Want to improve the birth rate? Stop being so harsh on mothers.



In their quest to make motherhood great again, conservatives have set a very high bar for those wanting to make a go of it. Enter the all-or-nothing mother.

She must breastfeed baby, and if she’s unable to produce milk for whatever reason, she’s just not trying hard enough. She can’t leave baby in a crib, or sleep-train baby, or leave baby alone with his father or extended family, because Mama must be with baby at all times, lest she give baby a lifetime of attachment-related trauma.

Rather than purity-spiraling and leading the birth rate into further decline, conservatives could simply tell women the truth: that they can relax, because there are a thousand different ways to be a good mother.

She must feed baby exclusively organic food, but she can’t have a job to help her afford it — that might require the ultimate dereliction of maternal duty: day care.

Not that preschool, full-day kindergarten, or half-day kindergarten is much better. Come to think of it, homeschooling is really the only path for any mother who cares about her children. And so on and so forth.

Domestic girlbosses

In theory, such all-or-nothing motherhood applies the tightly wound, busy-busy-busy culture of high-status, white-collar professions to the domestic sphere — where the stakes are the lives and souls of one’s own children, far greater than corporate presentations and spreadsheets ever could be!

And yet, in practice, this vision of motherhood makes it seem intolerable — not to mention impossible — to the only audience that matters: impressionable young women and girls. Far from convincing them of the value of motherhood, making motherhood out to be an all-or-nothing ordeal makes young women wonder if the feminists really were right, if being a mother is incompatible with being a full person.

I say this as a member of that demographic: I’m 23 years old and single, and while I am quite conservative and have always wanted children, I’m surrounded primarily by moderate to liberal, professional-class women my age who don’t know what they want.

Child-hating hags?

My peers, for the most part, aren’t the child-hating, travel-obsessed hags they’re all too often made out to be by conservative media — they happen to actually like children, sometimes in spite of themselves.

While some of their apprehension toward motherhood is absolutely driven by a culture that eggs on adult narcissism and extended adolescence, much of it is driven by the opposite extreme: the expectation that not only will they have to give up their friends, their hobbies, and their careers when they have children, but they will have to become completely dependent on their husbands for their financial and social life and will spend every moment hovering over their children with no self left besides “mother.”

When young women feel like motherhood is all or nothing, that either you stay “child-free” and keep yourself or become a mother and lose yourself, is it any wonder they’re choosing to keep themselves in greater numbers?

More time to spare

While this failure to create tolerable motherhood norms is nonpartisan — it’s telling, for instance, that conservative mothering and hippie mothering have basically become one and the same — conservatives have a special responsibility here.

After all, unlike liberals, conservatives are interested in getting more women to have more children. Instead of tilting at the windmill of middle-class maternal neglect, conservatives should acknowledge the reality that working mothers today spendmoretimewith their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago, and yet children today are more anxious and less self-sufficient than ever before.

Conservatives would do well to keep in mind that women in traditional cultures have the proverbial village to help them raise their children, something American women, even those with traditional values, usually lack.

As a result, while many of the demands conservatives make of mothers ostensibly resemble traditional culture, they deviate from traditional culture in the one way that counts: Rather than enmeshing mothers in the fabric of society, over-intensive conservative mothering norms often alienate mothers from everyone else.

Love's legacy

Why drive mothers crazy — and deter would-be mothers from having children — all for the sake of what is essentially a neurotic, individualistic ideology that doesn’t even seem to improve children’s outcomes — and might actually make them worse?

Rather than purity-spiraling and leading the birth rate into further decline, conservatives could simply tell women the truth: that they can relax, because there are a thousand different ways to be a good mother. And that, when we think of our mothers as adults, we don't remember the lifestyle choices they made — day care or not, organic or not, home birth or not — but rather the love they gave us — the deep, unconditional love that only a mother can give.

US surgeon general issues advisory warning people that parenting is hazardous to our health, recommends MORE government



In late August, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents.

