The <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/population" target="_blank" rel="noopener">population</a> of <a href="http://dailywire.com/topic/china" target="_blank" rel="noopener">China</a> witnessed a year-over-year decline for the first time in six decades.
The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics revealed on Tuesday that the country’s population dropped to 1.412 billion in 2022 from 1.413 billion in 2021, according to a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-population-declined-in-2022-for-first-time-in-decades-11673921036" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> from the Wall Street Journal, marking the first decline since the nation was devastated by famine in the early 1960s under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong.
The number of births fell to 9.56 million from 10.62 million over the same period, while birth rates dropped to 6.77 per thousand people from 7.52 per thousand people.
The news follows a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/world-population-surpasses-8-billion-people-india-to-overtake-china-next-year" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> by the United Nations forecasting that India would pass China this year as the world’s most populous nation. India presently has a fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman. In comparison, China has a fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman, according to <a href="https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">data</a> from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
China had spent decades championing the infamous one-child policy, under which couples were only permitted to bear a single child out of fear that the nation would not have sufficient resources to support a growing population. Even as couples are now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-now-says-it-will-allow-families-to-have-three-children-amid-fears-of-population-crash" target="_blank" rel="noopener">permitted</a> to have up to three children, the cultural value of having small families might now be <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/civilization-is-going-to-crumble-musk-on-chinas-plummeting-birth-rate-and-the-need-to-repopulate-the-planet" target="_blank" rel="noopener">embedded</a> into Chinese society after decades under the one-child policy, despite efforts from officials to increase fertility.
The Chinese government has therefore sanctioned several industries to create markets that promote affordability for larger families. Before a ban on private tutoring was introduced two years ago, China <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-cracks-down-on-120-billion-private-tutoring-industry" target="_blank" rel="noopener">maintained</a> a supplementary education sector worth $120 billion, with roughly 70% of parents in Beijing and Shanghai paying for their children to receive additional instruction. Officials also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-cracks-down-on-real-estate-industry-so-that-families-can-afford-housing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prohibited speculation</a> in residential real estate to decrease property prices.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who recently began his unprecedented third term as head of state, told Chinese Communist Party officials <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/xi-jinping-vows-to-grow-chinas-middle-class-at-key-communist-party-meeting" target="_blank" rel="noopener">assembled</a> last year that he desires to move more residents out of poverty.
“We will ensure more pay for more work and encourage people to achieve prosperity through hard work,” he said. “We will promote equality of opportunity, increase the income of low income earners and expand the size of the middle income group. We will keep income distribution and the means of accumulating wealth well regulated.”
China is among several world powers facing a demographic crisis marked by a higher number of elderly citizens relative to younger residents who are still economically productive. Western European countries, as well as Japan and the United States, are among the major economies witnessing a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/huge-problem-for-society-new-study-finds-sperm-concentration-has-halved-worldwide-problem-accelerating" target="_blank" rel="noopener">collapse</a> in birth rates, exerting pressure on government pension programs.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is among the most vocal opponents of conventional wisdom, which posits that global population expansion is harmful to the climate. He often <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-musk-predicts-chinese-population-collapse" target="_blank" rel="noopener">asserts</a> that the world is facing a demographic crisis, noting last year that China would lose some 40% of its population every generation under current birth rate conditions.
“I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” Musk <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-musk-warns-civilization-will-crumble-without-people-having-more-kids" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explained</a> at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit two years ago. “And yet, so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control. It’s completely the opposite.”

Opening Ceremony Of The 20th National Congress Of The Communist Party Of China

China Announces Its Population Has Dropped For The First Time In Six Decades

China Says Population Has Dropped For First Time Since Mao

China

Communist China

Elon Musk

General

Population

United Nations

World

A report from The <a href="http://dailywire.com/topic/united-nations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">United Nations</a> encouraged policymakers around the world to plan for older <a href="http://dailywire.com/topic/population" target="_blank" rel="noopener">populations</a> with fewer younger workers.
Developed countries with a greater share of older people and developing countries with more young people will experience the “irreversible global trend” of population aging, according to a <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2023/01/2023wsr-fullreport.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">report</a> from the organization. The number of people over 65 years old is expected to more than double over the next three decades, from around 760 million to over 1.6 billion, while the number of people over 80 years old is increasing at an even faster rate.
“This pattern began on a global scale around the middle of the twentieth century and is expected to intensify in the decades ahead,” the analysis explained. “Most of the more developed countries have experienced population ageing over several decades and are already in advanced stages of this process. By contrast, many developing countries face rapid transitions towards ageing societies.”
While nations in Europe and North America currently have the highest number of older people, nations in Africa and Western Asia are “expected to experience the fastest growth in the number of older people” over the next three decades. Dependency ratios, which chart the number of older people and children relative to the working-age populations upon which they depend, are projected to increase over the same horizon.
The UN therefore called upon governments to increase retirement ages and expand pension coverage while making investments in healthcare and education that permit older people to be more self-reliant and economically productive.
“Based on current global trends, future cohorts of working-age and older persons are likely to be healthier and better educated, and therefore more productive, compared to earlier cohorts,” the report continued. “Eliminating age-related discrimination and barriers to formal employment are other critical measures for older persons to make continued contributions.”
Several developed nations are facing overburdened pension systems as more individuals enter retirement age. Medicare Hospital Insurance in the United States is projected to be insolvent by 2028, while Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will deplete reserves by 2034, according to an <a href="https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/social-security-and-medicare-are-approaching-insolvency" target="_blank" rel="noopener">analysis</a> from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The UN <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/india-will-surpass-japan-and-germany-as-the-worlds-third-largest-economy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">forecasts</a> that the human race will have 8.5 billion people by 2030 and 9.7 billion people by 2050 even as worldwide fertility rates reach their lowest levels since 1950. India will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous nation; the former maintains a fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman, while the latter has a fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman, according to <a href="https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">data</a> from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Some commentators have rejected the conventional wisdom that the global population is expanding at an unsustainable rate. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-musk-warns-civilization-will-crumble-without-people-having-more-kids" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called</a> low birth rates “one of the biggest risks to civilization” and encouraged people to build families.
“So many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control,” he said. “It’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers. If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.”

UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY UNGA 77 TUESDAY

United Nations Alerts Policymakers To Brace For An Aging Population

Brace For An Aging Population, United Nations Tells World Governments

Economy

Social Security

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI died at the age of 95, nearly a decade after stepping down as head of the Catholic Church. His life was marked by adherence to a belief in an eternal truth above all. As he stated in a 2008 meeting with Catholic educators at the Catholic University of America, “Truth means more than knowledge: knowing the truth leads us to discover the good….[W]e observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted. Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in – a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God.”
There is a truth; that truth must be pursued; the only substitute for truth is falsehood. Human beings have sussed out eternal truths over the course of millenia, and to discard those truths in favor of subjectivism is crippling. Those eternal truths are rooted in the belief that God made us in His image; that He granted us roles and responsibilities; and that true freedom lies in making choices within the boundaries of those roles and responsibilities.
What happens when we discard those truths?
Disaster strikes.
First we lose belief in something Higher; then we lose belief in ourselves.
We are seeing the consequences of this two-step process before us in real time.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spelled out what happens when we turn our gaze inwards rather than outward. Generation Z, he said, has been sucked into a vortex of narcissism and jealousy and isolation. According to Haidt, there has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.” For girls, particularly, replacement of roles with constant self-assessment has been a pathway to hell: “You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.” The new cultural ideology “valorizes victimhood. …You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
Civilizationally, the loss of inherited wisdom and traditional values has resulted in new, ersatz gods to worship. The most obvious god is the pantheistic god of nature, revenging itself on us for our capitalist excesses. Why else would “60 Minutes” feature widely-discredited false green Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”? Ehrlich famously stated in 1968 that billions would die of starvation in the 1970s and 1980s; now, half a century later, he explains, “Humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. Not clear where they’re gonna come from.”
Never mind that Ehrlich is wrong. The real question is why he is still respected. The answer, of course, is that every religion requires its prophets, and the neo-paganism of environmental catastrophism is no exception.
As the West loses its links with traditional wisdom, it breaks loose of its philosophical moorings. The consequences will be dire, unless those moorings are reinforced. And they can only be reinforced by those who have the courage to defend eternal truths – not merely hide behind the tolerance of pluralism, a repository for the cowardice of conservatives who correctly stand with free speech but incorrectly think that stance sufficient to win the day.
In the end, either the truth will win out, or it will be destroyed. As Pope Benedict XVI told the Bishops of the United States in 2012, “The Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering.” Defenders of traditional values of all stripes are called to the same quest.

Ben Shapiro 7

The Death Of Eternal Truths And The New Paganism

60 Minutes

Ben Shapiro

Environmentalism

Readers Pass

U.S.

Japan is <a href="https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2023/01/03/Japan-Tokyo-birthrates-aging/9451672753742/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reportedly</a> offering families even more money than it had in the past to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/03/million-yen-per-child-to-leave-tokyo-japans-offer-to-families" target="_blank" rel="noopener">move</a> out of Tokyo over population concerns.
The government of the Asian country is saying it will give as much as 1 million yen, the <a href="https://wise.com/us/currency-converter/jpy-to-usd-rate?amount=1000000" target="_blank" rel="noopener">equivalent</a> of around $7,631, per child for a family if they leave Tokyo. Japan was already providing 300,000 yen — or around $2,289 — per kid for families who would move.
A press release <a href="https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/12/cfa934059dce-families-moving-out-of-tokyo-to-get-up-to-1-mil-yen-per-child.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published</a> on December 29, per Kyodo News, stated that the initiative originally began in the fiscal year of 2019. In the fiscal year of 2021, 2,381 people left the city region and took advantage of the financial help.
The outlet also noted that the new amount will be put forward in the fiscal year beginning next April, according to a source.
Those eligible for the money include residents of Tokyo’s 23 wards and people who commute to that area from nearby regions. If people take part in the program and get the money for moving, they have to live in one of the participating regions for a minimum of five years and have a job. If they leave before the necessary duration is up, it will be requested of them to give the money back. The money also only applies for a child who is under the age of eighteen, or who is eighteen years old but in his or her last year of high school.
The program also could encourage people to build businesses and be entrepreneurial in their new areas. Couples who have two kids less than eighteen years of age and decide to leave and begin a business in the new region they live in will get up to five million yen, or $38,157.
People who want to take part in the program have to approach the local government in the area they move to after three months to one year after they move and say they plan to stay for a minimum of five years, according to <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan-to-raise-financial-support-for-moving-out-of-Tokyo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nikkei Asia</a>.
The initiative is part of an overall effort by authorities to help areas that are struggling with populations that are getting older and smaller. Officials are also <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/03/japanese-families-reportedly-set-to-receive-1-million-yen-per-child-for-moving-out-of-tokyo.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">eager</a> to thin out the packed areas of Tokyo.
In 2020, Japan’s fertility <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=JP" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rate</a> was 1.3 births per woman. The fertility rate <a href="https://www.wri.org/research/achieving-replacement-level-fertility#:~:text=%E2%80%9CReplacement%20level%20fertility%E2%80%9D%20is%20the,modestly%20vary%20with%20mortality%20rates." target="_blank" rel="noopener">needed</a> to replace the current generation, with no migration, is around 2.1 children per woman in the majority of countries. The move could be a way to encourage people to have more children, as well as move to less populated areas.

10921EA5-A69F-44E9-B17B-305ACE978E17_1_105_c

Japan To Give Families Thousands Of Dollars Per Kid To Move Out Of Tokyo

Japan To Give Families $7,631 Per Kid To Move Out Of Tokyo To Rural Areas

Japan

Money

CBS News felt the best way to start 2023 was with a “<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/earth-mass-extinction-60-minutes-2023-01-01/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">60 Minutes</a>” segment on overpopulation featuring Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University’s Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus, as the centerpiece voice. 
Ehrlich is best known as the author of “The Population Bomb,” a book published nearly 55 years ago. He&#8217;s also known for making a catastrophically wrong prediction in that same book.
If you were born in the 1970s, go ahead and thank your parents for ignoring Ehrlich.
The next time the media trots out Paul Ehrlich — and there will be a next time — it would be best to associate him with another name: Harold Camping. Mr. Camping was a radio personality and evangelist who routinely predicted “the rapture” and the end of the world, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/harold-camping-quotes/350587/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">most famously on May 21, 2011</a>. Let’s take a look at the failed predictions of Camping and Ehrlich and see if we notice anything:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” wrote Ehrlich in “The Population Bomb.”
&#8220;We&#8217;re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We&#8217;re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it&#8217;s all coming to a head right now,&#8221; said Camping.
Here’s where their paths diverge, however. Camping was widely mocked before his predicted date and then nearly completely forgotten after his failure. Ehrlich, on the other hand, still enjoys massive credibility and is then featured as a voice of authority on one of the legacy media’s most prestigious programs. Perhaps having &#8216;PhD&#8217; after your name means never having to be accountable. 
Unblemished by his 50-year failure, Ehrlich shared his latest doomsday predictions with the ever-shrinking legacy media audience.
Reporter Scott Pelley: “You seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable?”
Paul Ehrlich: “Oh, humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you&#8217;d need five more Earths. Not clear where they&#8217;re gonna come from.”
Ehrlich and the parade of PhD’s in the story seem to feel this latest mass extinction is unavoidable, even at one point saying that if you look out your window in the future, “three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there.” Unfortunately for all of us, the Biden administration and their allies in Congress are listening to this alarmism. Perhaps when your record of failure is as bad as Biden’s, you can look past the failed prediction doomsday professors.
Inside one of the many versions of the recently passed $1.7 trillion government spending bill was <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/rep-dan-bishop-takes-575-million-family-planning-endangered-species-biodiversity" target="_blank" rel="noopener">over half a billion dollars in funding</a> for “family planning services” in areas where population growth “threatens biodiversity.” Conveniently, and no doubt coincidentally, “60 Minutes” trotted out Ehrlich and the overpopulation team just three days after Biden signed the spending package. No one thought to ask if the doomsday professors are getting a cut of federal funding to peddle their latest alarmism. Those questions would mean you’re a flat earther, daring to “question the science.”
One “solution” offered by the experts at CBS is paying people to keep their land “wild.” If they are using their land for farming, we can pay them more to stop it. Keep in mind, this is the same group who say we’re overpopulated advocating we use less land for food … and Joe Biden loves the idea.
Shortly after taking office, <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/biden-commits-to-30-by-2030-conservation-executive-orders" target="_blank" rel="noopener">President Biden introduced his 30 by 30 plan</a>. The goal is for the government to grab 30% of American land and water by 2030. He hasn’t mentioned it much over the last two years, but Paul Ehrlich and CBS News are already leading the charge.
Far from being ridiculed, the failed prophecies of doomsday professors are finding their way into billions of dollars and millions of acres of land.
The disruption heading our way from these ideas is substantial and the Biden administration is the tip of the problem. It appears they’re all adopting a new mantra: Never let a doomsday scenario go to waste.
Larry Behrens is the Communications Director for Power The Future, a non-profit that advocates for America’s energy workers. You can find him on Twitter @larrybehrens 
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Packed like sardines

I Watched The ’60 Minutes’ Doomsday Diatribe On Overpopulation So You Don’t Have To

Biden Administration

Climate Change

The Drug Enforcement Administration said it seized enough <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/fentanyl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fentanyl</a> so far this year to kill every single American citizen.
In a press release Tuesday, the DEA said it had seized some 50.6 million fake prescription pills laced with fentanyl, along with more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder, with two weeks left in calendar year 2022. That amounts to more than 379 million lethal doses of fentanyl so far this year, more than enough to kill every single citizen of the United States. There are 333 million people in the United States, according to the <a href="https://www.census.gov/popclock/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Census Bureau</a>.
“In the past year, the men and women of the DEA have relentlessly worked to seize over 379 million deadly doses of fentanyl from communities across the country,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a <a href="https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2022/12/20/drug-enforcement-administration-announces-seizure-over-379-million-deadly" target="_blank" rel="noopener">statement</a>. “These seizures – enough deadly doses of fentanyl to kill every American – reflect DEA’s unwavering commitment to protect Americans and save lives, by tenaciously pursuing those responsible for the trafficking of fentanyl across the United States. DEA’s top operational priority is to defeat the two Mexican drug cartels—the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels—that are primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans today.”
According to the press release, most of the fentanyl trafficked by the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels is mass-produced at secret Mexican factories with materials mostly sourced from China. Much of the drug is pressed into the shape of common prescription drugs that are used recreationally, such as OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax, and others. The counterfeit pills contain just fentanyl and a filler, and are often deadly. They are readily available on social media.
The DEA press release cautioned consumers to only ever take medications prescribed directly by a trusted physician and dispensed by a licensed pharmacist.
According to DEA laboratory tests, six out of ten counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl contained a potentially lethal dose. That was an increase from 2021, when four out of 10 pills the agency tested were found to contain a lethal dose.
According to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dea-issues-warning-over-emerging-trend-of-rainbow-fentanyl-across-u-s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">another press release</a> from the agency earlier this year, fentanyl is one of the strongest synthetic opioids in circulation; it is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. A lethal dose of fentanyl is just two milligrams, roughly equal to 10-15 grains of table salt. Without proper lab testing, it is impossible to tell how much fentanyl is concentrated in a particular pill or powder sample.
More than 107,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2021, according to data from the CDC — the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/record-number-of-americans-died-from-drug-overdoses-in-2021-cdc-data-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">largest number on record</a>. Synthetic opioids accounted for a large share (71,000) of the deaths, The New York Times reported. Furthermore, the nonprofit advocacy group <a href="https://twitter.com/FafFentanyl/status/1471270179783032833?s=20&amp;t=JMOmb9zR7aR_FWzya2kHyg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Families Against Fentanyl</a> tweeted in December that buried in the CDC data is the fact that fentanyl specifically was the leading killer of Americans in the 18-45 age range.
Fortunately, researchers at the University of Houston have developed a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-vaccine-targets-fentanyl-may-offer-route-back-to-sobriety" target="_blank" rel="noopener">vaccine</a> that could help fentanyl addicts beat addiction by preventing relapses.
“Our vaccine is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys,” lead researcher Colin Haile said. “Thus, the individual will not feel the euphoric effects and can ‘get back on the wagon’ to sobriety.”

