May 14, 2026

BOMBING CHINA’S POPULATION:

DOKOUPIL: America remains the innovation hub of the world. Made in China, yes; but designed and invented in the U.S.A. New drugs, new discoveries, new inventions, new space missions. Xi boasts of the country’s industrial might, and it’s impossible to deny that fact. China’s population is in decline, though, well below replacement rates. Unemployment is high with millions in rural provinces living in poverty, and massive housing complexes that now sit empty.

To paraphrase the lads in the Delta House, China f*cked up, they trusted us – more specifically, they trusted their fellow leftist, the recently deceased Paul Ehrlich, in the 1970s. As did that gold standard of CBS Evening News hosts, Uncle Walter:

[N]ow that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.”

Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News—inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”

From Douglas Brinkley’s 2012 book, Cronkite: The Definitive Biography of the Legendary News Anchor Who Shaped American Journalism.

(And unwittingly, the CCP’s birth dearth.)

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll