Keeping Up with the Collinses
The dreary end of the Pronatalist "movement."
I make it a rule not to judge anyone else’s parenting. It’s all just so tough, y’know? I try my best to be a good dad. But I don’t actually know what I’m doing. I figure all parents are just sort of making it up as we go. It seems reasonable to assume that everyone else is just trying their best too.
There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, though.
Parenting gurus/people who have declared themselves the voices of a new parenting “movement.” If you’re so sure you’ve got the right answers, then you deserve some cranky side eye.
People who hit their kids. Don’t do that. Don’t hit your kids.
And it turns out that Malcolm and Simone Collins, the self-styled leaders of the Pronatalist movement,” tick both of those boxes.
I’ve written about the Collinses before. They are the Peter Thiel-adjacent power couple behind Pronatalist.org. They’ve declared that the single greatest threat to human society is demographic collapse — not enough people (or at least, not enough of *the right* sort of people) are having enough babies.
Pronatalism has become fashionable among wealthy tech elites. Elon Musk loves it. Sam Altman too. Every few months, there’s another opinion piece or feature article about how, if birth rates don’t increase at some point in the next 30-60 years, global population will peak around 2100 and then start to decline.
Malcolm and Simone have made themselves the nerdy, pasty-white face of the movement. They’ve decided to have lots of babies, and to write a manifesto describing why everyone else in tech circles should have lots of babies too. Every six months or so, there’s another feature profile about them. (They might be two of the all-time-creepiest Redditors, but you’ve gotta respect their talent at garnering publicity.)
The latest profile was over the weekend, in The Guardian. And this one was different. I suspect it will be their last.
The author, Jenny Kleeman, visits the couple at their home and gives her readers a taste of what pronatalism looks like beyond the discussion boards. And the short version is that Malcolm hits his kids. In public. Right in front of a journalist taking notes. He pauses mid-sentence, smacks his two-year-old in the face, warns him “you’re gonna get bopped if you [kick the restaurant table because you’re understimulated from watching iPad all day]” and then picks up right where he left off.
He ignores the toddler until the toddler misbehaves. Then he hits the toddler. Fuck that guy.
The Collinses have reacted to public outrage over the incident by (1) claiming its “racist” to criticize Malcolm for hitting his toddler and (2) releasing a YouTube video titled “Why we don’t trust the ‘research’ on corporal punishment.” And I just… I have some notes:
-The fact that they think “this is anti-white racism!” is a winning persuasive communications strategy right now tells us volumes about the sort of discussion boards where they spend their free time.
-Malcolm starts the video by declaring “whenever anyone says every expert in a field agrees on something, I pretty much immediately dismiss it…. That just doesn’t happen in science when science is happening correctly.” On behalf of science, let me just say no Malcolm, you twit. You are a small, mean, shitty person of limited intellect. Stop hitting your kids for a moment and listen up:
There are plenty of debates within the social sciences. Human beings are complicated and there is a lot that we don’t know. But there are some things we do know, through mountains of study. They tend to be pretty simple, well-studied, and dramatic. They’re the types of things that attracted decades of intense research, and through that research we arrived at a consensus. And after reaching that consensus, the field then moved on to study other, more complicated matters.
“Smoking causes cancer” is one example. “drunk driving increases the likelihood of car accidents” is another. If someone told you “every expert in the field says drunk driving increases the likelihood of car accidents,” that would not be proof that everyone is science-ing wrong. It just means the settled findings were conclusive and the field has moved on to more difficult questions.
It’s particularly baffling because the Collinses (a) insist that they are deeply rational people who love to follow logical and objectivity, and (b) say that they “developed [their] parenting style based on something [Simone] observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment.”
So, on the one hand, we have the entire field of child developmental psychology saying “hitting your child has negative developmental impacts,” and on the other hand we have Malcolm Collins saying “bUt TiGeRs GeT tO dO iT!?!?”
Ah yes, Malcolm. So very rational and scientific.
I don’t think Malcolm and Simone will be sitting for any more feature profiles. Effectively the whole point of pronatalism was to provide a normie-friendly onramp to eugenics and Great Replacement theory. Their normie-friendly sheen is going to rust like a Cybertruck exposed to rainwater.
But I want to flag something about why they were such a media attraction in the first place. One reason the pronatalist couple has been treated as newsworthy is their funding from tech billionaires. Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn donated nearly half a million dollars to their foundation in 2022. That sounds like a significant commitment. News organizations take it seriously and treat the pronatalists like a growing movement because of the funding commitments from powerful people. Otherwise it’d just be a couple Reddit weirdos with a webpage. And the news coverage then legitimates the project, increasing the credibility of the nascent “movement.”
We’re seeing a similar phenomenon with all the wild-eyed proposals for techno-utopia cities that keep popping up. Read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Atlantic piece for some good coverage of a ludicrous idea. Or Joseph Bernstein’s NYT piece about a dream-city-that-will-never-get-built called Praxis. Or Gil Duran on Balaji Srinivasan’s fantasy of a San Francisco run by tech fascists.
Praxis is newsworthy because the utterly unqualified “founder” raised $19.2 million for his project. The pronatalists became media darlings by raising a million or so.
The thing we need to keep in mind is that, because of the gravitational force of tech money, those dollar signs signify much less than they otherwise would.
Tech billionaires giving $500,000 to a cause is about on par with you or me donating $50. It’s the type of money that you might toss at someone’s GoFundMe. It signals support without demonstrating deep commitment. (That’s especially true for the Collinses, because they’re running a tax-deductible 501c3. Troll the liberals and take a tax writeoff.)
These tech billionaires have awful taste and nonsensical political beliefs. They prop up political candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. with objectively large donations that are small relative to their own wealth.
It’s not that I think we should ignore these commitments entirely. It tells us plenty about Thiel, Musk, Altman, and the rest of their crowd.
But we should maybe stop treating their six-figure donations as prima facie evidence that a movement is serious or has any mass appeal. It’s just awful people, appealing to the vanity of rich fools, before eventually revealing themselves to be horrible, shallow human beings.
There’s one last thing I want to say about and to Malcolm and Simone Collins. In the Guardian article, Jenny Kleeman notes:
There is an AR-15 assault rifle mounted on the wall of Simone’s office. She has a Beretta shotgun above the mantelpiece in her bedroom, plus bear spray, and a bow and arrow.
The parents are menacing, restrictive, and inattentive. They want a lot of kids, and they want to make a statement about how one can raise a large family without sacrificing your career goals, so long as you ignore the kids/smack them when they get out of line.
Malcolm, Simone, listen up: it isn’t a good idea to leave a bunch of guns lying around, unsecured. If this story was fiction, that line from Kleeman would be what we call foreshadowing. Try to be minimally responsible human beings.
Here’s hoping this is the last we all hear of the pronatalist crusaders. And here’s hoping the next fashionable cause amongst the tech elites features slightly-less-awful people.
You might be amused (?) to learn that while I was reading that Guardian piece, I was thinking, "These people desperately need someone like Dave Karpf, only without any conscience," because they're absolutely clueless about communicating with people who don't share their insanity. A competent publicist wouldn't have let them within a mile of a Guardian reporter, at least not without heavy chaperoning.
But then I got to thinking: if, in fact, they're basically grifters, which they probably are (Rick Perlstein has argued for years that American conservatism is basically a gigantic grift), then being pilloried in The Guardian could end very well for them. For the kind of people apt to give them money, The Guardian is a hated symbol of The Liberal Elite (or something like that), so being "smeared" by The Guardian is a veritable badge of honor. Just recently, The Guardian has been trying to drum up subscriptions by quoting King-in-his-own-mind Elon as calling it, with typically imbecilic bluster, "the most misanthropic publication on Earth". So I expect the Collinses will monetize this thing to a fare-thee-well.
Also, you know, child abuse has a very large constituency in the USA. My own mother was part of it, as were the fundie christianists who ran the schools to which I was sent. Their violence toward their own children, including me, was one of my earliest clues that they were full of shit.
I feel genuinely sorry for the Collins children. Their names alone are almost a form of child abuse.
"Praxis is newsworthy because the utterly unqualified “founder” raised $19.2 million for his project."
This is a sidebar to this but this particular thing has really bugged me. That's a lot of money for you and me - as you note, pocket change for tech billionaires - but it is laughably insufficient to start a freaking CITY, by several orders of magnitude. People - and credulous reporters are very much included here - have really lost the plot of how BIG society is. Even the very richest humans can only plausibly use their wealth to gain power in/of a society/country - not build a new one. Jeff Bezos, if he wanted, could build a small-to-medium-sized city (he would hate it), but the list beyond that isn't very long. State-level resources - and obligations - are just a different thing than individual.