Fentanyl

DEA Seized Enough Fentanyl In 2022 To Kill Every Single American, And Then Some

Drugs

Health

Opioid Crisis

A new study from the Hebrew University of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/jerusalem" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jerusalem</a> found that sperm concentration has fallen drastically among men worldwide since the 1970s, and the drop is accelerating.
The <a href="https://academic.oup.com/humupd/article/23/6/646/4035689?login=false" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> published in the Human Reproduction Update built on data from a study published five years ago that gathered information on sperm concentration in men from Western countries, The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/15/humans-could-face-reproductive-crisis-as-sperm-count-declines-study-finds" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. The newest study looked at data from 57,000 men in 53 countries around the world, finding that sperm concentration dropped 51% between 1973 and 2018, from 101.2m per ml to 49.0m per ml.
Sperm counts dropped 1.2% per year between 1973 and 2000, but the rate accelerated to 2.6% per year from 2000 to 2018, which the study’s lead author, Professor Hagai Levine, called “an amazing pace,” <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2022/11/15/sperm-counts-decrease-men-health-exposure-fertility/10668233002/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to USA Today.
“The key point that needs to be made is that this is desperately bad news for couple fertility,” said Professor Richard Sharpe, an expert in male health at the University of Edinburgh.
Sharpe added, “These issues are not just a problem for couples trying to have kids. They are also a huge problem for society in the next 50-odd years as less and less young people will be around to work and support the increasing bulge of elderly folk.”
While it remains unclear what’s causing sperm counts to fall so drastically in less than 50 years, experts have a few theories. Some point to fossil fuel <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/environmentalism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pollution</a> as the reason for lower sperm concentration, saying that the pollution even affects unborn children, while others point to health issues related to obesity, poor diet, drinking, and smoking as possible factors.
Levine said the numbers should spark the world into crisis mode. “I think this is another signal that something is wrong with the globe and that we need to do something about it. So yes, I think it’s a crisis, that we [had] better tackle now, before it may reach a tipping point which may not be reversible,” he remarked.
As leftist climate activists argue that the globe is facing an existential crisis of overpopulation, some experts are warning about a decrease in fertility and births, even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/26/falling-sperm-counts-human-survival" target="_blank" rel="noopener">arguing</a> that falling sperm counts could “threaten human survival.” Troubling drops in birth rates in some of the planet’s largest countries like the U.S., Japan, and China have caused alarm over the past year. The U.S. fertility rate has dropped by about 2% per year since 2014, hitting record lows in 2020, 2019, and 2018, The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/overpopulation-fears-give-way-to-another-bogeyman-a-fertility-slump" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> in July. Meanwhile, Japan saw a record natural population <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/03/japan-low-births-population-decline-2021/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">decline</a> in 2021, and China’s birth rate fell to a record low the same year.
The issue made <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/civilization-is-going-to-crumble-musk-on-chinas-plummeting-birth-rate-and-the-need-to-repopulate-the-planet/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">headlines</a> again over the summer when billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk commented on what he sees as a global underpopulation problem.
“A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” he <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1545046146548019201?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tweeted</a>.
“Far too many people are under the illusion that Earth is overpopulated, even though birth rate trends are so obviously headed to population collapse,” Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1545050496230051844" target="_blank" rel="noopener">added</a>.

Men’s Health

‘Huge Problem For Society’: New Study Finds Sperm Concentration Has Halved Worldwide, Problem Accelerating

New Study Finds Sperm Concentration Has Halved Worldwide, Problem Accelerating

Israel

The global <a href="http://dailywire.com/topic/population" target="_blank" rel="noopener">population</a> surpassed 8 billion people as of Tuesday, according to a projection from the <a href="http://dailywire.com/topic/united-nations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">United Nations</a>.
The organization forecasts that the human race will have a membership of 8.5 billion people by 2030 and 9.7 billion people by 2050, although worldwide fertility rates have reached their lowest levels since 1950. India will surpass China next year as the world’s most populous nation.
“This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a <a href="https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-reach-8-billion-15-november-2022#:~:text=The%20global%20population%20is%20projected,today%20on%20World%20Population%20Day." target="_blank" rel="noopener">press release</a>. “At the same time, it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and a moment to reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another.”
More than half of global population growth over the next three decades is slated to occur in eight countries: Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to the United Nations. As the populations of most Western countries grow older, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as parts of Asia and Latin America, are witnessing younger average working populations, signaling the possibility of a more productive workforce presuming gains in education and technology.
The expanding human population, despite lower worldwide birth rates following the lockdown-induced recession, has been the subject of concern for many climate activists. Referencing the purported need to further reduce fertility, United Nations Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Liu Zhenmin commented in the press release that “rapid population growth makes eradicating poverty, combatting hunger and malnutrition, and increasing the coverage of health and education systems more difficult.”
Claims that decreasing population growth is beneficial for humanity, however, often overlook the robust innovation and productive capacity that can emerge from larger populations. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Marian Tupy, who has authored multiple books about the fallacy of planetary resource depletion, said during an interview with The Daily Wire that “the more people you have, the greater the number of people who are likely to be inventors or innovators.”
“The world’s population in the last 200 years has risen from 1 billion people to 8 billion people, and yet the world is much richer than it was before. Not just that, but we are living longer, we are healthier, we are better educated, we are more moral in many aspects,” he remarked. “Only human beings can have new ideas that lead to innovations, inventions, productivity gains, and increased standards of living. If any progress is going to come, it has to come from the human mind. The more people you have, the more ideas you have, the more innovations you have.”
Tupy, acknowledging that only a fraction of the population innovates in the way he described, noted that population growth is by no means the only factor for productivity. “If a large population was all that mattered, then China would be by far the richest country, because they have been the most populous country for the past 2,000 years,” he continued. “You need to have a modicum of freedom, whereby people are free to think, publish, and associate.”
With respect to climate change, Tupy cited innovation as a mechanism to harness resources in a more efficient manner, specifically pointing to the role of fracking in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the role of aquaculture in preserving fish populations.
“Yes, human beings are contributing to climate change, but they are also contributing to solving climate change,” he remarked. “Every human being comes into the world not just with an empty stomach, but also with a brain, and it is on those brains that we rely on to create wealth.”

Close up of mixed race newborn baby girl’s feet

World Population Surpasses 8 Billion People, India To Overtake China Next Year

World Population Surpasses 8 Billion People

Government <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/lockdowns" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lockdowns</a> enacted in response to the spread of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/covid-19" target="_blank" rel="noopener">COVID</a> may have caused the “first major reversal” in nearly two decades for American <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/population" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fertility rates</a>, according to a new <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30569/w30569.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">working paper</a> from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The analysis, written by economists Martha Bailey, Janet Currie, and Hannes Schwandt noted that forecasts originally predicted a dramatic baby bust of 300,000 children to 500,000 children as a result of the lockdowns. Instead, births declined by only 76,000 more than the baseline, while American-born mothers saw a net increase in births of roughly 46,000 children by 2021.
The “baby bump” was therefore the first salient disruption to falling American birth rates since 2007 and was “large enough to reverse two years of declining fertility rates,” according to the working paper. The trend was most noticeable among mothers experiencing their first births and women under 25, suggesting that many women were led to “start their families sooner” amid the phenomena of the past two years.
“Early data from California shows the baby bonus has persisted through August 2022,” Bailey noted to The Daily Wire, adding that the researchers are still awaiting nationwide statistics. “Elevated birth rates for younger women also suggest that the long decline in childbearing for this group may be shifting.”
Commentators have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elon-musk-warns-civilization-will-crumble-without-people-having-more-kids" target="_blank" rel="noopener">long discussed</a> the economic and cultural ramifications of declining American birth rates. Other nations, including China and Russia, recently implemented policies meant to encourage higher fertility, with the former eliminating its notorious <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-updates-child-policy-amid-population-growth-worries" target="_blank" rel="noopener">one-child policy</a> and the latter enacting <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/russia-to-give-1-million-rubles-to-women-who-birth-10-or-more-children" target="_blank" rel="noopener">financial incentives</a> for women who build large families.
Indeed, the number of births in the United States increased for the first time in more than seven years as of 2021, marking a 1% overall rise in births from 2020, according to <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220524.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">data</a> from the National Center for Health Statistics. In contrast, fertility declined 4% between 2019 and 2020.
The baby bump was also pronounced among women between 30 and 34 years old, according to the working paper, as well as women between 25 and 44 years old who had received a college degree. Highly educated individuals were “more likely to retain their jobs” during the lockdowns and transition to virtual work. Wealthy families likewise experienced higher economic stability as equity from the housing market and stock market increased their prosperity. Meanwhile, abortion facilities were “disrupted” or “completely shut down.”
“We think that increased flexibility in the workplace could be a major driver,” Currie explained to The Daily Wire. “We know that about 40% of days worked are still being worked from home as of June 2022. Also, we see the biggest fertility increases among college educated women, who are more likely to be able to work from home. These findings highlight the time costs of having children and the value parents place on the ability to work from home.”
Most of the decline in births was seen among foreign-born and nonresident women, who accounted for 23% of births as of 2019. Because the decrease in fertility among foreigners and migrants began at the “very beginning of the pandemic,” the authors of the paper suggested that government travel restrictions and a sudden unavailability of economic opportunities in the United States may have led to the decrease.
Nevertheless, without foreign-born women, the overall American birth rate “would be much lower and closer to other low-fertility countries found in Europe or Japan.” While the European Union saw a fertility rate of 1.53 children per woman as of 2018, Japan saw 1.42 children per woman, according to <a href="https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">data</a> from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Infant

Lockdowns May Have Caused Baby Boom As Young Women Start Families And More Mothers Work From Home

