Politico says making babies is ‘far right’ as low birth rates lead to population collapse

Population growth in the US, Europe, and parts of Asia are below replacement rate. While popular ideas on population from the 1970s, boosted by thinkers like Carl Sagan, claimed that the real threat to humanity was overpopulation, new concerns have emerged that humanity is heading for a population collapse. For Politico, however, advocating for human reproduction is nothing more than a far-right plot. 

"We are living through the greatest population bust in human history," NatalCon says. "The future belongs to those who show up." 

Politico reporter Gaby Del Valle headed out to cover the first Natal Conference in Austin at the end of last year as part of her beat writing about "immigration, surveillance, and the far right." What she discerned from that experience is that natalism, or the belief that humans should reproduce, has a more nefarious, "ultimate goal," which is "a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount." 

Elon Musk, who has had many children of his own, responded to the story, saying "If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end." And he's not wrong. 

Those pushing the crazy idea that human beings have a responsibility to perpetrate the species, and that if humans leave off having children, civilization will collapse, Del Valle writes, "are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now—and who often see the past as the best model for the future they'd like to build." 

Conservatives, of course, are averse to broad, chaotic social change and believe that traditional values have greater moral weight than the ever-shifting values of contemporary culture that lean into self-fulfillment above all else. Del Valle seems surprised that the conservatives at NatalCon advocated for nuclear families as the foundational building blocks of society. 

Del Valle spoke to Kevin Dolan, a father who spoke at NatalCon. Dolan told her that contemporary culture, that prioritizes career over family, has aided in the declining birth rate and contributed to the belief that starting a family is not that important. 

For Politico and Del Valle, the merger of concerns over immigration and the declining birth rate are some kind of eugenicist nightmare. "Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes," Del Valle writes, going on to say that the NatalCon attendees hope that through their advocacy there will be a burgeoning "population large enough to effect more lasting change." 

This is how she links advocating for more human births in the United States to, of course, racism. "This conference," she writes, "suggests there's a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority—one that looks and sounds just like them." Typically, however, when a couple brings new life into the world, it resembles them. 

She slams the notion that human reproduction is part of a divine plan, a belief held not only by Christians but by religous groups worldwide, before jumping into directly calling out those who want more babies as "white supremacists." 

"White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring 'a future for white children,'" and quotes a member of a white nationalist group who shares the belief that more children should be born. 

Abortion in the United States takes the lives of more unborn black babies that any other racial or ethnic group. Natalists, are by definition opposed to abortion. The Democrats' plan for tackling population decline is to import more cheap labor illegally across the US-Mexico border. 

The article brings up policy plans that could be in effect in a second Trump term, such as those that "would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families," as somehow abhorrent to American life. 

"We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on," Dolan said at the conference, echoing a concept that is rooted in a belief in the divine. 

The speakers, who, per Del Valle, are part of "the extremely online right," oppose birth control, abortion, antidepressants, microplastics in the environment, trans and gender ideology, dating apps, casual sex, and a feminist movement that has convinced women "that they can have it all — kids and a career and endless vacations and so much more — only to end up unhappy, infertile and alone." 

One of those speakers was Peachy Keenan, who pushed back against the article's claims, saying "This article complains that some speakers at the Natal conference (like me) explicitly pointed out that people on the left are not reproducing and people on the right are. This fact has been touted by the left as a sign of their moral superiority—they're not burdening women with kids, they're not using too much carbon. But when the right dares to notice that their plans for depopulation will assure longterm victory for the right, we're the bad guys. Too good!" 

The Democrats and progressive left are pro-illegal immigration, pro-abortion, pro-sex changes for children, pro a fertility industry that encourages conception later in life. In many ways, this means their views will be passed down to less children overall. That's just reality, as these factions of society don't have children, and conservatives do, there will simply be more conservative children. Some speakers brought that up, saying all conservatives need to do is have more babies and the rest will work itself out. 

This, Politico posits, is also kind of racist, or at least not nice. Del Valle writes that "these conference attendees have coalesced around a solution that won’t require them to persuade skeptics to join their cause. If everything goes as planned, the competition will go extinct on their own. All the natalists have to do is have enough children so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth."