Elon Musk’s Creepy Politics of Birthing
Elon Musk’s Creepy Politics of Birthing
Right-wing pronatalism bears little resemblance to the family values–focused conservatism of earlier eras.
TAYLOR SWIFT’S ENDORSEMENT OF Kamala Harris following the ABC presidential debate Tuesday night infuriated many conservatives who were already upset by Donald Trump’s poor performance.
The pop superstar’s signoff, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady,” was a reference to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s complaints about people without children having political power. Her taunt has become a powerful magnet for right-wing indignation.
One reply to Swift’s post was particularly creepy: “Fine Taylor . . . you win . . . I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” Elon Musk posted.
Musk’s joke wasn’t just casual misogyny broadcast to his 197.4 million followers. It reflected a larger preoccupation that has become a guiding ideological principle for today’s far right: a pronatalism that views women as a vehicle for population growth and, relatedly, as a means of countering the growth of racial minorities in the United States.
Musk himself has eleven children whom he fathered with three different mothers; two of them were born through a surrogate.
On one hand, it makes sense that this wealthy man is doing what he personally can to counter falling birth rates, which he portrays as a civilization-threatening problem. But on the other, Musk is not so much a family man as a paterfamilias. He is estranged from his trans daughter, Vivian, who has described him as authoritarian and narcissistic. Musk, in turn, claimed Vivian is “dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” and has blithely said of their estrangement, “Can’t win them all.”
Why make siring offspring such a priority if you don’t actually want to be a father to them? Musk’s position in this area starts to get a bit clearer when you factor in some of his other views: He is an outspoken border hawk and a critic of what he views as a woke attempt to impose a regime of cultural and ethnic diversity in Western countries.
Musk’s reply to Taylor Swift may have been an attempt to mockingly belittle her Harris endorsement. But it also treated her as a vessel in this larger ideological framework: She would need to have a child, he was saying, in order to feel political fulfillment.
Across today’s hard right, white procreation is being held up as a solution to both America’s demographic challenges and its political and cultural ones. This marks a drastic shift from the old conservative politics of family values, which emphasized principles of freedom and dignity. Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.
This isn’t to say that declining birth rates aren’t a real issue for Western democracies. In 2023, the United States saw its fertility rate fall to 1.62 births per woman; Italy fared even worse, reaching 1.2. These figures are harbingers of significant policy challenges that go along with aging populations.
Raising birth rates among people who already live in the country isn’t the only way to counter this trend, of course: Immigration has been the primary source of population growth in the Global North since 1990. As a writer for a magazine of the International Monetary Fund put it, increasing immigration “would reduce population decline, keep the size of the labor force from shrinking, improve age dependency ratios, and produce positive fiscal gains.”
Yet Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.
These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?
Musk believes that immigration will lead to civil war in Europe, recklessly posting about the inevitability of such violence during the far-right riots that erupted across the United Kingdom in August. It’s worth pointing out that these riots were fueled in part by anti-immigrant misinformation that many participants found through Musk’s own platform.
All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.
BILLIONAIRES OFTEN HAVE IDIOSYNCRATIC political positions, but Musk’s stances are very much in step with those of a larger right-wing movement—one that is growing in popularity around the globe. Last year, then–Hungarian President Katalin Novák, during a U.S. tour, stopped by Tesla’s Austin headquarters to meet Musk. Novák anointed him a “new ally in the fight for family freedom” and invited him to attend the next Budapest Demographic Summit.
Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.
Musk was among those who lobbied Trump to inflict Vance on the country. In addition to his declamations against “childless cat ladies” ruling America, Vance has offered a wider body of commentary on the issue that fuses cultural conservatism, anti-immigrant views, and a pronatalist agenda that instrumentalizes women. In the same interview during which he made his infamous comments about “childless cat ladies,” Vance also said, “If we want a healthy ruling class in this country . . . we should support more people who actually have kids.”
Musk’s views are also in line with those of Vance’s benefactor, Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. Thiel is Vance’s former employer and the primary backer of his 2022 Senate bid, and he has also funded other pronatalist and anti-immigrant politicians, such as twice-failed Arizona candidate Blake Masters.
In 2022, when I highlighted Masters as part of the rise of what I called America-First pronatalism, I was invited to appear on an episode of Dr. Phil as part of a panel on procreation that included far-right radio host Jesse Lee Peterson. Peterson, a black minister and activist, declared that “we need more white babies.” He continued: “If you lose white folks, it’s over for America. . . . All these other races don’t do nothing but destroy.” It was a shocking line of reasoning. But how far do Peterson’s blunt words really take him from where hardliners like Musk and Carlson want to go?
The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”
Rubin’s comments show how culture war can provide a frame for every person or issue. Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.
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