There are few people who have had such a meteoric – or controversial – rise to notoriety as Ashley St Clair. For the uninitiated, her bio reads a bit like this: a former small-town, quiet girl raised in Colorado, who was seemingly plucked from obscurity to become the face of far-right conservatism.

St Clair has amassed more than a million followers on X (Twitter) for her inflammatory rhetoric on gender and immigration (her latest diatribe includes calling Volodymyr Zelensky a gold-digger); authored a children’s book peddling anti-trans messaging; and is a vocal anti-vaxxer. She’s a 26-year-old tradwife advocate, an “anti-woke crusader” – and now, she claims to be the mother of Elon Musk’s 13th child.

Last week St Clair took to X to announce that she had given birth to Musk’s baby following a supposed whirlwind romance with the tech billionaire. St Clair told the New York Post that she had been sworn to secrecy about bearing his child, but had been forced to go public after tabloid reporters got wind of the story.

“Five months ago I welcomed a new baby into the world,” she wrote. “Elon Musk is the father. I have not previously disclosed this to protect our child’s privacy and safety, but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.”

A representative for St Clair, who reportedly came across the South African Tesla founder when her “gay best friend” showed her videos of his SpaceX rocket launches, said that the pair had been working towards an “agreement about raising their child” behind the scenes. Musk has yet to “publicly acknowledge his parental role”.

In fact, his only public comment so far has been – bizarrely – a reply to a tweet about St Clair alleging that she had plotted for “half a decade” to “ensnare” Musk, to which he posted a cryptic “Whoa”.

St Clair replied with obvious frustration: “Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded,” she said. “When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old?”

The frosty exchange following revelations that Musk had fathered yet another child inevitably sent global media into a mild frenzy, not least because his ongoing relationship history is messy and bizarre at best.

If St Clair’s claims are confirmed, she will be the fourth woman to have fathered a child with Musk – the others being his ex-wife, Justine Wilson, with whom he has six children, and two former girlfriends: singer-songwriter Grimes, who has three children with the billionaire, and Shivon Zilis, director of his neurotechnology company Neuralink Corp, with whom he has an additional three, including twins (the youngest was born late last year).

Ashley St Clair claims she’s given birth to Musk’s 13th child (@stclairashley/X)

Their unusual arrangements – such as the “secret compound” in Texas that, according to The New York Times, he purchased to accommodate all of his children and their mothers (a suggestion denied by Musk) – have raised eyebrows. But there’s a deeper, and darker, edge to all of it. Musk’s seemingly insatiable need for children is not just about expanding his family, but appears to align with an increasingly prominent pronatalist ideology underpinning so-called right-wing “family values”, on which St Clair has made her name.

To her audience of 1.1 million on X, St Clair has long banged the drum of “traditional” gender roles – modern feminism is bad, she says, because it’s pushed women away from their “natural” role as carers; she is in favour of male breadwinners and submissive wives by their sides. Women should be homemakers, she has said, describing those with careers (herself excluded, presumably) as “lonely, miserable and unfulfilled”.

Her views are in perfect step with those of Musk, who is now guiding Trump’s America as the president’s “first buddy”, as well as many of the key players in the new administration, who are on a mission to “Make America Mate Again”.

In his first public address as vice-president, JD Vance told the National March for Life rally by the Washington Monument: “I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

Elon Musk and his son X Æ A-Xii pictured in the Oval Office last Tuesday (AP)

Ostensibly, pronatalism exalts parenthood as a social imperative rather than a choice, and links a bigger population to a better economy. Musk has warned that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming” and that declining global fertility rates are “not just a crisis, but the crisis”.

However, their critics also point out that this pronatalist standpoint is also inextricably tied to nationalism, race and class identity. It’s not just about maintaining population levels, but maintaining a certain type of population in order to “preserve cultural and national identities”.

Before calling Kamala Harris a childless cat-lady, Vance also told a gathering in Washington: “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.”

Critics have rightly pointed out that the position held by many within the new administration has a darker undertone – the difference between being pro-family and pronatalist, some say, is the underlying inference that only certain people should be procreating: the healthiest, and the smartest. The clue, observers noted, was in Vance’s choice of the word “beautiful”.

With her ultra-feminine image and her youth, St Clair falls well into line. But she wasn’t always the polemicist she trades on being today. In fact, her background – as described by her in tweets from 2019 – paints a picture of adversity that, in many ways, feels at odds with her extreme, unsympathetic views.

It may seem as though the dystopian imaginings of Margaret Atwood’s book are too far-fetched ever to happen, but we should heed the fact that the author has always said there is nothing in her book that hasn’t already happened somewhere

She claims that her family were so poor as she grew up that “at times, we didn’t have running water”; after her parents divorced, her mother and two siblings – a younger brother and an older sister, who she describes as her “best friend” and “human diary” – were forced into poverty. They lived on food stamps, she tweeted, adding that her mother went “from feeding a family of four on $0.60 a day, eating cornstarch and water and drinking powdered milk to being a top business leader”.

Today, St Clair is living in a $15k apartment in New York City following her dramatic rise to alt-right stardom, having ridden waves of controversy all the way to the top – including those made by her most recent revelations. She first became prominent in the public eye when she was photographed at a diner with Nick Fuentes and other figures associated with the Groypers movement – a far-right, extremist faction known for their white nationalist and antisemitic views – back in 2019. It was a grave connection, and even Turning Point USA, a mainstream pro-Trump conservative organisation, severed ties with her.

Despite St Clair’s insistence that she didn’t share the toxic views of the Groypers movement, the damage had been done. Either she had knowingly entered the realms of extremists, many posed, or she is a naive spokesperson for the right. Some went one step further, labelling her an opportunist who grasped at airtime alongside controversial figures for clout. In other words, a grifter.

Musk holds one of his children at a Grand Prix auto race in Miami in 2023 (AP)

These accusations haven’t left her, and – since her claim that she’s had a baby outside of marriage, with a man she once described as someone who “goes through women pretty fast” – she’s faced criticism from liberals and conservatives alike. Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that her friend had revealed: “She realised, ‘OK, I’m out in the cold, I have to handle this myself.’”

Now St Clair is embarking on life as a single mother of two, having welcomed her firstborn, a son, in 2021, with her now ex-boyfriend. How that squares with the much-vaunted traditional values that she has expressed as part of the pro-family narrative of the new administration is unclear.

Certainly, the rhetoric around pronatalism doesn’t look like it is dialling down any time soon. Indeed, as it increases in momentum, alongside a return to traditional gender roles in marriage and the defunding of programmes for contraceptives, many in America are already feeling the echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale.

It may seem as though the dystopian imaginings of Margaret Atwood’s book are too far-fetched ever to happen, but we should heed the writer’s warning that nothing in her book hasn’t already happened somewhere. Beyond its paper-thin “family values” packaging, and the whiff of Christian fundamentalism, this new emboldened posturing on America’s political stage – be it from Musk, Trump or Vance – is only about one thing: men who are set on making a world in their own image. Ashley St Clair and her supporters should be careful what they wish for.