A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - The Breeders Who Want You to Have More Kids Right Now

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

Last week, the New York Times reported: “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children”. But who exactly is behind this push, and why, and what does it have to do with Elon Musk’s breeding compulsion? The answer is that “pronatalism”, a far-right movement that looks and smells a lot like a eugenics cult (despite what its leaders say), has entered the White House. Today, Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report and Moira Donegan of In Bed With the Right help explain how a particularly creepy strain of doomsday misogyny found itself at the center of the Republican party. COME SEE A BIT FRUITY LIVE! Tickets are on sale here. Listen to bonus episodes on Patreon! Thanks to today’s sponsors! Protect yourself online, wherever you go. Get a discount on NordVPN at https://www.nordvpn.com/fruity.  Start managing your money better and cancel unwanted expenses at https://www.rocketmoney.com/fruity.  Find me on Instagram. Find A Bit Fruity on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we're screening our embryos for is charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. And welcome to A BitFruity. I'm Matt Bernstein, and things are getting really, really weird. Last week, an article was published in the New York Times titled, White House assesses ways to persuade women to have more children. It detailed ways which the Trump administration is currently thinking about incentivizing people who don't have children to have them, and people who do have children to have more of them.

These included a one-time, quote-unquote, baby bonus of $5,000 to new mothers, which obviously doesn't even cover the fees it costs to have a child. It included government-funded programs to teach women about their menstrual cycles, not to empower them to learn more about their bodies and deepen their own bodily autonomy, but so they'd know when they're able to get pregnant and encourage them to seize on those opportunities. They included reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships for married parents, which to me sounds a lot like diversity, equity, and inclusion. They included an executive order which would award mothers of six or more children with the National Medal of Motherhood,

a proposal which chillingly resembles the cross of honor of the German mother, a tiered, decorative medal Hitler introduced for German mothers in Nazi Germany, bronze for four or five children, silver for six or seven, and gold for eight or more. Jewish German mothers were ineligible for this award. That particular proposal was submitted to the White House by Simone and Malcolm Collins, two names which when I read them in that New York Times article sounded really familiar to me. And then I remembered that this is famously the Brooklyn hipster-looking young couple that's been doing a media tour for the last two years about how they've been, quote, breeding to save mankind. All of this, coupled with J.D. Vance's frequent disparaging of childless

women, while abortion is no longer a legal right in large swaths of this country, and the simultaneously ever more dominant influence of Tradwife Megastar influencers like Ballerina Farm feels bad. It's giving handmaid's tale. Pranatalism, the movement, which says that it's women's, well, some women's, civilizational duty to have children has a firm grip on the White House. And for normal people who don't spend our days talking about the civilizational consequences of declining birth rates, I'm worried that we might not fully be grasping what that means for us and how we can fight back. So today, we're going to dive in to all of that.

And to help me, I have enlisted two people who know honestly a lot more about this than I do and that most people do, Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report, and Moira Donigan of In Bed with the Right. Welcome, welcome. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having me, Matt. I'm such a big fan of your show. I am too. I am thrilled to be here. I think this is going to be really fun. Agreed. Fun? You think it's going to be fun? I mean, if you consider, I would say, like, the cross-section of evangelical Christians assault on our reproductive rights with the techno-fascist, with the trad wife culture and then also good old-fashioned racist eugenics. It's fun in the way like looking under rock at the squirmy stuff is fun.

You know, like fun like a David Cronenberg film. It's going to be, it's going to be weird. But we're going to be very interested in what we find. Sure, sure. I guess. Before we get in too far, if you would like more of the show, you can get bonus episodes over on Patreon. I just yesterday put up a new one with Cat 10 Barge.

We dug our analytical claws into a one Ariel Scarcella, the internet's most infamous Make America Great Again, a lesbian influencer. And coming up very soon in just a couple weeks, I start a short live show tour of the podcast, which I'm so excited for. I am doing live shows in the end. of May and the beginning of June in Toronto, Chicago, Philly, Brooklyn, Seattle, L.A., San

Francisco, and Portland. If you would like to grab a last minute ticket to that, you can do so. I will link it in the episode description. Okay, I feel like a good entry point to this is the Collins couple, Malcolm and Simone Collins, because some people might be aware of them, and if they're not chronically online, they are happier people than us, and they don't yet know about them. But this is a fascinating couple. So what do you guys know? know about them. Like you, Matt, I have been looking at the Collins is kind of the way you look at like a car wreck on the side of the highway. You know, I cannot look away. And they are really seeking out our attention, right? These are the founders of pronatalism.org, which is a website that encourages

people to have as many children as possible. And they have really positioned themselves as the mascots for the American pro-natalism movement, in part by soliciting a lot of media attention for their own quest to have as many children as possible. I believe they currently have four with number five on the way. Yeah. And I would also say that it's important to note that they have ties to Peter Thiel, who has his fingers in the pots of many of these kind of more niche online, far right movements. They talk about how we need to have more children because birth rates are declining and we can get into that philosophy in just a bit. But to give people a preview, the claim is also false. Like the growth rate of births is expected to decline, but it is still

growing. It's just that the growth rate is expected to decline. And that's largely driven by a wealthier Western nation. So when there's... this talk of population decline, it's important to note that they are not talking about people in the global South and people with brown or black skin. I think it's also interesting to talk about who they mean in the U.S., right? Because while the United States has had a modest decline in births per household, especially over the past like 20 years or so, that has been almost entirely from a drop off in the teen birth rate, which is really collapsed as a result. of policy interventions designed to get sexual education to teenagers, to get contraceptions to

teenagers, and to encourage teenagers to postpone childbearing in favor of education, right? So these people, I think Emma, your point's really well taken. They're telling us to be very afraid of a problem that doesn't actually exist. Well, to them it may exist, right, in the sense that the point that they're gesturing towards is not the actual point that they're really. thinking about, right? So you'll hear them talk a lot about civilization. But if they were to put something like Western in front of civilization, it might make their arguments a little bit more clear because they're talking about specific kinds of birth rates. Wow, I really thought it would take us like at least 20 minutes to get to just like, this is a eugenics movement.

In fact, we're less than two bullet points in on my outline and we've already, well, fair enough. We might be bearing the lead a little, though, because we've talked about, you know, the Collins, they have these ties to Peter Thiel, who has been funding a ton of right-wing endeavors. They also have ties to Elon Musk, who's, of course, a big proponent of pronatalism. Malcolm Collins' brother is one of those doge boys helping to dismantle the federal bureaucracy as we speak. I didn't know that. But I think we're kind of burying the lead because we're not really talking about what they look like. That's where I plan to start this. Hey, I just want to dive in right into the eugenics, but let's take a pit stop and make fun of these freaks for a story. They are truly chilling people with horrible ideological belief systems.

But can we talk about how they dress? Okay, so for normal people who have no idea who this couple is, let me explain. Simone and Malcolm Collins are a couple. They're both in their late 30s, and they initially went viral when they were profiled a couple years ago in The Telegraph in an article titled, Meet the Elite Couple Breeding to Save Mankind. Then there was a follow-up profile in a Guardian titled America's Premier Pronerate. Natalists have tons of kids to save the world.

Now, I don't know if anyone has thoughts. They have four kids. I know she wants a lot more than four kids. Four kids, to be clear, is a lot more kids than I want. But it's also like kind of a normal amount of kids. Yeah, they're like compared to Elon Musk who has like 14 with an asterisk because we don't actually know how many children we have. You know, these are rookie numbers for the true elite freaks of the pro natalist movement.

Should we talk about the outfits? Do you have the outline open? Because I plucked a picture of them right up front. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What is with Simone's bonnet? Well, so, okay, my description visually of this couple, because I really think it's important to the way that they want to show themselves in the media, is like, like I said,

like they look like a hipster Brooklyn couple from 2012. They're like young, white. They have these like really thick, almost like performatively like nerdy glasses. but then also she dresses like a pilgrim, which I don't really understand. It's a bonnet, like literally it looks like she's an extra on the Handmaid's Tale. It's just, it's on the nose. But they also kind of dress like German modernists or like mimes a little bit. It's a lot of black and white.

The glasses are like oddly shaped in ways that are supposed to be conspicuous. Simone really likes to wear like bright red lipstick, which contrasts with her skin. which is quite pale. The red lipstick thing is definitely, I think, a deliberate choice. I don't know if you've heard Jordan Peterson talk about how, oh, the women wear rouge on their faces or their red lips so that they can attract a man at the office, like basically trying to say that if you don't want to have a man come on to you in your workplace, that you shouldn't be wearing these kinds of colors that are biologically designed to enhance male attraction. You can just see a lot of biological determinism in this line of argument, right? It's like this strain of the far right where there is this like

veneer of science, but right beneath it, they're just measuring skulls. Like, we're back to the 19th century and speaking about how different people are genetically more predisposed to success and that kind of thing. But they dress worse than those people, right? Like, I don't even get what this. is I think Amish when I see them. What you just said about, like, they think it's science, but it's not. It's literally like the Mabelene's logo. Like, maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Mabelene.

But they think that she's born with it. Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. I will mention there's a third person in the photo that we're looking at, which this photo was taken at Natalcon, a pro-natalist convention, which is something that we will also talk about.

But that third person is a woman named Amanda Bradford. And I want to put a pin in her for right now because we're going to talk about her because I was, there's more. But let's stay on Simone and Malcolm. She's like Chekhov's gun. Like she's going to go off in the third act. She's coming back. Yes. So Simone and Malcolm meet on a dating app and they get married in 2015.

Simone is a Bay Area native. And she initially is like a liberal. She wants no kids. She wants a career. Malcolm, on the other hand, comes from a wealthy family from Dallas, Texas. He's getting his MBA at Stanford, and he wants a lot of kids. The lore, as they tell it, goes, Simone was like, I don't want kids. I want a career. And Malcolm was like, what if you could have both? They ultimately have four kids. At the time that we're recording this, she's pregnant with her fifth. Three of those kids were born via C-section after she had complications with her. her first pregnancy. And I just also want to mention the kids' names. Do you know the kids' names?

The names are a trip. The names are something else. It's like if you asked AI to write an Einrand novel, like these would be the names of the characters. There is a four-year-old son named Octavian George, a two-year-old son named Torsten Savage, a 16-month-old daughter named Titan Evict. Oh, Jesus. A 16-month-old daughter named Titan Invictus and their youngest fourth child, Industry Americus Collins. What the hell is going on with these like crazy tech? Because these are like the Elon names too. Oh, industry. I can't wait to name my firstborn sweatshop. Oh my gosh. This like libertarian weirdness is just, it's insane to me. But I heard and maybe it was you. on your show, Matt, but the way Elon Musk names his children is this kind of almost humiliation ritual.

I believe that was me. That might have been you, right? And you can explain it better than I can. But it feels like an extension of that where you mark them with this kind of mark of the parent. You make sure that they're tied to you for the rest of their lives with this completely incomprehensible name. Yeah, it does feel almost like a brand. Those poor kids. Maura, did you want to explain the IVF genetic testing component of this? Yeah. So partly for personal reasons and partly for ideological reasons, the Collins is create most of their children through selective IVF. So they create these embryos outside of the uterus in a medical lab.

And that's partly because Simone has a history of eating disorders that have given her some fertility issues. but it's also because they have a very strong, and I want to say sort of like scientifically not justified faith in their ability to screen these embryos for things like health and intelligence. Crazy. Yeah, so they're creating what they think are like super babies, like genetically superior offspring. They screen those embryos for IQ levels, which like that's not, like that's not real.

IQs are already pseudoscience in the sense that we know that they are incredibly tilted towards people in the West into English speakers. This has already been debunked. So they're screening for a pseudoscience using likely pseudoscience themselves. It's like the Russian nesting doll of pseudoscientific racism. I was researching to make this outline and I was just like losing my mind with everything that I learned and every detail that I learned. And I told my boyfriend, I was like, they are screening the embryos for IQ levels. And he was like lost it. And he was like, I don't know if either of you watch Rupal's Drag Race. But he was like, the only thing we're screening our embryos for charisma uniqueness, nerve, and talent. But what I will say about this is they flatly deny being eugenicists.

But like, what is the non-ugenics explanation for? screening your embryos like this? I don't think that there is one. I actually think that we can talk about the Trump administration and the broader conservative movement as incorporating eugenics into their politics in ways that we haven't seen in decades, at least in this country. Even RFK Jr, you can think of him as a survival of the fittest kind of figure in the administration, right?

This mentality about public health that talks about, hey, you know, we want to stop disease. we want to stop things like autism, but they largely blame diagnoses like autism on controllable factors, which functions as a way to otherize people who are on the spectrum or who have disabilities as freaks. And in the end, it blames parents if their child is disabled or has some sort of condition.

And I do think that that is in part because in this country we don't guarantee health care and we are the wealthiest country in the world, and people fundamentally understand that there are so many billionaires in this country. But what? We're going to get charged thousands of dollars because I had to go to the doctor to take care of myself. And like, so people don't feel empowered over their health care.

So they go to private industry and snake oil salesmen. Yeah. And I think it's a good distinction to make because like the Collins are claiming that they are not negative eugenic, right? There's a difference between negative and positive eugenics. So negative eugenics is when these people who appoint themselves the arbiter of who should and should not be having children, try to prevent what they see as undesirable populations from having children, right? And if I was Malcolm and Simone Collins,

which thank God I'm not. But if I was, I think I would be like, well, I'm not a, we're not negative eugenicists. We're not eugenicists. We're not trying to stop anybody from having babies. We want people to have babies. But that's a very incomplete picture of their project, which is emphatically a positive eugenics project, right? They are identifying populations of people they think need to be breeding more to change the character of the population to make it more in line with their priorities and their values and frankly with their self-image, right? These are people who very much understand themselves as being the type of person who there needs to be more of and who needs to be breeding more so that America looks a little bit more like Malcolm and Simone Collins. That's their

goal and that is a eugenics goal. We should say that this is very similar to what figures like Elon Musk have said. And it's in part why he continues to have children largely through IVF. Again, I maintain that there is no way to confirm or deny whether or not this man has ever had sex. We shall see. There's been no physical evidence presented to us. So I choose to believe that he has not, but I don't have evidence in that regard. But putting that aside for a second. Sure, sure, sure. I just want to get that out there and spread that around the internet. He speaks about his children in that way and that he wants to create a legion of genetically superior kids. And why are they superior? Well, because they have my DNA, of course. Back to the Collins's. Before Trump took office,

again, they positioned themselves in a lot of these interviews that they did as like liberals. They would like talk about how they're pro-LGBQ kind of. They would say like, we're pro-diversity. in one article in the Washington Post, Simone said, not only are we not racist, I think the worst thing about being accused of racism is just, we think racism is so dumb. Oh, wow. That's a really well thought out anti-racist thought there, Matt. Yeah, I definitely believe them.

It sounds like they have thought this out. Since Trump has taken office and now they're like directly working with the Trump administration and the Heritage Foundation and people like Peter Thiel, They've kind of dropped the act. But I think from the beginning, you can see that this is, like, there's no liberal or left-wing way to have the ideology that they have. Because what they're fighting for, the world that they think should exist in the future, it comes with a profound cultural shift that they have also been fighting for alongside

the mandate to, like, have as many children as possible. Gabby Del Valle and Politico wrote, the couple is committed to fighting the, quote, urban monoculture, which is something they talk about a lot, 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 most important and effective way to fight the monoculture, Malcolm later tells me via email, is building school systems not dedicated to cultural genocide. Malcolm Collins also later said, I have kids for the future of human civilization because I have

pride in who I am and who my ancestors were and what I think my descendants will achieve. And I read that and I'm like, uh-oh, uh-oh, you can call yourself a lib, you can say that you love the gays, but once you start talking about civilization and your ancestors and your descendants, it's white supremacy all the way down. Oh, Matt, you know what this sounds exactly like? This is liberal Zionism. Talk about it. Oh, I was going to say it sounded like the neo-Confederates. It sounds like the lost cause people being like my ancestors have been unfairly maligned, but the South will rise again. It's all of those things, I think, but even the part about being pro-LGBQ, the pinkwashing of their far-right ideology is very much what you hear supporters of Israel talk about, which isn't even true. Yes, you can be a gay person and emigrate to Israel, aka you can move there. if you are already married, but they do not perform gay marriages in Israel because it is a far-right fascist colonial state. But my point is just that, like, they want that demographic shift.

So it's okay if you're gay and married and you want to move here. But for people that are already here, no, no, no. And so you can see how that liberal veneer is often used to obscure far-right politics. And I would say that the techno-fascist right here in this country has been a at this very tactic. And it's no coincidence that this proto-natalist movement comes out of that same ecosystem. Peter Thiel, in particular, being closely associated with Simone and Malcolm Collins is fascinating to me. Because he has seemingly a lot of other people on his payroll, including Gwen Stefani. Are you serious?

No. Well, yes. What? For what? Gwen Stefani, along with Mark Wahlberg and Chris Pratt, but like notably Gwen Stefani because I'm a gay man, shills for his anti-abortion prayer app. I did another episode on that. That is so unfortunate. His money is everywhere. Not to derail this, but Kat Tenbarge said it best on the episode. If you look at the center of everything that's wrong with this country right now, Peter Thiel.

Yeah, yeah. But that's an interesting example because I guess she might be a pre-year. pretty good example of the left wing or left wing adjacent to Tradwife-esque pipeline, which might put her in the Peter Thiel orbit. But the Weinstein brother, that I think it's Eric Weinstein, who works for him in this very dubious role, is another example of somebody who basically was a COVID disinformation person. He's an anti-peer review online podcaster influencer alongside his brother Brett Weinstein. And his role with Peter Thiel's company is very vague, but he still is doing some influencing on the internet. So you see how it seems like Teal wants to put certain people

to the forefront, to the top of the podcast charts, to elevate their profiles, even if they may not have the most organic audience to start. And I wouldn't be shocked if this couple and the number of damn profiles that they've had and the Guardian and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, what have you, is a direct result of his influence and his money being able to push these people out. I want to just push back

on Malcolm's characterization of like an urban pluralist or feminist culture because what exactly the fuck does he mean by cultural genocide? Right? Like there are fewer stay-at-home mothers in

America now than there were in whatever version of 1950s that he's imagining. And therefore, he is claiming the mantle of being a victim of a genocide. You know, it's such a collapsing of scale and of severity that is, I think, really typical of a lot of right-wing rhetoric. Well, it's also, I mean, that, to me, that's just like a white supremacist dog whistle, because they love to talk about, like, white genocide, cultural genocide. I mean, to me, it's just that. And so then to like say that and then deny that you're, racist. It's comically ridiculous, just not comical, unfortunately. It goes back to the earlier point that we were talking about where they'll say civilization is in jeopardy because of our birth rates, but they don't

put the white part in front of it. In the same way, when they say genocide, they don't put the white genocide in front of it because that is the great replacement theory. That's literally the white supremacist motivating theory behind a majority of the Republican Party. at this point, but particularly the Trump administration, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk, who connects the pronatalism with the Great Replacement Theory and, in fact, endorsed it and said that he found it very interesting on Twitter and the ADL back in the day, said that he was being anti-Semitic rightly, but then when he did the SIG Hile at the inauguration, oh, well, maybe not so much now that we're in bed with the Trump administration and their foreign policy.

So all of these far-right movements are connected in this incredibly dystopian way. Shall we take a brief and perhaps needed short break from this episode to thank the sponsor of today's episode, NordVPN? So I, you know, write and make a podcast for a living, which makes me a freelancer, which I love. I don't have an office outside of my living room because co-working space in New York is really expensive. Everything in New York is really expensive. But I kind of like being an office nomad. I like working from cafes and coffee shops and lounges, and it lets me get out and explore this city that I love so much.

The problem, though, is that I am constantly using a million different public Wi-Fi networks. And public Wi-Fi networks are typically less secure than your one at home. And what that means is they're typically not encrypted. So your data, like your web history or passwords when you log in or credit cards that you use, when checking out when you're using a public Wi-Fi network are much more easily hackable by cybercriminals. NordVPN helps me stay safe from that. NordVPN encrypts your internet connection so nobody, not the internet service provider, nor the business, nor a hacker, can access your data while you're on a public Wi-Fi network. Right now, Nord is offering listeners of a bitfruity

a huge discount on their service and four months free when you sign up for a two-year plan. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you don't have to stress about that. You can grab that discount right now at NordvPN.com slash fruity. That is NordvPN.com slash fruity. Now breaks over. Let's get back to it. I want to talk about pronatalism and its history a little bit in Christian and right-wing movements. And I want to give you my understanding first, which is not super thorough.

But I understand that a few different groups have converged on this idea of pro-natalism. One of which is Christians, because a lot of Christians think that large families are a divine mandate. God wants you to have a lot of kids. Another one for all the reasons that we've been talking about are white supremacists who great replacement theory, right? They think non-white populations are diluting white people's political power in America, and they think that that's a bad thing, and we have to, like, out-populate people of color essentially. And tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and people associated them like J.D. Vance

who are funding these like experimental reproductive technologies. And for what I've read who are concerned about like the future size of the labor force. But again, this is where it gets like so big and weird. And like we're getting it's like it's like normal people don't talk about this. Which is why when I started reading about it, I was like, what? Yeah. I think you're you're tapping into something, Matt, which is that there are some divides and fissures and contradictions within the emerging pro-natalist movement because a lot of these folks who really believe that white Americans need to be having more children and women need to be dropping out of public life in order to bear and care for them are from, as you mentioned, this Christian right tradition, right?

people like the Catholic Church and like a lot of evangelical churches who don't just oppose abortion, but actually really oppose the use of any kind of contraception. And I think that their most fierce and dedicated opposition is towards the kinds of birth control that are controlled by women themselves. They're not really coming after condoms. They're coming after the IUD, right? So that's one camp, right? But then you also have this interesting alliance with the tech dystopian right or the techno-fascist right, people out of Silicon Valley. The nerds, the nerd right. The tech broligarchy. The nerd rike, as the great writer Gilderan refers to you.

The nerd right. That's perfect. I love that so much. And they are not at all opposed to things like IVF or to surrogacy, which some of the Christian right does oppose, right? So you have people like the Collins is from this techno futurist camp who are like, no, we can use these reproductive technologies for eugenics purposes, right? I can have my baby. I can pay through the nose to have my embryo screened with a fake test for a fake quality like IQ and then I can make this genetic super baby. Or you have people like Elon Musk who is very comfortable not only with IVF but also with surrogacy and with these like weird harem arrangements.

where he's having children with tons and tons of different women who his, you know, relationships with are like ambiguous, but definitely seem to be simultaneous, right? So like there's different like models here. And I think it's interesting to look at what they have in common, which is what they have in common is a sense of racial superiority. What they have in common is a sense of like gender binarism, which they are very vigilant about enforcing. All of these people are super anti-trans, even if they're not re-trans. even if they're not really as explicitly anti-gay, which I think is also an interesting emerging distinction. And they're all really specific about what they believe the purpose of women is, right?

They very much believe that there is nothing a woman can be doing in a university or in a career or in public life that is equal to what she could be doing by having a genetically appropriate baby. And I think you can view the Trump administration's attacks on the, Department of Education and his declaration that he's going to eliminate it in that same vein, where you see that education levels also have a negative correlation with birth rates. The less education you have, the more likely you aren't going to be educated about contraception, and so you're more likely to have babies. You're also more likely to be of lower income and not have access to the health care that would allow you to make more reproductive choices.

And in what you're talking about is this fascist hallmark, which is this attempt to go back to this imagined past, right? You'll see this all the time when it's even in the slogan, make America great again, or how can we reclaim our heritage or the blood of our country even in the most extreme examples. And the past that they describe is never really the reality. But it's a way to not have a vision for folks that talks about improving the future or changing things proactively or even dealing with the facts of how our society is currently constructed and giving people a fantasy to look back towards. And oftentimes that fantasy because the people who are trafficking in these politics are fascists or are on the right. It involves an imagined past, which means white men, your superiority is elevated. And that includes this vision of a nuclear family that's increasingly impossible for men in this country to achieve. You had a great episode last week, Matt, on alpha males.

Emma, you are so nice to me on my own podcast. Thank you so much. I mean, how else will I get invited back? I got to suck up here. But I've been sending it to people. And their response has been great, too, because it really does, I think, hit on. this reactionary anti-feminist moment that we're currently in, which includes the backlash to me too and the influencers that have come out of that space, which is that they seek to empower men in ways that are deeply dangerous and I think are contributed greatly to Donald Trump's victory in the fall. This influencer space, this right-wing alpha male influencer space, is designed to give men this sense of empowerment. And that's in part because we, we

are at levels of incoming wealth inequality that are pre just complete disaster levels at this moment i saw that right there's this new data that shows that the average debt that an american consumer has is over a hundred thousand dollars um that were hitting new records of credit card debt door dash just made it just did a deal with a clorna so that people can finance the meals the $25 that they're ordering on DoorDash and do it over four installments, which means the people that have to make that kind of purchase are more likely to be of lower income. And that means that they may not be able to make the second, third, or fourth payment. And then the interest rate skyrocket. It's almost like a payday lender that all of these companies have installed into their checkout

services that is capitalizing on the financial precarity that people are experiencing and it's going continue to get worse under Donald Trump's tariffs. The reason I bring this up is that men, young men, are likely feeling like, okay, I've been told I should be a provider and that I should have a family and this nuclear family is important to me. And that's increasingly impossible for people if you're under the age of 50, basically. So where do they look? They look to these influencers that say, actually, you may feel out of control of your life economically, but you can control your woman. You can control. how you interact with women. You can control how you appear to women and they will come to you. You don't even

have to worry about it. You can just get jacked up and just do this routine. That's one piece of it. But then there's this pro-natalism tradwife thing, which is a version of that, but it's about making women into submissive creatures that bear your babies. And I think these are both right wing branches off the same kind of rotted core. Emma, I think that's such a smart point because it's one of the most crucial Marxist feminist insights that subordination of women in the private sphere, in the home, in the dating relationship is what allows men who are maybe being exploited in the workplace to feel like they have a degree of control so that they don't rebel against their public sphere or working sphere overlords, right? It's a way of distracting and buying off the exploited

male worker by giving him somebody else to punch down on. But I also wanted to bring back your point about the imagined past because I also think male supremacy is really crucial to how these creepy pronatalists are imagining the future, right? You mentioned earlier, Emma, and I think you touched on this as well, Matt, that these people tend to have a lot of boys. Or at least they seem to prioritize the births of male children and get very upset when those, assigned male children might have other ideas about their identity and their lives, like Elon Musk's wonderful trans daughter, Vivian. Vivian posted about how she basically said Elon genetically tests so that he only has boys. And part of the reason he was so angry about my transition is

partially, yes, that I was trans and now he's like on this whole anti-woke crusade, but also that I would no longer be his son. Right. He's an unhappy customer. Right. And, you know, there's something there about how they envision the future, right? When these guys talk about restoring Western civilization and making America great again, they imagine themselves as the heroes of a heroic project of civilizational restoration, of turning back the clock on time, on cultural progress, on the toppling of these hierarchies has been accomplished by social movements. And they imagine the heroes of that future as male. They think that only men can do things like become technological innovators. I think that only men can do things like become political

leaders. They think that only men can do things like make great art or have a vision for the future, right? That's why they're prioritizing those bursts. That's why they are so strict in their vision that men are for the public world and women are for making babies. It's why they are so aggressively antagonistic towards transition and trans life expression. It's because they have very specific visions of who are going to be the heroes of the future. And that's boys. And that's capitalists in the sense that this is a vision that's also anti-humanist, right? Where they don't necessarily see beauty in human expression or in the chance of maybe I'll have a girl or a boy.

And there's beauty in finding out. And there's beauty in having this experience together with your partner. And you can gender selection or if you have the resources to do. do it. But the reason that they're doing it is because they see their boys as ways to extend their kind of capital reproduction beyond their life as extensions of their view of themselves as superhumans. And this isn't in the sense that they think they can fly. But it is in the sense that they think that they are the kings of the world that should be able to have their sons carry on their legacy. They are adopting in the Curtis Jarvin vein a monarchical vision.

these tech feudalists of how they should continue society and they feel like it's their solemn duty. It's just narcissism and they're enabled by the billions of dollars that they've accumulated. Yeah. We're going to talk about Elon Musk in greater detail later in the outline, but he did sneak peek. He did exchange texts with Ashley St. Clair, one of his many baby mothers saying that like no army that's ever won a war was made up of women. But it just lends itself to what you're saying of like he sees this struggle for the future of civilization as like, you know, a war that he's leading that he has to create an army of his children. But let's not get too far. I want to talk about natalcon.

Oh my God. Are you guys excited for this year's natalcon? Oh, yeah. I'm going to be tripping balls. It's like a nightmare blood rotation. It's the worst. I went to natal con and I did ketamine in the bathroom. Wait, did you guys.

hear about Natal Khan that part of their planned programming was that they were going to have like a speed dating or matchmaking service and then not enough women showed up. They did it. They did it. There were two women. You're getting ahead. Okay. Okay.

Okay. What is Natal Khan? Tell us all about it. I thought you would never ask. I asked you to ask. So NatalCon is. I started this podcast to talk. about gay culture.

This is the opposite of that, Matt. I've got to say. This is the straightest culture, unfortunately. Our world took a nosedive, and now I have to talk about natalcon. I used to write about lesbian history, and like, now I'm just, I'm in the trenches with you, Matt. I mean, I guess I am talking about gay culture in the sense that all I ever talk about now is Peter Thiel, who unfortunately, and I don't know if he knows this, is a gay man.

But anyway, natal con is, I mean, it's a natal convention. It is an annual pro-natalist convention founded by the white supremacist Kevin Dolan, who was actually fired from his previous job after his like fake alt Twitter, which was like a white supremacist fake alt Twitter was like uncovered. And now he runs natalcon. Fun fact, he started natalcon after. watching the Tucker Carlson documentary, The End of Men. Do you guys remember that? Oh my God. Is that the one where he like sunned his balls? Yes. Kevin Dolan watched this Tucker Carlson documentary, which was about quote, collapsing testosterone levels in the West where Tucker Carlson advocated testicle tanning. Oh God. The words that are coming in my mouth. Please, I pray he's never done that. I don't want that mental image in my

brain. Yeah, nobody, nobody think about Tucker Carlson doing any testicle tanning right now. I need to like bleach my eyes. I need to bleach the back of my brain. I need a lobotomy. Yeah, it's this annual convention. It's in its third year. Some journalists have gone and covered this. Emma Goldberg for the New York Times attended it. And she wrote, quote, roughly 200 people had flown in for the natal conference, an event devoted to discussing collapsing fertility rates. There were churchgoing conservatives and Silicon Valley technologists, parents of five and parents of nine, edge lords in leather jackets, and women in Lily Pulitzer. I love that we all know exactly what that means.

Yes. All sharing a common concern, how to convince Americans, namely American women, to have more babies. It was also written about in detail in Politico, which noted that tickets for natal Khan went for up to a thousand dollars. So, so there are like all these panels led by mostly like right wing provocateurs. I mean, the speaker lineup included Simone and Malcolm Collins, Jack Posobiac, who's like a just like a white supremacist Twitter influencer, raw egg nationalist, which is the pseudonym for another white supremacist Twitter influencer. And they had all these panels. And to your point, Moira used to, they had like, they had, um, a moose. They had, um, a moose.

eligible natalist, like natalist bachelorette. But it was all men showed up and it was just like two women. How do you even pitch yourself on like a date with a pro natalist? You're like, I have most of my eggs left. Like it's got to be so dehumanizing. And there were men who spoke to journalists at these events. And when the journalists were like, where are all the women? The men were like, they're home having babies.

Which like on some level, I guess like it's dark to think that there are no women that are part of this movement. And it's actually probably darker to think that there are and that they are actually home, like just being really pregnant. Has somebody who studies a lot of right wing, anti-feminist women, as part of my podcast, In Bed with the Right, wherever you get your podcast available now. Sorry. Plug it. Plug it. It's good. Thank you. We had a blast talking to you. But one thing you see all the time is that when they have women, they put women front and center. And there's always money to made for a woman who's good on a microphone to travel around the country having a very high-powered

career telling other women not to have careers. It's like they do not blink at hypocrisy. They love it because it makes them look less sexist when they have women at the front of their movement. The anti-choice movement does it too. I feel like if they had the women, they would be there. Like they would have shelled out for the babysitter or like conscripted grandmother to do it. I think this is a mostly male intervention, which is not to say that there aren't crazy women. Trust me, I know them all. But I feel like, you know, Simone Collins is there grinning next to her husband and every one of these profiles, like for a reason. Well, speaking of women who they're really putting up front and center of this movement, another one of the speakers was Amanda Bradford, who

you might remember her from the photo at the beginning, who we put a pin in. We're about to take that pin out. Dun, dun, she's back. There is. You were right. It's Chekhov's, what's your name? I was reading articles about Natalcon, and Amanda Bradford would be described as a dating app entrepreneur.

She said in one of the times that she was speaking at NatalCon, quote, we're going to fix the birth rate decline in this room. Do you know what app Amanda Bradford is the founder of and CEO of? Can I guess? Yes. Bumble. No. No, it's unfortunately not like a big one like that that like normal people use.

Oh, damn. But it's the league. Oh, it's the league. I was going to say, is it the right stuff. But that might be too on the nose Republican. The right stuff is Peter Thiel. Wait, what's, I've been married for millionaires. What's the league?

Okay. Oh, I'm so excited to talk about this. I have been annoyed by the league since before I had a podcast. and I never thought I'd have the chance to talk about it. Okay. The League and Emma, feel free to chime in whenever you want to. I'm ready. But like, okay, the league is a dating app that posits itself as like the dating app for especially

motivated and successful and career-driven young professionals. To even use it, you have to apply. And the company will analyze your education levels, your degrees, your profession, your social influence. If you do get accepted to the app, a basic membership costs, drumroll. $99 a month, while higher tiers like owner,

which, whatever, costs between $249 and $1,000 a month. Oh my God, what a grift. And the thing is, I wouldn't even know about this, because there's no part of like my internet usage that would lead, you know, the league targeted ads to target me. But they did a huge out of home campaign of ads here in New York City that if you were like using the subways, you saw these ads. They were everywhere and

they annoyed the shit out of me because there were posters. I put some in the outline if you guys have it open and I'm going to throw them on the screen if you're watching the video version of this episode, but there were all these ads. It was like dating puns, but with like annoying elitist twists and puns. So it was like, be a goal digger. Fill the giant goal in your heart. And then there's this one. Date someone so ambitious, they make you want to IPO your pants. My thing with the league, my thing with the league. And baby, as a lot of these types of people love to say, It is a free country. If you want to get on the league, get on the league.

I don't think I've ever ranted this passionately about anything in my life. I also like the IPO your pants is like, oh, you'll pee your pants. Is that the reaction you get to a hot person? Sorry to cut you off, Matt. I think it's supposed to, I don't know. I interpret it as like you like, you like cum or something. Right, right. I get it.

But it doesn't sound like cum. It sounds like pee. No, it's just stupid. It's just stupid is what it is. My most generous interpretation of this pun is like the most closest thing we can think of to an orgasm is a initial public offering. I'm sorry. Like, you need to get laid. You need to get laid.

You need to get laid. If you want to. If you want to. But my thing with the league is isn't an app that advertises itself like this going to attract the worst possible people? Because you have to think of yourself. You have to see these ads. You have to think so highly of yourself. Like, yes, I am inherently more motivated and driven than other young people my age. That's why I don't even really understand what people mean when they say young professional. Because it's like, yeah, we all have jobs. Like, we're all young. Yeah, it's just, it feels like this attracts just in a pool of insufferable people who see these ads and think it's about them. Yeah, I mean, I will say I haven't been in the dating pool for over eight years. So I'm also not like, I'm engaged. I'm getting married actually in a month and a half. Thank you. But I met my fiancee on hinge. But I did like apply to all of them back in the day. And I didn't get into the league because like whatever. Oh, you applied to the league. I did. Well, it was like eight years, eight, nine years ago or something. I didn't know how bad it was at the time or whatever. But now aren't you so happy that you never got in and you never gave them your money? did get in, right? But like four years later, after I'd already been in this long-term relationship, and after, of course, I started being a public-ish figure on the internet, and then they were

able to verify that I was cool enough. But prior to that, my college wasn't good enough, and I wasn't hot enough, so they had discarded me. And then all of a sudden, maybe I get verified on Twitter or something like that back in the day. And then they bring you along. But it's just like the don't, it's the most, it is proanatalism before proto-natalism in the sense that like, yeah, like only this certain kind of person, like bring the capitalist grind culture into your bedroom is basically what they want you to do. And that sounds like the worst thing of all time. Well, it literally strikes me as like a eugenics dating app. Yeah. And I know that might sound dramatic, but honestly, spend two seconds on the league's website. It calls itself,

quote, a selective and high quality community of motivated daters looking for meaningful long-term relationships. Anytime you describe someone as high quality, it's like in-cell or eugenicist. I think about like Andrew Tate talking about high-value men or I think about like the Collins is talking about high-quality birth. Yeah, it assumes that there's a way to rank the worth of human life so that not all people are equal. Yes. And that like the people who would be doing that would not necessarily be at the bottom of any such worth ranking. You know, it's just like, oh, no, we are telling you and avowing that we think that we're better than other people. And that's why we should only be together. Right. It's also like anti-pluralist, right? It's like, no, no, you don't want to be

with the riffraff. You want to be in a place where it's only these worthy people, these better people who have been like measured and judged. It's such a depressing exercise. I'm just like sad now. It's exclusive and privatized. Like that's what the vision of, of the. right is. And it is interesting to view the Trump administration through this lens because we're talking about these people and they're freaks and we get it, right? But someone like Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, who was a part of the administration for quite a while and probably is still calling a lot of the shots behind the scenes, if you view certain populations increasing as some sort of threat and other populations decreasing as a problem, you're not a problem. And

and that they need to increase, well, how is that going to inform foreign policy, for example? You know, I return to this because I just can't stop thinking about it, but I mean, right, there hasn't been food that has gotten into Gaza for over a month. And I think that you can't view this administration as, you know, eugenesis, but also genocile without understanding how those two things interconnect, including the doge cuts to USAID, which we know resulted in immediate. HIV infections among kids who were relying on the United States's already threadbare supplementary aid to get their medication. There are going to be tens of thousands of children that die of AIDS because of Elon Musk and because of this administration. And how can you separate this

from the eugenicism of Elon Musk's ideology when it comes to protonatalism? And the other eugenicist elements of this administration, which I would say include RFK and his libertarian view of public health. Should talk about ballerina farm a little bit? Sure. Matt, I'm so sorry if I jumped the gun. No, no, no, no, no. You're so good at making all these connections and drawing it all together. So, like, you can't, you can't lose side of the big picture, which is really wonderful.

I appreciate it. I'm just, I don't want to talk too much. It's not my show. So let me know if I'm being annoying in any way. You're perfect. I just yelled for like three and a half minutes straight about how stupid this fucking dating app is. But it really is like, because you are so good at drawing.

all these connections. And I think that's, that's the connection I have to bring to this, right? Which is like the CEO of this like weird elitist dating app that I've always had weird feelings about. But it's like, oh, she's also speaking at the weird eugenicist pro natalist convention. Because when this is the fundamental mindset that you have about the world and about like who gets the privilege and who should even be forced to like multiply into the future, you get it in every facet of life, whether it's dating, whether it's lawmaking. It's like these people's paw prints are all over all of this. And it's so unsettling. Was that incoherent? No, it's perfect. I mean, I think this is so much of what it is, right? It imagines a future that is like the past. The phrase I've

heard that describes this as like retrofuturism. In the future, we will have this utopian restoration of all of our previous social hierarchies where women will be in their proper place and people of color will like just conveniently vanish and we won't have to deal with this annoying trans thing right it's this it's this image that like by having as many babies as possible and by you know privatizing as much as possible they can like get rid of history right but history is still there and it's still happened and is still going to continue happening with or without them so there's something like really futile about the pro natalist movement right i think they're going to do a lot of damage, definitely to human dignity and to like the dignity of women with their influence

on like our discursive world. But they are not going to succeed in creating the future that they want because there's going to be people like us in the future, whether they like it or not. And I think that they're aided by this country's eroding critical empathy and our inability, I think, sometimes to understand how people outside of this country, I mean, even in this country, we struggle. But it's particularly in the global south, how we have created a system that simulates how capitalism operated under slavery, where that labor was onshore and it was here in the United States. But then when we globalized, we made countries like China, the factory of the world. And we created these supply lines that were incredibly intricate, but relied on the cheapest labor possible. oftentimes in the global south. And then they don't have the education or the resources to have birth control and their population increases.

And here in the United States, we benefit as fat cats from importing all of these goods cheaply. And then there are some people who have the privilege to be able to make those choices for themselves. And then they see the rest of the world as a bit of a problem, even though their very existence is dependent on the fact. that these people are exploited. And so we see this viewpoint of people who have had worse luck than, say, you know, the genetic

lottery of being born in the United States. You see that and how people justify that and justify the oppression of those people manifest itself even in the pro-natalist movement. And I think it's a part of our foreign policy. It's a part of the current fight over tariffs, right? And how the Trump administration is approaching that and this protectionism that's entirely counterproductive. But it is this simulation of some of the almost domestic dynamics of racism that we see here, but applying it to the global south and an increasingly globalized world. So as we are a

protectionist in the United States with our trade policy, this is almost like a protectionist insular close rank around a certain race, around a certain ideology, around a certain genetic structure to make this kind of person work, as opposed to understanding that, like, we're We need to overhaul these systems that are repressing people that lead to this kind of thing. But eventually, fascist movements are borne out of this kind of structural inequality. And we're at a zenith in that period right now. I want to take a quick break from the show to thank Rocket Money for sponsoring today's episode. You know, something that's really pissed me off lately is how it feels like every time a new show comes out, it is somehow on a streaming service that you don't.

yet pay for and didn't know existed. You thought you paid for all of them. Thought you about all of them. But nope, not this one. This new season is on PP Plus. Brand new limited series on Timmy Tim with the Wii Woo package. And as much as it annoys me, RuPaul, I'm looking at you, it hasn't annoyed me enough for me to stop signing up for these streaming services or at least getting the free trial and then sometimes forgetting to cancel. In such precarious streaming times, it is natural for one to forget what they're paying for. And that is where Rocket Money comes in. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending,

and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. You just put your credit card info in, and the app will take a look at all of your bills. It gives you a dashboard where it shows you everything that you're subscribed to without you having to dig through your bills and do all the work yourself. And it'll help you cancel anything you don't want to be paying for anymore with just one click. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved them a total of $500 million and saves members up to $740 a year each when you use all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. If you want to give it a try, head over to rocketmoney.com slash fruity. That is rocketmoney.com slash fruity. Now let's get back

to talking about these freaks. Most people, even people who might agree with some of what pronatalists think, they probably don't know what pronatalism is, and they're certainly not like fervent pronatalist activists. Like I mentioned, you know, this pro natalist conference had 200 people. It's not that many people. But I do think the ideas that are at the root of pronatalism find ways to present and market themselves in things that feel more benign,

and that reach a lot more people. And this is where, and I'm always excited to get to invoke her, we talk about ballerina farm. How many children does she have now? Let me Google it. How many ballerina farm children? Eight. So Ballerina Farm, if you don't know,

she is the most famous, I would argue, trad wife influencer. She has over 10 million Instagram followers. her name is Hannah Nealman. She is an episode in and of herself. She and her weird, like, shitty husband who's a jet blue airline air. It's a separate episode that I've been like wanting and thinking about making. And actually I was talking, if you're big on YouTube, you might know Princess Weeks.

We've been talking about making an episode about that. But, you know, she basically just presents this beautiful Utah-looking farm life with her million children. running around in the cornfields, and her husband who's always dressed like a cowboy, and she's always in these dresses, and like her kitchen is wooden and beautiful, and like, everything that she uses to cook with is, like, wooden and beautiful, and then she sells replicas of those things online. But she has a huge draw. People I know in my home life, like follow Ballerina Farm on Instagram.

And she's obviously not, you know, getting on Instagram reels and talking about civilizational warfare and population decline. But she is obviously showing people that a life well lived is a life with a million children where even though you're making like seven figures by like selling the content related to that family lifestyle, you know, that's under the surface. The fact is she's selling a lifestyle. Yeah. And she's also selling a vision of a domesticated woman to an audience that may not just be

women like a lot of sometimes these mommy influencers are there to speak to women or people who can get pregnant or just parents in general about say what are some great tips in terms of child care that we can provide for you i mean these are like innocuous largely influencers on the internet but what this vision is is it's almost simulating i would say a sort of pornography for men which you get to see women domesticated in the home acting like, you know, they just stepped out of a meadow in the Netherlands or something like that, running through sunflowers and showing an idealized world that doesn't actually exist, but they pretend previously existed as is a hallmark of fascist propaganda. And it gets men to feel like, gosh, if I only found a woman like this, all of my problems with society that I had talked about earlier,

about the lack of economic opportunity for men in this country, all of that can be solved if I just found this kind of person. And if my girlfriend or my prospective romantic partners are not like this, well, there's probably something wrong with them. And then we get back to just rank misogyny. And that's where this influencer space, I think, leads to. I also brought a ballerina farm. I promise, dear listener, I don't try to shoehorn her into whenever I can

talk about her. But I also bring her up because when I was reading about NatalCon, there was a Natalcon attendee who told a journalist who was reporting on Natalcon that she went to NadelCon because she wanted to be in community in person with other pro-natalists because when she goes home, she feels like all she has is Ballerina Farm. So there is something genuinely drawing people into the pro-natalist movement from, you know, following Ballerina Farm and people like her. Oh, yeah. I mean, Ballerina Farm is a commercial enterprise and it is also an ideological propaganda enterprise. And she is trying to convince and convert her largely female audience into a lifestyle that, as Emma mentioned, everybody who actually lived it, both farming and having an unlimited number of children is something that everybody with the opportunity to stop doing that immediately does. Like people fled agriculture to work in not particularly good factory jobs in the 19th century because agriculture was so, so, so hard. Every community in which women have opportunities for education, opportunities for health care access, opportunities to do something with their life other than have a ton of children.

Every single community like that experiences a birth rate decrease, right? Because when people have the option to not live this way, that Hannah Nealeman is trying to convince them to live, They take it, right? So part of what I think is going on is that the ballerina farms, the pro natalist movement, it can only get this kind of cachet because people don't quite know what it really means, right? Because there's an ignorance and a little bit of a novelty about what these lives look like in reality, which is very, very different from how they're being presented on, say, Instagram. People don't actually want to live like this, right? Like, people love their families, but like also people love families that they're in that look maybe more like mine, right? Where there might not be children or there might be gay parents, right? Like this is an attempt to retrofit something really complicated and very personal, which is like familial love and personal ambition and gender expression back into like an extremely narrow and prescriptive vision that doesn't fit with people's actual desires. Because when people have the opportunity to have smaller families

with children they get to like spend more time with and invest more resources in and love a little more and more personally they tend to do that and when people get the opportunity to live lives that are you know beyond what is very narrowly prescribed for their gender be that like the incredibly restrictive uh vision of femininity that these people have or about gender roles more broadly like they do that because the human spirit is indomitable and people want to live in individual. ways that are about more than just like checking the boxes in some, you know, form held up by an evangelical megachurch pastor. We are just more creative and more inventive and weirder and freer than these people want us to be. So I want to move from ballerina farm to Elon Musk, who we've

peppered into this episode, but we're going to talk about specifics because I think Elon, it's fair to say is like the world's most powerful pro natalist. He's also a violent misogynist. And I think people, like everyone in the United States is very aware that Elon Musk is kind of this like overlord figure hanging over us right now. And myself included, like we often joke a lot about like, oh, he has so many kids and that or da-da-da. But I don't think people who aren't closely paying attention to like the Elon of it all are acutely aware of how, crazy and violent and dark his like personal life and childbearing life has become. There was this Wall Street Journal expose that came out very recently about the Ashley St. Clair

situation. If you don't know and you didn't listen to Moira's and my episode about it, Ashley St. Clair is a 26-year-old conservative influencer who had, it's actually not even Elon's most recent confirmed child anymore, but at the time we made that episode three months ago, it was. But she had a child with Elon and has been sort of duking it out with him publicly on Twitter since because he refused to take a paternity test and she acknowledged him as a father, which he didn't want her to do. And so this article kind of explained some of what was happening behind the scenes, which I will walk you through a little bit. So before the public knew about any of this,

Elon, through his fixer, offered Ashley a lump sum of $15 million with an additional $100,000 a month until the child turned 21 in exchange for keeping Elon's name off the birth certificate and staying silent about their relationship. She did keep Elon's name off the birth certificate, but she didn't sign the agreement, citing concerns about things like the fact that she wouldn't be able to talk about him, but he would continue to be able to talk about her. And while they were hashing this out, Ashley learned that the tabloids had found out about their relationship and their baby and were going to publish it anyway. So she got ahead of the story and posted this statement on Twitter that we've talked about in previous episodes where she was basically like, I had a child five months ago. The father is Elon. After she posted that, Elon terminated the $15 million offer.

And by the time the Wall Street Journal just came out with this, Elon's team had only ever paid her $20,000, which doesn't even cover like a small fraction of the legal fees that she will inevitably need to pay for because they're like having this legal battle over whether or not he'll take a paternity test, which he ended up taking. And the results from LabCorp came back, stating that the probability of paternity was 99.999%. I mentioned all of this here because this is a pattern with how Elon has treated the women who have had his children. We know Grimes is publicly on Twitter begging Elon to respond to concerns about their child's health condition.

And Elon just continues to do this thing with 14 plus children. I say 14 plus because this article also spoke to unnamed sources who said that the actual number of children Elon has is much higher than the public is. aware of, but he seems to literally be trying to create a, what he calls, a legion of children because he is a pronatalist and he fears civilizational decline if he does not populate the world with little Elon's. And he has no care for the women. He has disdain for the women who he employs to do this work for him. I think the key word there is employees, right? Like this, what Ashley St. Clair is describing her experience with Elon and with his representatives is an employment arrangement and kind of an exploitative shitty one, right?

Like, this is not a partner. This is not somebody you're in family with. This is not somebody who's treating you as an equal or as an entity worthy of respect. This is somebody who thinks he can buy you and will punish you with money and with the law if you don't behave the way he wants to. So I think like the other thing we need to talk about when we talk about pro-natalism is that it's not exactly pro-family because it really vulgarizes and like commodifies in the musk case these relationships that we think of as like really kind of personally meaningful. It's clearly not personally meaningful to the pro-natalists when all of his children are just numbers and their mothers are, you know, management problems he has to solve. It undercuts the entire notion of family. I am old enough to remember the entire Republican Party obsessing about the nuclear family as a way to disparage gay people and to try to kill gay marriage. George W. Bush ran in 2004 on the notion that he would do a constitutional amendment if he got back into power to make sure that there was no LGBTQ marriage. in the country for the rest of time.

And so this is as core to the Republican ideology as anything, the homophobia, but the complete fiction and the veneer of wanting to promulgate the nuclear family and traditional values has been disposed of by Donald Trump's very existence, but also all of the acolytes that have become a part of this movement, including Elon Musk. And so I think a competent opposition party in the Democrats would be pointing out this inherent contradiction about how they say they're for family values, but when it gets to its core, to the seed at the center, you see that it's about control. And Elon Musk, yeah, he may be creating children, but he's not a part of a family. He's not a part of that family. He's not providing

emotional support to those children. They're not creating a life together. It's just about breeding his DNA. And so frankly, I think there are a lot of conservative men that view their children with that same level of narcissism. It's why parents can't accept trans kids. I think there's a lot of misogynistic fathers that don't understand how could you reject the dominant gender for this other gender, XYZ, right? Like there's all this misogyny that's inherent in the transphobia in this country. But even when it comes down to parental rights and how the right has been going at school boards and trying to censor certain kinds of books that may promote LGBTQ equality. They'll say this is about parental rights.

They'll say this is about family. They'll say it's about protecting kids. But at the end of the day, it's as ridiculous as the nuclear family arguments were back in the Bush days. Because once you get down to brass tax, it's about control and it's about suppressing anybody that doesn't fit into a very specifically narrow box of how you should live your life. And the more you drill into it, it gets narrower and narrow. narrower. I think it's so interesting because we started the episode talking about the Collins's. You look at the photo shoots that they do for these interviews that they do with the Guardian,

with the telegraph, with Washington Post, and they look like ballerina farm photographs. You know, they have the kids, they're swinging in the grass, they're so happy. And of course, we talked about ballerina farm. But I think it's really helpful to talk about the violent misogyny of Elon Musk's personal life, because it is, actually the most distilled version of the movement that all of these people are part of. And it presents, I think, the clearest vision of what this is actually about, which both of you have made very clear, is about control of people's bodies. This isn't about anything else. And it's about eugenics. And it's about building a future of white people. Right. It's all white supremacy and

so it's a right wing movement. Congrats. I'm sorry, can we can we just like, I feel like we've done this throughout the episode, but I really just want to dwell on how pathetic this shit is. It's like, I need to be the best. I need my genes to be the best. I need other people to live the way I think they should live. It's like, it's a product of people who I think have like very little self-worth. And it's so fucking weird. Not to like Tim Walls it, but like normal people do not spend their days thinking about birth rate decline. It's just like, am I wrong? I don't know. Someone's going comment on this and be like, I think about birth rate decline all the time and I'm woke. But like, but like there, it's just, it's just weird. It's a really weird thing to preoccupy yourself with.

And it's then it's like, obviously, as we've demonstrated, like a strain of racist narcissism to think that you're the one who should be fixing it. It's weird. You're right. It's weird. These people need a fucking hobby. It's gross. It's weird. It also has the hallmarks of cults. And I, you know, in the sense of like giving people a purpose and this grandiose view of how you save humanity via your own individual actions that should be disconnected from it with any rational analysis. But it's not because we have the secret trick. It's totally a doomsday cult. I mean, it is.

I don't think that's a stretch at all because, you know, I read interviews with all sorts of pronatilists when I was researching for this. And they all talk about like the apocalypse. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I just had this conversation with Naomi Klein, one of our, you know, great writers. Oh, not that flex. I mean. You love Naomi Klein on this podcast. I'm one of my heroes and one of, you know, our best living thinkers and writers right now on the left in, like, the English-speaking world. She wrote a piece co-authored with Astra Taylor in The Guardian that I would encourage everybody to read.

And it talks about end times fascism and what connects the techno-fascist right with the evangelical right-wing movements. And it's also just like they've embraced the nihilism. The Trump administration and Elon Musk or whatever, they're post-truthers, right? They don't care about this objective reality that we all share. They make their own truth via force. And that's usually via capitalism. And so they don't care about any shared understanding, any shared collective humanity. It's all about let's get ours so we can get to Mars.

And they don't view saving the planet as something that they need to do as people in power. They view it as something that's inevitable and maybe something that they should accelerate for their own ends. And I see pronatalism very much in that very dystopian vision and a version of far right politics that I'm not sure we've ever seen, even though it's all the kind of the same contours. but it is in many ways a response to the climate crisis. As is Elon Musk's fascism, he says that his company, Tesla, was all about like, oh, let's reduce emissions. And you know what the entire business model is reliant upon and being held together on with like duct tape and gum is carbon credits, which he sells to other companies. So polluters can go over their emissions limit. and anything that his company is offsetting is completely moot.

Doesn't that say everything about how he views the planet? And that's what the right encapsulates here, I think, in this current moment. How do we end this? You know what? I try to end up on an uplifting note, but this is hard. I mean, I just said the word end times, words end times fashion. I did write down this like core question that I wanted to finish on because we haven't even recited the fact that. that like when most people saw, for example, this New York Times article that was like the White House is trying to get you to have more children.

Most people responded with like, I'll have more children, but I need some things from you. Like there's no shortage, I think, of people who want children, but they can't afford them. I wrote down this question. It seems like the main reason people are choosing to have less or no kids, right? One, yes, there's like a truth about changing gender roles in society and that has empowered some people to not want children, which I think is a great thing. But for people who do want kids or want more kids, most of them will tell you that they're not having them because the economic conditions and lack of social and governmental support make it impossible, right? The most obvious fix in my mind is like increasing the minimum wage, affordable child care, paid leave, gun control. But the pro-natalist

movement doesn't seem interested in any of this. I mean, I was reading about things that like Malcolm Collins has campaigned for. I don't know if you guys saw this, but he campaigned. Let me find my notes on this. Malcolm Collins has advocated for bans on car seat requirements. Have you seen this? What? I'm sorry, what?

Because he says that requiring parents to have car seats discourages people from having big families because he argues you can only fit so many cars. car seats into cars. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, like, I don't know. If I were appointed, like, the Simone Collins of the pro-natalist movement, I'd be like, give people affordable child care in a higher minimum wage. Get their maternal mortality rate down. Like, make it less expensive and less physically dangerous to give birth. Maybe don't defund Medicaid, which is the entire Republican budget plan, which is responsible for over 40% of births in this country. But this is when we come back to how proto-Natalism is just an extension of a eugenicist project, where they fundamentally view our society as to giving to folks who are not contributing, like the rest of the wealthy people and to capitalists, even though governments always redistribute wealth.

It's just a question of how we redistribute it, and we've been redistributing it all the way to the top to like French revolutionary levels. That's where we're at right now. They are trying to get everybody to blame people for their own conditions and to take on their own health care as like a libertarian individualist enterprise.

The right kind of people who have the right kind of funds can create the babies that will further Western civilization. They don't view our society as something that is there to create the most amount of happiness for the most amount of people, which is what the leftist vision is. They view it as a way to extract. On a New York Times article about the pronatalist movement, the pronatalist women, I was reading some comments. And I wanted to end on this one from a woman named Diana from Washington, D.C. Diana, wherever you are, hope you're well. She wrote, motherhood is hard work.

Women who need motherhood to be a brand are pathetic. Give it a rest, have children, or don't. I had a few. I didn't have them for the benefit of society or for Instagram. Pronatalists need to get it. Misogyny is a feature of fascism, not a bug. The U.S. is in the grip of politicians who are just fine with killing women through pregnancy and childbirth.

Oh, and children are dying of hunger, disease, and mass shootings. Rebrand that. Saucy Diana, clapping back at the president. pro natalists. This is what we need. I feel like exhausted liberal like middle age liberal moms are like actually the people we need to be hearing from. They may save us. The wine moms have been vindicated and I am going to, I will follow Diana into battle at this point. I'm getting text like, hey, maybe Bernie was right. I mean, we'll see if that lasts. But I think that there are some people that are getting radicalized by this moment and like seeing how liberalism is family. people, right? Where it's like liberal ideology for folks, like in terms of the way we should accept people in society being pro-LGBQ, anti-racist, whatever. Yeah, that part of liberalism works. But the liberalism for the market is killing us. And the institutions that embrace both

of those things, like our law firms or our universities, are capitulating to fascism because the liberalism of society came secondary to the free market liberalism, which is what their are based off of. And so I think, like, there are some people looking around saying, hey, maybe the Chuck Schumers of the world aren't our answer. Maybe it's the Bernie AOC wing that knew what they were talking about. And we got to break these oligarchs and take their money. Let it radicalize you. Yeah. Let this, like, lady in like a pilgrim outfit with her bonnet on and the fact that, like, she is intertwined, like, she has a direct ear in the White House. Like, let this radicalize you. These people are crazy. They're like in the handmade's tail outfit,

like for real. Like we all made fun of the handmade's tail outfits at the women's march back in 2017. Oh my God, I'm dating myself. But like now they are unironically wearing the bonnets. Like it's time ladies. It's time for a popular front to take these freaks down. Yep. They'll, uh, they'll behead me in a pussy hat. Emma and Moira, thank you so much for walking us down this very dark journey, but one that I think people need to understand maybe on a deeper level than most of us currently do because it's happening quicker than most of us can keep up with. See, I think we did have fun.

I think I was right. I think we did have fun. I think it's impossible not to have fun. with great folks like this. So thanks so much, Matt, Moira, for speaking with me today. And I appreciate you having me on that. Fuck the league. I hope their app goes out of business.

Oh, this is a blast. Thank you, the listener, for making it this far. I so appreciate you weird times. But the pendulum is going to swing back. And I have seen people on Twitter predicting that society is about to get woke on levels that we have never before. foreseen and I am clinging to that prediction personally. I love you all and until next time, stay fruity.