Trad Values Meets Tech

Still, there are rifts. Broadly speaking, the U.S. pronatalist movement can be divided into two factions: the “trads,” often Christian conservatives who see the rearing of large “traditional” families within heterosexual marriage as a divine mandate, and techies who see low birth-rates as a problem in need of a solution—one that, incidentally, they believe they are best poised to solve due to their deep pockets and superior genes.^[5] Both sides agree that declining birth-rates are the symptom of a mélange of social and economic problems, some of which overlap with concerns held by the Left. Among them are decreased fertility due to endocrine disruptors in our food and water; a waning interest in conventional family formation among young people attributed to the decline of traditional gender roles, which some view as a denial of biological truth regarding men and women’s respective traits and responsibilities; and a hyper-individualist culture that keeps people atomized, single, and childless. The question for the movement is how to solve these problems in a way that appeals to both religious-minded trad types and tech libertines.

“I don’t think the trads get out of this mess without bringing at least some of the technological firepower and problem-solving ability that these tech people are bringing to the table,” Dolan said on his podcast in 2023. “But I also don’t see a way for these tech people to produce healthy families and communities without somebody from the outside supplying them with some real values, because they’re trying to make them up as they go, and I just don’t think it’s workable. You can’t just believe that having values is useful; you have to actually believe.”^[6]

For the time being, these various groups are unified not only by their desire to boost the population but also by their support of President Donald Trump and a shared contempt for “wokeness” in all its manifestations: from diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to the mere existence of trans people.

“It’s essentially going to be trads or trad-types who seduce the tech people, and/or steal their tech,” Dolan continued. “It’s a lot easier for us to steal their tech than it is for them to crib our values.”^[7] Dolan’s prediction has largely borne out, though not in the way he expected. Though it’s too soon to determine whether the trad faction has stolen the other side’s tech, Silicon Valley pronatalists are indeed cribbing trad values—including a belief in what they claim are rigid biological truths about gender and race that are being suppressed by the woke elite in favor of politically correct lies. Biological essentialism, coupled with a desire to control reproduction, unites right-wing pronatalism’s tech and trad wings.

While covering the 2023 Natal Conference for Politico Magazine, it became clear to me that while I was witnessing the origins of a movement, it was nevertheless a fractured one. The event had drawn Heritage Foundation staffers, Fox News personalities, and, according to Dolan, former attendees of Singularity Summit, an annual artificial intelligence conference whose cofounders include Trump megadonor Peter Thiel, put on by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Natal Conference attendees, I realized, were split on moral and ideological grounds: they had opposing views on surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and the still-theoretical realm of artificial wombs, all of which the most steadfast members of the trad faction object to on religious grounds. Despite these differences, the two sides have reached a detente, for the time being, to rally together in support of a subject on which they can all agree: the need to convince Americans to have more babies.

“More babies of a certain kind”

Among the 2023 attendees was Emma Waters, a senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. While some conference goers courted the tech types in attendance in the hopes of enlarging the pronatalist tent, Waters was unsparing in her criticism of Silicon Valley pronatalism. “When considering the different kinds of pronatalism—and not all approaches are created equal—I typically rely on a ‘pro-family’ versus a ‘pronatalist’ distinction,” she wrote in 2024. “Those in the pro-family camp recognize the essential role of family formation, beginning with man-woman marriage, as part of the solution. In contrast, those who promote a ‘more babies’ pronatalism tend to encourage childbearing detached from its natural role within the family. The pronatalists of Silicon Valley, however, have a distinct goal that supersedes both categories.”^[8] These technophilic pronatalists, Waters continued, “tend to promote, in practice if not in speech, a selective pronatalism: more babies of a certain kind.” The goal is not simply to have more children, or even to encourage the proliferation of heterosexual families, but to use technology to create better children—an aim some critics say carries unmistakable traces of eugenic thinking.

That ethos certainly sums up the worldview of Malcolm and Simone Collins, the poster children—or perhaps poster parents—of techie pronatalism. The Collinses have four children and plan to have at least three more; the most recent of their progeny were the product of polygenic risk score testing, a controversial form of genetic testing that allows parents to “select” their embryos for certain traits, including IQ and the likelihood that they’ll develop disabilities or mental illness.^[9] The Collinses first branded themselves as somewhat apolitical activists whose sole goal was to boost birth-rates. They founded Pronatalist.org, which they describe as the “first pronatalist organization in the world”—one that sees pronatalism not as a tool for religious or cultural dominance but as an end unto itself. Like others on the tech Right, the Collinses believe in the value of optimization: they founded the Collins Institute, a homeschooling system, to enable “young scholars to become self-sufficient, world-class players in the real world.”^[10] Their turn towards homeschooling dovetailed nicely with the religious Right; when Simone ran for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 2024 on the Republican ticket, school choice and “education innovation” were part of her policy platform.^[11]

