Breed or Die: Inside Pronatalism
Malcolm and Simone Collins say they want people to have more babies. But which people?
HOPE not hate goes undercover inside pronatalism — the movement lobbying for more babies — and discovers the links that Malcolm and Simone Collins have developed with far-right activists.
“If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues,” Elon Musk posted on X in 2022, “civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers.” The world’s richest man has become one of the most ardent advocates for reversing the decline in western birth rates, claiming it is necessary to avoid societal destruction.
“Pronatalism”, as the movement calls itself, appears at first glance to be concerned merely with increasing fertility. A HOPE not hate investigation reveals, however, that some of those involved in the pronatalist movement also express fears that the quantity of babies being born is less important than the genetic “quality” of their parents. Furthermore, we have charted connections between the movement and far-right activism that poses questions about the true goals of pronatalism.
On the one hand, pronatalists say their movement is dedicated to raising the number of babies born. “We wanna produce babies in this country,” Donald Trump has said on the presidential campaign trail, promising a “baby boom”.
However, according to our analysis, pronatalism is often much more concerned about improving the so-called standard of babies, a notion that is redolent of eugenics and based on junk science.
This report examines the pronatalist movement, and the ways in which it has captured the imaginations of both conservatives and the wider far-right. During HOPE not hate’s investigation project, our undercover reporter met with Simone and Malcolm Collins — two of the most recognisable pronatalists today. The investigation exposes pronatalism as it really is, not as the movement it claims to be.
An uncomfortable history
The history of pronatalism is marked by its association with extreme politics. Defined as the encouragement of “childbearing by some or all members of a civil, ethnic, or national group”, pronatalism has been a preeminent far-right preoccupation for at least a century. In the 1930s, the concern that white people were being outbred by other races was commonplace among fascists and other racists. For example, Action, Oswald Mosley’s newspaper, ran an article on “the danger of our rapidly-falling birth rate” and the possible “decline of our race”. Nazi Germany emphasised the importance of kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church), awarding women with mutterkreuz medals based on the number of babies they had.
Pronatalism in Britain began to circulate in its current form in the early 2000s, when declining birth rates and rising immigration were increasingly discussed in the media. Articles in the conservative press additionally framed motherhood as a national duty incompatible with women’s independence. “All around is the siren voice of the feminist argument,” read a Daily Mail article in 2002. “Self-fulfilment lies less in being a wife and mother than in independence and a job which delivers a fat pay packet.”
Birth rates are now a popular topic in the conservative mainstream. Donald Trump, on the 2024 campaign trail, has promised to raise birth rates, telling his supporters: “You men are so lucky out there.” JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice-president, has furthermore insulted his Democrat opponents as “a bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives”, claiming that women who prioritise their careers “choose a path to misery”.
Some European countries like Hungary have framed their falling birth rates as a “struggle for the future of Europe”, as Viktor Orbán puts it, blending the reduction of migration and the boosting of “natural reproduction”. The far-right German party Alternative für Deutschland, which won the state election in Thuringia in September 2024, has called for an end to “undesirable demographic development” in its manifesto, adding as a slogan: “Larger Families instead of Mass Immigration”.
The Collinses
The best-known activists in the transatlantic pronatalist scene are Malcolm and Simone Collins. Former tech workers and venture capitalists, they are now the de facto spokespeople for the pronatalist movement, and have landed coverage in an impressive number of publications in the UK, the US, and Canada. In September 2024, the Collinses appeared in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and a broadcast of NBC News; they have previously been profiled by The Guardian, The Telegraph, Business Insider, VICE, and Piers Morgan on his TalkTV show.
They argue for the pronatalist cause in their media appearances, books, podcast shows, and dinners they organise with transatlantic tech entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, and politicians. Simone is now running on a pronatalist platform in the Pennsylvania state elections for the Republican Party this November. She is contesting District 150, which sits in Montgomery County, and although is currently held by a Democrat, was Republican until 2019.
Malcolm and Simone have a sharp understanding of the media ecosystem. They speak in quotable soundbites and present themselves as amusing eccentrics. They talk, for instance, about “the year of the harvest”, when, in 2018, the couple underwent IVF and had their embryos frozen. Simone has joked with reporters that she wants to keep having kids until her uterus is “forcibly removed”. So far, the Collinses have had four children and plan for a dozen.
