What 'fur babies,' 2D boyfriends, and 'sharenting' tell us about the West's future



Discussions about demographic decline in the West tend to focus on mass immigration, with good reason. Debates over borders, assimilation, and the so-called “Great Replacement” dominate political discourse across Europe and America, often framed as a demographic transformation imposed by elites.

But there is another kind of "replacement" under way — one that appears far less imposed and more self-managed. Across much of the developed world, societies are suppressing the primal biological imperative to reproduce, turning instead toward technological, emotional, and economic substitutes for children and family life.

Playgrounds grow quiet as kindergartens are repurposed into elderly care homes.

Birth rates are falling off a cliff, and the debate has long since outgrown dry statistics, morphing instead into a full-blown dystopian spectacle. As biological motherhood retreats, a new era of artificial and symbolic surrogacy is emerging. From robotic companions to the vicarious consumption of mommy blogs, the traditional cradle is being replaced by market-driven alternatives.

Fur-baby boom

While I often praise South Korea for its socially conservative traditions, its penchant for great zombie movies, and its willingness to lock up annoying American YouTubers in labor prisons, the country also faces an unfortunate distinction: It now has the world’s lowest fertility rate. At 0.8, this figure is far below the 2.1 replacement level needed for population stability without immigration.

As a result, unusual trends have emerged among Korean women. For example, 2023 marked the first time that pet strollers outsold baby carriages. This is more than a passing trend — last year the number of South Korean households with "fur babies" hit 15 million — or one in three.

The country’s infrastructure is visibly transforming to reflect its shrinking youth population. This March, at the start of the academic year, more than 200 elementary schools admitted no new pupils. The result is the rise of ghost schools across rural provinces — empty buildings that once housed children but now stand silent.

With nearly half of South Korea’s population expected to be senior citizens within 30 years, the government has taken drastic measures. Playgrounds grow quiet as kindergartens are repurposed into elderly care homes. What was once celebrated as the miracle on the Han River has evolved into a cautionary tale of a society that has optimized itself for productivity at the expense of its continuity.

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Cartoon courtship

While South Korea replaces children with pets, Japan has pioneered replacing human intimacy with a Wi-Fi connection. Some young woman have adopted a new sexual identity — 2D exclusive. A product of otaku (geek) culture gone mainstream, 2D aficionados — including Japanese Minister of State for Economic Security Kimi Onoda — prefer anime characters over living, breathing men, who tend to be less compliant and far more demanding.

Across the West, the refusal to reproduce is commonly framed as a personal choice. Scratch the surface, however, and you often find a reaction to powerful external forces. Chief among these is eco-anxiety about climate change, a sentiment especially pronounced among Western women.

Much like postcolonial studies, green ideology has inculcated a sense of guilt and victimhood, convincing many that bringing children into the world is reckless because of the Earth’s inevitable heat death. A major survey published in the Lancet revealed that 52% of Americans under 25 hesitate to have children, specifically due to concerns about the climate. The prevailing belief is that the worst thing a woman can do is increase her carbon footprint by bringing a baby into a doomed world.

The sharent trap

The vacuum left by declining birth rates has also allowed a strange new form of parasocial parenting to emerge. In the United States, the rise of a kind of "digital godmother" culture enables millions of childless followers to experience motherhood vicariously. Influencers like Savannah LaBrant carefully curate a highly scripted version of domestic life, offering their vast audiences an illusion of participation in parenthood.

LaBrant engages in "sharenting" — because everything fashionable now needs a stupid portmanteau — where parents share intimate details of their children’s lives online. Her followers develop deep one-sided emotional bonds with her three children, Rosie, Zealand, and Sunday, witnessing their lives from ultrasound images to toddler — yes, even their births were documented. Strangers offer advice, believing they are actively participating in raising the children.

The constant stream of photos and videos drives engagement and enhances the most important thing — brand value. Sponsorships range from HelloFresh to mobile gaming apps. (Nothing quite says "home and hearth" like an ad for RAID: Shadow Legends.)

Unbirth of a nation

In the United Kingdom, mass immigration goes hand in hand with reproductive policy. The number of abortions performed since 1968 — 10.9 million — almost equals the number of immigrants currently residing in the U.K. Immigration has replaced a generation of unborn children and sustained the workforce. Rather than incentivizing native births, state policy has increasingly adopted a neoliberal model that treats people as fungible units — importing adults to fill labor needs, instead of nurturing local family growth.

