For Malcolm and Simone Collins, declining birth rates across many developed countries are an existential threat. The solution is to have “tons of kids,” and to use a hyperrational, data-driven approach to guide everything from genetic selection to baby names and day-to-day parenting.
They don’t heat their Pennsylvania home in winter, because heating is a “pointless indulgence”. Their children wear iPads around their necks. And a Guardian journalist witnessed Malcolm strike their two-year-old across the face for misbehaviour, a parenting style they apparently developed based on watching “tigers in the wild”.
The Collinses are leading spokespeople for a movement called pronatalism, popular in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, a father of 11, is one of its leading proponents. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk tweeted.
Demographers disagree: there is no collapse, and one is not even predicted. Such evidence has not stopped the rise of pronatalism in response to an imagined “population bomb.”
Pronatalism has strong links to effective altruism, a movement tied to Silicon Valley and elite schools, which uses “evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit as many people as possible”, and longtermism, which insists our long-term future is the key moral priority.
The most profitable and fashionable place to be in media right now is pretending to be on the Left but actually being on the Right. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard and now Elizabeth Bruenig. Christ. There’s just SO MUCH of this shit.
I shouldn’t even have to say this, but “trad liberals” are much more pronatalist than all of these posturing trad wife Catholics and assorted other fad-following dummies.
How are we “pronatalist”? We fund public education and public health. We don’t tell people not to get their kids vaccinated. We protect the environment. We support workplace safety regs so parents can return to their children at the end of the workday. We support labor unions and high wage policy so parents have enough money to HAVE children. We invented WIC. We invented Head Start. We covered 37 million children under Medicaid and the Right fought us every step of the way. But all of these policies are too boring and old fashioned to attract our facile, silly elites in media and tech, so they think they discovered something new when tech titans told them there could be pro child policy. The far Right is fashionable now so expect every weak-minded ninny in media on Left, Right and Center to clamber aboard the far Right grift train. It’s all bullshit. Dull, wonky Medicaid expansion has done more for children than anything any of these people have done in their whole lives, or will ever do.
The best part of the far Right becoming fashionable and profitable is now normie, non elite Lefties and liberals are the counterculture. Maybe we can contact The Atlantic and the New York Times and tell them we invented Medicaid and food stamps in an Austin think tank and they’ll start actually covering real life.
