The pronatalists should scare the hell out of you.

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And we are talking about, once again– I knew we would be here, I knew we would be back here talking about the pronatalists. When we first started talking about them, it was more cautionary, like, “Hey, these people could be very dangerous.” And here’s– I think we took a more philosophical approach to describing, like, what this kind of person thinks and why they think that way and why we think they’re wrong. But the nature of the situation has changed. People like this are very much in power in our country’s politics right now and they’re ramping shit up and we should all, frankly, be terrified. Now, when I talk about the pronatalists, it is some folks we’ve talked about before. We’re gonna, I think, today, be talking a lot about Malcolm and Simone Collins. We’ve discussed them before, but we’re definitely talking about JD Vance. We’re talking about Elon Musk. And a lot of people who support their cause but aren’t as public facing.

Courtney: So let’s start with some of the sillier headline grabbing things that people have been rightfully clowning on that the Trump administration has been doing or saying or suggesting publicly. Because that is the surface layer right now, that is what the average person is hearing and what their understanding of the situation is. But we’re going to keep digging, we’re going to keep scratching that surface until we get down to the core of it today. So, hey, maybe this will be fun. If you’re listening on a platform you can comment on, comment with the timestamp of the first time it got horrifying for you and you said, “What the fuck?!” But we’ll start easy. We’ll start easy. This is a big one people have been talking about lately: there is a proposal to give a $5,000 baby bonus to every American mother after she gives birth. This one is so goofy and so frustrating because I can’t even argue against it, because giving money to mothers is objectively a good thing, but this is so frivolous and unhelpful.

Royce: Yeah, and I mean you could do more than that by just making all of the medical costs that go into having a birth cheaper.

Courtney: For our non-American listeners, who aren’t aware of our healthcare system, $5,000 will not cover the cost of the delivery room. If you’re lucky and it was an easy, uncomplicated pregnancy, and your baby is healthy, it might cover half.

Royce: So question: how does this proposal – and I’m assuming the answer is it’s undefined, they haven’t thought about it – how does it handle cases of surrogacy? Does the money go to the person who gave birth or to the people who are raising the child?

Courtney: That’s an awesome question, and I don’t even know if I know the answer without looking it up. Because I’ve been looking at general pronatalist policies and ideologies, and when you get deep enough, some of them go so far in the horrifying directions of eugenics and white supremacy that they’re like, “Oh, it should only be to parents who give birth to like a fit baby, a baby that we like. And it should only be married couples.” So like this policy is not that, but I know what the natural conclusion of this policy is.

Royce: I was also reaching a little bit assuming that, in cases of intentional surrogacy, or babies that are put up for adoption like basically at birth, that the people writing these laws would want the money to go towards groups of people who would raise children that they approve of.

Courtney: Yeah. And the thing is this– this $5,000 like baby bonus to incentivize children, I don’t think has actually been written out logistically as a policy. I think it’s just something that has been floated in the broader conversation of how do we get people to have more babies. Or at least that was the circumstance under which I was seeing a lot of these articles.

Royce: Speaking of your comment game of what is the timestamp of what you found to be surprising and horrifying, I think you skewed the metric by mentioning the American healthcare system.

Courtney: I will laugh so hard if all of our non-American listeners mark that moment. But the thing about this is – and where this fits into this conversation – is that giving a $5,000 bonus check to a new mother should be so inoffensive and non objectionable that everyone should be like, “Oh yeah, sure, we should give mothers new money.” But it’s not a firm policy. It is supposed to be attention grabbing. It’s supposed to be the people for whom a $5,000 check handed over would just be like a little nice. Like, they’re so financially stable that they’re not concerned about the cost of giving birth, so they’re like, “That would be a nice little bonus.” Those people are supposed to look at people who understand poverty and medical debt in this country, who are furious because they know $5,000 will not do anything meaningful to them in that situation. They’re supposed to look at those people and go, “Why don’t those people want to help mothers?”

Courtney: So at risk of falling into the trap, this is to get people talking and discoursing and outraged, or praising Trump if they’re financially privileged enough that 5000 would just be a little nice. And this is the kind of person who doesn’t need that to give birth. That’s the kind of person who, if they get $5,000, like they can put it in the bank, they can put it in the savings account. They aren’t going to need to immediately use it. But all of the surface level articles we’re seeing right now have talked a lot about falling birth rate, which we have talked about a lot on this podcast. Trump has coined himself the fertilization president. He said that. Did you– did you see a clip of that, Royce? Did you see him saying, “I’m the fertilization president”?

Royce: No, I try to not listen to Trump.

Courtney: That’s so fair. I envy your restraint. But perhaps this is a good opportunity now to set up the sort of two camps of pronatalists right wing people that there are. There are the kind of Christian nationalists, the ones that we’ve spoken about a lot, who oppose platonic marriage, they oppose gay marriage, they oppose trans people because they’re very in their own skewed sense of what biblical is. They think, you know, man and a woman were made this way and they must have kids and they must have kids under the institution of marriage. And those are the kind of folks who are obviously usually very anti abortion, but they’re also very often anti IVF. That is something we have talked about too. I know we talked about a case where there was actually a risk of a fertility clinic being, like, convicted of murder because of all the embryos that didn’t get implanted.

