At home with the pronatalists

May 25, 2024 8:29 AM

[CW: eugenics, racism, violent child abuse incident] Guardian: “His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.” [Previously: November 2022, You say 'Eugenics' like it's a bad thing (it is)]
posted by Wordshore (103 comments total)

Well, that was a fucked-up read into the heart of darkness and I hummed and haaad about making an FPP, but it can serve as an update to the post and many comments (linked) from 18 months ago. Many, many, points and questions about the wannabe state governer and her partner. One, in this paragraph, is missing some detail:

+ + + + +
“Obviously, we looked at IQ,” says Malcolm. They discounted embryos with high risk factors for cancer and what Simone calls “mental health-related stuff where there’s just no good known treatments” including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, depression and anxiety. They didn’t select against autism, which they consider part of a person’s identity. They have 34 embryos left, and plan to give away the ones they don’t use; three have already gone to a lesbian couple in California.
+ + + + +

How does it work in the US - do the "lesbian couple in California" know (or have a legal right to know) that the three embryos they have received they've been given because they have "high risk factors"? Or are they unaware?
posted by Wordshore at 8:39 AM on May 25, 2024 [6 favorites]

Wow, I’d love to see the spreadsheet they used to balance their personalities to optimize for weird, off putting, and concerning traits because they are totally killing it.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 8:45 AM on May 25, 2024 [45 favorites]

Terrible folks terrifyingly raising future terrors.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:52 AM on May 25, 2024 [4 favorites]

“Pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting,”

Oh, ask me how I personally know about this philosophy of kids being a cheap commodity.
posted by zenon at 8:55 AM on May 25, 2024 [27 favorites]

Those poor children, that was my first thought.

My second thought is that Kleeman went into this assignment thinking she’d write a quirky human interest story, and clearly had no idea how to reframe it after she saw Collins strike his son in public. What a strange article.
posted by Kattullus at 8:57 AM on May 25, 2024 [24 favorites]

@robinmarty.bsky.social: Evergreen reminder that billionaires donating and investing in IVF and fertility tech aren’t pronatalists, they are white supremacists and eugenics supporters.

@scottdagostino.bsky.social: It’s all connected: conservatives hate abortion rights and queer people and women working because this all interferes with the mass production of white babies to “defend” against a world full of other races. You know, Nazi ideology. Meet the Collins, your neighbours.

@rebeccasear.bsky.social: Once again begging journalists to talk to demographers when writing articles about demography. This piece repeatedly states that pronatalists are ‘data-driven’, yet allows their statement that low fertility will result in ‘countries of old people starving to death’ to pass by unchallenged.

@timmarchman.bsky.social: Aside from the child abuse, my main takeaway here is that as Catholics we really need to up our game if people with a mere three kids, who worship their god-king because he has a mere 11, are notable enough to profile.

@davidleheny.bsky.social: “Every decision the Collinses make is backed by data.” Well, maybe not the one to smack your very young child in the face at dinner.
posted by Wordshore at 9:09 AM on May 25, 2024 [36 favorites]

do the "lesbian couple in California" know ... the three embryos they have received they've been given because they have "high risk factors"?

I didn't get that sense from the article. I think some of the "screened" (eek) embryos is what they received.

As a democratic socialist, this sort of disturbingly militant eugenic ah polygenic big S Social Entrepreneurialism makes me very uncomfortable... But, if they can seduce enough of the right wing to quench their drive towards religious/racial/gender pogroms and climate-based pruning of the herd, then that is at the very least a violence-averting albeit highly volatile improvement.

The child abuse of course, is simply and obviously grotesque.
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:12 AM on May 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

If your parents name you "Industry Americus", anything you do to them should be legal.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 9:13 AM on May 25, 2024 [69 favorites]

Using children as the fungible gamepieces of an effective altruism campaign is grotesque.

So now my personal Horrible People Bingo Card has MAGA, Stanford, blockchain/cryptocurrency, private equity, McKinsey/BoozAllen/Bain, Christian nationalists, bigots, and effective altruism. Too much overlap there,: I should probably consolidate some of these to make room for more asshole types.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:16 AM on May 25, 2024 [29 favorites]

*Probably* a coincidence, but wouldn’t surprise me a bit if one of them turned out to be a non-ironic fan of the Imperium of Man: Titan Invictus
posted by McCoy Pauley at 9:26 AM on May 25, 2024 [10 favorites]

As appalling as all of this, are there any actual signs that this “movement” isn’t more than a basket case of muddled ideas, and only this one secular Quiverfull clan is trying it out? You see stuff like Musk saying that people should have more kids, but how many people are actually heeding his call?

