Instead of discussing or even acknowledging Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems earlier in the day, Tucker Carlson aired the second part of his interview with Elon Musk on Tuesday. And during this second installment of the meandering exchange, Musk advanced a curious idea about reproductive freedom, telling Carlson that birth control and abortion are contributing to the end of civilization.
Here’s how that came up. At one point, Musk said that procreation has been ”’subverted” somehow. Carlson asked Musk, “The urge to have sex and to procreate is, after breathing and eating, the most basic urge. Yes. How has it been subverted?”
“Well, it’s just the, in the past we could rely upon, um, you know, simple, uh, limbic system rewards,” Musk said. “In order to procreate. Um, but, uh, once you have birth control, um, and, you know, uh, abortions and whatnot, now, now you, now, you can still satisfy the limbic instinct, but not procreate.”
“So we didn’t, we haven’t yet evolved to deal with that cuz this is all fairly recent, you know, the last 50 years or so. Um, for the, for birth control,” Musk rambled on. “So I’m, I’m sort of worried that hey, civilization, you know, don’t, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s gonna crumble.”
“Does this the old question of like, uh, will civilization end with a, a bang or a whimper?” Carlson asked.
“Well, it’s currently trying to, to end with a whimper in adult diapers,” Musk said, apparently referencing childless older people.
Things went on from there — you can watch the bizarre exchange at the top of the page. (Video via Kat Abu.)
Meanwhile, Musk’s comments deserve some contextualization. His comment, “if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s gonna crumble,” is strange indeed considering the fact that the human population shows no signs of declining. The opposite is true, in fact.
Just to use Musk’s time frame of “the last 50 years or so,” he was born in 1972, when the number of people living was approximately 3.9 billion. Skip ahead 51 years? The human population is expected to pass 8 billion people at some point in 2023. In other words, the number of living humans has more than doubled during Elon Musk’s lifetime. Hardly evidence of a demographic apocalypse coinciding with the increase in reproductive freedom.
Meanwhile, Musk may not be aware of this when he raised the topic of civilization somehow collapsing because there aren’t enough babies, but Tucker Carlson, who last year advised fans to “have more children than you can afford,” has often expressed views on childbirth and population that are in line with so-called “replacement theory,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory holding that white people are in danger of being “replaced” by other races.
How are they replacing white people, you might ask? By having more babies, so goes the theory, which if we aren’t clear is extremely racist. Carlson apparently enjoys the topic a lot. For instance in 2017 with former Republican congressman Steve King. King of course expressed support, literally, for the concept of White Supremacy, and was essentially dropped by the Republican Party in 2020 after he got a little too vocal about it.
Carlson so frequently brings up topics related to replacement theory that an analysis by the New York Times declared that he hosts “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news.” Again, we have to assume Musk is unaware of all this.