Courtney: So there’s that religious camp that opposes these technologies. But then there is this new version of the religious right wing that’s very, very pro technology. As long as the technology is being used to create more babies. And the subtext to that is more of the right kind of babies. So unfortunately, those two sides are working together. You’ll see those same two people in a room together discussing things. But Trump, at least, as the president, is very pro IVF. So when he is saying these things, he’s speaking directly to these very technology focused pronatalists. And the thing also to keep in mind about anything that’s going to be in the same realm as a $5,000 baby bonus, giving people money, it’s kind of been proven multiple times in multiple different ways that you literally cannot pay people to have children. Other countries that have tried to make some sort of financial incentive have failed at doing so because dollars to the average person is not the reason why they are having kids. Sometimes not having enough dollars is the reason why they don’t have kids, but even then, not as often as popular discourse might lead you to believe.

Royce: Yeah, and in these cases, I think the financial incentives show that these one-time payments, or tax breaks or whatever they do to try to encourage people to have kids, doesn’t offset the pressure of poverty for the percentage of people where that is the leading factor.

Courtney: Right. Exactly. And like tax credits is a big one that people discuss. That’s something we discussed in the outline of Project 2025, incentivizing tax credits for parents. And like, if done well and responsibly, is not inherently evil. I do think we should do more to help families and, specifically, children. But where do Simone and Malcolm fit into all this? Because we’ve mentioned Trump, Vance, Musk they all have positions. Well, the funny thing is, Musk has been getting a lot of publicity for his little DOGE project, which is its own little horror story. Turns out, one of the members of DOGE is Miles Collins, who is Malcolm Collins’s brother.

Courtney: And Miles Collins has connections to a fertility clinic that is currently facing labor lawsuits. Now Miles Collins and his wife, Brittany Collins, bought the Pacific Fertility Center of Los Angeles in 2019, where he served as president and his wife served as CEO. I don’t know nearly as much about this couple because they are not as prominent and headline grabbing as Malcolm and Simone are, but they seem to be doing the same power couple thing. And, given the purchase of a fertility clinic, I can assume they’re pretty well within the pronatalist ideology. And this is all alleged, but employees of the business have accused it of underpaying them and depriving them of lunch breaks.

Royce: Oh wow, I just caught up here. You talked about a fertility clinic breaking labor laws, and I was not thinking of employees.

Courtney: [Bursts out laughing] Yeah, the employees of the clinic.

Royce: Okay, I’m here now.

Courtney: [laughs] Were you just sitting here going, “What kinds of labor laws?”

Royce: Yeah, what– what were these, what were the situations that people giving birth were in?

Courtney: So that is the kind of person who is on the team that is just hacking and slashing apart all of the good public services. And Simone and Malcolm Collins too. Like, Simone Collins literally worked for Peter Thiel’s, like, private exclusive club for billionaires. And if you don’t know who Peter Thiel is, congratulations. Big, big, big, big financer of right wing political propaganda. Look him up, he’s terrible. I don’t want this episode to be just about him. But I also, come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve talked about him much on this podcast. So they often try to do this very moderate thing when they’re having these high profile articles. Like we talked about one of the articles.

Courtney: There’s another article that came out about Malcolm and Simone that I kind of decided not to talk about because it was– The result was mostly readers thinking these people are goofs. They’re so weird. Look at the way they live, look at the way they raise their kids. Malcolm Collins, like hit his kid in front of this all day interview with an investigative reporter. Like smacked him in the face, which is legal in the state they live, for some reason. And so a lot of people were just like, “These pronatalists who hit their children how terrible.” Or look at how weird they dress or look at how you know, hands off, they are just handing their kids iPads.

Courtney: And like, the thing you have to understand is these two are very, very good at getting attention. And they’re very, very good at treading the line of sounding reasonable and genuinely concerned about this population collapse that they’re concerned about and being totally outlandish and wacky that they’ll get like– they’ll get the memes, they’ll get the people clowning on them. And I think that’s part of their tactic. They’re like: do something ridiculous or look ridiculous or sound ridiculous with something that is, at the end of the day, not that big of a deal, like the way they dress, their very thick rimmed glasses, the way Simone literally wears a bonnet. I mean, the jokes write themselves. People often compare her to the Handmaid’s Tale because of the bonnet. Like that’s just how the internet talks about them.

Courtney: But then when you look at these big articles, a lot of what they’re saying, like, can seem reasonable to the average person. But here is a policy that they have directly proposed to the Trump administration. And we know they have the ear of Elon Musk. We know Malcolm’s brother is in DOGE. We know that JD Vance and Trump appeal to people like this in their talking points about needing more children. They’ve proposed a national medal of motherhood to give, like, literally a military style medal to mothers with six or more children. And that is like literally something the Nazis did. There was very literally Nazi motherhood medals because they were also obsessed with increasing the German population. These– not only the size of the German population, but the health. That’s where we get into a lot of, you know, the racism and the Nazi shit of the era. I don’t have to tell you what the Nazi shit is.

Royce: Yeah, there were bronze, silver, and gold medals that were given from 1939 up until 1945.

