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Last Thursday night, I attended a cocktail party in the penthouse apartment of an Austin, Texas, highrise. Through floor-to-ceiling glass windows, we watched dusk settle over the rainy sweep of the city, from the bars below us to the university campus, to the downtown skyline, studded with construction sites. As the first guests began to trickle in, the conversation turned to the ethics of gene-editing embryos to create custom babies.

“I would actually argue that the ethical questions probably aren’t as big, because kids already don’t choose their genes,” said Malcolm Collins, a slight, bespectacled man in his late thirties who had helped organize the gathering. “I think that we’re really close to a subculture where this is normalized—a right-wing subculture.”

His wife, Simone, busily filling bowls with chips, nodded in agreement. Simone was dressed for the evening in a white, wide-brimmed bonnet, a peasant blouse, and an austere, calf-length black jumper; her daughter, one-year-old Industry Americus, lounged in a carrier on her back. She and her husband, she said, were comfortable with the idea of designer babies; after all, Industry and her three older siblings, all under the age of 7, had been created with the help of a company that said it could analyze their embryos’ genetic makeup to screen for genetic illnesses, depression, and schizophrenia, as well as predict their intelligence. Yet Simone wasn’t convinced that the world needed bespoke babies—the process would be too expensive, and with all the hormone shots, monitoring, and precise timing, too cumbersome. “IVF isn’t going to move the needle on birth rates,” she said.

The Collinses and some 200 others were in Austin that weekend for NatalCon, a conference held at the University of Texas-Austin for pronatalists, people who believe that falling birthrates the world over imperils humanity. The Collinses weren’t the official organizers, but ever since they spoke at the first NatalCon in 2023—before Industry Americus was born—they have emerged as the de facto spokespeople of the movement, enthusiastically appearing for a gauntlet of media interviews.

In their late thirties with chunky glasses and a sort of grad-student intensity, the Collinses are catnip for journalists because of their extreme eagerness to regale us with the sci-fi-esque details of their lives. They’re starting their own religion! They believe in something called the “future police!” Simone told me that the purpose of her unsubtle Handmaid’s Tale getup was at least in part for journalists’ benefit. (“Multiple things can be true at one time,” she explained. “You can both be trolling, but also be like, ‘Man, this is actually pretty comfortable.’”). Because of their media savvy, extreme self-confidence, and eagerness to open up, they have been the subjects of dozens of articles about the pronatalism movement, from the New York Magazine to the Washington Post to the Guardian.

I could go on and on about the Collinses—their backstory as erstwhile leftists who met on Reddit; the time Malcolm slapped his kid in front of a reporter; the fact that 80 percent of the viewers on their YouTube channel are men. But all the media focus on their charismatic quirkiness detracts from the darker corners of the movement. Many of the pronatalists make no secret of the fact that when they talk about saving civilization from birth rate collapse, they have a very specific civilization in mind. At the opening night of the conference, the day after the cocktail party, the keynote speaker, far-right influencer and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, told the crowd exactly that. “Western civilization isn’t just worth preserving. It’s worth fighting for,” he said. “This is a war, and natalism is our sword and shield, and we will not abandon the front line.” The enemies on the left “want us dead, so take them seriously,” he warned. “Think about it, the Luigis, the Tesla terrorists, they would have no problem at all with getting rid of us.”

In this war for the West, many of the natalists have long believed that God is on their side. But a major change has taken place since the first NatalCon because the political winds seem to be at their backs. “JD Vance and the entire Trump administration seem to be bringing their children everywhere with them, including the Oval Office,” enthused Terry Schilling, another opening night speaker who heads the right-wing lobbying group American Principles Project. Right-wing political commentator Steve Turley offered the attendees more specifics. “If Vice President JD Vance has his way,” he said, “our whole electoral process may be recalibrating around this new pronatal biopolitics.”

There are signs that this is not just wishful thinking. Vance and other members of the new administration have begun warning about falling birthrates and using some of the same rhetoric as the pronatalists. Around the same time NatalCon was beginning on Friday evening, Elon Musk appeared on Fox News. The host asked what he worried most about. “The birth rate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” Musk responded. “Humanity is dying.”

Meanwhile, at the conference, Posobiec was wrapping up his speech with the same theme. “This is the war for civilization, and we are going to win it one life at a time,” he said. “God bless the West.”

Posobiec’s rhetorical flourishes are distinctly lacking from the NatalCon website, which describes the problem of declining fertility rates in much more neutral terms. “By the end of this century,” it says, “nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse,” and “thousands of unique cultures and populations will be snuffed out.”

First, let’s get a few things straight. There is no consensus among demographers that the world is running out of humans; on the contrary, the world is on track to reach a population of 9 billion by 2037. Yet it’s true that dwindling fertility in developed nations will soon result in overall older populations, with significant portions aging out of the workforce. Today, about 21 percent of EU citizens are over 65; by 2050, according to World Economic Forum projections, more than a third of the populations of Italy, Spain, and Greece will be over the age of 65; in Hong Kong, the percentage of people over-65 will be greater than 40 percent, also compared to about 21 percent today. The trend is slightly less pronounced in the United States, where people over 65 are expected to increase in proportion from just shy of 17 percent in 2021 to 23 percent in 2050.

When so many people approach retirement at the same time, however, governments tend to get nervous about the collapse of the workforce—and in some places, they’re pulling out all the stops to prevent that from happening. Singapore, France, and Canada offer couples tantalizing combinations of long parental leaves, and thousands of dollars in “baby bonuses” and education savings accounts. Hungary implemented a policy that exempts mothers of four or more children from ever paying taxes again.

Jennifer Sciubba, a political demographer with the nonpartisan think tank Population Reference Bureau, notes that birth is not the only aspect of life governments could incentivize in order to address the problems presented by an aging population. The hiring of older workers, for instance, promoting policies to support caregivers of the elderly, and devoting resources to improving the health and quality of life of senior citizens could all be government initiatives. “I think we’re wasting a lot of time that we could be using to have innovative solutions and experiments at municipal levels to see what works,” she said. “And we just aren’t doing it.”

I was looking forward to asking the NatalCon organizers about their thoughts on non-baby-related solutions to the aging population problem, but I never had the opportunity. A few months ago, when I requested a press pass from the conference organizer, Kevin Dolan, who posts on Twitter under the name Bennet’s Phylactery, he tweeted out my email to his 91,000 followers. “The balls on these people lmao,” he wrote. “You want me to buy you dinner & pay for your booze because you can’t afford to come harsh the vibes & slander my friends on your own dime?” When I tried to pay to register, my application was rejected.

A father of six, Dolan runs a men’s society called Exit Group that describes itself as “a fraternity of like-minded men who take a short position in the present system and build for what comes next.” On X, Dolan overdoses on the words “retarded” and “gay,” complains about anti-white bias, and thunders against feminism, which he believes “will not reduce or curtail fertility, it will eliminate it—it is incompatible with human life.”

I hoped once I showed up to the conference, they might just let me in. Surely I, a middle-aged woman fading into irrelevance with my nearing-expiration-date womb, would be easy to ignore in this baby-crazy crowd. On the first evening of the conference, the day after the cocktail party, 200 attendees gathered for the opening dinner in the UT-Austin art museum. As soon as I introduced myself to the keeper of the wristbands, I was banished. “You are not welcome here!” he said and promptly summoned a cadre of security guards to escort me out of the building.

To really understand the pronatalist movement, you first need to be aware of its two main factions. The “trads,” most of whom are religiously motivated, believe that large families are God’s will. Some of the more militant among them also believe in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits the existence of a global conspiracy to replace white Americans with immigrants of color. Then there are the techies, many of whom see pronatalism as an imperative for maximizing the potential of the human race—they are interested in things like gene-editing people, figuring out how to increase the human lifespan, and replacing elementary school teachers with AI tutors.

