Existential, biological, epoch-defining???????????

The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population

Behind the scenes at the first Natal Conference, where a motley alliance is throwing out the idea of winning converts to their cause and trying to make their own instead.

By GABY DEL VALLE

The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies.

“The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him speak. “Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain,” Dolan says, “which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.”

Despite this grim prognosis, the mood is optimistic. It’s early December, a few weeks before Christmas, and the hundred-odd people who have flocked to Austin for the first Natal Conference are here to come up with solutions. Though relatively small, as conferences go, NatalCon has attracted attendees who are almost intensely dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate. The broader natalist movement has been gaining momentum lately in conservative circles — where anxieties over falling birth rates have converged with fears of rising immigration — and counts Elon Musk, who has nearly a dozen children, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán among its proponents. Natalism is often about more than raising birth rates, though that is certainly one of its aims; for many in the room, the ultimate goal is a total social overhaul, a culture in which child-rearing is paramount.

NatalCon’s emphasis on childbirth notwithstanding, there are very few women in the cavernous conference room of the LINE Hotel. The mostly male audience includes people of all ages, many of whom are childless themselves. Some of the women in attendance, however, have come to Austin with their children in tow — a visual representation of the desired outcome of this weekend. As if to emphasize the reason we’re all gathered here today, a baby babbles in the background while Dolan delivers his opening remarks.

Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.

At first glance, this conference might look like something new: A case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented. As Dolan later tells me in an email, declining birth rates are primarily the fault of “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which Dolan says is “in obvious competition with starting a family.” These systems, he believes, have created a consumer-driven, hedonistic society that requires its members to be slavishly devoted to their office jobs, often at the expense of starting a family.

But over the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, “wokeness,” declining genetic “quality.”

Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.

This conference suggests there’s a simple way around the problem of majority rule: breeding a new majority — one that looks and sounds just like them.

In recent years, various factions of the old and the new right have coalesced around the idea that babies might be the cure for everything that’s wrong with society, in the United States and other parts of the developed West.

It’s not a new argument. Natalists made similar claims in the early 20th century, when urbanization drove birth rates down and European immigration kept the U.S. population afloat. Then, too, people attributed the drop in fertility rates to endemic selfishness among young people.

Throughout it all, some religious conservative cultures have continued to see raising large broods as a divine mandate. White supremacists, meanwhile, have framed their project as a way of ensuring “a future for white children,” as declared by David Lane, a founding member of the white nationalist group The Order.

More recently, natalist thinking has emerged among tech types interested in funding and using experimental reproductive technologies, and conservatives concerned about falling fertility rates and what they might mean for the future labor force of the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. The conservative think tanks the Center for Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation — the latter of which was represented at NatalCon — have proposed policies for a potential second Trump administration that would promote having children and raising them in nuclear families, including limiting access to contraceptives, banning no-fault divorce and ending policies that subsidize “single-motherhood.”

Though Dolan opens the conference by talking about the potential economic consequences of a global birth dearth, he and the other NatalCon speakers aren’t primarily concerned with the utilitarian arguments for raising birth rates. “I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan says. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.”

Dolan, a conservative Mormon and a former Booz Allen Hamilton data scientist, resigned from his job in 2021 after a group of self-proclaimed anti-fascist Mormon activists exposed his anonymous Twitter account, which tied him to the far-right Deseret Nationalist movement. Having lost his livelihood and security clearance, Dolan started the EXIT Group, a “fraternity of like-minded men” who are preparing for the supposed collapse of American society — and who, as of recently, have taken on the decline in birth rates as their pet cause.

On his podcast, Dolan says he was first alerted to the problem of demographic collapse by a member of the EXIT Group, which claims to have 171 members. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West. The global drop in sperm concentrations has indeed puzzled scientists for decades and is believed to be one of the factors that has contributed to the global downturn in birth rates. But NatalCon’s organizers and attendees seem more interested in combating social institutions — like corporate employment and the educational system set up to support it — that, in Dolan’s words, have suppressed fertility by being “hostile to life.”

Most of the first day of the conference is spent defining the problem. In a nutshell: Sperm counts are historically low. Our bodies are full of microplastics. Public schools are indoctrinating children against the good Christian values with which they were raised. Dating apps have gamified romance, tricking lonely singles into believing that a better prospect is always around the corner. Women have been convinced that they can have it all — kids and a career and endless vacations and so much more — only to end up unhappy, infertile and alone.

The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process.

The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”

Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast.

But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear.

The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.”

But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.

Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.