During an undercover investigation last year, a HOPE not hate reporter met Malcolm and Simone Collins. They spoke on a video call in September 2023, and then when the Collinses visited London, they met for lunch in October and dinner in November. They also arranged a video call with Lillian Tara, who at the time was introduced as the CEO of Pronatalist.org, the Collinses’ non-profit organisation.
“BREED OR DIE!”
Key to understanding pronatalism is “demographic collapse”, the idea that an imminent crisis awaits society when women have fewer babies. This was captured best by Spearhead, a magazine founded by John Tyndall, a British neo-Nazi who once led the National Front and the British National Party. In 1983, he ran a front page featuring a white woman and her baby, emblazoned with the giant headline: “BREED OR DIE!” The idea gradually made its way into the conservative press. In 2001, an article about demographic concerns appeared in The Times. Written by the future Conservative politician Michael Gove, it was similarly headlined “Breed or die out”, an unfortunate echo of Spearhead’s earlier edition.
The overlap that pronatalism has with far-right ideology is the fear that civilisation is tumbling towards catastrophe. The way to fix this, pronatalists say, is by returning to a time when the functions and hierarchies of society were perceived to have been smarter, simpler, and purer — in this instance when women, even though they were confined to the domestic realm, had enough babies to sustain a population.
Although they clearly do not share every view, the same apocalyptic dread that permeates the pages of Spearhead influences the pronatalist activism of today. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble,” Elon Musk said in 2021. “Mark my words.”
Malcolm and Simone Collins likewise say that low-fertility societies are staring down the barrel. “There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,” Malcolm told The Guardian in May 2024. Pronatalist.org, the Collinses’ advocacy organisation, asserts: “Demographic collapse is inevitable”.
Critics of pronatalism are alarmed that the movement seeks a return to an era when the value of women depended on the number of babies they produced, and that regressive social policies would need to be enforced in order to force a raise in fertility rates. Aporia Magazine,Race Science Inc. Read more about Aporia in our report: Race Science Inc.
for instance, published an article in December 2023 headlined “How to solve demographic collapse”. It argued for restricting women’s access to education and work, which in turn would supposedly encourage them to stay home and have more children. Among its policy recommendations were bans on academic scholarships for women, an end to no-fault divorce, the stigmatisation of extramarital sex, and a pledge to “roll back the sexual revolution”.
Malcolm and Simone Collins also wade into these controversial waters. From their home in Pennsylvania, they host a daily podcast and YouTube show that lobbies for pronatalism. While they are careful to publicly disavow sexism, racism, and prejudice of any kind, they toy with controversial ideas to nudge birth rates in an upward direction. In April 2024, they published a podcast entitled: “Would Taking Away Women’s Right to Own Property Solve the Fertility Crisis?”
In the video, the fast-talking couple referred to a study that found women who win the lottery tend to leave their husbands, while men who hit the jackpot stay with their wives. They cite this as an example that finances are best left in the hands of men. “From a pronatalist perspective… where do you put money?” asked Malcolm. “You do not want to give money to women.”
Dysgenics
In their videos and writings, the Collinses deride what they think has gone dramatically wrong with today’s world. They rail against the “woke mind virus”, and in one video titled “How DEI Will Kill (More) People”, Malcolm said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion policies:
“I suspect within five to ten years there’s going to be a major incident in the US. We are going to have kids die, lots of kids. I’m telling you that right now, people are going to die.”
A key idea that animates the Collinses is that IQ used to be higher in the early 20th century and has been steadily declining ever since, imperilling the future of society. The Collinses described these fears to our undercover reporter. “With IQ declining as much as it is,” Malcolm said, “I’m never going to convince the general population to fix that problem, and I don’t think that there’s an ethical way that you can.” This is in line with their on-record views that not enough smart people are having children. In one August 2024 podcast, Malcolm said:
“These people — the dumb ones — are going to be more and more of the general population as time goes on. And so they will be electing and building bureaucracies that make it harder and harder for the geniuses to do their jobs.”
