Elon Musk is — as far as I can tell — the first celebrity to fret publicly about population decline since the Progressives’ eugenics period, when the collapsing population idea was seen as a tragedy primarily in racial terms: demographers noticed that whites were going into demographic collapse first.

Elon can get away with it by having focused first on Japan, making the demagogic-progressive response of CRY RACIST! unsuitable. He tweeted about this back in May, to the consternation of the Perpetually Consternated.

But the truth of the matter is that Elon is right, and increasingly smart, unflusterable folks are recognizing the truth:

Note that today’s progressives can be seen to have taken old-fashioned Progressives’ worry from racist to anti-“human-racist,” extolling population collapse as a response to “the population bomb” which, somehow — with the left’s logrolling of their specially coded Get Out of Fail Free card — they never got stuck with the racist marker. But they should have, since over-population was always really a Problem With Brown People. The whole “population bomb” scenario was in fact always tinged by racism, if by the peculiar racist inversions typical of post-WWII technocratic-socialist thought.

That Elon is popularizing basic demographic truths, after decades and decades of hysterical ideological sub-rosa racist fearmongering, is interesting, to say the least.

twv