The penthouse cocktail party was a tech-heavy crowd. In addition to the Collinses, the guest list included the co-founder of Heritage Molecular, which says it “makes customized human embryos using genetic engineering,” and the founder and CEO of Minicircle, a company that focuses on “reversible gene editing.” Another guest I met was Patri Friedman, the head of a Peter Thiel-backed venture firm that funds deregulated economic zones. He told me about his recent trip to one such zone in Honduras, where medical procedures are deregulated. While he was there, he said, he had all the bacteria in his mouth replaced so he would never get another cavity and underwent a gene editing procedure that he felt had substantially increased his cardio performance. He proudly pointed to the spot between the thumb and pointer finger on his right hand. There, he told me, a chip resided “that unlocks my Tesla and has my business card on it.”

For all their blue-sky thinking, when it comes to actual humans now walking the earth, the tech faction can be pessimistic. About halfway through the cocktail party, I dropped in on a conversation between Malcolm Collins and another guest, a woman who didn’t want to be named. Malcolm was holding forth about his observation that young people didn’t seem especially interested in having sex. The other guest agreed. “Everything about the young generation is less sexual,” she said. “People wear clothes that are much more androgynous; they don’t do as much to emphasize their sexuality,” she added. “I think everybody just needs to eat more meat, less hormonal birth control, and wear less polyester, and like anything else that’s disrupting your hormones.”

Malcolm nodded. He had recently been back to his alma mater, St. Andrews University in Scotland, where he had seen a group of students partaking in the annual tradition of running naked into the freezing ocean. Compared to his memories of the event from two decades ago, the current crop of students came up short. “There was no flirting—there wasn’t as much fun,” he said. “Everybody looked like an amorphous blob, but it wasn’t just that—young people were ugly.”

“Right,” said the other guest. “It’s the way that they, like, groom themselves.”

A few hours before the opening evening of the conference the following day, I had my first meeting with someone who was not a techie but a trad. We met at the George Washington statue at the center of the UT-Austin campus, and the students were out in force: sorority girls, kids hawking the campus humor magazine, a big group of kids clutching enormous, multi-hued boba teas. While the students streamed by, I caught up with Scott Yenor, who is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University, a fellow at the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, and a father of five. In a 2023 piece for the Claremont Institute website, he wrote about the dangers of what he called “anti-natalism.” Progressive values, he argued, had brought about the crash of South Korea’s birth rates, and America was headed in the same direction. “Honoring same-sex attraction above opposite-sex attraction and creating environments in which homosexuals receive special protection and encouragement will cause more people to identify as gay, as current polling indicates,” he wrote. “In these and many other ways, a legal and cultural regime can diminish the desire for children.”

I asked Yenor to tell me about his objections to feminism, and he explained that he saw it as a pernicious enemy of procreation. “When the ideal for womanly achievement is the independent woman, it is necessarily undermining family life,” he said. This problem was hard to fix because the 1964 Civil Rights Act had “made it impossible and in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.”  

Yenor told me that he is a member of a secretive fraternal order, a Christian nationalist group called the Society for American Civic Renewal. The unofficial head of the group is Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate who has said that he aspires to be a “warlord;” he wants to lead armed factions who would wage “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government or some subset or remnant of it.”

At the 2023 NatalCon, Haywood recounted the story of his growing feeling of contempt while watching a neighbor fetch his mail. The guy “was all well-kept and put together, but he was totally beta,” he said. (“Beta” is internet slang for submissive.) “We don’t get any kids unless men are masculine.” For this problem, he blamed schools that “feminize boys” and co-ed social spaces, including workplaces. “You should be able to have a group of men in the workplace who interact with each other, favor each other over women for advancement in the workplace, and just generally, advance the interests of men,” he said in his speech. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Haywood for clarification: Had he really meant that men should be promoted over women because they are men? “Women should not have careers,” he said emphatically. “They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.”

Yenor echoed those sentiments. Most women want to stay home with the kids anyway, he told me. I looked back at the students, many of whom were college girls carrying backpacks, hustling to class or lab or clubs. “It’s much better in society if we have a situation where men are providers, and women prioritize motherhood and being wives and homemakers,” Yenor said. “That should be the life script of about 70 percent of Americans.”

