On a rainy Thursday night in March, I showed up early to a cocktail party in a penthouse apartment of an Austin high-rise. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, I watched dusk settle over the sweep of Texas’ capital, from the bars below us to the university campus and the downtown skyline, studded with construction sites. As the first guests began to trickle in, the conversation turned, as these things do, 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 influencer 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. She was dressed for the evening in a white wide-brimmed bonnet, a peasant blouse, and an austere, calf-length black jumper; her daughter, 1-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 to get the job done at scale. “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 at Austin for pronatalists, people who believe that falling birthrates the world over imperil 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 30s with chunky glasses and a sort of hipster 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!” (The Collinses have invented their own religion, in which they worship their police-like descendants, who they believe are controlling their destiny from the far future.) 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 willingness to open up their lives, they have been the subjects of dozens of articles about the pronatalism movement, from New York Magazine to the Washington Post and the Guardian.
I could go on and on about the Collinses—their backstory as erstwhile leftists who met on Reddit; the time Malcolm slapped one of his kids 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 pronatalists make no secret of the fact that when they talk about saving civilization from birthrate collapse, the civilization they have in mind is a very specific one. Immigrants, they argue, aren’t fixing this problem; in fact, they’re making it worse by imposing their cultures on “ours.” What’s more, some of the speakers dabble in a line of eugenics that posits a correlation between race and intelligence, a theory that keeps rearing its head, despite being repeatedly whacked down by rigorous debunking.
At the opening night of the conference, 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,”—a reference to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO—“the Tesla terrorists, they would have no problem at all with getting rid of us.”
“If Vice President JD Vance has his way, our whole electoral process may be recalibrating around this new pronatal biopolitics.”
In their war for the West, many of the pronatalists have long believed that God is on their side. But a major change has taken place since the first NatalCon; the political winds are now at their backs. At the highest levels of national leadership, pronatalism is very much on trend: There is Elon Musk and his legion of offspring, Vice President JD Vance griping about childless cat ladies, President Donald Trump himself vowing to be the “fertilization president.” Terry Schilling, another opening night speaker who heads the lobbying group American Principles Project, enthused, “JD Vance and the entire Trump administration seem to be bringing their children everywhere with them, including the Oval Office.” 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.”
This is not just wishful thinking. Vance and other members of the administration who are obsessed with falling birthrates use some of the same rhetoric as the pronatalists and have the predilections and power to make policy. The New York Times recently reported that Musk has been “spending time” with Malcolm and Simone Collins. Around the same time NatalCon was beginning on Friday evening, Musk appeared on Fox News. The host asked what he worried most about. “The birthrate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” Musk, father of (at least) 14, 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 fascistic flourishes are distinctly lacking from the NatalCon website, which describes the problem of declining fertility rates in more matter-of-fact terms. “By the end of this century,” it warns, “nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse.” Add to this, “thousands of unique cultures and populations will be snuffed out.”
First, let’s get a few things straight. The world is not running out of humans. On the contrary, the Earth is on track to reach a population of 9 billion by 2037. Yet it’s true that dwindling fertility in some developed nations will soon result in overall older populations, with significant portions aging out of the workforce—meaning that fewer younger workers will have to support the elderly. 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 that old. In Japan and South Korea, that figure will be nearly 40 percent. 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, governments tend to get nervous about the imbalance—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 increasing the number of births is not the only way governments could address the problems presented by an aging population. The hiring of older workers, promoting policies to support caregivers of the elderly, and devoting resources to improving the health and quality of life of senior citizens, for instance, could all ease the burden on younger workers. If the government still needed more babies, improvements in approaches to parental leave, state child care, and universal health care could go a long way, as could abortion and assisted reproduction policies that allow families greater control over the timing of parenthood. “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.”
Immigration could help, too, of course, but as Posobiec hinted in his NatalCon speech, this solution would be anathema for many pronatalists. As NatalCon organizer Kevin Dolan contemptuously put it at the 2023 conference, “It’s not obvious, in any case, why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment, while their own grandmothers back home are starving.”
I was looking forward to asking the NatalCon organizers about their thoughts on non-baby-related solutions to our aging population problem in person, but I didn’t have the opportunity. A few months prior to the conference, I requested a press pass from Dolan, who posts on X under the name Bennett’s Phylactery, a reference to the 19th-century Mormon leader John Cook Bennett, an ardent polygamist. (Dolan is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which no longer endorses polygamy.) Dolan 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.
On X, Dolan liberally dispenses 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.” A father of six, Dolan was happily posting anonymously until 2021, when an antifascist group outed him, revealing him as the author of openly racist, antisemitic, and homophobic posts. They also uncovered Dolan’s connections to the Deseret Nationalist movement, a white nationalist group that has its roots in the Latter-Day Saints. (The church has said it is not affiliated with the movement.) As a result of these revelations, Dolan was fired from his job as a senior data scientist at the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. He took the opportunity to found a men’s society called Exit 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.” The members, some of whom, like Dolan, have been fired or ostracized as a result of provocative posts, hold regular meetups to nurture connections with “the kind of people [whose kids] you might want your kids to be friends with and date and connect with,” he says. Exit is a labor of love for Dolan, but it’s also remunerative. Membership dues combined with “business deals” he has made with some of the members have now replaced his former income.
