Natalism is not the End of the Battle
While the left is importing voters via the Southern border, thought leaders on the broadly-defined “new right” are proposing that conservatives simply make their own voters. This month, individuals such as Charlie Kirk and Chaya Raichik advanced a political strategy for the right — simply outbreed the left.
“We’re going to win either now or later, when we outbreed the left!” Kirk wrote on Twitter, captioning a video of moms at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit.
Raichik, the personality behind the popular Twitter account “Libs of TikTok,” tweeted that she plans “to have a lot of kids” and then “homeschool or send our kids to private school so they can’t be groomed into becoming activists for leftist causes.”
POLITICO noted this strategy in an April article detailing, “The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population.” The author noted that at a conference dedicated to solving the declining birth rate speakers advance a “mission … to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.”
A political strategy of simply making more babies than the other side shouldn’t be too difficult when the other side’s entire worldview is so fundamentally anti-natal. Conservatives often mock the left for seemingly supporting the demise of their own legacy — birth control from a young age, cutting up their own genitals, killing their own children in the womb, prioritizing the climate over family, and promoting the instability of a single-parent family structure. If all members of a particular political group live out these values, they should simply die out, or so the argument goes.
And that may be true in theory. But the left has hated children for a while, and yet somehow they keep winning elections. The left knows they don’t need their own children when they have yours.
The recent trend on the right to openly discuss large families as an explicitly political strategy is not new in itself. But younger influencers on the right are of a generation that saw what the culture did to their peers, and they understand that simply “breeding” is not enough. Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA, was originally founded as a means to counteract the liberal echo-chamber on college campuses. Raichik’s career shines a spotlight on the left-wing social media users who specifically target young children. Discussions of “outbreeding the left” among younger cohorts of conservatives contain a refreshing amount of dialogue on education, the church, and societal influences through social media.
Conservatives and Christians of a previous generation tended to believe that one’s offspring’s values should largely be formed by their own free will, but that the brutalities of adult life will inevitably make them into conservative adults. For this reason, boomers and generation-X often welcomed the influence of the elite institutions entirely captured by the left. While the influences at a four-year college will be left-wing, they would assure themselves, the education they receive will be solid enough to pad a decent resume that will land them a well-paying, respectable job. A detour into socialism during one’s college years will be short-lived, they argued, as soon as the young’uns get their first paycheck out of school and learn what “FICA” is. Yet, common sense has managed to evade these young people, to the shock and dismay of the parents who paid for their indoctrination. Reality has simply bent to the will of the college leftist grown up, as young radicals cow their older bosses into submission in newsrooms, corporate boardrooms, and medical fields across the country.
Parents cannot guarantee their children’s voting habits, but they are wrong to think it’s simply a numbers game. Absolutely, “outbreed the left,” but such a tactic must be accompanied by a robust understanding of what it would mean for this “breeding” to become a winning solution. A full 83% of the country’s young people ages 3 to 18 attended public schools in the 2021-2022 school year, according to Pew Research. About the same percentage of Christian parents as the public at large reportedly send their children to public schools. Christianity Today, an influential Christian media outlet, approvingly profiled parents who feel “called to stay” in public schools shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the school’s godless teachings, floundering academics, and complete lack of respect for the parent’s right to raise his own child. Instead of removing their children from public schools, the parents in the article opined, Christians should focus more on creating “healthy dialogue at home,” during the few weekday hours when their children are theirs to disciple. Christian author Jen Wilkin says she and her husband “believe in public education as an ideal” and that it provides her young children “opportunities to dialogue about their faith with friends.” For Wilkin, her choice to send her kids to public school is a fulfillment of the biblical command to love her neighbor.
“I would never say everyone should choose public school, but I would say we should try really hard to, if at all possible because we believe in the public school ideal. We believe that education is a right; it’s necessary for human flourishing; it’s good for society. It’s a mark of civilization…..We believed that our participation in the public school system was directly related to loving our neighbors, and so if we could opt in at all, then we absolutely wanted to, so we did.”
Parents should remove their children from the public schools as a start, but they should also look very closely at the sorts of people running their private school or homeschool co-op as well. Even many Christian “bible colleges” are wolves in sheep’s clothing that will send one’s child home “deconstructing,” questioning not only their Christian parents, but the Christian faith itself. An autobiographical article written by a self-described former Christian kid in 2022 at The Guardian details how her first foray into liberal thinking occurred during a class at a private Christian University less than an hour from her parents that, “challenged the gleaming American idealism I held so dear.”
Christians seeking to “outbreed the left” should be as zealous about guarding the hearts and minds of their own children as the left is about their own (and your own) children. A liberal parent would never dream of sending his child to Hillsdale College, yet a conservative parent will still brag about his daughter’s achievements if she lands an acceptance at Harvard University. The small number of children the left does have, grow up to know exactly where their identity lies. Just drive through a liberal, affluent neighborhood and read how many households proudly chant the creed of leftism from their lawns.
“In this house we believe: black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything.”
Many Christian parents would roll their eyes at this sort of political mantra, but send their children away to be taught by its purveyors and influenced by its children.
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