Elon Musk accused Vice President Kamala Harris of being an “extinctionist” in a melodramatic post on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday night.
Cosigning conservative claims that the left is pushing for fewer people to have kids, Musk offered an extreme interpretation of some of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate’s comments about families.
“Shamala is an extinctionist,” he replied in regard to a post by former President Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. “The natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!”
In his own post, Donald Trump Jr. shared a clip of Harris speaking at Pennsylvania’s Reading Area Community College last year, which he paired with a baseless claim she was “suggesting that young people should not have children due to climate change.”
Donald Trump Jr.’s assertion was a serious distortion of the former California senator’s comments, in which she talked about her empathy for young people who feel anxious about starting families during such an unstable time in the world.
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Focusing on the threat of climate change in her speech, Harris told the crowd that she understood why many were wary about their futures and hesitant to have children.
“Because young people said, ‘We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis’ — you know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called ‘climate anxiety,’” she said.
Harris went on, “Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home … because what will this climate be?”
While the VP’s remarks were a broad statement about an uncertain future, Musk’s misconception played perfectly into his own fixation on falling birth rates around the globe.
The Tesla CEO, a father of 12, has been adamant about declining birth rates posing an existential threat to humanity for years now.
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In 2022, he wrote that he was “doing his best to help the underpopulation crisis,” and called falling birth rates “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
Criticizing access to birth control and abortion in a 2023 interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk asked, “Will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.”
Lately, conservatives appear to be obsessively preoccupied with the idea of people without children.
After he was announced as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate earlier this month, JD Vance’s comments attacking Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” resurfaced, to wide condemnation.
Despite a swift and strong backlash, the Ohio senator has dug in his heels regarding the statement in multiple interviews since.