COVID Caused Baby Boom In 2021, Working Paper Reports

babies

COVID

Lockdowns

Humankind is heading towards extinction. This fact has attracted the attention of eccentric billionaire Elon Musk who is sounding the alarm.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1563020169160851456" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tweeted</a> earlier this year.
But it’s not just Elon Musk who foresees our collective demise. Numerous sociologists and researchers are predicting that, absent substantial changes in family formation and the fertility rate, our global population will begin to decline this century.
And then it will never stop.
Darrell Bricker, a leading international social researcher, and John Ibbitson, an award-winning journalist, published the book Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline in 2019.
“The great defining event of the twenty-first century … will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end,” they write. “We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust – a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd.”
Clearly, something has gone wrong. The fertility rate in the United States, and in nearly all of the Western world, is below the replacement rate. Many in the younger generations – Millennials and Gen Z – have lost the will to continue or see no future for the next generation. They are no longer producing enough children to replace themselves.
Unless something changes, the decline of our species is just a few short decades away.
Certainly, there’s no singular cause behind this fact. The decline of religion, the delaying and redefinition of marriage, and the rise of couples who have no desire to create children are obvious factors.
But one of the more overlooked contributing causes may be the rising cost of purchasing a home. If young people of reproductive age can’t afford a home to house a growing family, they will stop growing that family.
<h3>The Rising Cost of Housing</h3>
<a href="https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">According to</a> data provided by the U.S. Federal Reserve, following the burst of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s, home prices began to increase substantially in 2012 when compared to the median household income. This increase has continued ever since.
During the housing bubble, the highest the home price to median income ratio reached was 7.03 on November 30, 2005. This means the average price of a home was 7.03 times more than the median income.
But as of May 31, 2022, the average price of a house in the U.S. cost 7.79 times the yearly household income. This was the largest number ever recorded in the last eight decades, since such data was first collected beginning in 1946 – including the peak of the housing bubble.
Data website Longtermtrends.net <a href="https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/">shares a chart highlighting</a> the home price to median household income ratio from 1946 &#8211; 2022.
Between 1960 and 2000, the home price to median income ratio varied between roughly four and five. The two spikes in the ratio to seven or eight (during the housing bubble, and now, respectively) are anomalies in U.S. history.
This data demonstrates the price of housing in the 21st century is substantially greater than it ever was in the 20th century. This is not a sustainable trendline for families.
While the rising price of housing benefits Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, who are more likely to own homes, it harms Millennials and young families who have no equity and are trying to buy their first homes.
In addition, a number of studies have confirmed the trend of rising real estate prices over the past several decades.
The online brokerage Clever Real Estate <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/10/home-prices-are-now-rising-much-faster-than-incomes-studies-show.html#:~:text=A%20common%20rule%20of%20thumb,2.5%20times%20your%20annual%20salary." target="_blank" rel="noopener">recently reported</a> that while the dramatic rise in home prices worsened following the COVID pandemic, 2020 was not the start of the incongruence. Rather, the disparity between home prices and median household income has been growing for 50 years.
“After accounting for inflation, home prices have jumped 118% since 1965, while income has only increased by 15%,” Clever Real Estate found. “To afford a home in 2021, Americans need an average income of $144,192 — far more than the median household income of $69,178.”
<a href="https://anytimeestimate.com/research/housing-prices-vs-inflation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">According to another estimate</a>, housing is currently far more expensive for Millennials than it was for Baby Boomers several decades ago.
“If home prices grew at the same rate as inflation since 1970, the median home price today would be just $177,788 – rather than $408,100,” Anytime Estimate, a data research entity, reports. “Compared to the average baby boomer entering their 30s in 1985, the average millennial entering their 30s in 2019 faced a 31% higher home-price-to-income ratio.”
Clearly, Millennials today face a much more difficult time entering the housing market than their parents did in the 20th century.
<h3>Wither the Starter Home?</h3>
Another phenomenon presenting a negative impact on younger people is the disappearance of the “starter home.”
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/upshot/starter-home-prices.html">According to a recent article</a> in The New York Times, “The nation has a deepening shortage of housing. But, more specifically, there isn’t enough of this housing: small, no-frill homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity.”
Or start a family.
“Nationwide, the small, detached house has all but vanished from new construction. Only about 8 percent of new single-family homes today are 1,400 square feet or less. In the 1940s, according to CoreLogic, nearly 70 percent of new houses were that small,” The Times writes.
The type of less expensive, smaller houses young couples who desire to have children would be able to afford are all but vanishing.
Today, starter homes are disappearing. The homes being built and resold are far more expensive. The cost of housing has far exceeded inflation and wage increases. And the losers in that equation are younger people and families.
Stereotypically, older generations like regaling younger people with the difficulties of life “back in their day.” But what if it’s really the younger generations who have it hardest? What if Millennials should start saying, “Now in our day.”
Considering these statistics, should we really be surprised younger generations are struggling to make it on their own, much less marry and have children?
<h3>Millennials Delaying Family Formation</h3>
The above information isn’t esoteric. It’s having a real-world effect on young people and family formation.
A <a href="https://justthenews.com/nation/economy/survey-majority-young-adults-who-moved-back-parents-during-pandemic-still-live-there" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent survey</a> from LendingTree found that “nearly a third (32%) of millennials and Gen Zers moved back home with their parents during the pandemic … Two-thirds of young adults who moved back home remain with their parents [and are] focused on paying down debt and saving for a home.”
Young adults feel forced to pick between saving up for a home and moving on with their lives.
An important 2013 <a href="https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/95429/1/737808942.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> was the first to look at the role of housing in young adults’ decisions regarding family size. It was conducted by the LIS Cross-National Data Center, a non-profit economic data organization and found that the cost of housing “influences fertility by shaping transition decisions into parenthood.”
The study found that when it comes to decisions regarding family size, “housing costs are directly related to fertility. Children and housing are competing goods, and thus there is a tradeoff between the two.”
Additionally, “Housing costs are indirectly related to fertility through transition decisions of young adults. If housing is expensive enough to delay key transition decisions, fertility is also delayed, and sometimes lowered.”
Another 2009 <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166046208000823" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> found that higher rent prices negatively impact fertility rates. And a <a href="https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-fertility" target="_blank" rel="noopener">third study</a> from the National Bureau of Economic Research published in 2012 found “housing prices have a significant impact on a family’s decision to have children&#8230;&#8221;
<h3>Where We Go from Here</h3>
There is no single, easy solution to help younger people get married, buy homes, and have children. But our society, including government authorities, must consider what practices and policies could be implemented to foster family formation.
It can be all too easy to turn to the government to solve our problems. But as former President Ronald Reagan said during his 1981 inaugural <a href="https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/inaugural-address-2/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">address</a>, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
Following the bursting of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s, the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate to near-zero, kept it there for nearly a decade, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-feds-damage-to-the-housing-market-may-last-years/2022/08/11/fa4e8f4c-1964-11ed-b998-b2ab68f58468_story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">purchased</a> trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. These actions had as their purpose, and consequence, the artificial boosting of asset prices, including stocks and real estate.
The federal government and unaccountable central bankers may not be able to solve our housing-affordability crisis, but maybe they can reverse their decades long easy money policies and stop contributing to it.
In addition, as the Brookings Institution <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/bigideas/to-improve-housing-affordability-we-need-better-alignment-of-zoning-taxes-and-subsidies/#:~:text=City%2Dwide%20zoning%20reforms%20that,accessible%20to%20many%20more%20families." target="_blank" rel="noopener">suggests</a>, local zoning reform could open up neighborhoods to more townhomes and duplexes, helping to increase the supply of more affordable housing – especially the kind of “starter homes” that the U.S. is in desperate need of.
Other policies, like expanding tax credits for first time home buyers, should also be considered.
Whatever the approach, helping younger generations purchase affordable homes, and start families, should be one of the main priorities of the federal, state and local governments.
Because without an increase in family formation and fertility rates, we face the dire prospect of an empty planet.
Zachary Mettler is a staff writer for Focus on the Family&#8217;s Daily Citizen. Mettler earned his bachelor&#8217;s degree from William Jessup University and is an alumnus of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Human Hand Placing A Coin On Increasing Coin Stacks