Eager to spread the word about their project, and defensive against accusations that they believe in eugenics or are advocating for anti-choice policies, the Collinses initially branded themselves as ardent proponents of reproductive rights, telling reporters that their choice to have more babies would ensure others aren’t forced to in the future. “People are like, ‘You’re bringing a Handmaid’s Tale into the world!’—that’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent,” Malcolm told The Guardian in 2024, adding that he and Simone have “quite a beef with anti-abortion people.”^[12]

Their beef with “anti-abortion people” notwithstanding, the Collinses are also frequent critics of Planned Parenthood. In an August 2024 episode of their Based Camp podcast titled “Even if you are Pro-Choice You Should Not Support Planned Parenthood,” the couple lambast the organization for providing gender-affirming care to trans people.^[13] The fact that Planned Parenthood is not only the biggest provider of testosterone in the country but also largely serves trans people aged 18 to 22, Malcolm says, is “horrifying.” Planned Parenthood, Simone adds, is a “unidirectional, sterilizing organization.” “What do the puberty blockers do?” Malcolm asks. “They sterilize people.” In a separate episode posted earlier that month, the couple refer to abortion as “a religious act” for members of the “urban monoculture,” the Collinses catch-all term for a “cultural framework that exists around the world, mostly concentrated in urban centers” that convinces people to prioritize their own short-term gratification and comfort above all else, including the continuation of the human species.^[14]

Despite previous efforts to assure the liberal intelligentsia that they’re fighting for them, the Collinses have, in recent years, been more explicit about their true allegiances. “A lot of people look at us and think we’re secretly trying to save the progressives,” Malcolm said in a July 2024 Based Camp episode. “I would like some aspects of their culture to survive, but I don’t want them to have the cultural dominance that they have now …. They basically become Nazis when they gain cultural power.” As if to soften her husband’s statement, Simone interjects that she and Malcolm support many of progressives’ stated goals—like pluralism and “freedom of lifestyle”—which progressives themselves do not actually support. “The parties have flipped, basically, with Trump,” Malcolm concludes.^[15]

Fellow Silicon Valley pronatalist Elon Musk has similarly claimed Trump is a champion of freedom and a bulwark against liberal overreach, the regulatory state, and the so-called “woke mind virus”—a term Musk has used to decry a host of things ranging from gender-affirming care for transgender people to the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at workplaces and universities across the country.^[16] In a 2024 interview with right-wing self-help guru Jordan Peterson, Musk claimed that one of his children was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” The child in question, 20-year-old Vivian Wilson, is in fact alive—though she is estranged from Musk, who she has described as a cold, absent father who berated her for being queer.^[17]

Musk, who has twelve known children with three different women, may be who Waters had in mind when she accused Silicon Valley pronatalists of encouraging childbearing while being uninterested in family formation. His first marriage with Justine Wilson ended in a messy divorce,^[18] and his relationship with Claire Boucher, the Canadian musician who goes by Grimes, with whom Musk has three children, ended in a year-long custody battle.^[19] While Boucher and Musk were expecting their second child, Musk had twins with another woman—Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his companies—without telling Boucher. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis told Musk’s biographer, who added that Musk offered to be Zilis’s sperm donor so her children “would be genetically his.”^[20]

If Musk weren’t wealthy, White, or well-connected, it’s possible that conservatives would take issue with the fact that he has had multiple children out of wedlock, is an absentee father, and openly uses ketamine and other drugs. The more trad pronatalists like Waters could explicitly decry Musk for conceiving children via IVF and surrogacy. (Peachy Keenan, a Claremont Institute-affiliated writer who spoke at the 2023 Natal Conference, has called surrogacy a “nine-month prostitution gig, a ‘wife experience’ commercial exchange, with some bonus child trafficking thrown in”—a not uncommon sentiment among trad pronatalists.^[21])

But Musk is politically expedient, and he plans to use his considerable wealth to advance trad pronatalists’ goals. He has pledged to use the Department of Government Efficiency, a former pipe dream established by Trump on his first day in office, to defund “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood,” a longstanding conservative goal.^[22] Despite his nontraditional familial arrangements, Musk reportedly believes in rigid gender roles: his first wife claims he called himself the “alpha” in their relationship, and he has accused universities and nonprofit organizations of spreading “gender ideology poison”: the notion that there are more than two genders, because gender identity and biological sex are not inherently connected.^[23]

