Ladies, ladies, ladies, this is an emergency. You’re not doing your part. Our very existence as a species is threatened, and it’s all your fault.

Elon Musk calls it “a war for civilization.” He says, “Humanity is dying.”

JD Vance wants “more babies in America” and wants to give parents more votes than people who don’t — or can’t — have children.

The Trump administration is considering creating a “National Medal of Motherhood” for moms who have six or more kids. (This is hardly original, by the way. It’s a direct ripoff of the “Cross of Honour of the German Mother,” created by Hitler and awarded to mothers of four or more children — as long as they weren’t Jewish.) Trump also says he wants to be the “fertilization president” and is entertaining a proposal to teach women about menstruation.

Let’s all pause here and take a moment to just picture that.

Colorado is definitely seen as part of the problem.

The birth rate here is 52.5 per 1,000 population, eighth-lowest in the nation. Teen birth rates, long a reliable source of children here, have declined especially dramatically from 76.7 births per 1,000 teen girls in 2009 to 11.1 today. As a result, school districts are shuttering elementary schools; hospitals are closing maternity wards.

The situation is dire and, in the view of the strutting Trump-Vance-Musk cult, there’s only one solution: get more women pregnant.

Ever since those damnable scientists with their degrees from elite institutions discovered safe and effective contraception, and since Democrats in this country and DEI radicals in countries all over the world outlawed discrimination against women in education, the workplace, financial services and protection from abusive partners, birth rates have been in decline.

The fertility rate, a rough number representing how many babies an average woman will have, must be 2.1 or higher just to maintain a stable population. The U.S. fertility rate is 1.6. South Korea’s — the lowest in the world — is 0.7.

This is not a joke.

It turns out if women have agency, they look at motherhood as a choice, not an inevitability. They plan pregnancies. They avoid unwanted ones. They even follow their dreams.

The manosphere hates that. And its leaders are hellbent on reversing these dangerous trends.

At a recent conference of NatalCon 2025, a menagerie of about 200 racists, misogynists and eugenicists gathered in Texas to rally support for increasing birth rates — but not for just any women.

They want more babies who are white, have high IQs, aren’t gay or trans, and won’t ever need child care, maternity leaves, paternity leaves, low-income housing or, heaven forbid, equality.

Musk, the unquestioned sperminator and poster boy for the pronatalist movement, has a preference for males among his 14 offspring, most of whom reportedly were conceived through IVF with a variety of women, some acting as surrogates, others who just happened to work for him. The IVF method conveniently allows him to select for gender.

When one of his kids transitioned and changed her name from Xavier to Vivian, he disowned her.

History offers an array of possible roadmaps for the Trump administration in its quest to address the shortage of women interested in getting pregnant.

One of the most notorious examples was Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania and, in light of Trump’s 100-day reign of terror and the creepy bros he hangs with, the Communist dictator might already be his idea of a perfect role model.

Ceaușescu came to power in the 1960s and decided early on that the country’s birthrate was dangerously low and government intervention was needed to boost the population for the purpose of economic development and to increase the ranks of workers for the labor market.

He started tentatively.

Taxes were increased for childless women regardless of whether they had cats, and when that seemed a little too woke, he got serious.

Contraception and abortion were outlawed in almost all cases. Women were required to be monitored by state gynecologists and secret police oversaw hospital procedures to make sure there were no sterilizations or surreptitious abortions provided.

Sure, it was the ’60s, so the methods were primitive. If only they’d had iPhones in those days, they could have developed a digital database of women’s periods, ovulation dates and sexual activity. But I digress.

A brief baby boom ensued, followed by what might be called reality, or in Ceaușescu’s view, unmitigated disaster.

Women from wealthy families bribed doctors to access contraception and abortion services. Poor women found illegal abortion providers who left many of them sick, sterile or dead. Many of the children were malnourished or disabled, and large numbers were abandoned to state orphanages by parents who had neither the means nor the ability to care for them.

Ultimately, Ceaușescu was executed.

But hold your applause. Even that hasn’t kept other countries from trying to interfere in women’s lives.

