Rawdog the Apocalypse

On birth rates, brain worms, and the least erotic breeding program in American history

Dr. Mehmet Oz — a man whose entire medical career can be summarized as “what if a pharmaceutical rep fucked a horoscope and the baby got a TV show” — a man who told millions of American women to shove jade eggs into their vaginas for wellness, who peddled miracle weight loss supplements that did nothing except make him rich and make you shit, who called reopening schools during a pandemic “an appetizing opportunity” because the extra deaths would be “a tradeoff some folks would consider” — is now in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, and he just walked into the Oval Office and announced that Americans are “under-babied.”

UNDER-BABIED.

Under-babied. Like the United States is a Build-A-Bear Workshop that missed its Q4 stuffing targets and now there’s an emergency caucus.

Under-babied. Like somewhere there is a federal toddler czar — lanyard, pivot table, the thousand-yard stare of a man three quarters into a PowerPoint about birth rates — screaming: “PEOPLE. The numbers are BAD. The babies are NOT COMING. We have tried NOTHING and we are FRESH OUT OF IDEAS.”

And then — because apparently God has fully checked out and left humanity unattended in a hot car with these people — he said the other thing:

“Trump babies.”

Two words so aggressively, catastrophically, cosmically unsexy that every female egg in America just volunteered to scramble itself.

If you just threw up in your mouth a little, me too, and I’m sincerely sorry.

Oz is standing there in his smarmy syndicated TV-doctor energy demanding Trump babies, while next to him RFK Jr. — the brain-worm-killing, Central-Park-bear-dumping, raw-sewage-swimming, felching sexter who is somehow America’s top health official — is musing aloud about teenage sperm counts like a man who absolutely should not be allowed within five hundred feet of a science fair.

And slumped behind the Resolute Desk, in front of God and everyone, the President of the United States is completely fucking gone — not nodding off, not resting his eyes, not having a moment — this man is in REM, he is deep in it, he is somewhere warm and dark dreaming about whatever the fuck, while the cameras are rolling and the world is watching and the rest of us are just sitting here, fully conscious, which at this point feels like the bigger problem.

This is the least erotic gathering of men since a county tax-assessor convention at a Death Valley Days Inn with broken air conditioning and unlimited beef stroganoff, and THEY are the ones demanding a national breeding program.

Because nothing says “public service” like punishing the entire country because women did not react to your flaccid paper-straw personality by throwing underwear at you in a Panera parking lot.

And this would all be merely embarrassing if these “men” were confined to muttering into Facebook comments sections and screaming at Buffalo Wild Wings hostesses about seed oils. Instead, these bargain-bin megalomaniacs and billionaire broligarchs have weaponized their sad-boy spite, turning decades of sexual rejection, seething entitlement, and festering internet rage into actual public policy.

This shit is what happens when you give power to men whose understanding of intimacy comes from Pornhub comments.

And let’s stop pretending there isn’t something deeply sinister slithering underneath all of this.

Because we have heard this language before.

“Domestic supply of infants.”

That wasn’t some accidental phrase somebody tripped over. That was the mask slipping. That was the quiet part cannonballing naked through a plate-glass window.

This is not about “babies.”

It is about the RIGHT babies.

The desired babies.

The “correct” babies.

History may not repeat itself, but it sure as shit rhymes, and we do not have to dig very far back through the ash heap of human history to find the blueprint for governments panicking about birth rates, policing women’s bodies, fetishizing “traditional” families, and treating reproduction like a state-managed resource instead of a human decision.

And now these Temu teeny-peen tyrants and billionaire grievance-merchants are lumbering toward Gilead like they found a coupon code for authoritarianism and decided to make it everybody else’s problem.

For decades, emotionally constipated little empire-builders like this have transformed the United States into a place that feels actively hostile to raising children unless you’re independently wealthy or willing to accept a quality of life for your kids that would have been considered bleak as hell twenty years ago.

At some point this stops feeling like incompetence and starts feeling like the one thing these psychos actually know how to do.

At the exact same time they’re demanding more births, they’re cutting food assistance — literally kicking starving people off food stamps with the dead-eyed efficiency of a DMV manager denying a form in 1997 — while building themselves a billion-dollar ballroom and there is always, always money for another military dick-measuring contest, another endless war detonating gas prices into the thermosphere, another vanity-project palace for Botoxed freedom-fetishists who think patriotism means dry-humping an American flag on cable news, because nothing says “we care about American families” like a monument to your own ego.

Trump has said out loud, repeatedly, that he does not want the government spending money on childcare.

Childcare.

Keeping children alive is apparently socialism, but the bombs are fine. The ballroom is fine. The vanity projects are fine.

They are slashing children’s cancer research, gutting services for kids with autism and learning disabilities, banning IVF, and announcing with the serene, sociopathic confidence you can only have when you’ve never once worried about a co-pay that childcare is not the government’s problem.

Women in dozens of states around the country are now being forced to wait until they are actively hemorrhaging before doctors can legally intervene in pregnancy complications because Republican lawmakers decided that medical care should come with a legal review board and a prosecutor standing in the corner.

Because nothing says “start a family” like your doctor being legally required to watch you bleed while a healthcare attorney decides whether saving your life counts as a gray area.

And if you’re a rape survivor — even if you’re a teenager, even if you’re a child — the state can force you to carry that pregnancy to term anyway.

Because “freedom.”

But gee. Why aren’t women having babies?

People are underpaid. Under-housed. Underinsured. Underfed.

One surprise cavity, one rent hike, one “check engine” light away from eating canned corn over the sink and Googling the going rate for a kidney.

We live in a country where trying to buy a pound of ground beef now feels like applying for a second mortgage at a grocery store that somehow smells faintly like mop water and despair.

And forgive me — forgive me — if women aren’t exactly sprinting toward reproduction because three leathery, formaldehyde-preserved men with powerful “Epstein had them in his Rolodex under a nickname” energy shuffled into the Oval Office demanding fresh labor units for their rotting, rancid little dynasty like the world’s creepiest barbershop quartet sponsored by testosterone gummies and a maritime vlog.

Maybe — and I’m just spitballing here — maybe women don’t want to be treated like government-issued incubators in a collapsing oligarchy where kindergarteners practice active-shooter drills before they learn to read, where the maternal mortality rate looks like a developing nation’s, and where the same people panicking about birth rates voted against the child tax credit, against paid leave, against school lunch programs, against literally every policy that would make having a child something other than a twenty-year financial trauma with a cute face.

Maybe mothers are just fucking tired. Tired of being expected to work like they don’t parent and parent like they don’t work and then smile politely through a bootstraps speech from some guy named Brent who has opinions about your uterus and a podcast explaining why twelve-year-olds yearn for the mines.

Maybe some women can’t have babies — their bodies, their heartbreak, their goddamn business — and being lectured about the nation’s fertility gap by a man who once suggested cooking with essential oils feels like its own load-bearing category of fuck you.

Maybe some women just don’t want babies. Full stop. Maybe they looked around at this collapsing carnival of greed, surveillance, school shootings, algorithmic psychosis, and evaporating human dignity and decided they did not, in fact, want to rawdog the apocalypse.

Maybe people don’t want children because they can barely keep themselves breathing inside this smoldering Chili’s-adjacent open-air prison you people spent decades constructing and calling freedom.

But gee.

Why.

Aren’t.

Women.

Having.

Babies.

You want more babies?

Then make America a place where having one doesn’t feel like signing a twenty-year lease on a panic attack with a four-thousand-dollar deductible and a school board losing its mind over pronouns while a superintendent named Chip screams about litter boxes at a town hall held between a vape shop and a Spirit Halloween.

Feed children.

Protect children.

Fund schools.

Fund healthcare.

Pay people enough to survive.

Stop treating women like county fair livestock at a fertility auction run by men who would point to the pancreas on a labeled diagram and confidently yell “fallopian tube.”

Until then — until you have done one measurable thing to make this country livable for actual families instead of treating women like unpaid extras in some depraved, dystopian breeding-fetish fever dream — you can take “under-babied” and shove it straight up your underbabied fucking ass.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Stay strong, stay safe, stay connected to each other.

No updates yet on my ongoing saga. They’ve been unusually quiet, which is hopefully a sign that they’re done going after me. I doubt it, but it would be nice.

💙 Jo