This global trend is more than a simple decline in birth rates — it marks a paradigm shift in our assumptions about what gives life meaning. For many, it used to be the simple yet profound drive to leave a legacy for the next generation. The free market has proven itself quite adept at selling quick-fix alternatives to this rewarding, yet often thankless, pursuit. Immigration reform is badly needed, but no amount of border security will sustain a culture that cares so little about its future.

Indiana Jones found the lost ark of campus clichés



They say never meet your heroes. It turns out Indiana Jones is no exception.

Arizona State University’s commencement this year featured exactly the kind of speaker Americans have come to expect from modern universities: a wealthy Hollywood celebrity lecturing graduates about climate change, “indigenous spirituality,” social justice, and the moral failures of Western civilization.

The sign over the modern left-wing academy reads: Let none who seek intellectual consistency enter here.

Harrison Ford told ASU graduates, “Humanity is a part of nature, not above it,” before calling for sweeping environmental action, “cultural change,” and the elevation of indigenous perspectives about the natural world. Had he remained silent, some might have mistaken him for wise. Instead, he opened his mouth and proved himself a fool.

The speech mattered not because it was unusual, but because it perfectly captured the ideology that now dominates many American universities. Had you asked ChatGPT to generate a commencement address based on ASU’s official political commitments, it would have sounded very much like this one.

The solutions offered by Hollywood activists and university administrators are the very ideas that helped produce much of the confusion in the first place.

Ford’s speech rested on a rejection of the biblical view of man. Scripture teaches that human beings are distinct from the rest of creation because they are made in the image of God. In Genesis, man is commanded to exercise dominion over the earth, not as a tyrant, but as a steward. Human beings are created to behold the glory of God in the world He made, not merely to dissolve into nature as one creature among many.

Ford rejects that distinction. But the moment he does, he collapses into contradiction. If human beings are merely another species within nature, no different in principle from wolves, termites, or algae, then why should they presume to reorganize economies, restrict energy production, and manage the global ecosystem?

The rest of nature does not hold climate summits. Ants do not draft sustainability goals. Coyotes do not issue carbon mandates.

Nature simply acts according to its nature. That is the emptiness of leftism. Ford made millions pretending to be heroes who could save the day. Now, sliding into old age, he has no answer for anyone. The left thrives on captive audiences. Put its spokesmen outside the lecture hall, and the whole performance looks ridiculous.

RELATED: The answer to university decline is hiding in plain sight

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Ironically, Ford’s own activism depends on the very biblical framework he rejects. The claim that mankind has a moral duty to care for the world makes sense only if man occupies a unique place above the rest of creation. Stewardship presupposes authority.

The modern environmental movement tries to erase the biblical doctrine of dominion while quietly smuggling morality back in whenever moral action becomes necessary. Yet it cannot explain where such morality comes from. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Why, then, should man not follow suit?

Ford also praised indigenous communities for understanding that “the trees, the mountain, water, soil are not commodities. They are relatives.”

This romanticized view of indigenous life now comes standard in university rhetoric. It also bears little resemblance to history. Human beings across cultures, ancient and modern, have altered landscapes, hunted animals to extinction, waged wars, enslaved rivals, and struggled ruthlessly for survival. Indigenous tribes were not mystical ecological saints floating above ordinary human nature.

One cannot help noticing the contradiction built into these speeches. ASU routinely acknowledges that it sits on indigenous land. Fine. If that confession is sincere, when exactly does the university plan to return the property? ASU confesses the theft, keeps the land, and then congratulates itself for moral awareness. That is not repentance. That is performance.

And what about Ford himself?

He owns multiple luxury properties and has spent decades enjoying private aviation, industrial modernity, and immense personal wealth. Has he offered to return any of his land? Has he proposed downsizing his estates for the sake of climate justice? The modern progressive elite increasingly resembles a secular priesthood that demands sacrifice from everyone except itself.

Ford also repeated the now-obligatory oppressor-oppressed framework that dominates university discourse. Every social question gets filtered through the same categories: oppressor versus oppressed, colonizer versus marginalized, privileged versus victimized.

That framework has become so totalizing that universities no longer even pretend to offer intellectual diversity on first questions about human nature, morality, or society. In their world, you are either oppressed or an oppressor, and those are the only categories available for interpreting history.

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Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

That raises an obvious question: Will ASU ever invite a commencement speaker who openly defends the American founding, free markets, Christianity, or the biblical doctrine of man?

Or will commencement remain an ideological pep rally, one last progressive sermon after four years of DEI, decolonization, and critical-theory mush?

To Ford’s credit, he did say one thing that was undeniably true. Speaking to the graduates, he admitted, "The world you're stepping into, the world my generation left you, is a real mess."

On that point, he was right. But then he instructed the students to clean it up and presumably climbed into a private jet back to one of his luxury homes.

The ideas pushed by Hollywood activists and university administrators are the very ideas that helped produce the confusion in the first place: hostility to the biblical view of man, contempt for America’s inheritance, and utopian promises of social transformation through centralized moral activism.

ASU’s graduates deserved better than another lecture in fashionable conformity. A university worthy of the name would expose students to competing visions of humanity and the good life. Instead, they got Harrison Ford declaring that mankind is not above nature, moments before assigning mankind the duty to save the planet and clean up after him.

The sign over the modern left-wing academy reads: Let none who seek intellectual consistency enter here.

'GOOD RIDDANCE': Trump dunks on climate alarmists over ridiculous doomsday scenario



President Donald Trump mocked climate alarmists on Saturday after another one of their doomsday scenarios was shown to be utter nonsense.

The admission by scientists that prompted Trump's derision is but the latest in a long series of embarrassments for those activists keen to use climate prophecies as an excuse to socially engineer human beings and regulate society.

Narrative collapse

The imagined threat of anthropogenic climate change has driven numerous public officials, scientists, and impressionable people bonkers in recent decades.

While Western politicians sacrificed energy security and hobbled industry in hopes of slowing natural phenomena and defeating the arch-villain carbon dioxide (plant food), similarly minded scientists proposed blotting out the sun; "culling" the emission-generating human population with a deadly pandemic; reducing or eliminating meat consumption; putting the population on a diet of bugs, weeds, and micro-algae; and having fewer children.

'Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.'

This madness has been driven and exacerbated in large part by bogus claims and laughably wrong predictions. In most cases, all that's required to debunk such claims is time and a functional set of eyes.

Failed Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, said at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 that new research indicated there was "a 75% chance that the entire North Polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years."

Just as Gore was wrong about a 20-foot rise in the global sea level "in the near future," polar bear drownings, and the snows of Kilimanjaro, he was wrong about the future of Arctic ice.

A paper published late last year in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that over the past 20 years, "Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005."

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If, perhaps, Gore confused the Arctic with the Antarctic, he'd still be wrong. Antarctica has enjoyed a massive gain in ice mass — at a rate of 119 billion tons per year from 2021 to 2023.

Polar ice is hardly the only planetary feature alarmists mistakenly suggested would fall victim to climate change.

Alarmists suggested in a 2017 study and elsewhere that climate change posed an existential threat to the world's coral reefs and that "immediate global action to curb future warming is essential to secure a future for coral reefs."

While dutifully claiming that "climate change mitigation" was still essential, researchers admitted in 2024 that "widespread and diverse coral species all exhibit the potential to adapt to the changing climate."

Former Jeffrey Epstein associate Bill Gates is one of the few alarmists to admit to having pie on his face.

Gates alleged in a 2021 work of climate alarmist agitprop that if humanity failed to eliminate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, "climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic."

After years of fear-mongering, he apparently felt compelled to admit that he too had gotten it wrong.

Gates noted in October that the "doomsday view of climate change" that says "cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization" and that "nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature" is wrong.

UN wrong, again

The United Nations, like Gates a longtime proponent of climate hysteria, was recently confronted with evidence that it too is wrong.

The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project, an outfit led by a committee of top climate scientists, admitted in a study published last month in the journal Geoscientific Model Development that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case future emissions scenarios are "implausible based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends."

Taking into account the world's future population, emission trends, energy sources, climate policies, and other factors, researchers have cooked up various climate scenarios for use in scientific modeling and activist propaganda.

In the early 2010s, such researchers developed a set of four scenarios for climate modeling, called "representative concentration pathways" or RCPs. The most extreme of these was RCP8.5.