‘Largest Disparity In Eight Decades’: Millennials Face Unprecedented Hurdles Buying First Home, Starting Family

Housing

Inflation

Interest Rates

Millennials

If you understand nothing else about Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, get this: they are godless.
That matters. From your answer to the question “Does God exist?” flows the whole of your worldview. If your government thinks you are a product of random chance and necessity, and that there is no God to judge in the next life their actions in this one, history demonstrates with chilling clarity how that plays out.
In <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klaus-schwab-the-world-economic-forum-and-the-new-fascism-3">Part 3</a> of this series, we saw how Schwab’s literary references in his books suggested a shallow understanding of the humanities and none whatsoever of religion.
There are, however, numerous philosophical references in which he reveals a more intimate knowledge: Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Gramsci, Steven Pinker, Yuval Noah Harari, and Peter Singer to name only a few. This is telling. All of them are atheists, and aggressively so.
Schwab quotes them favorably, and where the WEF has taken a little from each is obvious:
From Nietzsche, the idea of the Superman who can face the harsh reality of a world without any ultimate transcendent hope.
Gramsci, an evil little Italian communist, contributed the ideas for the overthrow of the Christian and democratic West; ideas that inform <a href="https://youtu.be/kqJRx7tvEO4" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the subversive tactics of the radical Left</a> from Black Lives Matter to the sexualization of children.
Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, sang the siren song of perpetual human progress in his books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, a tune irresistible to secular scientific elites.
Harari, a historian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has written a personal mission statement reading: “Care about suffering.” And yet, according to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ian Parker of The New Yorker</a>, Harari nonetheless speaks of suffering with “nihilistic composure.” Adds Parker: “The subject of human suffering — even extreme suffering — doesn’t seem to agitate Harari in quite the way that industrial agriculture does.” Perhaps that’s because his original mission statement, “Embrace ambiguity,” leaves open the question of whose suffering he cares about.
And Singer.
Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton University, is quite possibly the most influential philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. In 1975 he published Animal Liberation, giving rise to the modern animal rights movement. 
Once, while dining with him in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia, I listened as he explained his animal rights philosophy. A vegetarian for obvious reasons, he ordered gnocchi. Wordlessly, I expressed my views on animals and their place within creation by ordering kangaroo.
He is the most philosophically consistent atheist I have ever met, and I’ve known more than a few. In addition to debating the late atheist journalist <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Christopher-Hitchens-Restless-Notorious/dp/0718022173/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1664734347&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Christopher Hitchens</a>, Tuft’s cognitive scientist <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/third-rail/multimedia/2015/5/does-religion-do-more-harm-than-good1.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Daniel Dennett</a>, and Skeptic Magazine editor <a href="https://youtu.be/3S4x3gtkubY" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Shermer</a>, I organized and chaired three of Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s debates. But Singer is, by far, the most dangerous of the lot, and that’s because he is willing to follow his atheism to its dark conclusions.
Journalist Kevin Toolis writes of him: “[W]hat is legitimate for Singer is just plain murder for other people.”
It is Singer’s view that man is an animal like any other and that he deserves no special status among the various species. That is, he argues, a residual of Christian thought. Worse, he has argued that parents should get twenty-eight days with a newborn child to determine if they want to keep it or euthanize it. This is where atheism, pushed to its logical outcome, takes you. And it’s where the WEF would like to take the rest of us.
This bring us to Dennis Meadows, Emeritus Professor of Systems Management at the University of New Hampshire. Meadows is an original member of the Club of Rome and one of the co-authors of Limits to Growth, a mega-bestseller that informs the WEF’s agenda. Meadows <a href="https://youtu.be/ojK05pVOlhs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">thinks we must reduce the global population by, oh, a mere 6-7 billion people</a>. But no worries, he wants to do it “peacefully.”
These are the people from whom Schwab and the WEF take their cues. Pinker, Harari, Singer, and Meadows are WEF “agenda contributors.” (That’s a little more than what appears at the bottom of this article: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author …) 
Read their books. Watch them in smug conversation. They simply cannot resist telling you what they think and what they want to do. These are your would-be overlords.
Combine these murderous ideas with politicians who have the power to implement them — <a href="https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_AM22_List_of_confirmed_PFs.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more than fifty government leaders attended this year’s WEF annual meeting</a> — and you have a toxic combination.
Take, for example, Ursula von der Leyen. Perhaps you saw her recently in the news. She is the unelected President of the European Commission <a href="https://youtu.be/a50pq2Dg6OQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">who threatened</a> Italy with unspecified sanctions should they elect a prime minister at odds with the EU’s vision for the continent. (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-appears-to-shadowban-videos-of-italys-first-female-incoming-prime-minister" target="_blank" rel="noopener">I’m delighted to say the Italians defied von der Leyen</a>.) She is also a WEF agenda contributor and is front and center in <a href="https://www.weforum.org/about/leadership-and-governance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this WEF leadership photo</a>.
*     *     *     *     *
At bottom, the WEF has no actual power. They possess no armies, they hold no seat at the UN, and they are stateless. What they have is influence. 
Schwab is Mr. Networker Guy. He has managed to gather world leaders of disparate cultures, languages, of democratic and non-democratic countries, some who are enemies, all of whom have participated on a voluntary basis, and he’s given them an organizing vision. But it’s not Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People techniques that have enabled him to do it. 
It’s the product he&#8217;s selling and they all want it:
Absolute power.
It is a fact of history. We are always just a step from totalitarianism. Those politicians who would readily embrace it and the thugs who would readily enforce it are always there. It just needs someone to speak it into being, to offer a roadmap to get there.
That’s what the WEF offers, and it offers it all under the cover of environmental and humanitarian virtue.
Do you really think Xi or Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both WEF participants, really care about “a sustainable future”? The WEF deals in the laundering of reputations, those of current or aspiring tyrants in particular.
In my considerable experience engaging men who posture as some of the world’s smartest, I’ve discovered when it comes to seductive but unworkable utopian ideas, intellectuals are not unlike football coaches with talented but troublesome players: they are confident they will be able to succeed where the last guy could not. As a consequence, Marxism and fascism live on like <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nfl-wide-receiver-antonio-brown-responds-to-controversial-video-of-him-allegedly-exposing-himself-to-a-woman" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Antonio Brown’s career</a>.
With the threat of a climate apocalypse serving as Plato’s Noble Lie, Marxist-style government power grabs are taking place all over the Western world. But Marxism could never survive on its own because Marxist economics don’t work. So, it must always adopt a fascist element, loosening government restrictions on private property and a market economy; not totally, but as the Chinese have done it: “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” 
The addition of ESG — <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/climate-risk-is-investment-risk-bill-clinton-and-blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-make-bold-claims-about-woke-investing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Environmental, Social, and Governance</a> — is that fascist element. A kind of coercive corporate social credit system, once compliance is fully in place, it will bring all industry to government heel.
The path to totalitarianism, you see, is quite clear.
I have visited the sites of past claimants to the utopian throne. They are not, as you might suppose, great works of architecture or museums housing their treasures. They are places with names like Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Babyn Yar, Lefortovo, and Lubyanka. 
They are the homes I have visited in Cuba, China, Russia, Vietnam, and half a dozen more where dissenters must hide from the regime. Because the most consistent feature of earthly utopias is their gulags and their gallows.
But there is, I think, a path to a “sustainable future” for freedom.
In his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061">Civilization: The West and the Rest</a>, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Sciences:
“We were asked to look into what accounted for the … pre-eminence of the West over all the world … At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”
For centuries, the Christian faith served as the West’s bulwark against moral and political evils. But with the decline of Christian belief has come a corresponding rise in perversions of every kind. Rather than a Christian culture, we’ve become Christian-ish.
Thus, concepts with a Christian foundation — love, freedom, tolerance, diversity, stewardship of the environment, care for the poor, etc. — are easily highjacked and harnessed to a destructive end.
If the West is to survive in any recognizable sense, it must be more than Christian-ish.
As T.S. Eliot observed, “If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
Larry Alex Taunton is a freelance columnist contributing to The Daily Wire, USA Today, Fox News, First Things, The Atlantic, The New York Post, CNN, Daily Caller, and The American Spectator. He is also the author of <a href="https://larryalextaunton.com/books/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Faith of Christopher Hitchens</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Grace-Effect-Reverse-Corruption-Unbelief/dp/1595554408/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1664139427&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Grace Effect</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Around-World-More-Than-Days/dp/1642935921/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&amp;keywords=around+the+world+in+more+than+80+days+taunton&amp;qid=1585871070&amp;sr=8-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Around the World in (More Than) 80 Days</a>. You can subscribe to his podcast at <a href="https://larryalextaunton.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">larryalextaunton.com</a> and find him on Twitter @larrytaunton.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