Courtney: Yeah, and like in 1933, shortly after the Nazis, like, rose to power, they cracked down even harder on abortion penalties. Abortion was already criminalized at the time, but they made that stricter just a few years before enacting this motherhood thing. So obviously, we’ve had Roe vs Wade overturned. A lot less people have access to a safe abortion in this country now as a direct result of Trump’s first term and the Supreme Court justices he appointed. And of course, right now they’re saying, “Oh, it’s just, you know, any mother with six or more children,” but if history is rhyming again, in Nazi Germany it had to be an Aryan mother. It had to be a non-disabled mother. It had to be a baby who was genetically healthy. If you were blind or deaf, if you had anything that they thought could be heritable, you do not get this medal because we do not want your babies.

Courtney: And Simone Collins has been quoted as saying, “I think this administration is inherently pronatalist.” And I think she’s right. And it’s an incredibly weird line to toe too, because when you see Elon Musk in the White House doing press conferences with, like, his– one of his sons on his shoulders, like some people are looking at that being like what a good dad. And yes, we should normalize children. And that’s so weird and complicated because I agree, but not like this. I do think children should have more access to our world and the community, and it should be less frowned upon to bring your child wherever you need to go. I do think that is a social change that is going to take a lot of time and restructuring of some of our social habits to get there. But in a case like this, you have the wealthiest man on the planet, who is an unelected official, talking about major changes to our country that is impacting the lives of many Americans, and he’s got a young child with him.

Courtney: They’re showing his face to the world. Meanwhile, this kid’s mother is, like, terrified for his safety and being like, “Please don’t take our son to these press conferences.” And that is a very, very real, valid concern. But my issue with this isn’t like, “Oh, Elon Musk is just a hardworking father who had to bring his kid into work today.” Like, this is pure optics. This is propaganda. You cannot tell me that Elon Musk just had to bring his kid in. They are signaling to their base. And I think in Elon Musk’s case, it’s probably a show of power too. Because he clearly has so many kids with so many women, often done through IVF.

Courtney: I believe Elon Musk’s trans daughter, who has spoken out against him, says that he prefers to pre-select for boys as opposed to girls.

Courtney: And a guy like this wants a lot of kids. He’s used the word legion. “I’m building a legion.” He thinks his genes are so perfect, and special, and superior that– Like, this is– This is what world domination looks like. He’s like, “I need to have as many kids as possible to save humanity, because my genes and mine alone will do it.” But enough of the exposition, let’s get into the terror of it all. Simone and Malcolm Collins are weird for me because I find them extremely fascinating. I’ve listened to a lot of episodes of their podcast. And in fact, I don’t know, I fell into a hole of listening to them at one point and I was trying to talk to you about it, Royce, and you were like, “I just can’t listen to these people.”

Royce: Yeah, you find ideas that are different, even if they’re wrong in a lot of ways, fascinating. I find them frustrating. Because once I’ve reached a point where, okay, this, the foundation of this person’s knowledge is fundamentally flawed, hearing more of it just makes it worse. Like, like we’ve already– Like, this is wrong. You’re still talking. Well, it’s still wrong. You continue to talk. It’s still wrong. Because the foundation of all of the things you were saying was incorrect.

Courtney: Which I get to an extent. But it’s not just their ideas that grab me, it’s the way they talk about them. Because they are, if nothing else, probably genius marketers. The way they grab attention and toe the line between absurd and meme worthy, and maybe kind of reasonable. Well, hiding a lot of their more out there views under the surface, where most people are not accessing them, is very, very fascinating to me. And the way they use words. Because we’ve talked about when going through, like, the Project 2025 training videos or recent executive disorders where people are trying to legislate language, like, this word means this and we’re only using sex, we aren’t using the word gender. They, like, also are very careful about words. They say that– I think they’re acutely aware of what words and phrases have a bad rap and are not going to reach different people, and they make a cognitive choice to try to change their words in a way that I think is very effective, and is probably a large part of why they get so many high profile articles written about them to get more eyes on their cause.

Courtney: Like they will often outright reject that they are right wing. They will at times say that this is not a right wing cause. “We are not right wing.” They will say that they were previously liberals and if you dig deep enough, they’ll talk about the woke mind virus being the problem for society. But they stopped calling it the woke mind virus. They started calling it the urban monoculture. The urban monoculture is the problem. And instead of calling themselves explicitly right wing, they’ll call themselves pragmatists. They’re like, “We’re pragmatists.” And they’ll publish books like the pragmatist guide to x, y and z. And they’re like, “Well, we’re not hyper conservative, we’re just pragmatic.” And their use of these words, and the way I’ve seen them use them and evolve over time is really, really interesting. And I think they should only be studied for marketing and manipulation of words, and not at all any of their underlying ideologies.

Royce: I mean, what you’re describing is just the style of propaganda that always sits in front of indoctrination into some sort of extremist ideology or cults, because they’re basically the same thing.

Courtney: So let me ask you this, because we made an agreement when I was first hyperfocusing on these two. Because there was a period of time where I was trying to figure out why I was so fascinated with them, because I’ve encountered other pronatalists that I’m not as fascinated with. And so I was like, there’s something about them that’s different, what is it and why? So I was, you know, consuming some of their content, trying to figure that out, and we made an agreement that I was not going to talk to you about them because you can’t handle it. How bad do you think this gets? How deep do you think it gets? Because, whatever you’re envisioning, I’ve got a feeling that it’s worse.

Royce: I mean, I’m not expecting to be surprised. You’ve already touched on the bubbles that they’re in, the ideologies that they surround. I assume that pretty much everything that they say can somehow be traced back to things that people tend to look back on as some of the worst parts of, like, relatively recent humanity. Like what could these two possibly come up with that wasn’t thought of from the 1800s era of eugenics and scientific racism up to the Holocaust? Like.

Courtney: Well, it’s really fascinating that you say that because they call themselves techno-Puritans. They’re like, “We follow techno-Puritanism.” And I’ve heard them describe it as, like, “We should have the ideology of a utopian society on a hill that the Puritans envisioned, but we should have the scientific drive and the hunger of like Victorian era scientists.” So that’s fun, because Victorians famously loved eugenics.

Courtney: So I found their city state proposal that they have tried and, as far as I know, thank goodness, failed to pitch investors on. It is a 15-page PowerPoint called The Next Empire: Leveraging a Changing World to Save Civilization. [reading] “Is it possible to create a region with a high economic output and a high fertility rate?” Because this is another thing they will admit they’re like, “In countries where women get more rights, they have fewer children.” That’s a thing they openly admit.

Courtney: But then they’ll try to say we’re not saying we should take women out of the workforce, or that you have to choose between being a parent or furthering your career. And, like famously, Simone will be like, “Yes, right after giving birth I’m pulling up my laptop and I am working from my hospital bed while I’m in labor, because I just love working so much and I want to prove that you can do both.” Which is not everyone’s dream. Let me tell you that. They say in this slide: [reading] “Fertility rates are falling in every developed nation across the world, especially in technologically engaged regions with high economic output. This yields a unique opportunity to create a charter city, poised to become a dominant world power in the future. In a world with rapidly collapsing populations, it is those with high fertility, technologically engaged human populations who wield the most power and influence. Almost every nation in the world is based on a failed experiment.”

Courtney: And they go on to talk about literally George Washington, how his experiment failed. And they say, [reading] “When creating new governing systems under which large populations will live, it makes sense to go with systems that seem relatively safe and functional while disturbing as much power to stakeholders as possible to lower the odds of revolt. Nevertheless, if one were to craft the next world power with an opt-in population, they would almost certainly build something very different. Why would an existing country secede land to this kind of experiment?” They make their case for, hey, this will actually be good for everyone. Nothing all that horrifying yet. But they make the case for why they think this can work. They think it can be appealing to the host country, it can generate revenue, it can generate citizens. So how are they structuring their new city-state?

Courtney: [reading] “No holds barred medical research. Enshrined into the constitution that the only medical research not allowed is that which lacks informed consent. This attracts both extant and cutting-edge businesses to develop therapies and innovations, including artificial wombs and human genetic modification, that are in high demand but nearly impossible to develop in a heavily regulated environment. This will also create a medical tourism industry. Second, AI citizenship. Enshrined into the Constitution citizen rights for synthetic intelligences. As AI develops, much of the world’s economic opportunity will be generated by AIs themselves. However, restrictions on AI owning property or capital will make most nations difficult places to host these centers of economic production.”

Courtney: And then write the government into blockchain. But, most importantly, the government must incentivize the creation of highly productive economic actors. Now this is a part I really can’t wait to talk about. Their governing structure. [reading] “The proposed government is run by a single dictator.” They specify it is a dictator in the text, but they’re calling it the executor. But in parentheses the first time: Dictator. [reading] “Who has full control of the government’s laws and operational structure during their tenure. This maximizes efficiency and flexibility, while also allowing for the judicious and timely removal of an inefficient dictator or one who exploits their position for personal gain.”

Royce: How.

Courtney: Oh, we’ll get there. They have a reason. But note: dictators can be AIs. It’s early to specify, or it’s important to specify that early.

Royce: So their how to become a world power thesis is the race to the singularity.

Courtney: Yeah, it gets– It goes even further downhill from here. So once every four years, the dictator must be unanimously selected by three wards. At any time, a dictator can be immediately recalled and replaced if ever two wards decide so.

Royce: Something dictators in the past have famously been willing to do.

Courtney: [reading] “Dictators are therefore given much more power than the head of any existing governing structure. However, they are also easier and faster to recall.” The problem isn’t dictators! The problem is that if we don’t like the dictator, it’s hard to get rid of them. That’s the only problem. So there are three wards they call the ward of the present, the ward of the future, and the ward of the past. Because they had to go Christmas Carol with this. And each one is selected in a different way. And this is like– If the dictator didn’t tell you how anti-democracy they actually are. [reading] “The ward of the present. The voting power of citizens in this election is determined by their total tax contribution to the governing system minus the amount the governing system has spent on them, to determine their net utility to the state. Any salary paid to the government employee is treated the same as payouts like welfare. And if an individual wants to pay more than their share of taxes for additional voting power, title and privileges, they can.”

Royce: Okay, so realistically, the governing body is chosen by a cabal of like 10 people.

