Lucid

05/02/2025

$5000 bonuses for mothers after delivery. Medals for prolific mothers (more than 6 kids). Up to one-third Fulbright scholarships reserved for people who are married or who have children. These pro-natalist measures the Donald Trump administration is considering are part of a larger attempt to use government to re-engineer the American population. Detaining and ejecting immigrants, disparaging “childless” women, privileging motherhood as central to female identity, and incentivizing White Christian births to “natural families” –unions of one man and one woman –are part of this plan.

Great Replacement Theory, or the idea that White Christians are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, threatening the survival of the race and “civilization,” was central to Fascist ideologies and practices and it is central to anti-immigrant and other racist platforms of far-right parties and governments today.

MAGA is the American hub of this transnational racist project, and the proposals of the Trump administration also reflect the obsession with increasing White Christian birthrates among many prominent Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance and unelected co-U.S. leader Elon Musk.

Population design suggests the ways that today’s United States government is in dialogue with foreign authoritarian practice past and present, and with extremist ideologies that see Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants as dangers to the nation’s genetic pool. This essay looks at far-right Italy and Hungary to place what is unfolding in America in a broader context.

Only Children Can Save the World, But Only Some People Should Have Children

It should be no surprise to find DOGE head Musk, a friend to far-right politicians everywhere, mobilized for White Christian civilizational rescue. Musk seems to be on a one-man crusade to spread his own supposedly superior genes as widely as possible. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Musk has a growing “legion” of over a dozen children, birthed by many different mothers. He joined Meloni at a 2024 gala celebrating Novák’s new organization, x-y, which is dedicated to “saving nations” from “a collapsing global birthrate.”

Novák was available to start this initiative because she was forced to resign from the Hungarian presidency in 2023 after she pardoned a man convicted of serial child sex abuse in a state-run childrens’ home. What better comeback than to redouble her commitment to “natural” family values! And so, x-y was born.

“Only children can save the world,” wrote Novák, as she posted the selfie of herself with Musk and Meloni. Left out from this feel-good message was her evident belief that only some people should be allowed to have those children. With Trump back in office, America will officially join this transnational project of politicizing the family in service of racist population design.