I hoped that once I showed up to NatalCon, they might just let me in. Surely I, a middle-aged woman fading into breeding irrelevance with my nearing-sell-by-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, the attendees gathered for the opening dinner in the local history 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 American 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 plot to replace white Americans with immigrants of color—which is why the notion that immigrants can compensate for a declining birthrate is so unthinkable. 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 that will make learning as effective and efficient as possible. The Collinses fall into this camp.
The penthouse cocktail party, which was not an official conference event, drew a tech-heavy crowd. In addition to the Collinses, who had invited me and didn’t seem to care that I had been blacklisted from the conference, 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, grandson of the famous economist Milton Friedman and the head of Pronomos Capital, a Peter Thiel–backed venture firm that funds autonomous economic zones.
At first, I couldn’t quite figure out what Friedman, a twice-divorced dad of three, had to do with the pronatalists. But halfway through our conversation, it began to make sense. Friedman eagerly told me about his recent trip to Próspera, a deregulated zone in Honduras, where he visited Vitalia, a pop-up longevity-themed city where medical procedures were deregulated. While he was there, he said, he had all the bacteria in his mouth replaced with genetically engineered germs so he would supposedly 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 tech-leaning pronatalists, deregulated zones could serve as assisted reproduction sandboxes, allowing the kinds of fertility-optimizing and baby-designing experiments that US laws forbid.
It’s not hard to see why such alternative nations could be attractive to Dolan’s Exit group, too. “We form alternative institutions: new businesses, new schools, new communities, new markets, and new guards for our future security,” the Exit website says. “As the old regime hemorrhages talent, we bring that talent together and build things that will thrive amid volatility and decay.”
“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.”
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 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, the University of St. Andrews 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.”
The following day, I had my first meeting with a trad. We met at the George Washington statue in the thick of the UT Austin campus, and the students were out in force: young people, coeds, students hawking the campus humor magazine, a big group clutching enormous, multihued boba teas. While they streamed by, I caught up with Scott Yenor, a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University, the senior director of state coalitions 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 birthrates, 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.”
“When the ideal for womanly achievement is the independent woman, it is necessarily undermining family life.”
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 currently 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 former shampoo magnate who has said that he aspires to be a “warlord” and wants to lead armed factions that 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 right-wing internet slang for submissive.) “We don’t get any kids unless men are masculine.” He blamed schools that “feminize boys” and coed 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, after an audience member asked a question, Haywood clarified. “Generally, 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 stared past him at the college women 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.”
Yenor’s ideas may sound extreme, but they’re gaining traction. In April, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was mulling ideas to promote pronatalism, including several submitted by the Collinses. One of their suggestions was a medal for mothers of six or more children, an idea that gained popularity when Adolf Hitler conferred a similar honor on German mothers of eight or more children in 1938, calling it the Cross of Honour of the German Mother. (Naturally, Jews were not among the 4.7 million women who received the medal between 1938 and 1944.) The brutal Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin followed suit, offering a similar medal in 1944. Historians recognize pronatalism as a hallmark of fascist regimes, pointing to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s “battle for births” after World War I and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current efforts to boost his country’s birthrates.
Some historians are beginning to draw connections between those historical projects and the American present. Lina-Maria Murillo, an assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa, is the author of a recent paper that warns about an ascendant “American vision that unites fear of white demographic decline, a total disavowal of any kind of immigration, and the supposed feminization of white cisgender masculinity.” Murillo worries that if we ignore the history of these movements and the warning signs around, we will react to “extreme reproductive punishment with incredulity and confusion,” she writes. “Let us not be caught unaware.”
I had half-expected to see evidence of a schism between the trads and the techies, but what I discovered instead was that they were often fundamentally aligned, particularly regarding politics, and specifically the Republican Party, where the two camps have begun to overlap. 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 who were influential in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Representatives from this camp include House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Paula White-Cain, a longtime Trump spiritual adviser who is now leader of his new White House Faith Office.
The Republican techies believe that a no-holds-barred approach to 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 Musk. A father of 14 who once offered to impregnate Taylor Swift and, the Wall Street Journal reports, regularly propositions women to have his babies in DMs on X, Musk is the staunchest and most highly visible pronatalist close to the Trump administration. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates,” Musk allegedly texted the mother of one of his children. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness,” he wrote on X in November. In April 2024, he posted 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. A 2023 Bloomberg News investigation revealed that in 2021, Musk donated $10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative, a research group at UT 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 he thinks “what Trump has done to USAID is awful.”)