In the same podcast, Malcolm claims that IQ is falling. “The data in this is so loud and from so many different angles and it will create real problems from society if we try to ignore this or pretend it’s not happening,” he said, further claiming that the phenomenon “has been well documented in many sources”.
Malcolm calls this view “dysgenics”, which is a sister term to eugenics. If eugenics is concerned with desirable traits, then dysgenics encompasses the fear that adverse traits are damaging the gene pool, principally via low-IQ immigration and breeding. Adam Rutherford, the UCL geneticist who has publicly criticised the scientific understanding of the Collinses, told us he has not seen any meaningful data to support a view that dysgenics is occurring, adding that it is “not a term that actual geneticists would use”.
To make his case that IQ is falling, Malcolm cited a study that claims the average IQ of US university students “has been dropping by 0.2 points per year since the mid 20th century”. This, he said, was evidence of dysgenics.
However, the actual paper, first published by Frontiers in Psychology, says something different. While it does find that IQ scores of US university students were higher in 1939 than 2022, it makes clear that this was a “necessary consequence of college and university education becoming a new norm rather than the privilege of a few”. There were far fewer students in 1940 — approximately 10 percent of young people went to university, compared to 60 percent today. This does not prove IQ is falling, just that more Americans are going to university, lowering the average. Furthermore, the study’s authors called for IQ “not be used to make high-stakes decisions about individuals”.
Pronatalism for who?
The assertions of pronatalists that IQ scores are declining has prompted speculation that the movement is less concerned with the quantity of babies being born, and more with their perceived quality. Pronatalist.org, an advocacy website run by the Collinses, insists that a demographic crisis is coming that will affect the entire planet. In a September 2023 video call with Malcolm and Simone, our undercover reporter learned that in practice, they have a more specific focus.
Malcolm said that his pronatalism campaigning secretly targets a particular group of people to have more babies. He said:
“When we talk to reporters we’re very, ‘Oh this isn’t just for the elites,’ but, in truth, we do target the elites unfortunately.”
The pair are no strangers to elite networks. Simone studied for a master’s degree at Cambridge; Malcolm got his at Stanford. She was managing director of Dialog, a secretive networking society set up by the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, and he was born into a famous Texan political dynasty and has attended the Bohemian Grove, another secret club for rich and powerful Americans (which has been the subject of numerous far-fetched conspiracy theories).
Malcolm explained that his advocacy was focused on a particular subsection of society. “It’s easy to forget how small the population of people in the world who actually impacts anything or matters is,” he said in a September 2023 video call. “When we do our campaigns, we work really aggressively on how we spread ideas within that narrow network, because they are also the people we want having kids.”
This echoes the Collinses’ stated view that not enough smart people are breeding. In an August 2024 podcast, Malcolm said:
“We also need to consider the geopolitics of how a declining number of competent, productive individuals impacts the solutions that countries are going to have access to when demographic collapse really hits.”
The Collinses articulate a view they call “techno puritanism”, which they used to call “secular Calvinism”, drawn from the Protestant sect that believed in a notion of “the elect”, that salvation awaited only for those chosen by God. In their self-help books, the Collinses expand on this idea:
“Whether you matter and manage to become a virtuous, productive person is predetermined.”
Ideas of predestination, elitism, and notions of dysgenics indicate that the pronatalism espoused by Malcolm and Simone Collins is much more focused on who has babies, not just how many of them are born.
In a follow-up email to HOPE not hate, Malcolm disputed that he meant his pronatalist advocacy was just for the elites, claiming he was referring to his marketing strategy. “I do not like that our outreach efforts disproportionately have to target the elites to reach downstream in society, but that is just how the world is structured,” he said.
Cutting through
Malcolm and Simone Collins are skilled communicators and have managed to thread the line between mainstream acceptance and the extreme fringe remarkably well. The couple rarely mention race explicitly and publicly reject the label of eugenics.
Instead, they talk about the importance of “competent” individuals and the dangers of lower fertility rates, genetics and educational attainment. This approach has afforded them a level of legitimacy and won them mainstream attention.
The demographic collapse narrative is a useful way to hide regressive politics while retaining plausible deniability. Declining fertility is, after all, a real phenomenon. This allows both conservatives and far-right extremists to champion the pronatalist cause and for its activists to move between the mainstream and the extreme fringe.
In the UK’s Conservative Party, pronatalist policy is presented as a way of confronting falling birth rates. In the early 1960s, British mothers had an average of three children, compared to 1.5 today. Miriam Cates, the former Conservative MP, has spoken about a national “malaise” about having children. Similarly, Neil O’Brien, who shared on social media a different Aporia article headlined “The West’s Fertility Crisis”, has written that “there are large numbers of people who would like children (or more children) but feel they are held back”, mainly by economic factors.
When the Collinses visited London for the right-wing ARC conference between 30 October and 1 November 2023, our undercover reporter met with them twice. During their time in the capital, they organised a dinner at the Veeraswamy restaurant in central London. On the invite list was a former Downing Street advisor, a fellow from the Conservative think tank Policy Exchange, plus two researchers at Oxford University.
The Collinses’ careful language and focus on what many believe is an existential threat has given them a platform and access to people of influence. Their rejection of terms such as “eugenicists” has likely helped them avoid deeper scrutiny on the effects of what they are saying. But despite the rejection of the label, what the couple propose is often reminiscent of eugenics. In addition to their concern for demographic collapse, there is a throughline that focuses not just on the number of children born but on the apparent calibre of their genetic makeup.
In an email to HOPE not hate, Malcolm said: “We think the data shows pretty clearly humans have been experiencing dysgenic selection since we transferred from a society in which many infants died to one where most lived.”
The Collinses have used cutting edge technology to attempt to improve the IQ of their offspring. For their third and fourth children, who were born via IVF, the Collinses used a genetic screening service (see HOPE not hate tomorrow for our forthcoming report on this company). It identified which of their embryos were likely to have high IQs. While they took their embryos’ likelihood of certain diseases like cancer into consideration, at the top of their list was IQ. “We will never choose a child that is less privileged in IQ than either of us,” Malcolm said.
While the Collinses reject the label of “eugenicist”, polygenic embryo selection, the service they used, has been labelled a form of eugenics by many journalists, academics and even proponents of the practice. Antonio Regalado, who has reported on the field for several years in the MIT Technology Review, has dubbed it “Eugenics 2.0”. Even Toby Young, the right wing commentator and Spectator columnist, recommended polygenic embryo selection for “progressive eugenics”. Jonathan Anomaly, an advocate of polygenic screening, has furthermore used the term “liberal eugenics”, citing the definition made by Leonard Darwin, son of the biologist Charles:
“Eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human race.”
The Collinses eschew the term on the basis that, according to their definition, eugenics has to contain an element of state coercion. In an email response to HOPE not hate, Malcolm Collins defines eugenics as “the state or a social group attempting to force genetic choices on an entire population”.
While being identified as eugenicists is something Malcolm and Simone wish to avoid, they are seemingly more comfortable with the label when appearing on live streams with smaller audiences. In May 2023, Simone was interviewed on the podcast of Edward Dutton, a pseudo-scientific racist, who introduced her as involved in “basically eugenics”. Simone did not dispute his characterisation. In a follow-up email, Malcolm said she chose not to because “there is no point arguing against every accusation or association thrown at us”.
Furthermore, the Collinses enlisted Lillian Tara, a pronatalist graduate student at Harvard University. During a call with our undercover reporter, Tara referred three times to her work with the Collinses as eugenics. “I don’t care if you call me a eugenicist,” she said. According to a response from Malcolm Collins, Tara is no longer affiliated with Pronatalist.org. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Unsavoury connections
Malcolm and Simone Collins strenuously deny that their advocacy work has any connections to the far right. Indeed, they have mocked ethno-nationalism on their podcast. “Scientific Racism is for Midwits (as is Ethno-Nationalism)” is the title of one of their episodes.
