If Democrat Scott Wallace beats Rep. Bryan Fitzpatrick (R.) in Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district in November, he will become at least the third richest member of Congress, which is saying something: Nineteen of our legislators have net assets totaling more than $30 million. Wallace, a grandson of a vice president, is worth between $127 million and $309 million.
But Wallace isn't just extremely wealthy. He is also apparently kept awake at night by the thought of the rest of us poor slobs breeding.
Wallace has for many years been at the helm of the Wallace Global Fund, his family's nonprofit foundation, which has given more than $7 million in the last two decades to groups that advocate state-sponsored population control, including China-style limits on the number of children families are allowed to have.
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One of these outfits, Population Connected, founded as Zero Population Growth in 1968, had this to say in a lovely brochure for new members:
We advocate: 1. That no responsible family should have more than two children. Any family wanting to care for more than two children should adopt further children. Adopting children does not increase the population. 2. All methods of birth control, including legalized abortion, should be freely available — and at no cost in poverty cases. 3. Irresponsible people who have more than two children should be taxed to the hilt for the privilege of irresponsible breeding. [Population Connected]
"Irresponsible breeding!"
It would be nice to give Wallace the benefit of the doubt here and assume that a man with that much money to throw around doesn't look carefully at where all of it ends up. Maybe for him telling women that they have no right to bear children was a youthful fad that he's gotten over since 2003. It's impossible to say, though, because his campaign has refused to answer any questions about the subject. When Fox News contacted him about his foundation's support for the group and his views about state-sponsored population control measures, his communications director responded with a seeming non-sequitur about Planned Parenthood.
It's a pity that Fox's reporter apparently did not bother to have a look at Wallace's own campaign website, where he announces the following under the tab for "International Relations."
Two fundamental drivers of conflict are population growth and climate change — issues which my wife, Christy, and I have spent decades working to mitigate. Adding another billion people to the planet, while allowing climate change to flood vast swaths of low-lying land, from Miami to Manhattan to Bangladesh — or to ruin vast arable lands with drought, fire, and deforestation — is a recipe for mass migration, refugees, political upheaval, competition for scarce life-sustaining resources, and ultimately violent conflict. The most important things we can do to avoid conflict and global war is to intelligently manage these twin pressures of unchecked population growth and climate-driven devastation. [Scott Wallace]
Between this, his description of himself as an "advocate for global family planning," and the literally glowing accolade from the former vice president of Population Action International quoted on one of his pages, I think we can guess where Wallace stands here. In the meantime I’m trying my damnedest to figure out what Wallace means when he says elsewhere on his website that he is "running for Congress to be a voice for Pennsylvania families." What does he intend to tell them with that voice? How many children they are allowed to have?
His apparent obsession with the fertility of others, including potential immigrants, aside, Wallace appears to be your standard-issue woke capitalist Democrat. Under the "Jobs" heading of his site, he sneers at critics of the disruptions visited upon American workers by 20 years of globalized free trade and technologization: "Whale-oil gave way to electricity. The internet, and our new information-based economy, is transforming everything. Let's embrace it. And lead the way in the 21st Century." Memo to Buck County residents: Learn. To. Code.
One of Wallace's favorite things to do is to have two positions on the same issue. He agrees, for example, that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of Israel, but criticizes the Trump administration for doing so: "What's unfortunate is the way the Trump administration executed the move, precipitously, politically, using the occasion to stoke partisan and evangelical divisions in the U.S. and violent conflict in Israel." He is also apparently a critic of the Iranian nuclear deal secured by the Obama administration in 2015, which he calls "imperfect and time-limited," while insisting that Trump's decision to withdraw from it was "precipitous and dangerous." He claims that he is appalled by the role money plays in our politics but proudly declares that he has the resources to fund his own campaign.
Even by the impossibly low standards of the party of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Wallace is a venal embarrassment, a caricature of an entitled Clintonite hack and one with an odd fixation on other people's babies to boot. Which is probably why the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been so eager to add him to add this gazillionaire to its dorky "Red to Blue" list of approved candidates for the fall.
We'll know in a few months whether it works out for Wallace, assuming the world's food supplies hold out that long against the growing demands of irresponsible breeders.
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Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.
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