It’s a lengthy document, so allow Glenn Beck to translate it for you: “Being a parent is hazardous to your health,” so just “give the government more money, and they'll watch your kids for you.”

Sadly, he’s not kidding. This is indeed an accuration summation of Murthy’s warning.

Unfortunately, this advisory is just further proof that our government is trying to tear the nuclear family down, as it’s the foundation of the society the government seeks to control.

To discuss this issue, Glenn invites one of the brightest talents in the commentating world, Isabel Brown, to discuss this concerning government overreach.

Brown tells Glenn that she finds Murthy’s warning “incredibly concerning.”

“It is just alarming to me the strategic advantage that the media and the machine of the government are using to convince you that marriage and family – the most important bedrock foundation of our society – is somehow bad for you and going to destroy your life,” she says.

Glenn adds that what’s really stressing families out is the reality that it takes “three and a half incomes” to make ends meet these days.

“How about the idea of having a country where one income can actually support a family?” he asks.

“Absolutely correct,” Isabel agrees. “Unfortunately, it seems our elected officials in particular are asking all of the wrong questions about how to fix these ailments in society. Their answer is always the same – more government.”

However, what really needs to happen is the opposite of what Dr. Murthy recommends. We need more marriage and childbearing and less government regulation.

Unfortunately, the government is currently winning the battle. Gen Z is either at or nearing the marriage and childbearing stages, and the statistics aren’t pretty.

“Our marriage rates are currently standing at an all-time low – at the lowest they've ever been since 1867,” says Isabel.

With less interest in creating families, the birth rate has also dropped. In 2023, the U.S. saw its lowest birth rate in history.

Clearly the government’s calculated plan to villainize the nuclear family is working.

But Isabel has hope. And it’s in the very generation many of us have written off as doomed.

“I am incredibly optimistic about Gen. Z,” she tells Glenn, noting that statistically, Zoomers are shockingly “the most culturally and politically conservative generation we've seen since World War II.”

Brown actually wrote a book on this subject. In “The End of the Alphabet: How Gen Z Can Save America,” she explains how Gen Z is poised at the center of the culture shift that will determine the future of our country.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.

Ditch the helicopter — children need submarine parents



The birth rate is falling. Population collapse is imminent. The world is graying. We are living through a massive population bottleneck.

It’s so large and so gradual that it’s hard for us to see. We can’t even really feel it … yet.

The submarine parent doesn’t do anything for his kids that his kids can do for themselves. The submarine parent steps back and gives his kids room to breathe.

Large swaths of the population are being culled. Entire socio-cultural blocs are simply being eliminated from the game. The future will not look like the present. There is heavy selection going on. But it doesn’t feel like it because it is all based on choice. Everyone is free to have children or not.

Bare care

And who chooses to have children in an era of population collapse? Who are the ones deciding to inherit the future? While it’s a varied assortment of people from a variety of backgrounds, there is one pitfall that haunts us all.

It’s very simple. If you are consciously deciding to have children during an anti-natalist era, you most likely really want to have children. You probably didn’t end up with a couple of kids by accident. It was a very intentional choice.

For many, it means going against the grain. You care a lot. You probably “care” more than your parents did, most certainly more than your grandparents did before them. Your grandparents probably didn’t critically examine their parenting style daily. That verb, parenting, didn’t even exist in popular consciousness when they were raising kids.

If you are choosing to have kids today, you might be obsessed with your kids. And this obsession is exacerbated by the fact that there are fewer and fewer kids around. That you are in the minority accelerates all of this. It’s more fuel for your fire.

You are laser-focused on raising your kids right, so determined to give them the best opportunity possible. It almost becomes your identity. The temptation is to become so neurotically focused on your kids that you become a helicopter parent on steroids. We all feel it. We all love our kids so much that we can’t help ourselves.

This is the struggle.

Brat factory

By virtue of the fact that you have kids during an era of population collapse, you are predisposed to over-caring and over-parenting. As with so many things in life, a positive contains the seed of a nascent negative, even if it isn’t always obvious on the surface.