However, while Malcolm and Simone disavow racism, the couple have simultaneously developed connections to a number of far-right activists. In November 2023, the couple spoke at the Natal conference in Austin, Texas. The event was organised by Kevin Dolan, an activist in the DezNat far-right Mormon movement, which uses the fasces as part of its symbol. Speaking at the event was Charles Cornish-DaleCharles Cornish-DaleA figurehead of the rightwing bodybuilding scene, Raw Egg Nationalist has built a huge following.More about Raw Egg Nationalist (the pseudonymous author known as Raw Egg Nationalist who HOPE not hate exposed earlier this year), who has called for the deportation of legal migrants. Jared Taylor, America’s most notorious white nationalist, attended the event as a guest. On an Aporia podcast this year, Taylor said: “There is no possibility of blacks and whites living peacefully together.”
Charles Cornish-DaleA figurehead of the rightwing bodybuilding scene, Raw Egg Nationalist has built a huge following.More about Raw Egg NationalistMalcolm told HOPE not hate that he was unaware that Jared Taylor was going to attend the conference. “We never turn down any speaking opportunity,” he said. “You can’t talk racists out of their positions if you don’t expose them to other ideas.” He further claimed to have deconverted a number of far-right extremists, although declined to mention who.
In his email to us, Malcolm said he and his wife had been providing a “non-racist avenue to discuss fertility collapse and human genetics”, and by doing so had “deflated the racist movements”.
The Collinses have nonetheless platformed far-right activists and promoted racist narratives themselves. In March 2024, when speaking to Mercator, a rightwing Australian outlet, Malcolm recognised that the ethno-nationalist conspiracy theory of demographic replacement due to primarily Muslim immigration — also known as the “The Great Replacement” theory — is useful for their cause. He said:
“If you have daily reminders that people who look, act, and think like you might be ‘replaced’, that is a strong motivation to have kids.”
The couple also promoted the theory in a July 2024 video on their YouTube channel titled “Will Muslims Replace Us? & What Does that Mean for LGBT Communities”. Charles Cornish-Dale, who addressed the Natalism conference, promoted the Great Replacement theory in March of this year, while Peachy Keenan, who also spoke at the event, did so in September.
The Collinses have also brought a known far-right activist onto their YouTube channel. In one interview with Edward Dutton, Malcolm recommended to his followers that they buy his book, The Naked Classroom:
“I really would encourage people to check out this book if you like some of the topics we were talking about and dissident science, the last real science that’s left.”
Dutton, in his book, makes the case for a vicious form of scientific racism, writing that different races perform worse in school for genetic reasons:
“You will likely have noticed that many of the Black children, whose parents or grandparents are from Jamaica, don’t do very well academically and don’t behave very well either. In fact, they may actively disrupt the class.”
Citing the research of Richard Lynn, Dutton goes on to claim that Black people are less agreeable, conscientious, and intelligent than whites because they are adapted to Sub-Saharan Africa, where the sudden use of “lethal force” is apparently needed for survival. In a follow-up email to HOPE not hate, Malcolm said: “Had we known that line was in the book, we would not have promoted it and now knowing that was stated in the book, we regret doing so.” Both Malcolm and Simone have been interviewed separately on Dutton’s channel.
Malcolm has also appeared on the podcast of the scientific racism outlet Aporia, when it was known by its previous name, Ideas Sleep Furiously.
Allies and fellow travellers
While the Collinses reject the accusation that their advocacy is motivated by far-right ideology, it is clear that their interest in genetic quality makes them allies of an extremist cause. It is therefore unsurprising that they are warmly received by the likes of Edward Dutton, Kevin Dolan, and Charles Cornish-Dale.
Pronatalism, in its current iteration, seeks to distinguish itself from its dark history. In earlier years, pronatalists tried to raise the birth rates of white people out of fear that other races would outbreed them. Pronatalism was, in part, a way to coerce and confine women in the domestic space, just as it tried to enforce eugenic concerns about genetic quality.
The leading advocates of pronatalism today, Malcolm and Simone Collins, have tried to detoxify the movement. But what they lobby for in public is very different to what they want in private. They are less concerned about everyone having more babies so much as “elites”. Their use of embryo screening technology to boost the IQ of their children also speaks to an agenda that, despite claims to the contrary, is suggestive of eugenics. Their links to far-right activists are furthermore highly disconcerting.
There are concerns to be addressed about falling birth rates and economic barriers to parenthood. But are the Collinses the best people to do it?