The number 8.5 here signals the level of radiative forcing — the extra heat supposedly trapped in the Earth's system, expressed in watts per square meter — projected by the year 2100.

The IPCC projected in 2013 that under this scenario, there would be a temperature rise of 4.3°C by 2081-2100 when compared to the pre-industrial period.

Government of Canada

RCP8.5's successor, "shared socioeconomic pathway"-8.5, projected warming of 4.4°C by 2081-2100, with a "very likely" range of 3.3°C to 5.7°C, the Carbon Brief reported.

It was all nonsense.

Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted, "The four scenarios were never apples-to-apples. They were four different fruits from four different trees. Yet, over more than a decade and in tens of thousands of papers, RCP8.5 was treated as where the world was headed and the other three scenarios — but especially RCP4.5 and 2.6 — as a world with climate policy interventions."

Despite numerous scientists stressing that the alarmist scenario was not only unlikely but misleading, the RCP8.5 scenario "came to dominate the literature to a degree that is impossible to overstate," Pielke said.

"RCP8.5 accounted for more than half of all RCP references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, nearly 60 percent in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere, and about a third of all RCP references in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report," Pielke wrote. "By early 2020, researchers were publishing studies invoking RCP8.5 at a rate of roughly 20 per day. So far in 2026, studies using RCP8.5 (or its even more extreme successor, SSP5-8.5) are being published at a rate of ~30 new studies per day."

Now, the scientific community must contend with the acknowledgment that this scenario is bogus.

Science journalist Maarten Keulemans noted in a post that has been translated from its original Dutch, "The IPCC acknowledges what has been circulating for a long time: The highest disaster scenario, 8.5, no longer aligns with reality. WHAT CONSEQUENCES this has. ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU READ ABOUT CLIMATE FUTURE IS WRONG."

Keuleman suggested further that this admission effectively torpedoes claims that global surface temperature will increase 4-5°C by 2100; summers will all hit 104°F and agriculture in Western Europe will be unsustainable by century's end; tuna, swordfish, and other marine creatures will go extinct; there will be millions of climate refugees every year; and that there will be no more Winter Olympics by 2040.

Trump similarly weighed in, stating, "GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that 'Climate Change' is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!"

"For far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Polices, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs," the president continued. "Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their GREEN NEW SCAM, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!"

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Bizarre academic paper about releasing ticks resurfaces amid surging bites



An estimated 31 million people living in the U.S. are bitten by ticks annually, but this year, the number may hit a record. If a pair of radical professors had their way, then the surging bites would go unchecked, leaving multitudes of Americans sick — and unable to eat meat.

Citing its Tick Bite Tracker dashboard, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced late last month that visits to emergency rooms for tick bites were higher than normal in many parts of the country and that in all but the South Central U.S., "weekly rates of ER visits for tick bites are the highest for this time of year since 2017." The Midwest is the most affected region.

This is especially concerning because tick bites can lead to various serious and potentially debilitating diseases including Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and every carnivore's nightmare: alpha-gal syndrome.

'This is the kind of philosophical argument that gives philosophy and the study of ethics a bad name.'

Amid this surge in tick bites and hospitalizations, a July 2025 academic paper defending the intentional spread of AGS via genetically modified ticks is once again in the spotlight.

AGS is a serious, potentially deadly allergy to alpha-gal, a molecule found in most mammals including cows and pigs. According to the CDC, the body of an afflicted individual registers alpha-gal in red meat and other mammal products as a threat and triggers an allergic reaction. This allergy can develop after a bite from a tick, most commonly the lone star tick.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are believed to presently be affected by AGS.

A pair of professors at Western Michigan University School of Medicine said in an article titled "Beneficial Bloodsucking," which was published in the journal Bioethics, that tick-borne AGS should be regarded as a "moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat."

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Eating meat, as humans have done for millions of years, is — according to Professors Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth — supposedly bad for the world because it contributes to "climate change" and harms animals.

"AGS promotes in the people who have it a resistance to eating mammalian meat," wrote the professors. "Thus, they eat less mammalian meat, which is an improvement in their capacity for moral behavior."

