Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has done it again.
After claiming that the world as we know it will end in 12 years, she is now advising millennials not to have children.
“Our planet is going to face disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Feb. 24, 2019, touting her Green New Deal in an Instagram live video.
No matter that there is zero evidence the world is facing an imminent climate-driven catastrophe. And that whatever gradual rise in global temperatures does occur over the next century can surely be dealt with in a measured, rational way without wrecking the U.S. economy.
I grant you that Ocasio-Cortez seems to experience real angst about global warming. Why else would she go around saying things like, “Hurricanes, storms, wildfires, we are dying now.”
Might it be because she knows that saying “the end is near,” and implying that “only I know how to save you” is a great way to scare millennials into voting for her?
Now that she’s in Washington, however, she’s taking matters one step further. She seems to want to scare millennials into not having children.
“There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” she warns in the same video. “And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?”
Of course, no one would want to bring a child into the world that Ocasio-Cortez describes, namely, one teetering on the brink of climate chaos and societal anarchy. And it’s certainly true that parts of the planet already resemble such a “Mad Max” dystopia. In such places, conditions really are so bad that thoughtful people might well want to remain childless.
Those who live in socialist “paradises” like Venezuela, North Korea, and Zimbabwe, for example, might reasonably take a pause from procreation. Who wants to watch their child eat out of garbage cans, or even starve to death, because of socialist mismanagement of the economy?
Or consider the plight of children in China, where the lack of environmental controls means that the air in major cities is often barely breathable. Who wants to watch their child choke on smog?
But in the United States? We live in the most stable, prosperous, and—yes—environmentally conscious democracy the world has ever seen. For Ocasio-Cortez to advise young American women that “global warming” means going childless makes no sense.
Yet such will be the corrosive effect of her climate change propaganda on the minds of millennials that some will probably do just that.
It’s happened before.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968) traumatized an entire generation of college students. “The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich breathlessly informed his readers on the very first page. “Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in the 1970s.” It only got scarier from there.
Reading Ehrlich, many of the 1960s generation decided that the only responsible thing to do was not to have children.
The Mills University valedictorian of 1969, for example, was so shocked by Ehrlich’s apocalyptic message that she devoted her entire address to the dangers of overpopulation.
“Our days as a race on this planet are numbered,” she declared. “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane things for me to do is to have no children at all.”
She entitled her address, “The Future is a Cruel Hoax.”
But the only hoax in question was Ehrlich’s, which robbed her of her future children.
It was not until 2000, by which time our one-time valedictorian—along with the rest of her generation—would have been long past menopause, that the media finally acknowledged the truth: Overpopulation was a 20th-century myth.
Will Ocasio-Cortez’s climate change alarmism now morph into the kind of anti-people, anti-baby attitudes found in the radical environmental movement? Will another generation of young people be robbed of their progeny?
This is surely the least charming way to refer to newborns.
But now Ocasio-Cortez, too, thinks that maybe it’s not OK to have children.
In her view, the planet—not people—must come first.