Everyone knows that only children have certain issues that children raised with siblings do not. While having lots of one-on-one time has certain benefits, there are also negative impacts.

Crudely put, if you are a kid and you are always the center of attention with the perception that the world revolves around you, you often turn into a brat. This tends to be how snots are made. It’s the truth. Every parent knows it.

How do we very involved parents having children during this strange era avoid this fate for our children? How do we avoid creating a brat factory?

We need to restrain ourselves. We need to step back. We need to realize that our natural inclination is to care too much. We need to realize that that strong desire to have a family becomes a curious weakness at a point.

That sounds provocative, but it’s true. We need to realize that we live in extreme times and that all of us who have kids have some kind of extreme feeling inside us that resulted in us having kids, and we need to temper that.

Submarine parenting

We need to, somehow, raise our two kids as if we have five kids. Or raise our four kids as if we have eight kids. We need to realize that we do not risk doing too little. We risk doing too much. We cannot be helicopter parents. We need to be submarine parents.

Helicopter parents are always hovering over the children making sure everything is right. They are always there making sure they have the best of the best. They want to make sure they have every opportunity. They are always at their children’s beck and call, obsessing over the latest and greatest fears Instagram serves up.

The helicopter parent takes on all the stress of her child in hopes of making her child’s life as easy as possible. Helicopter parents love their children. They just don’t realize how that love hurts their children and themselves. We are already stressed about everything; we are already embarking on the task of maintaining civilization amid population collapse. We can only take so much.

The submarine parent isn’t always visibly there waiting to correct anything that might be troubling the youngster. The submarine parent doesn’t do anything for his kids that his kids can do for themselves. The submarine parent steps back and gives his kids room to breathe.

Dive!

Submarine parents realize that there is effectively no chance that they run the risk of being absentee parents. They realize that they have spent hours researching the best techniques for sleeping, introducing foods, conscious choices about discipline and technology, and every other possible consideration known to mankind.

There is zero chance they aren’t involved. There is zero chance they are checked out. They are the most involved generation of conscious parents ever to have walked God’s green earth. In light of this, they must relax and embrace the submarine.

Submarine parents are always there, of course. But they aren’t hovering. They aren’t making everything easy. They aren’t the entertainment committee. They aren’t always correcting every inconvenience or every minor trouble.

We love our kids so much that we have to realize that our love can be a hindrance. It can manifest in ways that aren’t helpful.

Our natural drive and desire that led us to have children in the first place run the risk of driving us, and our kids, crazy. We have to to temper it and realize who we are. It’s okay. We have to relax a bit. If we don’t want to run a brat factory, we must reject the helicopter and embrace the submarine.

California Law Mandating Indoctrination Of Students On Climate Change Goes Into Effect This Year

The bombardment of doomsday climate commentary has already contributed to widespread environmental anxiety among children and young adults.

To save civilization, become a happy warrior



I used to find myself quietly, yet haughtily, indignant about other people’s unwillingness to have more kids. This is a sentence that should make the reader cringe. It certainly has that effect on the writer.

Our society’s drastically declining birth rate (starkly represented as a precariously top-heavy, upside-down pyramid) and its potential consequences inspire anxiety.

At times, wallowing in doom and gloom seems preferable to facing up to the massive responsibility of raising the children I birthed.

Who will be there to run all the critical functions of an advanced society? Who will be there to take care of the elderly?

Who will be there to maintain our Western traditions and unspoken moral codes before wave after wave of immigrants from high birthrate societies arrive, immigrants largely unwilling to assimilate and unconcerned with becoming productive citizens?

Who will save us from ourselves?

Cleaning our room

When I discovered Jordan Peterson in 2015, I was a junior in college. By then, campus leftism was dialing up in ways that had begun to grate my conscience — even as a standard-issue lib.

I didn’t like the fact that the administration had begun sending surveys requesting my pronouns, asking how it could better accommodate social contagions that were a strange minority, almost universally rejected by the student body.