Straddling the trad-tech divide is Vice President JD Vance. A Catholic convert 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, who also bankrolled his rise to power. Through both his religious and Silicon Valley communities, Vance is perpetually plugged into online right-wing intellectual movements.
The pronatalists recognize Vance for the linchpin 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.” Dolan finds Vance relatable. “It’s not even ideological for a lot of guys,” he remarked. “You can imagine playing Xbox with him.”
In January, addressing the annual March for Life 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 Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tax break for big families. During the campaign, Vance took heat for a resurfaced video in which he derided “childless cat ladies” and claimed they would “make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In a 2024 interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, he clarified that he hadn’t meant to offend these women.
Vance has since proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which parents would cast more votes than those who are childless. Yenor, the Boise 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 and former Real World star 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, two members of 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 noted 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 birthrates “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.”
I’ll be known as the fertilization president, and that’s okay.”
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 attendees to look to Xenophon’s Memorabilia 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 in vitro fertilization is “because we want more babies, to put it very nicely.” 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 has also 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.”
Dolan agrees that bad genes are a problem. He is a devotee of Charles Murray, the American Enterprise Institute political scientist and co-author of the book The Bell Curve, which promotes the discredited idea of a correlation between race and intelligence. Dolan argues in favor of “selective breeding” on his Substack, writing, “I don’t believe excellence is entirely a question of biology and heredity, but obviously those things count for something.”
Yet I didn’t hear anyone utter the phrase “bad genes” in the speeches at NatalCon. Although 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 conference sponsor, 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, noted “any healthy 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, argued that the result of our comfortable and coddled modern condition is a decline in sexual desire.
The seemingly mild-mannered 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 British volunteer 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 108,000 followers, 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.” Occasionally his posts can drift toward unapologetic fascism. He has been known to fixate on the superiority of “Aryan” features like blue eyes, including posting a meme that refers to those with blue eyes as “philosophers” or “kings” and those with brown eyes as “peasants” or even “untouchable.” 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 birthrates low forever.”
But the bland speeches of these online firebrands seemed designed to appeal to ordinary conference-goers, many of whom were hoping to find community. At a happy hour for attendees on Friday that preceded the opening dinner, I spoke to a graying 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 whether anyone was trying to make the technology more individualized. A Texas mother told me that the conference had helped her see the weight of starting a family. “You’re leaving a legacy, right? That’s something very important.”
Two days after NatalCon ended, I published an account on the Mother Jones website. Much to my surprise, that afternoon, I received an email from Dolan, the subject of which was, “Kiera, I was very impressed by your article.” Dolan asked if he could call me, so that evening, we talked. He told me that he had been worried that I would mock the conference attendees, particularly those with “social challenges.” He was surprised and relieved to find that I had treated his guests with respect, and he apologized for having booted me from the conference. Leaving aside the irony of a guy who regularly uses the slur “retard” preaccusing me of ableism, I thanked him for his apology and arranged to have a longer chat with him the following week.
During that conversation, I asked Dolan about something that had eluded me before: the connection between his two projects, pronatalism and Exit. He told me that it all went back to the turning point in his life when he was fired from his job for his shitposting. For that, he said, he was grateful, because it gave him a chance to escape from the emasculating world of the American workplace. Corporate culture, he said, is terrible for men because it goes against “all of our instincts to protect and preside and provide, the sort of things that differentiate us hormonally.”
It’s this deadening environment, Dolan believes, that is truly responsible for the declining fertility rate. He sees the emasculating culture that he was fired from as fundamentally unfixable, well past the point of incentives and other economic tweaks. Imagine modern Americans as giant pandas in a zoo, he said. “What if we just gave the pandas some extra kibble? Like, would they breed if they had extra kibble? And it’s like, I don’t actually think kibble is the problem. It’s a spiritual thing. It’s a deep thing. It’s about meaning and it’s about what’s worth doing.” With Exit, Dolan hoped to start from scratch, to make the kind of masculine world in which his specific children would want to procreate.
The whole thing reminded him of a quote from Tucker Carlson, which he then paraphrased. “I don’t worship capitalism, I worship God. And if it’s just a system and if your system makes it impossible for me to raise a family,” he continued, “then I’m happy to set your system on fire.”
Update, May 19: The day this story was originally published, conference organizer Kevin Dolan reached out to reporter Kiera Butler to apologize for refusing her a press pass and having her escorted out of the conference. Butler and Dolan conducted an additional interview, and a new ending was added to the piece. The new version will appear in the July+August print issue of Mother Jones. The original online piece has been updated accordingly, and also corrected to reflect the university that Malcolm Collins attended, the religion of Sen. Mike Lee, the nationality of a soldier, the job title of Scott Yenor, the authorship of an op-ed by Heritage Foundation members, the authorship of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, the venue of a conference dinner, and the source of JD Vance’s comments.