SWITZERLAND-DAVOS-WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Klaus Schwab, The World Economic Forum, And The Atheists Paving The Road To Absolute Power

European Union

Klaus Schwab

World Economic Forum

Thousands of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/new-york" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New Yorkers</a> left their democrat-run state for the warmer and more conservative <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/florida" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Florida</a> in August.
A monthly-record of 5,833 New Yorkers changed their drivers licenses to Florida last month, according to a New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/09/20/record-number-of-new-yorkers-swap-to-florida-licenses/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">analysis</a> of data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. That brought the year’s total to over 41,000 Empire State citizens leaving the blue bastion for the south.
“First it was the billionaires. Then it was the rich following behind them. Now you have the middle class,” said Alvin Valley, a fashion designer who moved to Palm Beach during the COVID pandemic.
“A lot of families just began to feel like New York was becoming unlivable,” Valley added, the Post reported. “Especially for younger couples with kids in their thirties and forties. They don’t want to get on the subway. It’s a safety issue, it’s a schools issue.”
The New York exodus began when people left the heavily-restricted state during the pandemic to live in the Republican-led Florida that had lifted COVID restrictions, but <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/serious-crimes-up-in-nyc-report-finds-as-new-mayor-dismisses-concerns" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rising crime</a> rates in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-man-brandishes-axe-in-nyc-mcdonalds-smashes-property-frightens-customers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New York</a> also seem to play a factor in people’s decision to leave.
John Macari, a retired NYPD Lieutenant, told the Post that COVID vaccine mandates coupled “with the rise in crime and zero competence from our elected officials and a lot of people just don’t see a future in New York City for themselves.”
In April, New York City Mayor Eric Adams attempted to <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/179-22/mayor-adams-new-campaign-digital-billboards-five-florida-markets-denouncing-don-t#/0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lure</a> Floridians into moving to the city by purchasing digital billboards in the Sunshine State that displayed messages falsely referring to the newly-passed “Parental Rights in Education” law as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
“I am the mayor of New York City, but I have a message for Florida’s LGBTQ+ community — come to a city where you can say and be whoever you want,” Adams said at the time. “Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill is the latest shameful, extremist culture war targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Today, we say to the families living in fear of this state-sponsored discrimination that you will always have a home in New York City.”
Adams’ billboards apparently did not work as New Yorkers continue to leave for Governor Ron DeSantis&#8217; Florida at a record rate, while Florida’s population is still growing. The current trend suggests that last year’s record of 61,728 New Yorkers moving to Florida could be overtaken this year.

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