There was one guy who wore dresses. I once found myself alone in a bathroom with him and left as soon as I noticed we were alone, the hair on my neck bristling.

Peterson’s now infamous exhortation to “clean your room” spoke to me. He invited students who concerned themselves too intensely with the state of the world — be it the impending climate apocalypse or their peers’ “transphobic” use of standard English — to turn their attention to more immediate, personal responsibilities.

Instantiate order in all the small ways first, he said. If you aren’t capable of the small, you’ll never be capable of the large things that currently overwhelm you. The message, simple as it was (our mothers had been saying something similar for years), was revolutionary. For those with ears to hear, it was liberating.

New specters

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

The liberation was short-lived. While I no longer feared the prevailing liberal bugaboos, other specters emerged to haunt me. Enthralled by my new “dissident” stance, it didn’t occur to me that I had simply swapped one distraction for another. Surely, I was nothing like those misguided activist-students Peterson humbled in those iconic YouTube videos.

This habit of mind — seeing every political dispute in the most totalizing, civilization-threatening terms possible — has been hard to shake, especially given my flair for the dramatic.

For the most part, I’ve successfully confined my political despair to my online interactions. But lately, I’ve noticed it bleeding into my real life. My despair distracts me. Opening X first thing in the morning sets the day up for failure. Have I become addicted to upsetting myself? Is this any way to live?

'Hath much to love'

Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior” comes to mind:

—He who, though thus endued as with a sense

And faculty for storm and turbulence,

Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans

To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;

Sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be,

Are at his heart; and such fidelity

It is his darling passion to approve;

More brave for this, that he hath much to love:—

Can we maintain a sense of civilizational purpose without indulging despairing images of the future we strive to avoid?

What optimism requires

We can — and must. In fact, this is essential to the character of the happy warrior: hope without fear, courage without anger, purpose without despair.

Collapse — however we imagine it — may still be imminent. My concerns are still valid; the denial of base reality at the heart of transgender ideology, for example, remains dangerous.

But I can acknowledge this truth without letting it overwhelm me. Our family’s recent move to Budapest from suburban South Carolina has included all the expected challenges, as well as some unexpected ones.

At times, wallowing in gloom and doom seems preferable to facing up to the massive responsibility of raising the children I birthed, and I realize that I’m no less tempted by such negative escapism than I was as a liberal.

What optimism requires is far more tedious and labor-intensive. Here, as in much of life, the “fidelity” Wordsworth mentions makes all the difference. The “homefelt pleasures and ... gentle scenes” of domestic life aren’t distractions from some larger battle but the very foundation of any civilization worth saving.

Blaze News original: Experts debunk the alarming lies about parenthood driving DINK culture and the declining birth rate



There is a silent — but serious — cancer metastasizing in American culture.

In April, the National Center for Health Statistics published preliminary data showing the birth rate in the United States dropped to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, a record-low figure that is below the replacement rate of approximately 2.1 births per woman.

'Living for yourself ends up being often boring and a dead end on so many different levels.'

At the same time, DINKs — an acronym that refers to a married couple without kids (dual income, no kids), generally those couples who are child-free by choice — are flourishing.

Instead of embracing family, an increasing number of American adults in their 20s and 30s are not only delaying marriage, but they’re putting off children once they finally tie the knot.

Whereas the late 20s and 30s were once peak parenting years, now DINKs are spending their time and money on themselves, free of the responsibilities and sacrifices inherent in parenting. In fact, a recent estimate published in “Nature” showed that 21.6% of U.S. adults are childless by choice. That cohort is only growing as the declining birth rate indicates.

The acronym "DINK" is not new. But the phrase and lifestyle are experiencing a renaissance thanks to social media.

Now, DINKs use their Instagram and TikTok accounts to flaunt their flexible lifestyle, racking up millions of views and thousands of followers in the process.

"Being DINKs means we just have a lot of freedom, time, and money," said 25-year-old Natalie Fischer, who boasts a six-figure income and hopes to build a net worth of at least $1 million by age 30.

Mirlanda Beaufils, a 30-year-old real estate agent from Texas, summarized her marriage and DINK lifestyle, "We go where the wind blows."

Travel. Wealth. Career. Freedom. Dogs. Individual expression and self-realization. The radical pursuit of happiness.

Those are the values of America's DINKs, a lifestyle that is now more popular — and less stigmatized — than ever before.

The elephant in the room

The rise in the popularity of the DINK lifestyle colliding with the declining birth rate raises important questions about the pro-DINK narrative that ensnares so many young adults.

Is the DINK lifestyle the path to the good life? Is it where adults find true joy?

And, more importantly: Is the DINK lifestyle good — not only for the individual but for society?

The conventional theory argues that the economic pressures of raising children — which some estimates claim costs tens of thousands of dollars per year — is responsible for the increase in adults choosing the DINK lifestyle. It is true, after all, that the cost of living is getting out of hand for most middle-class Americans, the cost of child care is skyrocketing, and that most industries do not offer their employees meaningful parental benefits.

But Dr. Allan Carlson, a retired professor whose research focuses on family, told Blaze News that "ideas, not economics, drive fertility decline."

Carlson agreed there are economic forces at work, specifically "negative incentives" of capitalism that distort human anthropology. But he explained that secularism and a "shift in ideas" are the mechanism driving an anti-family culture.

The idea shift, he said, is away from the outward-facing values of "survival, security, and human solidarity" and toward inward-facing values that prioritize the individual.

"Individual self-realization, expressive work, pursuit of education all see children as a problem or something in the way of these other values. And so fertility falls continues to fall well below the replacement level," Carlson explained.

'At some fundamental level, we've taken what used to be called the deadly sins and have made them into virtues.'

In many ways, the DINK lifestyle maximizes the American ideal of personal freedom.

The elephant in the room, then, is whether or not pursuing individual happiness and personal freedom to the detriment of family leads to a flourishing life and society.

"People get confused between focusing on short-term pleasure and long-term meaning and don't recognize that yes, it's nice to be able to sleep in on Saturday morning; yes, it's nice to be able to take a trip to Miami Beach, but the sacrifices that you make for having children endow your life with a sense of meaning and deep joy and happiness," Dr. Brad Wilcox told Blaze News.

Wilcox, a professor at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, said DINKs are buying into a deceptive cultural lie.

That falsehood, he explained, discounts "long-term well-being in favor of a short-term view" that minimizes "the stresses and strains and sacrifices that come with having small children and then kids more generally."

It's a lie that claims parenthood only takes from you.

"People don't recognize and appreciate how much kids bring a sense of meaning and purpose and identity to your life and to your marriage as well," Wilcox said.

"People like the experience of going on a honeymoon ... but after a time, that's boring. If you just sit there stuck on the beach for 12 months, that's not going to be a very rich marriage," he explained. "Whereas once you have kids, there are things to do, [you've] got to feed them, care for them, guide them, direct them, celebrate with them.

"Kids are much more meaningful than a lot of the distractions and dopamine-hit kinds of practices" associated with the DINK lifestyle, Wilcox added.

Importantly, research consistently corroborates Wilcox's point: Married parents are the happiest cohort of all Americans.

And yet, culture tells young adults the opposite.

"At some fundamental level, we've taken what used to be called the deadly sins and have made them into virtues — pride, greed, lust, those things which used to be properly understood as symbols of serious social and moral disorder," Carlson said. "They're the new duties of our culture. You must enjoy yourself, pursue your envy, pursue your greed, pursue your pride, pursue your lusts."

The end result of expressive individualism that prioritizes "me" at the expense of "we," Carlson warned, is "the disappearance of children."

Consumers consume

Two of the benefits of America's capitalist economy are the wealth and freedom it generates. But it also creates negative incentives that encourage individualism, consumerism, and the DINK lifestyle.

In interviews with Blaze News, both Carlson and Wilcox talked about how the Industrial Revolution, which forever changed the economy and brought an end to economic households, changed family culture.