In Italy, families get financial subsidies, paid paternity leaves and subsidized child care to have kids. In South Korea and China, abortion bans are being used to force women to take unwanted pregnancies to term. Iran has imposed bans on abortion, sterilization and contraception in an effort to manufacture a baby boom.

Birth rates in all cases remain stubbornly low.

So, ladies, it’s all up to you. It comes down to patriotism. How much do you love this country?

Uncle Sam — as well as Elon, JD and The Donald — want you to get pregnant early and often. Never mind what’s good for you as a woman. It’s your duty. Don’t be so stubborn.

As one prominent Republican running for office in 2022 so transparently suggested, don’t fight the inevitable, girls. “Lie back and enjoy it.”

Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.

The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.

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Elon Musk’s never-ending daddy issues

I regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.

You’ll be familiar with some of these details already. By now we all know that Musk seems to think that the only way to save western civilization is if people like him have as many children as possible. And you’ve probably read the New York Times report which alleges that Musk, who likes preaching what he practices in regards to populating the world, has a habit of wandering around offering his sperm to strangers.

What you might not know, however, is that Musk is so committed to this idea of himself as a superhero saving the universe that, even in private conversations, he apparently speaks like he is a character in a poorly written sci-fi novel. According to the Journal, Musk reportedly refers to his children as a “legion” and has been brainstorming ways to breed more efficiently.

“To reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates,” he reportedly said to Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of his children, in a text message seen by the newspaper.

Surrogacy can often be a complex ethical issue. Not in this case. Musk appears to view women as nothing more than walking wombs he can use to further his own narcissistic agenda. Ethics aside for a moment, one has to wonder why a man who styles himself as a tech guru can’t figure out a faster way to pop out offspring than surrogacy. At the very least, I’m surprised that Musk hasn’t yet followed the lead of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly had visions of using his ranch in New Mexico as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies. But that may come later, I suppose. All the money that Doge, Musk’s pet government project, has cut from libraries and medical research might, at this very moment, be getting funneled into an Official Institute of Accelerated Insemination.

While Musk may not have a birthing ranch (yet), he does own a very expensive social network which, according to the Journal, he’s been using to solicit more baby mamas. Musk has apparently been engaging with the cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong on X, sending so many followers her way that she earned $21,000 over a two-week period from the revenue-sharing programs for creators on the platform. Once she was enjoying how lucrative it was to be on his good side, the billionaire asked Fong if she was interested in birthing his child. You know, as you do. Fong politely declined and Musk swiftly unfollowed her, causing her X-related income to drop.

We all know that Musk has very thin skin. How has he responded to the Journal’s embarrassing reporting? Honestly, in an unusually restrained fashion. Nobody has been sent to El Salvador (yet), no reporters have been doxed. Musk has just dismissed the piece as scurrilous gossip. On Tuesday he tweeted “TMZ >> WSJ”. And, in normal circumstances, Musk would be correct that, as long as all parties involved are consenting adults, his private life is no one else’s business. But Musk is not your run-of-the-mill rich guy, is he? I don’t think Donald Trump or JD Vance believe in very much other than their own advancement. But Musk is an ideologue: he’s inserted himself into the top levels of government and is busy rearranging the US according to his worldview. Understanding all the ins and outs of this worldview is now very much a matter of public interest.

It’s also illuminating, I think, to look at the sort of coverage Musk’s shenanigans get, particularly in the conservative press. While people love gawking at Musk, he’s still widely seen as an eccentric genius. Even the headline of the Wall Street Journal piece: “The tactics Elon Musk uses to manage his ‘Legion’ of babies – and their mothers”, seemed to suggest admiration for his multitasking. I’ve offered up this thought experiment before, but just humor me again and imagine a world where a woman acted like Musk. You can’t, can you? She’d be eviscerated on Fox News. There’d be a million thought pieces about what a terrible mother she was. Absolutely nobody would consider her a genius and she certainly wouldn’t be advising the president. There is perhaps no better embodiment of gendered double standards than Musk. And now he’s set on exporting those double standards to Mars.

