Extinctionism – older than you think

Elon Musk occasionally likes to highlight a particular person or issue that concerns him, by posting about it on X. With one hundred fifty-nine million followers, he can make that person or issue “go viral” with a single post. Today he left two posts, on a subject that has concerned him for well over a year: extinctionism. Indeed he went so far as to say that extinctionism is the real ideological threat to humanity.

Extinctionism – what is it, and who actively propounds it?

Extinctionism means seeking the extinction of the human race. Even that concept, as extreme as it sounds, encompasses a broad spectrum of ways to achieve that end. Elon Musk highlighted one of them in his two posts:

Les U. Knight founded the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, abbreviated VHEMT (pronounced Vehement, “because that’s what we are,” says Knight.) Its method is simple: let all human beings abstain from reproduction. Thus the human race would die off by simple attrition. If everyone adopted that idea, humanity would die out within one generation. Knight founded VHEMT in 1991, but he formed his ideas for the concept in the 1970s, which saw the establishment of “Earth Day.”

On the environmentalism spectrum the position one step removed from extinctionism is zero population growth. Theoretically that requires limiting women to two children during their childbearing years. (Any authority trying to mandate this exact population balance would have to allow one woman in ten to have a third child to replace children who die before they have a chance to mature.) Taking one step toward extinctionism, some advocate for limiting families to one child each. China did that, and then abandoned that when their population began to shrink. But more extreme even than the VHEMT position is calling on people to commit suicide – and until then, to consume the dead.

Who has adopted this concept for their own ends?

Why Elon Musk picked on Les Knight to highlight his alarm about extinctionism, is not immediately clear. But his real enemies include Bill Gates, George Soros, and Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. One can readily see why he would pick on someone other than those three, at least for now. He wants people to think about extinctionism as a political movement, and what’s wrong with it. Then perhaps he will condemn those who promote it most strongly today. CNAV does not doubt that he knows the roles those three men play. Musk associated himself with the WEF for years, until he fell out with Schwab and his colleagues. Since that falling-out, he has been urging people to reproduce, as much as possible. (Actually, Musk did attack Soros directly, in May, comparing him to a Marvel Comics antihero.)

Very likely, some elite has been propounding extinctionism throughout history, as Les Knight himself suspects. The concept doesn’t use this name but should be familiar to any student of the history of the environmentalist movement. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, actually said that five Earths would be required to sustain Earth’s present population. Robert Duncan-Enzmann had his number, and those of many others, while he (Enzmann) was designing interstellar colony wagons. Consider these quotes from an article he wrote in 1980:

Common sense and progress seem to be forced upon the establishment by the Middle Classes, Lower Middle Classes, and Blue-Collar populations. Without exception, unless one searches very hard for an instance, technological progress had been forced upon the establishment by the common man. Without exception, the establishment has been dragged, howling, kicking, and screaming protest every inch of the way, trying at every possibility to obstruct, confuse, and sidetrack matters. On top of this, the so-called liberal establishment has fought tooth and nail to dismantle as much technology as possible, load all efforts with red herrings, give overwhelming publicity to the most improbable and expensive solution to all problems. They worked unremittingly toward lowering humanity’s living standards, education, and health and reducing any opportunity.

Examples of the quite wealthy, liberal wine and cheese kneejerk lovers-of-the-suffering-masses success at spreading misery are startling. Some of the more notorious recent examples include banning DDT resulting in the spread of malaria to hundreds of millions. To suffer from malaria is bitter; personally, it is cruel to one’s children, and it is a burden upon the community.

Imagine a presidential election campaign in which the candidates blither about tax reforms and saving the people from the maw of rapacious energy-producing companies. However, tax laws penalizing marriage are never whispered about.

Behold the liberal Eastern community of geniuses babbling about methods of abolishing municipal sewage systems ‘to save irreplaceable nutrients.’ However, the same beautiful people never mention the European university professors who taught the precepts of technological devolution, abolition of education, and massive population decrease on a global scale as soon as possible.