According to Carlson, the "ideal human being under industrial capitalism" includes three values: being helpless, mobile, and childless.

  • Helpless: "By helpless, I mean not capable of doing anything. They can't feed themselves, they can't take care of themselves, they can't shelter themselves. They're functionally helpless, so they have to buy everything from the system. They have to buy everything from their food to their shelter to their clothing. Everything has to be purchased from the system."
  • Mobile: "That is, they need to pursue whatever their little specialty is — whether they're writing code for the computers or whether they're running a dishwasher for a restaurant, they need to find the place where they're providing maximum efficiency with their one little skill."
  • Childless: "Marriage is bad for the system because marriage involves bonds and obligations and responsibilities that track the person from a focus on their work. And they also don't want children because children again take time and take time away from what could be done from a pure focus on doing two things, working for the system and buying from the system."

This industrial human anthropology has created generations of consumers and, now, consumers who prefer consuming and career over cultivating a family.

"There's kind of a deeply consumeristic message too that is now being telegraphed to young adults," Wilcox told Blaze News. "I think it just discourages them from settling down, getting married, and having kids because there's always some other kind of step you need to take.

"Status and money and jobs — these things are good up to a point," he added. "But if they distract us from focusing on family and friends, then they end up being obstacles to our capacity to flourish."

Carlson, in fact, said the economic system is designed to create consumers to consume.

"The capitalist system — the great capitalists don't think about it this way, but they do think in effect, it's where they wind up — wants people to consume. And it is true. Babies can consume things, but they'd rather have them spend money on cruise ships or trips abroad or fancy cars or second homes," he said. "I know so many people that have two or three homes. They have no children, but they got a lot of homes, a lot of bedrooms."

"Those messages are all the economic system telling people what they want," he added.

"Again, they want people who are helpless in terms of doing things themselves but will spend lots of money to buy stuff," Carlson explained. "The system penalizes people with children."

The rewards of sacrifice

Contrary to the cultural lie that children only take from you, Wilcox said the truth is that reward and accomplishment come with the sacrifices and suffering required of parents.

"No suffering is also bad for us," he told Blaze News. "That if your life is very cushy and easy, it tends to be both meaningless and your own strength of character is pretty minimal.

"The point is that some degree of suffering is good for us emotionally and spiritually, especially when it's attached to something that's meaningful to us," Wilcox explained. "It seems like having a spouse — especially having children — does entail suffering and sacrifice, but it's meaningful suffering and sacrifice."

Wilcox said the economic household before the Industrial Revolution epitomized the type of suffering that is full of reward. Sharing in meaningful work, he explained, produces a true sense of accomplishment.

This same principle applies to the sacrifices required of parenthood.

"Do you want to live a meaningful life? Would you like to flourish? Would you like to be happy? Being a parent apparent opens up new horizons for us of care and concern — a sense of the future extends beyond your death," Wilcox said.

"There's something incredible about seeing a child who is your own flesh and blood excel when it comes to a sport like soccer or an instrument like the piano, or a challenge like starring in the school play, or caring for the poor and the sick, and they're vulnerable," he explained. "So I just think at the end of the day, living for yourself ends up being often boring and a dead end on so many different levels."

As the old saying goes: Anything worthwhile requires sacrifice.

"If you invest yourself in becoming a good father or a good mother, I think the rewards are immense," Wilcox said.

Carlson agrees. The truth about parenting, he said, is that raising children and cultivating a strong family is one of the greatest purposes for your life.

"It's what you're supposed to do. That's what your human destiny is," Carlson told Blaze News.

"If you want to be healthy, wealthy, and happy, what should you do? Get married, have babies, create a family," he said. "The gifts that will come back to you are amazing. You'll live longer, you'll be happier."

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China's hundred-year marathon slows to a crawl amid economic woes and record-low birth rate



China's aspirations of seeing its hundred-year marathon through to displacing the U.S. and becoming global hegemon by 2049 are growing increasingly fantastical. The economic and social problems the Asian nation faced in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic have not gone away. Rather, things have continued to deteriorate.