Give Fatima Hassouna a ‘loud death’

Being a journalist in Gaza is a death sentence, with Israel apparently set on ensuring a complete media blackout of the ongoing genocide. On Wednesday, days before her wedding, Fatima Hassouna, a young photojournalist who is the subject of a new documentary, became one of the latest journalists to be killed by Israel. A strike on her home killed her along with 10 members of her family, including her pregnant sister. “If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna had written on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear.”

This is what it means to be Palestinian: to have to beg the world to care about you. To have cowards avert your eyes as you are massacred. To have the architects of your annihilation trot around the world being treated as VIPs by countries that once pretended to care about human rights.

Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayor

I fully endorse this.

Young women now binge-drink more than young men

While gen Z may drink less than previous generations, the gender gap in risky drinking has been narrowing. A new study finds that women aged 18-25 are now actually drinking slightly more than men the same age.

Sudan: two years of war and shameful international neglect

“Last week, Amnesty International released a new investigation finding the Rapid Support Forces committed widespread sexual violence, including rape, gang rape and sexual slavery, amounting to possible crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara Rosas said in a statement marking the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of Sudan’s civil war. “Despite these atrocities, the world has largely chosen to remain passive. Alarmingly, the UN Security Council has failed to implement a comprehensive arms embargo on Sudan to halt the constant flow of weapons fueling these heinous crimes.”

A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revolting

I chuckled a lot at this headline.

Everyone is making fun of Katy Perry for her little space trip, even Wendy’s

The fast-food chain is refusing to apologize to the singer for a tweet suggesting she should be sent back to space. The Blue Origin flight has been widely panned, with the model and actor Emily Ratajkowski saying she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.”

The week in pawtriarchy

Remember when Trump got attacked by an angry bald eagle during a photoshoot in 2015? Unfortunately, the bird kingdom did not properly organize to stop his presidency back then but it seems that some of our feathered friends have decided to fight the Maga powers that be. Last Friday, a pigeon landed on Fox News’s Peter Doocy’s head while the White House correspondent was wrapping up a segment on tariffs. Not the first time that a Fox News correspondent has looked bird-brained.

Sam Harris is the kind of guest Joe Rogan loves to have on his podcast: he dresses awkwardly in a sport coat with jeans; he undertook a PhD in neuroscience after a transformative experience with MDMA; his tone is accessible yet patronising; he has a sense of academic authority which belies a set of controversial views that include calling Islam “uniquely uncivil” and almost unfettered support for Israeli attacks on Gaza; he made an app called Waking Up, which promises to be “a new operating system for your mind”. Rogan has hosted Harris on his podcast many times and the pair call each other good friends.

But even Harris seems perturbed by Rogan’s more wholehearted embrace of Musk and Maga. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris told his listeners of his own podcast last week. “He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”

Joe Rogan’s podcast success has in large part been about building a community of regular guests from the worlds of comedy, wrestling, psychedelics and non-fiction publishing, a kind of Rogansphere that has begun to feel like a subculture. He hosts his favourite guests time after time, with many of them building entire careers off their appearances on the show.

But recently, various members of the Rogansphere have started to turn against their leader. They can’t understand how the host of the most popular podcast in the world seems to have gone from examining both sides to defending Elon Musk at every turn and providing a platform for second world war revisionists.

View image in fullscreen Sam Harris debates Jordan Peterson in London in 2021. Photograph: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy

In the past few months, Rogan has called people who thought Elon Musk’s hand gesture was a Nazi salute “dumb”, “crazy”, “illogical and weird” and defended it by saying it’s how Americans used to give the pledge of allegiance in the 1940s. Weeks later, he gave a very sympathetic interview to the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who has previously called Winston Churchill the main villain of the second world war and tweeted an image of Nazis in Paris, saying it was “infinitely preferable” to the drag “Last Supper” scene at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.

Rogan wasn’t always like this. Over the past decade he has built his podcast into by far the most successful in the world, weathering numerous controversies. He spent much of his career being mislabelled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.