And as with Quiverfull, many of these kids will inevitably grow up to become prodigals.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:37 AM on May 25, 2024 [9 favorites]

her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus

Someone has been watching waaay too much Attack on Titan. Side bet: once this child starts school, her nickname will be "Tits". Great. 16 months old and already cursed for life.
posted by SPrintF at 9:46 AM on May 25, 2024 [4 favorites]

The rest of us are going to be paying for their kids' education, livelihoods, and therapy, just as the rest of us currently pay for their "careers" in extracting profit from others' labor. "Data-driven" my ass, every word out of their mouths was pure sophistry. I've no doubt they believe it, as the best sophists do.

"I love the kids I don't have yet as much as the ones I currently do" is another way of saying "My children are not real people to me, they are important only as abstractions of my ideology."

Those poor kids.
posted by biogeo at 9:47 AM on May 25, 2024 [38 favorites]

"bopped"

Tigers.

OK.

"For someone dedicated to helping people have as many babies as possible, Malcolm doesn’t seem to like children very much."

That seems accurate.
posted by Zumbador at 9:53 AM on May 25, 2024 [13 favorites]

Getting more Weimar by the day...
posted by Fupped Duck at 10:26 AM on May 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

"Low-effort parenting" means either neglecting children's physical and/or emotional needs;

or it means pressganging your older children into parenting your younger children for you (which is what the Quiverfull people do.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:31 AM on May 25, 2024 [28 favorites]

Also: there is no excuse to hit children except maybe in emergencies to stop them touching a hot stove or running into traffic.

Hitting children in non-emergencies is abuse, and just gives your children PTSD and makes them hate you. And no, they probably won't forgive you when they are 20/30/40 years old.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:40 AM on May 25, 2024 [22 favorites]

There’s the hitting and then also not having any space to themselves (the dad’s office is their bedroom?) and not heating the house, which honestly feels worse to me in the long run.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 10:49 AM on May 25, 2024 [9 favorites]

Read this article earlier today - what dreadful, self-serving pricks those people are.

The ecological / environmental impacts of having even more children in a rapidly overpopulating world. The smacking-your-two-year-old-child-in-the-face-and-shrugging thing (that seems like it must happen often enough that you even have a tried and true justification for it you can trot out). The fetishising of intelligence, the "quirky" names, the deliberate eccentricism. It's all so very deliberately, desperately nothing trying so hard to be something.

Those poor children.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 11:03 AM on May 25, 2024 [7 favorites]

They believe in science and data and studies and research, except for the data and studies and research and science that shows our planet is seriously overcrowded and having MORE KIDS FOR THE SAKE OF HAVING MORE KIDS is a stupid, asinine, dangerous idea.

I always wanted lots of kids. Guess what folks: turns out one is lots.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:16 AM on May 25, 2024 [15 favorites]

Oh and guess how ELSE you can make sure there is enough pension money to support the aging population? Start fucking making billionaires and the companies they own pay some fucking taxes
posted by caution live frogs at 11:18 AM on May 25, 2024 [56 favorites]

The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly. “Girls that have gender neutral names are more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees.” ...
“I am autistic, and I really feel uncomfortable sitting still.” Simone was diagnosed fairly recently, after Octavian was diagnosed. She and Malcolm see her autism as an asset. At the recent Natal conference in Austin, Malcolm says, “one of the big jokes was how autistic the movement was. Like a third of the people there had autism.”

I'm missing something here. What's the connection between natalism and autism?
posted by doctornemo at 11:20 AM on May 25, 2024

The names remind me of classic Puritan ones.
posted by doctornemo at 11:20 AM on May 25, 2024 [9 favorites]

"the problem is most acute in countries...where women have rights"

hahaha the fuck

there are so many lines I could quote from that article. JMFC!!! these people are insane and they don't heat their house in the winter IN PENNSYLVANIA??????? that's abuse too.

