’s just true. They’ve put it in writing.
The good news is that this is one of the few problems in our society that pretty much everyone can help solve. It’s maybe the single most solvable crisis in history. They have to expend all this effort and push all this propaganda to discourage reproduction because it’s one of the most natural things a person can do. But the propaganda is failing now. Because of the Natal Conference and efforts like it, as well as Elon Musk and other prominent figures, there’s more attention to declining birth rates than there has been at any point in recent history. That’s why Politico and Left-wing activists are melting down. There’s nothing they want to see less than more children being born. That tells you everything you need to know about their ideology — and it also tells you how to defeat it.
