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$5000 bonuses for mothers after delivery. Medals for prolific mothers (more than 6 kids). Up to one-third Fulbright scholarships reserved for people who are married or who have children. These pro-natalist measures the Donald Trump administration is considering are part of a larger attempt to use government to re-engineer the American population. Detaining and ejecting immigrants, disparaging “childless” women, privileging motherhood as central to female identity, and incentivizing White Christian births to “natural families” –unions of one man and one woman –are part of this plan.
Great Replacement Theory, or the idea that White Christians are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, threatening the survival of the race and “civilization,” was central to Fascist ideologies and practices and it is central to anti-immigrant and other racist platforms of far-right parties and governments today.
MAGA is the American hub of this transnational racist project, and the proposals of the Trump administration also reflect the obsession with increasing White Christian birthrates among many prominent Republicans, including Vice President J.D. Vance and unelected co-U.S. leader Elon Musk.
Population design suggests the ways that today’s United States government is in dialogue with foreign authoritarian practice past and present, and with extremist ideologies that see Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants as dangers to the nation’s genetic pool. This essay looks at far-right Italy and Hungary to place what is unfolding in America in a broader context.
An American Trajectory
The United States has a long history of using state power to make sure the “wrong” people don’t have babies: the sterilization of at least 60,000 Blacks, Latinos, poor whites, and the disabled during the 20th century speaks to that. So does the prominence of eugenics “science” in America and the history of government-sanctioned racist segregation and violence from California to the Jim Crow South.
America has also been part of an international culture of racism and eugenics. The adaptation of U.S. eugenics programs by the Nazis (who sterilized 400,000 Jews, Afro-Germans, and others, and referred to disabled people targeted for euthanasia as “lives unworthy of life”) is the most famous case.
Authoritarians have always thought long-term and holistically in this area, not least because they see people in the aggregate and consider the family as a political rather than private entity. This is why the far right in the United States is focusing on demographics and culture as well as attacks on democratic institutions and legal norms.
If the goal is a White ethnostate, as it seems to be for the Trump administration, it is not enough to change the political system from democracy to autocracy: you also have to change the culture and the composition of the population. The extremism that marked Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign was proportionate to the perceived threat presented by the adversary: then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who in her person and family embodies America as a multi-faith and multi-racial nation.
Now that Trump has returned to office, population and purity obsessions of the MAGA world can be translated into policies that include plans to remove or detain the “wrong” people from the nation, and encourage the “right” people to have babies.
Population design on racist premises is why Miller and others have endorsed “remigration,” or the idea of removing non-European immigrants from the nation even if they are U.S. citizens. Authoritarian ethnostates disregard citizenship status because they care nothing about legal and social contracts. Instead, your race, ethnicity, or religion can determine your rights to stay in the country, procreate, and, in the extreme cases, exist.
Italian Population Design from Mussolini to Meloni
In Italy, the idea of White extinction due to falling birthrates became government policy during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding," Il Duce declared in 1927, years before Adolf Hitler came to power. "The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.”
A “Battle for Babies” followed, as did extensive social welfare assistance for new mothers, ceremonies for prolific mothers (Trump is not original), and, for men, a tax on bachelors over 25 years old. Abortion and contraception were already banned but it was now forbidden to mention them in the press.
Vance and other contemporary American critics of “people without kids” and “childless” women carry forth attitudes that circulated during Fascism. This 1932 Fascist satirical drawing, ”Cocktail,” by Mino Maccari, compared the so-called “crisis woman,” to a good Italian woman giving milk to a baby. One grew the population, the other did not.
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One hundred years later, Italy has a neofascist Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, who opposes "gender ideology, “LGBT lobbies” and same-sex unions that harm "the natural family," and promotes White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.
Meloni’s Minister of the Family, Birthrates, and Equal Opportunity, Eugenia Roccella, is anti-abortion and anti-same sex marriage and has crusaded for years on behalf of the "traditional" family. She considers motherhood to be the most important female labor and wants to "restore to the condition of maternity the centrality and prestige it deserves."
Meloni’s version of Great Replacement theory has been among the most extreme. She uses the term "ethnic substitution," and goes deep into conspiracy theory territory. "I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack," Meloni stated in March 2019, elsewhere pointing to Jewish democracy funder George Soros as a mastermind of this plot.
With 24.7% of its population over 65, Italy in 2025 is the second oldest country in world. Italy truly needs immigrants, including as a labor force. And yet Meloni takes extreme measures to keep out non-White immigrants. A 2023 Italian-Albanian deal created an immigration center in Albania (a non-EU country) for asylum seekers who sought to reach Italy and were rescued in the Mediterranean.
Now Meloni’s government wishes to convert the facility into an offshore detention center for undocumented migrants —an equivalent to what Trump is doing in El Salvador—, but this is held up by Italian and European courts. Italy already has 10 detention centers in Italy where people the state is trying to deport can be held for up to 18 months.
Then there is Deputy Prime minister Matteo Salvini, who is also Minister of Infrastructure and Transport. In 2017, he called for “mass cleansings, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood” of immigrants. Now he controls the Coast Guard and Italy's ports: "The battle against illegal immigration resumes," he tweeted in October 2024.
“We Want Hungarian Children”
Hungary offers another example of the toxic triad of targeted pro-natalism, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-immigration meant strengthen the “natural family” and redesign the population. Former Hungarian President Katalin Novák has led this charge. “Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Novák in 2019, when she was Hungary’s minister for family and youth affairs, reprising Mussolini’s words.
"Hungary must defend itself because the Western left wing is attacking. It is trying to relativize the notion of family. Its tools for doing so are gender ideology and the LGBTQ lobby," Orban claimed at his 2021 Demographic Summit, where former Vice President Mike Pence also spoke. "We don't just want numbers, we want Hungarian children," Orban said, “Hungarian” meaning the product of White, Christian, and one-man and one-woman unions.
A 2024 study on the effects of Hungarian government propaganda found that immigrants of European origin are viewed differently than Muslims arriving from the Middle East and North Africa. The government and state media have also gone after LGBTQ+ individuals with vigor, associating homosexuality with pedophilia. Same-sex marriage is banned, and a 2020 measure spelled the end for legal recognition of transgender and intersex people and adoption by same-sex couples —all justified as protecting the Hungarian family.
Italian-Hungarian cooperation on the common cause of population redesign grew more intense after Meloni’s 2022 victory. Just after the election, Novák tweeted, "Good to see that #family policy earns special attention in the new #Italian government," using an emoji to underscore that "family" means a man, a woman and two children. "We have always shared that family policies need to be strongly implemented. It's what we'll try to do in the coming years," Meloni replied.
Only Children Can Save the World, But Only Some People Should Have Children
It should be no surprise to find DOGE head Musk, a friend to far-right politicians everywhere, mobilized for White Christian civilizational rescue. Musk seems to be on a one-man crusade to spread his own supposedly superior genes as widely as possible. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Musk has a growing “legion” of over a dozen children, birthed by many different mothers. He joined Meloni at a 2024 gala celebrating Novák’s new organization, x-y, which is dedicated to "saving nations" from "a collapsing global birthrate.”
Novák was available to start this initiative because she was forced to resign from the Hungarian presidency in 2023 after she pardoned a man convicted of serial child sex abuse in a state-run childrens’ home. What better comeback than to redouble her commitment to “natural” family values! And so, x-y was born.
“Only children can save the world," wrote Novák, as she posted the selfie of herself with Musk and Meloni. Left out from this feel-good message was her evident belief that only some people should be allowed to have those children. With Trump back in office, America will officially join this transnational project of politicizing the family in service of racist population design.
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Reference: Benito Mussolini, preface to Riccardo Korherr, Regresso delle nascite: Morte dei popoli (Rome: Unione Editoriale d'Italia, 1928), 10, 19.
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