Consider the implacable hindrance by America and England’s academic elite of the development of cheap power of any sort, ranging through obstruction of hydroelectric power, oil shale, heavy oils, tar sands, nuclear power, breeder reactors, burning of coal, or diesel engines.

Almost to a man, the Liberal community loves unspoiled Nature and primitive man, who naturally lives in perfect balance and harmony with the natural environment. The writer remembers some young teenage Eskimo girls whose fathers and brothers fought with gunfire against the liberal nature-loving Danes who sought to strip them of all modern sacraments of Western technology. Several wept as they chewed seal skins to make them soft enough to wear. These girls knew that their teeth would be worn to stubs level with their gums by the time they were 28. Fortunately, the revolution was a success, and Greenland is now independent.

How odd: Enzmann wrote that 43 years ago, and one could imagine someone writing that today. Plus ça change, plus ça reste.

But it gets worse

Enzmann without a doubt knew that a conspiracy of some kind existed. But whether he thought of all its measures to support extinctionism is less clear. He mentioned the “marriage tax” explicitly, but did not mention abortion on demand, or contraception either.

Nor is he likely to have imagined the Alphabet Soup (LGBTQIA+) movement. The one thing all Alphabet Soupers have in common is: their lifestyles preclude reproduction. Let no one hold his breath waiting for research programs aimed at getting “trans” men pregnant. That’s the shiny object for the shut-eyes in the Alphabet Soup movement. The powers-that-be who organized it, intend to implement the Les Knight/VHEMT precept: no reproduction at all. By every credible account, they would leave no child out of the regimen of surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning. They will persuade children to undertake it voluntarily, by convincing them they were born into the wrong bodies. In some jurisdictions, parents could lose custody if they try to counter the gender confusion their children’s teachers provoke in them at school.

Nor should we leave out some parents who deliberately confuse their own children as to their gender. At least one motion picture featured a character, ostensibly a girl, with a male “secret friend.” The reader will readily guess that girl and “secret friend” were one and the same. This “girl” brutally murdered her mother and aunt. By movie’s end we find out that the “girl” was a boy all along.

But extinctionism cannot survive

That motion picture involved merely raising a boy as a girl. Today several celebrities do worse: they subject a child to surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning. But that’s only part of a larger plot to extinguish humanity. Abandonment of agriculture and animal husbandry, manipulation of people’s immune systems – it all adds up.

No, Enzmann did not foresee extinctionism as an explicit movement. Maybe he didn’t understand the true aim of the “misery spreading” he decried. But he did offer this stark warning to those who tried to enforce anything like it from the top down:

Such dictatorship is inevitably followed by rule through a hereditary intelligentsia which used to be called Nobility or First Estate, with devolution of every aspect of life for the working majority, proletariat, or blue-collar and middle-class. The hardworking people will exist under emergency laws formulated to meet conditions so serious that all normal freedoms have to be abrogated until the currently manufactured crisis is resolved. Resolution usually includes mandatory execution of extended families, social groups, and even nations guilty of or even capable of criminal actions.

The death of such societies is inevitable, either through the execution of most of the population or the execution of its entrenched and merciless government. The entrenchment of such governments is always through the control of information sources, the Fourth Estate, by an entrenched Nobility (currently, they fashionably call themselves the Intelligentsia) acting through a dictator.

Robert Duncan-Enzmann is now dead. (And, tellingly, the curators of his Archive took this article down – but not before the Wayback Machine captured it.) But Elon Musk has identified that dictator – or rather, that triumvirate of Gates, Soros, and Schwab.

To save itself, humanity needs more than the identities of the triumvirs. Ayn Rand cautioned against fighting men rather than their evil ideas. Anything that discourages – or precludes – procreation is something to fight. Yes, that even includes contraception. Those who abandon a lifestyle that emphasizes present convenience will outlast those who stick with that lifestyle. This goes double for those, like the Amish, who never embraced such “convenience” to begin with.

Enzmann frankly predicted violent revolution as the cure for the nihilism that enforced extinctionism represents. Perhaps next year’s election cycle will determine whether that is necessary, or whether Americans, at least, can throw off the extinctionism regime peaceably.