One Of The Most Evil Men In History Just Died

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.

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We’re not supposed to say anything but good about people who’ve just died. As the saying goes, speak no ill of the dead.

This man, however, left a wake of death, destruction, and catastrophe wherever he went. And most people don’t even know his name: Paul Ehrlich.

I write about Paul Ehrlich at some length in my book “Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.”

And now, here we have his obituary in The New York Times:

“Premature,” lol. The abject refusal to just admit this guy was completely wrong is one of the funnier Boomer-coded traits. pic.twitter.com/oM5GYgDEtR

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) March 16, 2026

Source: @SonnyBunch/X.com

The headline and sub-headline reads:

Paul Ehrlich, who alarmed the world with The Population Bomb, dies at 93.

His bestselling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement, but he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.

Here we go. Big lie.

His predictions “proved premature.” What were his predictions? His prediction was that if the population grew any more, we would have widespread famine, because the Earth could not sustain all those people.

His prescriptions, therefore, were to stop having kids and sterilize people. We should use the government to reduce the population. These policies of his led to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilizations in India. This guy is — not single-handedly, but pretty close — responsible for the population crisis (or depopulation) that we face today.

And they say his predictions “proved premature.”

Since he made his prediction that we would inevitably face mass starvation because the population was growing too much, since that time, the world population has doubled and global malnutrition has been cut dramatically. Today there are twice as many people as when he made his prediction, and we are more well-fed than ever.

It’s not that his predictions proved premature. They were completely wrong. Totally wrong.

The New York Times is covering for Ehrlich in its obituary of him. Ehrlich did more evil than almost anybody in the 20th century. And the consequences of his stupid predictions and prescriptions — because he prescribed policy to governments — were mass evil.

The consequences of his ideas led to mass death, sterilization, the violation of basic rights, and he never let up on it.

Here is Paul Ehrlich, in the 1970s, discussing the problem as he saw it:

In a 1970 interview, Paul Ehrlich stated: “The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.”

He added that if this approach failed, then the government should “legislate the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have… pic.twitter.com/Ij7C5eso4W

— Gentry Gevers (@gentrywgevers) March 16, 2026

Source: @gentrywgevers/X.com

In the interview, Ehrlich says,

The first thing the government should do is try and take the pressure off to reproduce … Young couples — if they don’t have children — people say, ‘gee, they must be sterile.’ They never say, ‘gee, maybe they like good wine and going to the theater and so on, they prefer that to scraping diapers.’ So there’s pressure to have children. So the first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say, ‘From here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one, if you’re starting a family now.’ He ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light wherever they appear …  you can move to giving women bonuses for not having babies, that almost certainly would do the job.

If that didn’t have the effect, then you could move to changing the tax structure so that people who had the money and had the children paid more for them — in other words, increase taxes on people with children rather than decrease them, since when they have the children they require more services.

If that doesn’t work, then you’ll have the government legislating the size of the family. And people say, ‘Oh that’s impossible, government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.’ Well, I got news — you know it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have and there’s not the slightest question that if we don’t get the population under control with voluntary means that in the not-too-distant-future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many.

So God tells us in the book of Genesis to “Be fruitful and multiply.”

This Antichrist figure comes out in the 1970s and says, “Do not have children. It’s unpatriotic to have children.”

It’s funny because patriotism comes from the word “Pater,” meaning father — it’s an extension of filial piety, it’s an extension of the family — and he’s saying the pro-family thing to do is to destroy your family.

He says, first we’re going to incentivize people — we’re going to discourage them culturally. Say having kids is bad, you should just drink good wine instead.

All these arguments you hear today — Don’t you want to travel? Don’t you want to have experiences? Don’t have kids.

And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to pay people not to have kids. Give women bonuses. Subsidize it. Say instead of having kids, go work at the widget factory, do spreadsheets, we’ll give you money.

That doesn’t work? Okay, now we punish you. Forget the carrot, now it’s the stick. If you have kids, we’re going to tax you. We’re going to make you pay for the privilege.

And if that doesn’t work, we’re just going to stop you from having kids.

What does that mean in practice? Because China implemented this. It means forced abortion. The government comes in and kills your child. You want to keep your child? No. Government kills your child.

It leads to policies like in India, where people were told you can only get access to food and resources if you sterilize yourself.

That happened because of this guy. Because of his book. Because of his ideas.

He said in “The Population Bomb”:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over… hundreds of millions of people will starve to death… nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Totally wrong. Could not have been more wrong.

He said we must have population control — hopefully through voluntary means, but by compulsion if necessary. That was his thesis.

He described population growth as a “cancer.” Population growth just means more people. So if more people are a cancer, then people are the disease.

Human beings are a disease.

The left has held on to that view for a very, very long time. And this is where the truly wicked origins of leftism — which endeavors to invert reality — began, during the French Revolution as an assault on the Church. This is where the real satanic, Luciferian character of liberalism really begins to show itself. One of the fruits of liberalism is the view that human beings are a disease that must be cured, that must be eradicated from the earth.

And now this guy is eradicated from the earth. And it’s sad, because every man’s death diminishes me because I’m a human.

As John Donne wrote in his famous poem, “No Man is an Island”:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man’s death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom 

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

We should pray for him, because he led a very, very evil life. And in many ways, maybe he didn’t fully understand what he was doing. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

But we can’t just think about him — we have to think about the institutions.

This guy got everything wrong. Not a little wrong — perfectly wrong. And he never paid a price for it. He kept his positions, his prestige, his influence. His policies were implemented. They led to enormous harm. And the institutions backed him up.

And now one of the chief cultural institutions, The New York Times, is still covering for him — still saying his ideas were just “premature.”

Not premature. Wrong.

And as a final note, that idea — “forgive them, for they know not what they do” — this connects to something else.

The world feel tense right now. The stakes feel higher. There’s conflict in Iran, division at home, a lot of strain in the culture. For Christians, this is Lent. And if you’ve paid attention over the years, this season often feels like that — more tension, more conflict, more difficulty. In the story, this is the period in the desert, the temptation, the struggle.

And then comes Easter.

I’m not saying everything magically gets better overnight. But if you believe in spiritual realities, that there is a meaning to history, a rhythm to the liturgical calendar, then it’s not surprising that things feel strained right now.

Sometimes things look like they’re falling apart — like when Christ was crucified on Calvary — right before they come back together.

That’s the pattern.