Fallout of the one-child policy

China faces a worsening demographic crisis, due in part to the Chinese Communist Party's one-child policy as well as to other correlated factors such as a decrease in the number of women of childbearing age, higher suicide rates in women than in men, sex-selective abortion, and declining fertility.

The birth rate was over 20 births per 1,000 people in 1990, one decade after the implementation of the one-child policy. Over the next 25 years, the country saw a precipitous decline in the birth rate, which a two-child policy in 2016 was unable to arrest. The rate hit a record low of 7.5 births per 1,000 people in 2021.

Data released by China's National Bureau of Statistics Wednesday indicated the birth rate reached a new low in 2023 of 6.39 per 1,000 people, reported the BBC.

The country's annual population has in turn fallen for a second consecutive year, this time by an estimated 2.08 million people.

"It's not a surprise. They've got one of the lowest fertility rates in the world so this is just what happens - the population stops growing and starts to decline," Stuart Gietel-Basten, a population policy expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the BBC.

The country's fertility rate in 1950, the year after communists formally took power, was 5.29. The rate dropped to a record low of 1.16 in 2022. Blaze News previously noted that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development regards 2.1 as the standard for a stable population.

Demographic stability has been further undermined by a sex-ratio imbalance. As of 2021, there were over 34.9 million more men than women in the country, reported Newsweek.

"It's kind of locked in now… this is just the next year in this new era of population stagnation or decline for China," added Gietel-Basten.

The demographic problem has been compounded by economic stress as many of those in China who want and can physically have children reportedly cannot afford to do so.

Economic woes

Data released this week revealed the Chinese economy had allegedly grown at one of the slowest rates in over 30 years. Reuters reported that China's GDP allegedly grew by 5.2% in the fourth quarter of 2023, disappointing many investors and analysts.

"Although the government met its 2023 GDP growth target of 'around 5.0%', achieving the same pace of expansion in 2024 will prove a lot more challenging," said Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China Economics at Capital Economics.

The China Beige Book International's latest survey suggested, "Any true acceleration (this year) will require either a major global upside surprise or more active government policy."

Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the non-partisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Newsweek that the regime's latest claims about the country's GDP growth "are just not credible."

"Focusing on China's false GDP figures risks missing the forest for the tree," said Singleton. "The days of China's sky-high growth are over."

"There is no getting around the fact that China is in damage control mode, attempting to project a sense of stability to the international community while grappling with myriad domestic challenges. If ever the cliché 'investor beware' applied, it's now," added Singleton.

The country is struggling with high debt, a stock market in free fall, and a real estate crisis that continues to ravage the sector.

Reuters indicated that amid China's disputed recovery and in the face of concerns about renewed lockdowns, the jobless rate nationwide increased to 5.1% last month and unemployment among Chinese youths ages 16 to 24 also remains high.

The youth unemployment rate skyrocketed to 21.3% in June 2023, prompting the regime to suspend the release of monthly data. The rate allegedly sank to 14.1% in December, but is still high enough to create trouble for the regime, which has promised progressive increases in living standards in exchange for acceptance of its authoritarian rule.

In addition to a potentially restive, largely male youth population, China has to contend with its massive elderly population. The BBC indicated that the retiree population, placing increasing pressure on the health care and pension systems, is projected to increase by 60% to 400 million over the next 10 years.

The Guardian noted that 14% of China's population is over the age of 65 and is on track to have more geriatrics than the entire population of the United States.

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The War On Men Is A War On Civilization

A generation of men ghosting their loved ones, leaving the workforce, and even committing suicide is a sign of dark and evil times.

FACT CHECK: Did Australia See A 63% Drop In Births After The Introduction Of COVID-19 Vaccines?

This claim originates from a website that regularly publishes misinformation

EXCLUSIVE: Hungarian Minister For Families Asks Environmentalists Forgoing Children: ‘For Whom Do You Preserve The Planet?’

'If you don't have children, for whom do you preserve the planet for?'