Do "pronatalists" like Musk care about children and babies?

They certainly care about making their own and encouraging specific groups to do the same.

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Things that were until recently unthinkable and unsayable are now being said, in public and on TV. “White genocide is real.” “Great replacement is not a conspiracy theory.” “Covid came from the lab.” “There are two genders.” “Claudine Gay is a fraud who got her job because of race quotas.” Imagine how far we can push the [Overton] Window next year!

— “Peachy Keenan” (pseudonym), writer and speaker at the 2024 Natal Conference

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever.

—Charles Haywood, men’s rights activist and aspiring “warlord,” speaker at the 2024 Natal Conference

Women need to take their jobs seriously… Not their jobs. Their duty.

—Clara Chan, attendee at the 2024 Natal Conference

[Nazis] believed that the women’s movement was part of an internaional Jewish conspiracy to subvert the German family and thus destroy the German race. The movement, it claimed, was encouraging women to assert their economic independence and to neglect their proper task of producing children.

—Charu Gupta, quoted in How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley

As a writer who often focuses on censorship, and as an anti-censorship advocate and former teacher, I’ve heard a lot about “protecting children” over the past two decades, and the insistence that we must “protect children” has gotten signficantly more intense in American public discourse over the past several years.

During the height of the pandemic, a backlash against Covid-19 mitigation strategies often used the rhetoric of “protecting children” to argue for everything from a return to in-person school, to prohibitions against requiring masks, to an increasingly open opposition to vaccination efforts. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that many of the loudest anti-mitigation activists (à la Moms for Liberty) went on to fully embrace book bans and other censorship efforts once they ran out of mitigation efforts to oppose.

I don’t think all (or even most) people who have spent the past five or more years yelling at school boards and banning books are fascists, or that they intentionally support fascists. But it seems clear that they’re using the same rhetoric fascists use to get us to ignore their attacks on civil and individual rights.

As Jason Stanley writes in How Fascism Works, “It’s hard to advance a policy that will harm a large group of people in straightforward terms. The role of political propaganda is to conceal politicians’ or political movements’ clearly problematic goals by making them in ideals that are widely accepted”¹.

And as we’ll see, the pronatalist movement, which shares at least some overlap with fascist rhetoric, has major proponents who are doing exactly that: pushing wildly unpopular and dangerous policy changes that are cloaked in abstract pro-birth, pro-family language.

Elon Musk

Perhaps one reason why Elon Musk has pulled so much focus during the first months of the Trump presidency is that he seems to exemplify both the superficially pro-children rhetoric and a seemingly complete disinterest in what actually happens to children that suggests alternate motives.

Elon Musk with son X (the subject of a custody dispute with Musk’s former partner) during his February 11, 2025 Oval Office appearance. (Screenshot from CSPAN). To date, publicly available information indicates Musk has fathered at least fourteen children.

As the New York Times reported this week, Musk is ending his official tenure as a “special government employee” (as unofficial head of the officially non-agency Trump administration initiative DOGE) after a period of manic behavior, significant illicit drug use, and lots of personal and legal drama involving his efforts to impregnate as many women as possible.

As a matter of public policy, this is significant because while Musk has proclaimed to see falling birthrates as a major crisis, it’s pretty clear that he really is only concerned with the falling birthrate among wealthy, probably white, people with the “right” political ideologies.

What do pronatalists want?

Pronatalism seems to be a big tent, but one strain of the movement seems to be exemplified by much of Elon Musk’s recent rhetoric and movements. (The fact that he is the world’s richest man and was until recently acting— legally or not— as a powerful government official and advisor means that his policy ideas, such as they are, arguably carry more weight than those of almost any other pronatalist.)

Musk told a Fox News host earlier this year, “Humanity is dying… The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And so unless that changes, civilization will disappear.”

Of course, “humanity” has not stopped having babies, though the world birthrate has declined, but perhaps the “civilization” Musk fears disappearing is explained by the historically low birthrate in the United States, which is especially acute among women aged 20-24, according to the CDC in 2024. Significantly, according to a report the next year, also from the CDC, “The provisional number of births for the United States in 2024 was 3,622,673, up 1% from 2023.”

Musk is not alone. As Politico reported last year on the pronatalist Natal Conference, “Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together — gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.” (Musk, along with Vice President JD Vance, who has often bemoaned low birth rates among Americans, attended the conference.)

And some members of the conference explicitly promoted ideas like the white supremacist “great replacement theory,” which suggest that for at least some pronatalists, the fear is not a decline in births, but a decline in white births.

Even a “progressive” couple interviewed for the Politico piece, who explicitly disagreed with some of the anti-transgender and anti-immigrant rhetoric used by many conference speakers, admitted that they believed that “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”

Intentionally or not, this kind of opinion adopted as policy would encourage more births among the upper class, who can better afford the ideal family type often promoted by pronatalists: many children and a parent who can afford not to work outside of the home.

(If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale.)

The impact of Musk’s cuts to USAID

Musk has palled around with members of the pronatalist movement, but at the same time has overseen catastrophic cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a US government foreign aid program created by Congress in 1961 which, in part, exists to combat the deaths of children and infants.

A screenshot from the official USAID.gov website shows a message that almost all direct hire USAID personnel have been fired as part of the DOGE cuts.

According to data analysis from Boston University School of Public Health associate professor Dr. Brooke Nichols, USAID cuts could lead to the deaths of “more than 176,000 additional adults and children around the world” due to HIV infection.

As of this writing, the data tracker created by Nichols reports that there have been 209,398 excess child deaths worldwide due to DOGE’s USAID funding cuts.

So while Musk clearly values more and healthier children for himself, he was willing to slash funding that saved real children— rather than making any attempt at structural reforms to solve whatever problems may or may not have existed at USAID— in order to satisfy conspiracy theorists and make a political dig at “radical leftists”.

This feels a lot like Musk’s “free speech absolutism”. Musk has long railed against real and perceived censorship by “the Left,” but since joining the Make America Great Again movement, he has escalated his rhetoric, saying that “the Left” was “uh, trying to stop freedom of speech, and uh, just in general trying to infringe upon people’s personal freedoms, and, state control, state control of what you say,” and that, “sort of, the Left wanted to make comedy illegal” during the last CPAC conference.

Of course, at the same time, Musk was using his platforms— particularly, Twitter, which he bought, he said, because he was a “free speech absolutist”— to throw transgender identity and critiques of himself down the digital memory hole.

This only seems like a contradiction if you believe “free speech,” for Musk and similar powerful figures, applies to everyone. Musk obviously wants his personal birthrate to rise (he has fathered at least fourteen children, often unbeknownst to romantic partners who believed they were in a monogamous relationship), and he wants his personal speech, and that of those who agree with him, to be protected, but has repeatedly said that other people are just “NPCs”.

As Stanley writes in How Fascism Works (originally published in 2018), “we find the enemies of liberal democracy… pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech”².

Much of what Musk and some other pronatalists are saying sounds like Fascist Rhetoric 101.

Create a class of “others” (transgender people, Jewish people, Arab people, etc.) and argue that they do not have essential humanity, then make big, ostentious movements (which expand the power of governments and individuals) that protect “real people” from the supposed encroachments of these “others”.

For Musk, the “other” is anyone who opposes him. He has openly stated that he was largely apolitical until he began to believe he was under attack from “the Left,” at which point he poured hundreds over $290 million reelecting president Trump and other ideologically-aligned politicians and became a close advisor to the administration (until things apparently soured due to Musk’s erratic and attention-seeking behavior, as highlighted in the Times piece).

But, again, Musk is mostly just a useful avatar for a larger anti-intellectual, pro-censorship, pronatalist (as in, promoting the birthrates of “desirable” groups, often in reaction to “white genocide” conspiracy theories), anti-regulation, pro-cronyism movement that seeks to radically expand the executive branch of the government in order to achieve its goals (the thing that, for example, Project 2025 explicitly set out to do in its Mandate for Leadership).

As Stanley writes, “Fascist politicians characteristically decry corruption in the state they seek to take over, which is bizarre, given that fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat”.

As Heather Cox Richardson and others have pointed out, Musk leaves his tenure slashing government agency budgets with fewer regulations hanging over his personal businesses, with his friends and allies in key regulatory roles, and with expanded government contracts likely to net him billions.

Ultimately, history warns us that fascists “ideology,” such as it is, is pretty simple: the people who promote it generally want power for themselves, and they’re willing to single out victims to scapegoat or even destroy if it helps them to gain power.

What they don’t really care about, in any practical way, is building a world that is healthier and safer for all children. And in, for example, Musk’s case, the pronatalist rhetoric coexists with actions which have actively led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of real children.

1. An example Stanley gives is Richard Nixon saying (according to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks… They key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (This is the essence of the “Southern Strategy”.)

2. An example from Stanley: former attorney general Jeff Sessions had a former librarian prosecuted for “chuckling” during a hearing. At the same time, he gave a speech at Georgetown Law “excoriating university campuses for failing to live up to a commitment to free speech because of the presumption that the academy discourages right-leaning voices”.