Courtney: It’s the Elon Musk’s of the world.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: It’s the Collinses of the world. It’s the tech CEOs, it’s the tech bros. That’s what it is. [reading] “The ward of the future. A citizen’s voting power in this election is determined by the net utility to the state of all citizens they have brought to the state, either by having and raising citizens, coding them (in the case of AI), or founding them (in the case of corporations), plus half the net utility of any secondary recruits their direct recruits brought, (e.g. grandchildren or spin-off AIs/companies).” So, ward one if you have more money, you can vote more. Ward 2, if you have more children or companies or computers, you can vote more. And then the Ward of the Past is elected by a vote from all past living dictators. [reading] “This lowers the influence of political parties and enables those with the most knowledge of being the dictator to have a say in who gets the job. But why not one vote, one person?” Their next slide says.

Courtney: [reading] “Our system recognizes that competence is not evenly distributed among a population and rewards individuals with more control over governing decisions when they have demonstrated, proven, measurable competence. Our system furthermore lowers the voice of those who already work within the government or receive government support, as they are adversely incentivized to protect their own positions and privileges. Productivity is not the only contributory factor that warrants governing power. The system must also reward those who raise and build productive elements in a society, while punishing those who bring citizens into the system that are net drains on resources.” So hey, do you have a child who is disabled and unable to work a full-time job? That’s a drain on our resources. We want the system to punish you.

Courtney: The next slide is entitled a tiered society. [reading] “Existing governing systems assume that every citizen has equal value, when they objectively do not.” They say that their system should be a state that only attracts productive immigrants. “And, to this end, not all citizens are equal. Within the state, individuals can be rewarded with titles and additional privileges, all as determined by the dictator, by opting into lump sum payments or higher tax schemes. This is akin to paying for a premium membership, but at a state level. The set of laws an individual has to follow is determined by their title, (e.g. a person opting into paying more taxes may have different speed limits that apply to them and have reserved parking spaces.) Wards of the state, individuals with net negative contribution scores who are not state workers are always treated as a separate class. The consequences of this status are determined by the current dictator.” Okay, so if the current dictator decides, I don’t know, lock them all up, deport them from the country, kill them all...

Royce: I was going to go in the opposite direction. Because this idea shows not only, like, a very fundamental lack of empathy, but a complete unawareness of, like, human philosophy, of human nature, of past civilizations. Like this thing would collapse so quickly. But my question was going to be: why can’t the people on the bottom just move? Move out of said city-state and go to somewhere where they’re actually treated as, like, people?

Courtney: Well, it does say this system is designed to encourage productive immigration while also pressuring non-productive citizens to leave the country.

Royce: Really? Okay. Well then, their– their city would immediately collapse because you’d have a bunch of CEOs with no practical skills and no one to do the work.

Courtney: Oops!

Royce: So, well, that’s what I was going to say. The thing that the dictator would do in that instance is say, “Oh no, all of our workers are leaving,” and all of a sudden they’re legalizing slavery for the bottom class.

Courtney: It sounds like the dictator is literally allowed to do that. But it’s okay, I’m sure their ward system is a fine system of checks and balances. I’m sure if it ever got to that point, clearly two wards would be like, “Maybe we got to get this guy out.”

Royce: And instead replace him with a ChatGPT version of himself. They’re going to have each dictator spend a certain amount of hours per day speaking into a microphone that is being analyzed for text.

Courtney: [laughs] So what is their social structure? [reading] “For a person or entity to become a citizen, they must either start a new tribe or be accepted by an existing tribe. Tribes are associated with cultures and cultural norms, (e.g. Catholics, Mormons, etc.) The individual’s tribe is responsible for social services, medical care, schooling, social safety nets, etc. The individual consumes and can demand independent taxes that are collected by the state and distributed to the tribal group.”

Royce: So there are two examples of tribes, are religious institutions known to closet away enormous sums of money.

Courtney: Yeah, but what I want to know is if they’re taking these taxes to the state and talking about how we need people to contribute economically to the state and the state is not providing any social services at all…?

Royce: Yeah, how would–?

Courtney: Where’s that money going?

Royce: I mean, it’s going to all of the corporate executives running the country, which is another reason why this would crash and burn immediately, because the level of consumption at the top would be extraordinary.

Courtney: Oh yeah. Just wait till we get to the individual bonds, their two tier tax system, because it’s like literally a pyramid scheme–

Royce: Yeah!

Courtney: –for procreation.

Royce: Oh, okay. I was gonna say this entire city-state sounds like a pyramid scheme. Like, you design it without telling anyone, for it to last like five years. [Courtney laughs] And then it collapses and all the people at the top just–

Courtney: See ya!

Royce: –take the money that was generated.

Courtney: So an individual can switch tribes if they choose to, but only after both paying a fine and paying back their tribal group for all services rendered to them. [reading] “For example, if an individual joined the Catholic group for their good medical care, they would not be able to deconvert immediately after a medical issue was dealt with unless they paid for the tribe’s net tax loss on their medical expenses. Individuals moving out of their parents’ homes, as well as individuals marrying for the first time, are exempt from this rule. Tribal groups can apply any restrictions they want on joining and can impose additional laws on their members, (e.g. a tribe may enforce monogamy, but the tribe is responsible for internally policing.)” So individual bonds, this is the one that I had to read this slide so many times.

Courtney: [reading] “Every individual, AI, or company registered in the state pays two tax streams. One is paid to the state like normal taxes, while the other is paid to their bondholders. The initial owner of an individual’s bond is the individual’s creators. For example, a child’s bond would be split 50% between their parents. Some tribes may also demand a portion of this bond in exchange for membership.” Like, if the Mormon community might want 50% of this bond for every child born within their community. So literally some of the taxes you pay are going to your parents once you start paying taxes, because they created you. They brought you into this world, so you pay them back for doing that.

Royce: Yeah, so you’re– You’re literally born into debt in a classist society where your drain on the society determines your voting power.

Courtney: Yep. This system, however – they say, the bond system – “Is designed for three purposes. One: it yields a direct and large cash benefit to having a child and raising them well. This cash benefit exactly scales with the presumed economic productivity of the child, as parents can sell their children shares.”

Royce: I keep thinking you’re going to stop the sentence like a word early. “Parents can sell their children.” [Courtney laughs] Earlier you said like the owner of a person’s bond, and my mind put a period after ‘person’, and then you said another word.

Courtney: [reading] “These shares will be worth less if parents do not raise their child to be economically productive. Two, it provides an economic incentive for those with capital to invest in those without, like children born into disadvantaged families. For example, if an otherwise smart kid was born into a disadvantaged family and their parents traded or sold their shares at a discount to an elite educational institution, that institution would be financially incentivized to educate that child, to help them in any way it can. We imagine most of the time these shares will be sold to educational institutions or other types of companies that specialize in improving people’s economic status, as that will be in the best interest of both parents and children. And three, it provides a large economic incentives for companies, educational centers, and cultural groups to study methods for raising economically productive individuals.” So– [sighs]

Royce: And you mean to tell me this entire 15-page PowerPoint manifesto didn’t get any investors?

Courtney: Doesn’t sound like it’s gotten any investors yet.

Royce: I wonder why!

Courtney: But they are quite literally not thinking about situations such as disability. Because that’s a big concern in my mind for something like this. But in their mind, and they’re practicing what they preach, they’re like, “Well, if we incentivize all fertility based technologies, including experimental technologies, we’re just going to gene select. We’re going to gene select kids who do not have what we deem to be undesirable traits.” They, in their own lives, are already doing this in a very weird pseudo-scientific way. They’re like, gene selecting for IQ for all of their own children. And they’re– they– they’ve kind of admitted that IQ is the biggest first thing they look at. They’re like, “We refuse to have a child with a lower IQ than either of us.” And then after that, you know, maybe lower risks of cancers or other things.

Courtney: Anytime someone does bring up eugenics, they– they’re like, “No, we’re not– We’re not selecting out for autism because we’re a little autistic. Elon Musk is a little autistic. Autistic people are kind of the geniuses that are going to save us anyway. So why would we select out for that?” And it’s really quite startling that they literally have this 15 page city-state proposal manifesto and a couple of articles have talked about it, but it has not gotten nearly the same reach as, “Oh my gosh, this guy hit his kid in front of a reporter. He knew the reporter was going to see him hit his kid.” Like, why is this not the first thing anybody talks about when we discuss the pronatalists? And the fact that they’re actively trying to incorporate pronatalist ideology into our current government while also trying to start a brand new one from scratch with these warped ideas?

Courtney: Because they’re going to make it in a situation like this so that, like, eugenics, gene selection is going to basically be required to function in a society like this. Because, if they are saying an all-powerful dictator gets to decide what happens to you and your kid, if you have a kid that we deem is a drain on society…? Absolutely not. And then compare that to other things we’ve heard recently, we have talked about how JD Vance has said that people with more– like people with kids should get more votes than people without them. We have people in power right now who are trying to get us closer to this. And what’s disappointing is the honesty. Like we already have a tiered justice system. We already do. They’re just enshrining it into law. They’re, like, dropping all pretense of trying to protect fair and equal access to our judicial system. They’re like, “We don’t have it now, so let’s make it worse and even more obvious and just tell everybody that that’s what’s going on.”

Courtney: And publicly– And they’ve admitted this, publicly they’ll say, “Oh, this isn’t just for elites. We want to help anybody who wants to have more children, anybody who wants to have a lot of children. We want to help them get the resources to do that.” Like this direct quote is: [reading] “When we talk to reporters, we’re very, oh, this isn’t just for elites, but in truth, we do target the elites.” That’s a direct quote on this Guardian article I just pulled up. All– all of the things I’m referencing, by the way, going to be in the show notes on our website and the description box on YouTube, so you can pull up all of these and read these quotes and see the slideshow for yourself.

Courtney: And maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re already so anti democratic. But, like Simone Collins actually is running for state house, like in Pennsylvania, so she has attempted to become a politician. And some of the quotes about what she’s trying to do, like low cost and highly effective ways to sway election results, which included printing out hundreds and hundreds of mail-in ballot applications, filling them out and sending them to potential Republican voters to just sign and send back. Which is really, really interesting. Because the Republican Party is the one who is trying to do away with mail-in ballots because of all the fraud that they’re saying that there is.

Royce: And yet somehow not surprising.

Courtney: Somehow not surprising. Their religious views are very odd and interesting because they’re kind of religious but not really Christian. But they’re trying to raise their kids to have a secondary religion. So they, like, just recently started celebrating like Hanukkah and Jewish holidays. Because by their logic– They kind of seem to me to talk about religion as a social technology, which I think is fascinating. And I can think of about six people in my life that I want to sit down at a table and have like a late night conversation about, because I think the places it would go would be interesting. But they kind of see it as the cure to the woke mind virus. They’re like, “So many people have fallen to the woke mind virus because their religion failed them, their religion was cruel to them, their religion tried to break them, so they shrugged off all religion and became leftists.” I don’t know.

Courtney: And so their entire ideology is: we have developed our own patched together religion of techno-Puritanism that we’re going to raise our children by, but if our kids don’t like our weird ideas, we want to give them a secondary religion they can fall back on, because otherwise the only place they have to turn is the urban monoculture. So very weird to choose Judaism to do that. Because apparently Simone found out recently that she’s Jewish. And like, recently learned about Jewish, like, matrilineal lines, and she’s kind of like, “Oh, I guess I technically qualify for this. Yes, Judaism is a perfect backup religion for my kids.” They were apparently also flirting with Mormonism because they like Mormons. Except Mormonism has bad branding right now because of all the ex-Mormons speaking out against Mormonism online. So weird way to choose religions for your kids.

Courtney: But– And I just– I was thinking back to that podcast where I was listening to them describe this and why they’re doing this for their kids and having a backup religion, I was thinking about all this while I’m looking at their tribal system of religions within this city-state. Because does it have to exclusively be religions? They said you can create a new one, but I don’t know, how would they feel about having a queer tribe? Is that allowed? And so the way they also kind of see their really warped scientific views as coinciding with religion is like the idea of predestination. Like, in religious situations where this religious group is like, yes, we follow the one true God and everyone else who doesn’t is damned, and we are– we are the chosen people, we are the selected. They’re like, “Yeah, we agree that whether you matter and manage to become a virtuous, productive person is predetermined,” but instead of an all powerful God creating a chosen people, they’re like, “It’s IQ, it’s intelligence, it’s technology.”

Courtney: So in a way, they’re kind of playing God by being like, “We are selecting from our embryos.” Which they adamantly refuse to admit is eugenics, by the way. They think it’s only eugenics when the state is mandating this over the people. But they’re like, “It’s literally our own embryos. We’re selecting our own potential children. All of these could have become our potential children. So what we’re doing is not eugenics.” But I do hate to break it to them, creating a city-state that actively and intentionally punishes anyone they deem to be a drain on society – I don’t care how many technological options or bonds and stocks and financial incentives you throw at them as possibilities – that’s eugenics.

Courtney: And some people who work closely with them will actually just own the word eugenics and just try to normalize it and be like, “Eugenics isn’t inherently a problem. Eugenics is good actually.” But then they also literally have famous ethno-nationalists who are talking to them and working with them and going to the same conferences as them. You have people who literally proudly espouse the Great Replacement theory running in these same circles. Jared Taylor being one example. Notorious white nationalist who has advocated for deporting legal migrants and has been quoted as saying: “There is no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together.”

Courtney: And when people say, “Hey, you’re hanging out with this guy. That doesn’t sound great.” Then they’ll say things like, “Racism is literally so stupid. We are– We are so not racist, it’s wild that people would call us racist. We think racists are stupid actually.” But then they’ll say, [reading] “If you have daily reminders that people who look, act and think like you might be – quote – ‘replaced’, that is a strong motivation to have kids.” So they’re like, we’re not racist, but the racists help our cause. And actually this might be kind of funny, because there’s no way to talk about all of the podcasts I’ve listened to and all of their ideologies and the weird things they say. But, Royce, I think you should just pull up their YouTube channel and just look at some of the thumbnails and the titles. Because they do the most out there, screen grabby, clickbaity titles. And I laugh because we have recently been accused of using clickbait titles. But these two, these two…

Royce: I don’t know what I’m looking for. It looks just like common YouTube low effort thumbnails and titles.

Courtney: Oh, I thought for sure you’d see some titles that are. Maybe– maybe I should have had you do this before we got to how bad they actually are and their little manifesto, because like–

Royce: Like, I’ve scrolled a little bit and I don’t see anything that looks interesting, and also– I mean they aren’t even going edgy or anything like that for the most part.

Courtney: Oh, they absolutely do sometimes. They’re like–

Royce: I mean there’s definitely– like there’s obvious conspiracy theories all over the place.

Courtney: I mean they’ll– They’ll have titles like, “My husband’s not gay. Why we stand same sex attracted men marrying women?” And they’ll have several questions about, like, can women still own property and have high fertility? That one wasn’t a direct quote, I’m just trying to pull from my memory, but they’ll.

Royce: Well, they’re putting out like, what– Five videos a week? It definitely looks like a content mill to me.

Courtney: Yeah, some of these titles just still baffle me, even though I’ve listened to some of these. Like, “How autism and anorexia unlocked the mechanism behind gender dysphoria.” Random fun fact, just because when he threw it out once randomly I couldn’t believe he did, but apparently Malcolm is a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell. So it seems like maybe everyone in his family has a Lord Protector Complex. But yeah, I guess, the biggest takeaway from things like this is don’t be distracted by the jokes and the surface level criticisms that tend to get circulated a lot more. Because, like I said, a lot of these articles are like, “No, we’re trying to help everyone.” Or they’ll even say like, “We’re trying to help the left, because the left as a culture is not having enough babies. And we think several cultures is good actually, so we’re trying to help you. We’re telling you to have more kids too.” And it’s like–

Courtney: But all of the logic you’re using about why you think we all need to have more babies is not logic that is going to resonate with left leaning people. So you have this plausible deniability now where you’re like, “No, no, no, this isn’t about one side, I’m trying to help everyone, I’m also trying to help you even.” Your dog-whistling to the right at every step of the way. And like, yeah, the $5,000 baby bonus. You have them talking about it. For example, Simone agrees that $5,000 is probably not enough to move the needle for people considering children, and Malcolm says he opposes universal payments to low income people who have children because they are already a drain on the tax system. Oh my god.

Courtney: And like you don’t see those in the big articles that go viral. You see them in smaller, independent articles. And a lot of the things people on the left say that will help people have more children, like paid parental leave, like these are things these people also outright disagree with. Like Simone here, when asked about paid parental leave, she says, “No, don’t agree with that. Women need to keep working right after giving birth.” And she says, “I think the biggest thing that would help is stronger work from home policies.” Which is so funny, because the self declared left leaning guy we recently talked to, who also thinks people need to have more sex, is like, “Work from home is a disaster.” And that’s why I’m so fascinated. Every time people look at a guy like Scott Galloway and think, “Yeah, this guy’s got it all figured out.” It’s like, at the end of the day, you are kind of saying the same thing as these other people, just not to the same extreme. And I hate that Simone Collins has a better view on working from home than Scott Galloway does.

Royce: I mean it’s because they do a lot of work from home, so they know how valuable it is. Meanwhile, Scott is a career CEO who only accomplishes things in office rooms.

Courtney: Yeah, I mean–

Royce: It’s all– it’s all personal experience. That’s the problem with people who struggle to empathize with other people is they can only understand their own experience.

Courtney: Mmm. But yeah, I think it’s just important to keep the natural conclusion of these things in mind, both from history and from these proposed futures. Because think about this in conjunction with all the quotes we’ve heard recently. I mean, Trump has said immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. Trump said, oh, we’re only going to go after the bad ones, the ones who commit crimes. And now we have people being deported and shipped literally to concentration camps who are probably never going to come home, even though the Supreme Court is saying bring them back. We are already living in a fascist state and it has been getting more and more aggressive and transparent.

Courtney: But this is not just a thought experiment anymore. It’s not just a cautionary tale. These are people with immense power and influence and positions in government and they’re in these elite clubs. They have the ear of billionaires. And we know what they want. And it’s fucking terrifying. And like an article here from the BBC also says that Malcolm and Simone are discussing pronatalist policies with the Heritage Foundation, whom we’ve spoken to a lot. These are not just fringe people, they are in the clique. And they have, quote, “submitted draft executive orders to the Trump administration.” So Simone and Malcolm Collins are sitting down in a room at the Heritage Foundation writing executive orders to send to Trump just to sign. Terrifying, absolutely terrifying.

Courtney: And when you think of their, “Yeah, we’re not even gonna sugarcoat it, we want to live in a dictatorship,” is even more alarming when we do go back to all of those 2025 training videos and how we’ve seen it all start to play out already in the first hundred days of the Trump administration, where they are going for a unitary executive, which used to be a fringe politics– like a fringe political judicial philosophy. They are trying at every turn to funnel as much power as possible to the executive branch, to the president, and they’re just trying to kneecap all of our other systems of checks and balances because they literally do want a dictatorship.

Courtney: And I am sick and tired of seeing online discourse where people would say things like, “These people literally want a dictator,” and everyone’s like, “No, that’s– that’s extreme, that’s– that’s not what they want. Why– Why do you always go to hyperbole? Why do you always over exaggerate? Why are you catastrophizing?” No, they’re literally saying it. It’s written here in their own little slideshow. So I am, unfortunately, very sure that this is not the last time we are going to talk about the pronatalist movement, but I think that’s gonna do it for today’s rabbit hole. So that is going to bring us to today’s featured MarketplACE vendor.

Courtney: Big shout out to Prof Chris Ceary: consulting and sensitivity/compassion reader for ace/aro/enby identities and psychological concepts. Chris studies psychology of gender and sexuality and can offer expertise to your project at negotiable prices. This is a really awesome opportunity for any creatives out there who are working on writing a book, writing a video game. I know we have such a creative audience. And, in fact, we often get contacted by people saying, “Hey, I want to write an ace character, can you help me with it?” We do not always have time to take all of those requests, so definitely check out this MarketplACE vendor. It looks like this vendor has consulted on multiple projects for Marvel comics. That’s awesome. And is a doctoral student, so anything mental health or mental illness related, therapy, gender, sexuality, definitely reach out if those services could be of use to you. As always, thank you all so much for being here and we will talk to you all, same time, same place, next week.