Over and over again, pronatalists invoke transness as a threat to the established social order and their dreams of a flourishing population. At the same time, some pronatalists boast that a few generations of prolific reproduction will allow them to outnumber their ideological enemies. “The other side is not reproducing,” Keenan said at the 2023 conference. “The anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”^[24]

The Great Replacement

The 2023 Natal Conference began with a shocking, albeit somewhat uncontroversial claim: all over the world, people are having fewer children than their ancestors did, a steady decline that, if left unchecked, could eventually lead to mass depopulation. This childlessness, moreover, is largely unplanned—as some speakers argued, it is the result of a socioeconomic system that discourages family formation even among people who want children. But as the day progressed, some speakers became more explicit about their belief in a rigid social hierarchy. Dr. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute at the Catholic University of America, described strict gender roles as both positive and necessary for family formation. Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate who now uses his millions to fund right-wing causes, ended his speech about the need to reinstate male-only spaces with a call to abolish the Civil Rights Act, which he called the “single most destructive set of laws in American history.”^[25]

These public statements nonetheless pale in comparison to the openly racist and eugenicist beliefs of some conference attendees—particularly those who skipped the first day of public speeches but participated in off-the-record workshops held during the second day. At least one workshop was reportedly attended by Jared Taylor, the founder and editor of the White supremacist magazine American Renaissance, and Lydia Brimelow, whose husband, Peter, founded the White nationalist website VDARE. Taylor and Brimelow are among the foremost proponents of the “Great Replacement,” an antisemitic far-right conspiracy theory that claims a cabal of “elites” is importing dark-skinned migrants to the United States, Europe, and Australia as part of a nefarious plot to replace White people with people of color.^[26]

Taylor and Brimelow’s presence at the Natal Conference suggests that for some pronatalists, the goal is not to raise birth-rates across the board but to encourage certain groups—specifically, White people—to secure their existence by having more children, an aim that echoes the infamous “14 words” slogan coined by White supremacist David Lane. Not all pronatalists share this goal, but for some, a desire to stave off demographic replacement appears to be key to their plans. Musk, for example, has promoted a softer version of the conspiracy theory which claims that Democrats are importing immigrants in order to dominate elections.^[27]

Other conference participants were sympathetic to the notion that intelligence is biologically determined, an idea common to the scientific racism behind assertions of White superiority. Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist who spoke at the 2023 conference and is scheduled to speak at this year’s, referred obliquely to “good quality children.”^[28] She also assured the audience that their “genes are more important than drag queen story hour”—implying that nature always triumphs over nurture, even when “wokeness” goes too far. Fleischman is a regular contributor to Aporia, a “pro-evolution” digital magazine that describes itself as refusing to “cower beneath the god of political correctness.” In practice, this means publishing pseudoscientific screeds about the scourge of wokeness, the biological basis of the “black-white IQ gap,” and the need for high-IQ people to have more children.^[29] Fleishman’s own contributions include such articles as “You’re probably a eugenicist” and “Embryo Selection: Toward a healthier society.”^[30]

Though Aporia is firmly on the tech futurist side of the tech/trad divide, its writers have attempted to find common cause with religious pronatalists who may be uncomfortable with evolution, not to mention more controversial topics like polygenic risk testing and artificial wombs. A November 2024 article, for instance, attempts to bridge the gap between the tech and trad factions by encouraging Christians to embrace gene editing, which writer Lipton Matthews claims could be harnessed “as a means of fulfilling God’s desire for human flourishing” by eliminating disease and disability.^[31] Meanwhile, some members of the movement’s trad wing have begun reclaiming criticisms lobbed against tech-friendly pronatalists like the Collinses. “Is it eugenics to encourage stable, monogamous breeding pairs to have larger families if they can?” Keenan wrote in a 2023 post for The American Mind, a blog affiliated with the right-wing Claremont Institute. “Or is that just brilliant public policy that has the potential to rescue our civilization from its decline over a couple generations?”^[32]  What remains unsaid—by the more prominent figures in the movement, at least—is who “our civilization” includes. Elsewhere, Keenan has asserted that the “great replacement is real.”^[33]

Thus far, it appears that Dolan was correct in his assessment that the tech and trad camps of the pronatalist movement can not only coexist but also learn from each other while advancing far-right ideologies. Still, some fault lines remain. “My fellow pro-natalists and I share the same goal—to prevent Western civilization from committing suicide—” Keenan wrote, “but I may be the only one standing athwart the CRISPR machine yelling ‘STOP!’” The trad pronatalists may not be interested in artificial wombs, CRISPR-assisted DNA modification, or even IVF, but like their techie counterparts, they want to populate the earth with their own superior progeny. The question is how long this fragile coalition will hold.