I don't regret reading that article but the sum of stupidity going on right now has me stuffed to the gills.
posted by supermedusa at 11:21 AM on May 25, 2024 [20 favorites]

Ah, the "recent Natal conference in Austin" they mention, which was, as savvy readers may have guessed, basically just a bunch of Nazis. Linked article includes a picture of our lovely couple.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:39 AM on May 25, 2024 [21 favorites]

If learning that Simone Collins is running for a state representative seat makes you feel a way, you might enjoy learning that the district she's running in seems to be about 55-45 D.

Also and for no particular reason, here's a list of modifiers this writer used to describe how one of the adult Collinses said something: simply, proudly, staunchly, almost apologetically, magnimously, wide-eyed, airily, and 'delighted to be asked.'
posted by box at 11:46 AM on May 25, 2024 [11 favorites]

I'm missing something here. What's the connection between natalism and autism?

Just a guess, but I think this is linked to t Aspergers' Supremacy, a belief by some autistic people that autism is a more advanced stage of humanity.

It has close links to White Supremacy and Nazism.
posted by Zumbador at 11:47 AM on May 25, 2024 [13 favorites]

I tried to write something coherent and insightful but I just can't. This is so gross. If these people just want to increase the (white, American) population at any cost, why not just do surrogacy or arrange adoptions so that the kids can go someone who actually sees them as human beings? (This is a rhetorical question, I could provide any number of answers myself). The most tragic thing here is that I doubt these kids are going to have any sane, caring adults involved in their lives, which seems to be such a big factor in ameliorating the damage to kids exposed to lots of adverse childhood events.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 11:53 AM on May 25, 2024 [3 favorites]

I'm missing something here. What's the connection between natalism and autism?

Just a guess, but I think this is linked to t Aspergers' Supremacy, a belief by some autistic people that autism is a more advanced stage of humanity.

It has close links to White Supremacy and Nazism.

I'd guess it's because their natalism circles are full of techbros, who are probably more likely to be diagnosed or identify as autistic for a variety of reasons.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 11:55 AM on May 25, 2024 [8 favorites]

Re Ms. Collins' candidacy, she answered a questionnaire for Ballotpedia. She says her favorite books are the ones written by her and her husband.
posted by box at 11:55 AM on May 25, 2024 [7 favorites]

This is another really irresponsible piece of journalism by the Guardian. These people have clear and persistent ties to white supremacists and this is nowhere brought out in the article. They aren't just your ordinary child-hitting loons, and frankly this piece is very much in the Richard-Spencer-dapper-Nazi line.
posted by Frowner at 12:22 PM on May 25, 2024 [40 favorites]

The 'Elite' Breeding Couple Are Terminally Online Redditors Who've Gone Viral Before (Vice, Samantha Cole, 2023)
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:38 PM on May 25, 2024 [25 favorites]

Just a guess, but I think this is linked to t Aspergers' Supremacy, a belief by some autistic people that autism is a more advanced stage of humanity.

My own personal term for this is "Dr. House syndrome".
posted by srboisvert at 1:28 PM on May 25, 2024 [7 favorites]

There was only the briefest mention that they bought an entire house for their child care providers. (And it's a lot easier to "not need maternity leave" when you have someone else to provide child care.) How much time are the kids with their actual parents? Hopefully not much!
posted by metasarah at 1:37 PM on May 25, 2024 [3 favorites]

Opening the borders really solves most birth rate problems, but there’s still that pesky worker’s rights problem to be solved
posted by toodleydoodley at 1:38 PM on May 25, 2024 [8 favorites]

Also, I'm autistic, and it's very easy for me to go all-in on a philosophy I've decided is rational, without reconsidering it in the future unless something HUGE occurs which forces me to. My autism also made parenting young also-autistic children actual hell. I hope these folks hit a wall sooner rather than later, so they don't dig themselves an even deeper hole they'll eventually need to drag themselves and a bunch of kids out of.
posted by metasarah at 1:41 PM on May 25, 2024 [5 favorites]

Malcolm had a turbulent childhood that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about. He comes from a wealthy family and grew up in Dallas, but was sent to a “troubled teen” residential facility when he was 11. The only reason he can give me for being sent there was that his parents were getting divorced and were locked in a bitter custody dispute, and the judge “thought I shouldn’t be with either parent”. After that, he lived at a private boarding school, with his fees and expenses covered by a family trust.

How's that journalism thing go, when somebody doesn't want to answer a question, that's the story?
posted by box at 1:45 PM on May 25, 2024 [24 favorites]

Thank you, Zumbador, Jacen, and nanny's striped stocking.
posted by doctornemo at 2:10 PM on May 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

My wife and I, in unison, leaned over our son's crib and happily informed him that he was going to be an only child...
posted by jim in austin at 2:13 PM on May 25, 2024 [3 favorites]

It’s like the Duggars if the Duggars were the kind of people who figured out how to read at age two and never stopped believing it made them the next step in human evolution.

Poor Titan won’t be able to go to school to get her name made fun of. She’s getting homeschooled like all of them. In fact, it seems like none of them get anything of their own unless they’ve done something to please their parents, like on “Future Day.”

Even as someone who has seen extremely mild corporal punishment in loving, caring families, you don’t hit a fucking child in the face, and you don’t do it at all for just causing a mild inconvenience. Here’s hoping they all get out without a family annihilation like that bluegrass brothers band that was on Wife Swap.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:34 PM on May 25, 2024 [12 favorites]

(And although I shouldn’t make too much of it, I can’t quite get over Simone’s background as the child of a polyamorous hippie situation. They created someone who wanted to write her own rules in life and get the hell away from her childhood as far as possible.)
posted by Countess Elena at 2:37 PM on May 25, 2024 [5 favorites]

Ah, the "recent Natal conference in Austin" they mention, which was, as savvy readers may have guessed, basically just a bunch of Nazis. Linked article includes a picture of our lovely couple.

I alerted another speaker to this fact and he ended up withdrawing from the conference.

I also alerted the Collinses but they were totally fine with it.
posted by nicolas.bray at 2:53 PM on May 25, 2024 [13 favorites]

This is another really irresponsible piece of journalism by the Guardian.

As a follow up to my previous comment, I’m not altogether convinced that this is anything more than a freakshow family, or rather to be fair to be kids, a freak show couple. Hearing that they were able to buy a house just for the caregivers seems to imply that only the few wealthiest of supremacists would be indulging in this lifestyle. So yeah, I’d say this is irresponsible in that it’s platforming a very specific example of real-life aspiring supervillain masterminds and making it seem like it’s an actual phenomenon, when it’s just like one specific couple. And as pointed out above, it’s not even the first time they’ve been profiled! There are probably more couples who turn their day-to-day lives into historical reenactment LARP (the 24/7 Victorian cosplay types) than who do “Quiverfull but LessWrong.” The press should point out their racist ties and move on rather than gawking at them and inviting others to attempt emulating them.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:25 PM on May 25, 2024 [3 favorites]

they don't heat their house in the winter IN PENNSYLVANIA???????

Based on the photos they have open hearths and baseboard heaters, possibly resistive, aka almost literally the worst ways to heat your house. You'd think if they were such smartypants they could figure out how to install a freaking heat pump
posted by pullayup at 3:34 PM on May 25, 2024 [12 favorites]

I sure hope Protagonist Syndrome isn't hereditary.
posted by Sphinx at 3:51 PM on May 25, 2024 [4 favorites]

“The vast majority of right-leaning people in Silicon Valley are pronatalist. You’re probably looking at 100,000 people or something that subscribe to our specific vision.” For a data-obsessed couple, the basis for this figure is notably woolly: he says it comes from “the size of various communities and the number of views specific things get”.

I wouldn't mind seeing someone take a deep dive into that 100,000 claim.

Living in a bubble has a way of making someone think that far more people agree with you than actually do.
posted by box at 4:04 PM on May 25, 2024 [12 favorites]

Over and over while reading the article, I said "ewww" out loud. When I got to the smacking the kid in the face part, I closed my laptop and went for a walk to try to get rid of the adrenaline surge. Between flashbacks and down right anger, I was..... I don't even have a word.
posted by kathrynm at 4:47 PM on May 25, 2024 [9 favorites]

Christ, what a pair of assholes.
posted by Carillon at 5:12 PM on May 25, 2024 [6 favorites]

Being genuinely "data driven" would make it trivially obvious that reducing the population is critical to mitigating climate change. We can thus infer that the data point they're really optimizing for is "% of white people."
posted by microscone at 6:28 PM on May 25, 2024 [11 favorites]

These are chan creatures who have escaped containment.