Haywood’s final words to the audience elicit raucous applause: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever,” he says before getting off stage. (A few women told me afterward they and others disagreed with Haywood.)

Notably, most of the speakers do not make a case for more immigration to counter the trend of declining birth rates. Immigrants can’t solve our population problem, Dolan says, because they’ll eventually realize they were brought here to pay into Social Security for old white people. (On X, Dolan has used the word “replacement” to refer to immigration.)

Some at the conference are interested in the genetics of the children they believe everyone should be having. Evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman and writer Jonathan Anomaly argue that genetics are destiny. (“I shouldn’t say Good quality children,” Fleischman says after speaking at length about how people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting some children are indeed biologically better than others.)

Razib Khan — a geneticist and science blogger who in 2015 was hired and quickly fired by the New York Times opinion section after Gawker reported on his ties to racist far-right publications — illustrates the problem of current demographic trends in the West compared to other regions by pointing to Ethiopia, which had nearly as many births in 2020 as the entire European continent. “This is the future we’re already in,” says Khan, who is Bangladeshi-American. “Many of you have young children. … They will live to see this world.”

Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together — gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters. Though few speakers explicitly mentioned race, the conference provided an opportunity for those with genuine concerns about population decline to join forces with, and perhaps be influenced by, those who espouse racist or regressive views. During the second day of the conference — a closed-door, phone-off event dedicated to brainstorming ways to reverse the population crisis — VIP ticket holders mingled with Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, according to multiple people in attendance who wanted to remain anonymous because having their name linked to the conference would jeopardize their work.

The following day, I talk with Malcolm and Simone Collins, the husband-and-wife founder of Pronatalist.org who went viral in 2023 after the Telegraph dubbed them the “elite couple breeding to save mankind.” They are entrepreneurs and investors and previously served as co-CEOs of a travel agency company; Simone is also currently running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

The Collinses tell me they want to promote a plurality of cultures and protect everyone’s right to be “weird.” Malcolm says they want to make their movement a “big tent” and were initially worried about what kinds of people the conference would attract. “Are they going to be like, ‘[No] transgender people reading kids books?’ Are they going to be racist nut jobs? It’s a real concern,” he says.

The Collinses — parents of four children — present themselves as rationalists, techies trying to solve the looming depopulation crisis by any means necessary. (Simone was pregnant with the fourth child during the conference. That baby, Industry Americus Collins, was born in April.) With their third and fourth children, the Collinses used a preimplantation genetic test that allowed them to select an embryo with optimum genetic makeup.

But they, too, are far more interested in the cultural implications of declining fertility rates than their fascination with reproductive technologies might lead you to believe. The couple is committed to fighting the “urban monoculture” that they claim has tricked a generation of young Americans into spending their most fertile years chasing professional achievements and personal fulfillment at the expense of building a family.

“The monoculture is not an evil thing,” Malcolm says over panang curry and pineapple fried rice at a Thai restaurant the day after the conference’s VIP event, but, he continues, it’s built on false promises. “It promises people, if you join us, you can do whatever makes you happy, so long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s quality of life, and you can be affirmed for whoever you want to be.” In reality, though, they become casualties of an elitist scam.

The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone.

Malcolm compares the “urban monoculture” to the boarding schools the Canadian government forced Native children into, in which indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white culture. (The U.S. government had similar boarding schools.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to convert them to a culture that’s closer to mine — what you’re doing is wrong,” he says. When I tell him the boarding schools were a state program, not a voluntary form of acculturation, Malcolm becomes animated. “This is a state project! What’s going on in the public schools is a state project! The mechanisms that the urban monoculture uses to de-convert people are primarily a state funded educational system,” he says. (In a subsequent email, he describes the urban monoculture as “one of the descendants of European imperialism.”) The most important and effective way to fight the monoculture, Malcolm later tells me via email, is building “school systems not dedicated to cultural genocide.”

The goal, though, the Collinses tell me, is not to convert the childless, or even to counteract the phenomena that contribute to the “unplanned childlessness” that has become endemic among millennials: it’s to encourage people with a lot of children to have even more. “Some people matter less than other people in getting fertility rates up,” Malcolm says. “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”

Ultimately, this is what unites the Collinses with the more “trad” wings of the natalist movement, from the nativists to the Christian nationalists: pushing back on social and cultural changes they see as imposed on them by outside forces. To do that, these conference attendees have coalesced around a solution that won’t require them to persuade skeptics to join their cause. If everything goes as planned, the competition will go extinct on their own. All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth.