They Don’t Fear Extinction. They Fear Sharing.

From Elon Musk’s fertility spreadsheets to Stephen Miller’s "civilization" rhetoric, the far-right panic over global birth rates isn't about population at all—it's about rank.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

A few weeks ago, Roland Martin and his panel — Dr. Greg Carr, Reecie Colbert, and Dr. Larry Walker — went somewhere that most mainstream political commentary refuses to go. They dismantled one of the most carefully maintained lies in Western political discourse. I did a deeper dive into the data after watching. And what I found confirmed everything they were saying — and then some.

The segment starts with what looks like a conversation about fertility rates. Fox News clips. CDC data. Teen pregnancy statistics. For a few minutes, you might think Elon Musk had decided to become America’s loudest OB-GYN. But Roland and the crew make the turn quickly and cleanly: this was never really a conversation about fertility rates. It was never really about population at all. What the panic is actually about — what it has always been about — is the declining population of white people specifically. And the Western political and media establishment has spent years talking around that reality, dressing it up in the language of civilization and demographics and birth rates, rather than saying the quiet part out loud.

Let’s look at the numbers, because somewhere in America Elon Musk just felt a disturbance in the force and opened another fertility spreadsheet. The demographic shift is real and it is significant. The white share of the United States population has been in long-term decline since 1950. In 2020, non-Hispanic whites represented about 59.7% of the country. By 2030, that figure is projected to drop to 55.8%. Demographers at the Census Bureau project that white people will fall below 50% of the total U.S. population around 2045. White children under 18 crossed that threshold already — they are already in the minority.

And it is not just a share decline. It is an absolute one. The non-Hispanic white population is expected to contract by roughly 19 million people between 2016 and 2060 — shrinking from 198 million to 179 million — even as the total U.S. population grows. The 2020 Census confirmed that the 2010s was the first decade in the nation’s history in which the white population declined in absolute terms. The second consecutive decade in which the white population under 18 shrank.

The European picture is arguably more acute. In 2024, the European Union’s total fertility rate sat at just 1.34 births per woman — well below the 2.1 replacement level. Germany’s rate dropped to 1.35. Italy hit a record low of 1.18. France, historically Europe’s most fertile major nation, fell to 1.62 — its lowest since World War I. Poland is at 1.1, nearly half of what it was in 1990. At this point, Elon Musk probably has a group chat titled “Save Western Civilization” muted somewhere on his phone. No European country currently meets the replacement rate. Without international migration, the UK population would begin declining from mid-2025 onward.

The demographic shift is real. The more interesting question is what the numbers are being made to mean — and more importantly, who is being allowed to panic about them publicly, and what they are actually panicking about.

When Roland pointed out that Elon Musk seems to spend an alarming amount of his free time thinking about birth rates, he made a point worth sitting with. Roland said, bluntly: “He’s talking about white women. He ain’t talking about Black women or Black Africans. He’s talking about them white folks.” And when you look at the data — and at Musk’s own rhetoric — that read becomes difficult to argue with. Elon Musk has somehow become the world’s richest amateur demographer, but his concern rarely appears to extend to humanity in the abstract. It appears to have a much more specific zip code.

Musk has said on Fox News that “the birth rate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear.” He has posted on X that declining birth rates present “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” He has declared that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” The word he keeps using is civilization. Hold that word. We are coming back to it.

Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda in both the first term and the current second non-consecutive term, is the most important figure in this conversation because his language is the most carefully coded. He speaks as if he is the final guardian of Western civilization, when in reality he often sounds like the last surviving member of a homeowners association whose neighborhood changed fifteen years ago and he still hasn’t recovered.

He declared in 2024: “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World.” He called the prospect of a Biden second term “the assisted suicide of Western civilization.” He has said openly that he preferred the pre-1965 immigration quota system — the one that explicitly favored immigrants from Western and Northern Europe over what he called “third world countries.” He once told Trump directly: “This was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.” And most recently, he posted on Twitter: “We’ve been saying for years this is a fight to save civilization. Anyone with eyes can see that now.”