If I expected a kind of battle royale between the trads and the techies, I would have been disappointed. What I discovered instead was that despite what appeared to be their differences, the techies and the trads were much more fundamentally aligned. One arena for this cooperation is in politics, specifically with the Republican party, where the tech bros have begun to overlap with the trads. As Steve Turley, the political commentator, said during his NatalCon speech, there are “kinds of pronatal possibilities that open up” in the “tech-trad alignment.”

 In the GOP, the trads are the conservative Christians, many of whom believe that Trump is God’s chosen leader. Leaders in this group are associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic Christians that was influential in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Representatives from this camp include House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), and Paula White, a longtime Trump spiritual adviser who is now leader of his new White House Faith Office.

The Republican techies are the extremely online leaders who believe that a no-holds-barred approach to technological innovation can usher in a new era of prosperity for the United States. The de-facto leader of this group, of course, is Department of Government Efficiency head and tech multibillionaire Elon Musk. A father of 14, Musk is the staunchest and most highly visible pronatalist in the Trump administration. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” he posted on X in November. Last April, he posted Kevin Dolan’s speech from the 2023 NatalCon, commenting, “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end,” the phrase he would later repeat during his Fox News interview last week. A 2023 Bloomberg News investigation revealed that in 2021, Musk donated $10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative, a research group at the University of Texas-Austin that says it conducts “foundational research in economics, demography, and social welfare evaluation.” (Dean Spears, who heads the group, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that Musk’s donation did not influence the center’s work. He said his own work focuses on global health and that he thinks “what Trump has done to USAID is awful.”)

Straddling the trad-tech divide is Vice President JD Vance. A traditional Catholic who is staunchly pro-life, Vance is connected to the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial Protestant men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Vance also has deep connections to Silicon Valley, where he worked briefly for Peter Thiel, as well as for Circuit Therapeutics, a biotech firm that focused on gene editing. In addition to his tech sector work experience, Vance is also famously well-connected on social media, plugged into perpetually online right-wing intellectual movements.

The pronatalists recognize Vance for the lynchpin that he is. “Vance is often cited as a symbol of this tech-trad realignment,” Turley said in his speech. “He’s a traditionalist Catholic. Grew up in the hillbilly mountains of Appalachia, and he’s also part of a very successful Silicon Valley Tech company with Peter Thiel.”

In January, addressing the annual March for Life an anti-abortion rally crowd in Washington, DC, shortly after he was sworn in as vice president, Vance said, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” He has also fanboyed over Hungarian President Viktor Orbán’s tax break for big families. Last year, when Vance took heat for a resurfaced video in which he derided “childless cat ladies,” he clarified in an interview with Fox News Megyn Kelly that he hadn’t meant to offend these ladies, only to suggest that their misery over their own choice to remain childless would “make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance has proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless. Yenor, the Idaho State professor, told me he liked the sound of that idea; he worried that as nonparents begin to make up a greater share of voters, “there will be less interest in sustaining an environment for children to be raised in.”  

It’s not just Vance and Musk who are bringing pronatalism to the national stage. In February, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a father of nine) signed a memo recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Last year, the Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for the Project 2025 roadmap for Trump’s second term, recommended that the government defund higher education, claiming that more educated women tend to have fewer babies. In the same article, the authors suggested that “education policy also suppresses fertility by discouraging parents from choosing religious education in K-12 schools.” The far-right Claremont Institute suggested in 2023 that states could juice birth rates “by building relatively wholesome environments for raising children,” adding that “protecting kids from publicly-sponsored gender wokeness is a great first step.” Part of that wholesome environment, the authors write, could be “pro-family programming” on state public television and a campaign to draw churches with a “family-friendly mission.” If the “lefties” didn’t like these new policies, fine! “Plenty of U-Haul trucks are available! Family-friendly citizens in; other citizens out.”

Trump himself appears ready to listen. At a Maryland campaign event in 2023, he thundered, “I want a baby boom!” In December, Trump named Michael Anton, a conservative writer who spoke at the 2023 NatalCon, to be his director of policy planning for the State Department. (Anton’s speech at the 2023 NatalCon advised viewers to look to Socrates’ Xenophon for examples of how to woo women by making them feel insecure.) Trump said in a February executive order that the reason he believed more Americans should be able to undergo IVF was “because we want more babies, to put it very nicely.” Last week, during a Women’s History Month event at the White House, Trump said, “We’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.”

Trump also has shown openness to some of the darker sides of pronatalism, repeatedly bragging about his “good genes.” At a 2020 rally in Minnesota, he told the majority-white crowd, “You have good genes. A lot of it’s about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe the racehorse theory? You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” Last October, on the campaign trail, he said, of immigrants who committed crimes, “It’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

I didn’t hear anyone utter the phrase “bad genes” in the speeches at NatalCon. Though I was barred from attending the conference itself, I was able to obtain recordings of the speeches, which were, with the notable exception of Posobiec, milquetoast. Jonathan Keeperman, whose far-right company Passage Publishing was a sponsor of the conference, made a speech in which he argued that one barrier to having children was the culture of frenetically carting kids around to a zillion activities. Peachy Keenan, a Los Angeles mother of five and the pseudonymous author of the 2023 book Domestic Extremist: a Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, said “the natalism movement must be about more than numbers and technology. It has to be about in the simplest terms, maternal love.” Raw Egg Nationalist, the pseudonym for a British writer who opines online about masculinity, opined that the result of our comfortable and coddled modern condition is a decline in sexual desire.

The eminently reasonable people who made those speeches bore little resemblance to their online alter egos. Keeperman, who often uses the pseudonym Lomez, has created a niche in republishing works by fascist thinkers—for example, a Spanish soldier who fought on Francisco Franco’s side, a WWI-era German nationalist, and a Russian czar loyalist who “chronicles the chaos, courage, and tragedy of his struggle against the Bolsheviks.” On X, where Keeperman posts to 106,000 followers under the pseudonym Lomez, he decries immigration (“no, actually we don’t want your huddled masses”), makes liberal use of slurs, and theorizes about “bioleninism,” the idea that the political left exists because “the dregs of society cannot accrue status of their own, and so depend instead on the state and its unofficial organs to give them status in exchange for loyalty.”

Raw Egg Nationalist writes regularly about his belief that immigrants threaten Western civilization; he has referred to immigration as “a hostile act.” And then things can drift towards unapologetic fascism. He has been known to drop the occasional “HH”—short for “Heil Hitler—to his 280,000 followers on X. Keenan, meanwhile, often warns about proselytizing pronatalism to the enemy. “We don’t really want to market natalism to the progressive feminists—the people maxing out their fertility should be people, ideally, who won’t raise their children to be gender-neutral furries who want to join Antifa one day,” she said at the 2023 NatalCon. “The good news is that the fear of climate change will keep liberal women’s birth rates low forever.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine how the common-sense speeches of the online firebrands could appeal to ordinary conference-goers, many of whom were hoping to find community. At a happy hour event before the conference, I spoke to a greying guy who said he had come because he found himself single, without kids, and was the sole caretaker of his elderly parents who were suffering from dementia. With the aging of the population, he worried more people would soon end up in his situation. A woman I talked to was there because she had endured many rounds of IVF and wondered if anyone was trying to make the technology more individualized.

On the second day of the conference, I met a Texas couple, accompanied by a few of their nine children, who had come because they were hoping to meet other large families. What had they thought of the conference so far, I asked. The man, who didn’t want me to use his name, likened what he had heard about the coming fertility crash to the Y2K bug. “People in 1995 didn’t somehow consider that the year 2000 was only a couple years away, right?” he said. “People don’t really think about the future anymore—we knew when the year 2000 was coming, and yet people were not prepared for it.” The conference, the woman said, had helped her see the weight of their responsibility to their children. “You’re leaving a legacy, right? That’s something very important.”

Trump said on Sunday that he’s “not joking” about running for a third term—despite the fact that would be unconstitutional.Jacquelyn Martin/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. President Donald Trump has repeatedly teased running for a third term in violation of the 22nd Amendment…

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