I remember seeing the same attitude that having a lot of kids is easy when you didn’t give a fuck about them growing up in the woods in Tennessee. This couple has strong Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel energy.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:52 PM on May 25, 2024 [9 favorites]

Based on the photos they have open hearths and baseboard heaters, possibly resistive, aka almost literally the worst ways to heat your house. You'd think if they were such smartypants they could figure out how to install a freaking heat pump

Per the article, they think heating their home is an unnecessary indulgence.
posted by Well I never at 8:00 PM on May 25, 2024 [2 favorites]

them claiming that autism makes them act like they do is horrifying to me. everything described in this piece (and every that's also left undescribed...) violates my fundamental values as a human being. I do not want myself or other neuroqueer folks I know to be associated with these people in any way, shape, or form.

like don't go all-in on child abuse and Nazism and then claim you're led by the shining light of your neurodivergence. that's like, advocating for sexual assault and then trying to add a new letter to LGBTQIA for "out and proud rapist". makes me feel physically ill
posted by cnidaria at 11:35 PM on May 25, 2024 [24 favorites]

Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement – most recently made notorious by Sam Bankman-Fried – which its proponents claim uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth.

Edits mine. Utterly irresponsible reportage to have left that framed the way they did.
posted by flabdablet at 11:49 PM on May 25, 2024 [9 favorites]

He shakes his head. “The kids who I haven’t had yet, they are just as precious to me as the kids I already have.”

And there it is. These tescreal cretins have their heads wedged so far up their own arseholes that they genuinely can't see any difference between real people and imaginary ones.
posted by flabdablet at 12:07 AM on May 26, 2024 [8 favorites]

I'd like to leave behind a better world, but I don't have descendants coming after me to ensure that it is. Best of luck to the children of these idiots and please believe that at least some of us tried in our own way.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 12:13 AM on May 26, 2024 [2 favorites]

Titus Invictus is cranky and needs a nap.
posted by Soliloquy at 12:14 AM on May 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

Chiming in as another autistic person who was delighted to get permanently sterilised before some nouveau-right techbro fucklechud could persuade me it was actually in the best interests of humanity for me to carry numerous pregnancies to term.

One of the things that struck me most was the idea that a person who originally didn't want any kids because they wanted a big career could possibly be satisfied with such an asinine career as CEO of their own bullshit nonprofit/foundation. That's such an obvious non-career to me that I'm struggling to see how she fell for it if she's as smart as she makes herself out to be.

Things fell into place about these people when I read that she hands off childrearing around 18 months to the guy who hits their kids in the face in public for discipline. As an autistic kid, getting hit growing up never made me reconsider my behaviour, it just made me fear and loathe the adults doing the hitting. I know from my own experience that it's possible to build a life that looks decent on the outside after being raised by total fuckwads, but very little of it has been easy or fun, so good luck to those poor damn kids.

It also strikes me that they're very philosophically pro-autism but not doing a lot to raise their neurodivergent kids in ways that genuinely help with sensory and social stuff, like not making then endure the sensory hell of sharing a room with multiple other small children, or, y'know, not hitting them in the face and pretending it's a meaningful form of discipline.
posted by terretu at 1:13 AM on May 26, 2024 [27 favorites]

It also strikes me that they're very philosophically pro-autism but not doing a lot to raise their neurodivergent kids in ways that genuinely help with sensory and social stuff,

That's one symptom of the underlying attitude I find so disturbing. They don't see their children as valid, independent people who deserve autonomy and have their own ideas and experiences. They see those children as raw material to be molded into whatever shape seems best to them.

It's profoundly disrespectful.
posted by Zumbador at 2:57 AM on May 26, 2024 [20 favorites]

So yeah, I’d say this is irresponsible in that it’s platforming a very specific example of real-life aspiring supervillain masterminds and making it seem like it’s an actual phenomenon, when it’s just like one specific couple

I mean, yes, but also, the most newsworthy fact about people who speak at nazi conferences is that they speak at nazi conferences. Second most newsworthy is probably that they think it's good to hit their kids. You don't have to dig deep to find out that these people are at best fellow travelers with white supremacists. There are lots of people who are just arguably annoying weirdos - indeed, metafilter has argued over many of them - but these people are the types who run the fascist state after the coup. They just completely stepped out of the wrong side of that old "Who Goes Nazi" piece.