The best thing you could say about Rogan is that he is distrustful of all mainstream narratives, in an indiscriminate way. That’s led to him promoting a number of conspiracy theories that fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about vaccines and the climate crisis, but also vocally criticising the war in Gaza and the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC.

But his outlook has shifted since Trump was elected for the second time, a victory many credit to a good performance on Rogan’s podcast and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement. On Saturday night at a UFC fight, Rogan ran into Trump, warmly embraced him and said: “I’m so happy for you sir.” Many of his biggest fans, those that discuss episodes in detail on Reddit and Discord, are complaining that he has become a shill for the elites he used to claim to distrust.

Rogan has tended to brush off these critiques in the past, saying he’s just an interested comedian asking questions. But even Rogan’s comedy friends have started to bristle at his unwavering support for Musk. Rogan values comedy above all else, investing much of the riches from his podcast in the Austin comedy scene, buying up clubs and appearing regularly as a panellist on Kill Tony, the open-mic standup podcast that takes shots at perceived wokeism. Rogan has a regular cast of comedians on his podcast including Shane Gillis, Kyle Dunnigan and Tim Dillon. These comedians give Rogan his street credibility, and he in turn has given them a huge platform.

While they haven’t turned on Rogan yet, they are incredibly disparaging about Musk. Dillon called Musk’s White House press conference “the grossest and cringiest shit anyone has seen for a long time … I disagree with close friends of mine who think Elon Musk is the new Jesus.” Gillis laughed about Musk’s salute on his podcast, and said he thought Musk was “psychotic” and “fucking weird” for lying about how good he is at video games.

Rogan meanwhile has recently called Musk “a super genius that’s been fucked with” and “one of the smartest people alive”.

This emerging divide between Rogan and his comedic milieu came to a head last month at the recording of Kill Tony’s first special for Netflix (filmed at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin). Both Dunnigan and Rogan were on the panel together but Dunnigan was in character, hilariously, as Musk. It was a brilliant and vicious send-up of Musk’s bizarre humour and minimal intelligence that had everyone laughing except Rogan, who avoided making eye contact or saying almost anything for the entire episode. It seemed as though he didn’t want to give any impression to Musk that he was was mocking him.

There are no simple ideological lines being drawn between Rogan and the guests that are turning on him. Douglas Murray, for example, is an incredibly conservative pro-Israel historian who supports the withdrawal of visas from students who demonstrated on college campuses last year and has said he wants to ban “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries”. In many ways he is to the right of Rogan, and spent much of his appearance on the podcast losing a debate with his fellow guest Dave Smith over Gaza. Yet he also used his time to admonish Rogan for having too many amateur and conspiracy theory-minded historians on the podcast. “I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people. You’ve now got a big platform and have been throwing out counter-historical stuff but a very dangerous kind.”

Rogan had very little in the way of a meaningful defence. Defending why he had the conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate proponent Ian Carroll on his program, Rogan replied: “I just think I’d like to talk to this person … I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”

There are no smart guys here; both Murray and Rogan have tendency to use circuitous straw man arguments that suit their specific brand of politics. But it does show cracks in the cultural wing of Trumpism.

Rogan himself seems to be backing down from a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies, calling the Venezuelan deportations “horrific” and “bad for the cause”, and calling Trump’s feud with Canada over tariffs “stupid”. Last month he said healthcare should “100% should be socially funded” and was celebrated by Bernie Sanders for doing so.

Yet these acknowledgements of bad policies haven’t translated into a lack of enthusiasm for either Trump or Musk, yet. But with Rogan it only takes one convincing guest to change his mind.

What’s more, Rogan’s main constituency of listeners, young men, appear to be feeling buyer’s remorse about Trump, with new polling suggesting the group is swinging away from the president. Where his audience go, Rogan tends to follow.

On his podcast, Harris told his listeners: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.” Rogan might revel in criticism from progressives, but barbs from his friends are likely to sting. How long Trump can count on Rogan’s cuddles and warm wishes might depend on whether his favourite guests begin to ostracize him.