Crutchfield and Hereth not only argued that efforts to prevent the spread of tick-borne AGS are impermissible but that "promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory" and that promoting the proliferation of tick-borne AGS by genetically optimizing the disease-carrying capacity and adaptability of ticks is "morally obligatory."

"Today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation," added the radicals.

The professors claimed — in the paper that Crutchfield subsequently said was a hypothetical ethical framework for discussion — that intentionally infecting people with a syndrome that prevents them from eating meat does not violate their rights but is rather analogous to mass "vaccinations."

Crutchfield argued in a 2019 paper that such "moral bioenhancement" interventions in pursuit of imagined moral improvements, not health gains, ought to be not only compulsory but covert.

"This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement," he noted in the abstract for the 2019 paper.

Crutchfield and Hereth are hardly the first on the scene to discuss possibly using bioengineering to render the population incapable of eating meat.

For instance, Taiwanese-American "bioethicist" S. Matthew Liao discussed over a decade ago not only reducing humans' average height to reduce their "footprint" but artificially inducing "intolerance to red meat by stimulating the immune system against common bovine proteins" by way of a medical device resembling a nicotine patch or other means.

H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, told the College Fix in response to the 2025 paper, "It is never morally right to promote a disease which harms people, robs them of choice, literally makes them sick, and, in extreme instances, kills them."

"Whether to fight climate change or promote animal welfare, preventing the eradication of a disease that causes human harm — indeed, promoting increased infection — is morally abhorrent," continued Burnett. "This is the kind of philosophical argument that gives philosophy and the study of ethics a bad name."

Bioethics published a critical response in March to Crutchfield and Hereth's paper that challenged the professors' assumptions that introducing AGS would reduce overall animal suffering, that intentionally infecting humans would not violate fundamental moral rights, and that intentionally infecting people with AGS is comparable to vaccination.

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Renowned Left-Wing Crank Turns on Bluesky, the Social Media App for Left-Wing Cranks

Bluesky, the X-alternative social media app, was specifically designed for obnoxious journalists and other left-wing cranks who needed a safe space to rant. So when a prominent Bluesky user who is widely regarded as "one of the least likable progressives in the Milky Way galaxy" complained that the app had failed to live up to its promise, a handful of people took notice.

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Platner's Maine: Texas Transplants Feel 'Lucky' To Find Vagrant's Feces on Front Porch After Fleeing 'Climate Change'

Graham Platner's Maine could soon become a popular destination for obnoxious liberals fleeing red states due to "climate anxiety." The Bangor Daily News on Tuesday profiled Shawn and Sara Good, a married couple who recently moved to Bangor from Austin, Texas. The Goods decided to relocate because, among other reasons, Austin wasn't liberal enough and "nobody was doing anything to address" climate change.

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Maryland Governor Wes Moore's 'Climate Study' Is Bankrolled by Left-Wing Rockefeller Fund Amid Push To Force Oil Companies To Pay Billions in Damages

The left-wing environmental nonprofit Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) is bankrolling a study commissioned by Maryland governor Wes Moore (D.) to "assess the undue burden Marylanders are paying for extreme weather events," records show. The group says the study is the first step in passing a law that would require oil companies to pay the state billions of dollars in climate damages.

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Maryland Supreme Court Tosses Dem Attempt To Hold Oil Companies Accountable for Climate Events

The Supreme Court of Maryland dismissed three lawsuits from Democratic-led jurisdictions that sought to hold oil and gas companies accountable for climate change, striking a blow to a coordinated legal effort to force energy producers to pay billions of dollars in weather-related damages nationwide.

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Insect-ifying Humanity: The Paul Ehrlich Legacy

Dr. Paul Ralph Ehrlich (1933-2026), who passed away last week at the age of 93, was perhaps the world’s most famous opinionator on the population question since Reverend T.R. Malthus himself. An unabashed apostle of population control and prophet of impending worldwide demographic catastrophe, he preached a secular gospel of "overpopulation" and eco-apocalypse from his perch at Stanford University for over 50 years.

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New York Times Blames ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Immigration Enforcement’ for L.A. Restaurant Closures

New York Times reporter Julia Moskin has what seems to be a pretty good story. The Times online headline definitely doesn’t undersell it: "Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chef’s Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the World’s Top-Rated Restaurant." Nor does the subheadline: "Dozens of former employees say René Redzepi inflicted physical and psychological violence on the staff for years."

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