The Guardian goes along being all "vaguely liberal but not left enough to alienate the comfortable classes" and producing funny restaurant reviews and then blammo, they have some kind of series of extremely irresponsible pieces that just make you wonder about the whole project. Quirky nazis, A Trans Woman Committed A Serious Crime Should This Invalidate Her Gender, deeply misleading coverage about indigenous and environmentalist issues, etc. It suggests that there are a lot of shady rich people in the background and that the foreground is made up substantially of journalists who don't take politics seriously because they themselves are comfortably off. No one with normal political radar thinks it's a good idea to publicize and quirkify white nationalist fellow travelers, but the Guardian does.
posted by Frowner at 4:34 AM on May 26, 2024 [17 favorites]

I read this the other day and have been ruminating. I feel weird agreeing with these people on aspects of their lifestyle (frugality, allowing their kids to play partially unsupervised) while at the same time feeling unsettled by their larger philosophy. They are promoting their flavour of eugenics as a logical system to be taken up by all. Which makes their idiosyncratic lifestyle less a worrying curiosity and instead a threat.

A warning I think, to those of us with logical mindset: how can one person (or two in this case) claim to hold enough knowledge in their heads to reach such confident, and potentially harmful if wrong, conclusions?

This is far too close to religion for my liking (and ironically by confessed atheists).
posted by BrStekker at 5:44 AM on May 26, 2024 [2 favorites]

Simone was a “mistake baby”, the child of hippies (she has two half siblings from her father’s previous polyamorous marriage; her mother was their babysitter, she says).

Malcolm always wanted a large family. Multiple generations of his family had as many as 15 children. He has two siblings; his younger brother, also a pronatalist, is “in a competition” with him to have as many children as possible. He told Simone about his plans on their second date, and she replied that she didn’t want to have kids ever, because she didn’t want to give up on her career. He told her she didn’t have to.

Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”

Going out on a limb to predict that at least one of these people has spent time around someone I would consider a cult leader.
posted by box at 7:18 AM on May 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

Right Now, brilliant scientific minded, musicically gifted, artistic, humanitarian, ethical leaders, wildly creative, etc., children are hungry and poorly educated in a slum, are a child in a large family, whose capability may never be recognized or nurtured, are being home-schooled by parents who don't believe in science or access to information, are in hyper-religious families who renounce facts, oppress women, are gay in cultures who oppress them, and more. Philanthropy that looks for talent and capability so it can be nurtured, or just allowed to exist, would be far more efficient. Improving nutrition everywhere in the world would be efficient; too many great talents are stunted by lack of nutrition. So, yeah, obscenely arrogant narcissists. I hope their kids are resilient and okay.
posted by theora55 at 8:41 AM on May 26, 2024 [14 favorites]

Instead of having kids, why didn’t they use their superior intellect to just invent an iPad that watches itself? They could duct tape it to a punching bag if they needed the exercise.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 8:59 AM on May 26, 2024 [10 favorites]

I sure hope Protagonist Syndrome isn't hereditary.

It is, however, the name of their next child.
posted by dannyboybell at 9:12 AM on May 26, 2024 [12 favorites]

But it's not "science based" to hit your kids...so much bullshit in one article. 🙄
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:15 AM on May 26, 2024 [1 favorite]

But it's not "science based" to hit your kids.

But the tigers, tiny frying pan. The tigers are showing us the way.
posted by Well I never at 10:27 AM on May 26, 2024 [7 favorites]

Really hope those kids are spending most of their time at the neighbor's house.
posted by subdee at 11:35 AM on May 26, 2024 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: arguably annoying weirdos
posted by Captaintripps at 11:40 AM on May 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

What's the connection between natalism and autism?

If that's rephrased to "what's the connection between autism and any philosophy or worldview that is arguably fascist, proto-fascist, or crypto-fascist", then I think that an argument could be made that people on the spectrum, at least when they're younger and especially if they're bullied or neglected, tend to be attracted to stories or movements that suggest that they're not only different but better than normies/neurotypicals/flatscans/Muggles. Even before you had Harry Potter (and note the familiarity of the parents' glasses in this story) or the X-Men, you had A.E. van Vogt's Slan, and the subsequent declaration by members of the SFF community that "fans are Slans."

