Rather than discuss or acknowledge Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Tucker Carlson aired the second part of his interview with Elon Musk on Tuesday. And during this second installment of the rambling exchange, Musk brought up a curious idea about reproductive freedom, telling Carlson that birth control and abortion are contributing to the end of civilization.
Here’s how it unfolded. At one point, Musk said that the purchase had been “distorted” somehow. Carlson asked Musk, “The desire to have sex and reproduce is, after breathing and eating, the most basic urge. Yes. How is it reversed?”
“Well, it’s just, in the past we could rely on, um, you know, simple, uh, limbic system rewards,” Musk said. “To have offspring. Um, but, uh, once you have birth control, um, and, you know, uh, abortion and whatnot, now, now you, now, you can still satisfy the limbic instinct. Can, but cannot create.
“So we haven’t, we haven’t yet evolved to deal with it because it’s all happened very recently, you know, the last 50 years or so. Um, for birth control,” Musk said. “So I, I’m kind of worried that hey, civilization, you know, no, if we don’t create enough people to at least maintain our numbers, maybe increase it a little bit, then civilization’s going to collapse. Will go.”
“Is that the old question, uh, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper?” Carlson asked.
“Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers,” Musk said.
Things took off from there – you can see the bizarre exchange at the top of the page. (Video via Kat Abu,
In the meantime, Musk’s comments deserve some relevance. His comment, “If we don’t create enough people to at least maintain our numbers, maybe even increase a little bit, then civilization will collapse,” is indeed strange considering the fact that The human population shows no signs of dwindling. The opposite is true, in fact.
To use Musk’s “last 50 years or so” time frame, he was born in 1972, when the number of people living about 3.9 billion, Skip ahead 51 years? human population 8 billion people are expected to pass Sometime in 2023. In other words, the number of human beings alive has more than doubled in Elon Musk’s lifetime. There is hardly any evidence of a demographic apocalypse coinciding with an increase in reproductive freedom.
Meanwhile, Musk probably wasn’t aware when he brought up the subject of civilization’s collapse because there weren’t enough kids, but Tucker Carlson, who advised fans last year that “have more children than you can handle,” has often expressed views on childbirth and population. In his case, he has done so in ways that are consistent with the so-called “replacement theory,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory that white people are in danger of being “replaced” by other races.
How are they taking the place of white people, you may ask? Having more kids, goes this theory, which is extremely racist if we’re not clear. Carlson clearly enjoys the subject very much. For example With former Republican Congressman Steve King in 2017, Of course King expressed support, literally, to the concept of white supremacyand was essentially He was fired by the Republican Party in 2020 after he became too outspoken about this.
Carlson often brings up topics related to substitution theory. 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 that Musk is clueless about all this.