National survival is not just about elections and politics. It’s the decision of a culture to keep on going. A whole lot of Americans are voting to disappear.

I recently wrote that…

1 in 3 Americans feel lonely every week and 1 in 5 feel lonely every day. Less than half of households are headed by married couples and the marriage rate hovers at 16.7. 63% of single people are not looking for a relationship and the majority of Gen Z didn’t date as teenagers.

As I previously noted, the rate of unwed teenage mothers is much less of an issue because rates of intimacy have dropped. Abortion rates are also less of an issue (until they were goosed by liberal activism). Relationships, even of the kind that conservatives used to decry, are rapidly disappearing.

The results are clocking in.

The U.S. fertility rate dropped to an all-time low to 1.6 children per woman in 2024, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Fertility rates declined for women and girls ages 15-34 between 2023 and 2024, remained unchanged for women ages 35-39 and rose for women ages 40-44, the data show.

Those are European rates. We’re bumping up against the UK’s fertility rate. And that’s an extinction rate. It’s one of the ways in which we’re becoming more and more like Europe.

And, like Europe, those rates combine numbers for high-fertility immigrant populations, especially from enemy nations, and the native population, which means the actual rates are lower than they seem.

It also means that the cliff is much closer than it seems.