by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m old enough to remember when a book came out called “The Birth Dearth.” I was too young to read it all — I did try — but in general the book was about how America faced a “birth dearth” in the coming decades.
I’ve heard a little bit more about this book as an adult and apparently it was racist as hell. But anyway, I thought of this book when I caught a moment of the tech bro podcast “All In.”
One of their Smartest Guys In The Room participants said offhandedly that America was — you guessed it — facing a birth dearth (among white people) because of gender equality. They were quick to say, “Well, we all know gender equality is good thing…”
Then it hit me — do we? Does everyone agree with that? The answer is, no. In fact, a huge swath of the MAGA New Right agenda is based specifically on the idea of ending gender equality once and for all. It all goes back to the demographic panic among white conservative men about their place in American society.
Hence, abortion — even contraception in general — will probably be outlawed. The whole point is — white conservative men believe they are in an existential struggle to keep their status by forcing more white babies to be born. They will do everything in their power to achieve this goal, to the point of making women second class citizens if need be.
And the quest to do that goes hand-in-hand with the overall MAGA New Right desire to turn the United States into an autocratic white Christian ethno state of blood and soil.
The real question, of course, is as we are in the final transition into autocracy, do we have a civil war and bomb ourselves into oblivion? I still think we’re just going to slip peacefully into autocracy.