Hopefully, most if not nearly all of the neurodivergent people who get into this groove grow out of it, and at least come to question the Five Geek Social Fallacies and come to some sort of accommodation with NTs if not actually becoming friends/lovers/bridge partners with some of them. The Collinses sadly seem to have gone to the opposite extreme; I'm especially looking at that Vice link that shows how much they thrive on exposure to, and reinforcement from, social media. If I had the means, I'd set up a foundation to enable their kids to escape.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:08 PM on May 26, 2024 [9 favorites]

Why Many Entrepreneurs Are Turning to a 'Search Fund' Model (D Magazine (a Dallas lifestyle magazine), 2017), in which a somewhat 1.0 version of the Collinses gets their feet wet in what sounds a lot like minor-league private equity with the help of a family friend.

We also learn that Malcolm's grandfather (NYT obituary, 1989) was a Republican congressman who represented north Dallas for 7 terms before trying to unseat Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1982. Did he oppose desegregation busing and federal spending? Was he accused of masterminding a salary kickback scheme? As they say in Texas, boy, howdy.

The 'Bizarrely Authoritarian' US Education System Inspired This Husband and Wife to Found a 'Genius School' for Future Entrepreneurs and Leaders (Entrepreneur, 2022), in which a very credulous writer describes the founding of the Collins Institute for the Gifted, which (their words) 'does not privilege teachers over a book, Wikipedia article, or YouTube video'' and (my words) is definitely a real thing that exists.
posted by box at 1:19 PM on May 26, 2024 [6 favorites]

Via the wife's Ballotpedia page, it looks like they have a podcast called "Based Camp." I still think of "based" as mostly a nazi/4chan thing, but did it at some point achieve escape velocity into wider online youngish culture? Still, it's an extra dollop of suspicious for this nazi-adjacent, eugenics-adjacent white republican couple who seem to try to come off as liberal-palatable in these media profiles.

Separately, despite having no reverence for secular or non-secular Christmas, I thought this was a "fun"/terrible Ayn Rand-like pullquote:

Instead of Christmas, they have Future Day. “The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back with some gifts and stuff. They get more gifts when they do whatever they said they were going to do."

The Future Police! Who are contract attorneys! (Have the kids realized yet that it's just their parents dressed up in riot gear?)
posted by nobody at 2:34 PM on May 26, 2024 [5 favorites]

I read this in the Guardian and came here hoping to find some discussion about the horrible world they have constructed for their children-- the unheated house, the same-as-Daddy's uniform of black shirts and jeans that they were wearing, the casual physical abuse, and not to mention the neglect. I was, like the author, speechless at the end. These people should not be in charge of, or be authorities on, absolutely nothing. And their invented crisis of too few people in the world, where what they mean is too few white people, is grotesque.

The biggest blind spot in their "philosophy", if I can call it that, is their confusion over why birth rates fall when education and contraception is available. They think it's a bad thing, these crashing birth rates. But as a referendum on the current status of mothers in this world, and how mothers are treated, it's pretty damning. It's a deal millions of women will opt out of, given the chance. And all the "fixes" proposed do nothing to address the real problem, which is that same lack of status, and autonomy, and freedom both financial and personal. And then, of course, is the genuine stepping back from having children in North America (I assume Europe, too, but I haven't had personal experience with it) where people in their 20s and 20s don't want to bring children into a world heading into climate crisis. There is no need for more people on the earth; for better social organization, absolutely.
posted by jokeefe at 5:40 PM on May 26, 2024 [11 favorites]

Having a lot of money can lead to bad outcomes...

Can't imagine having a nanny, and makeing my kids fly in economy while I fly in first class. What a douchebag. Other people in the article, you do you.
posted by Windopaene at 5:54 PM on May 26, 2024

This is far too close to religion for my liking (and ironically by confessed atheists).

In the previously linked article they described themselves as "secular Calvinists", a more cursed self-descriptor being hard to imagine.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:01 PM on May 26, 2024 [11 favorites]

most if not nearly all of the neurodivergent people who get into this groove grow out of it

Very similar to people who never grew out of their libertarian phase. Like, grow up! It's just embarrassing.

And you just know that if any of their kids turn out to be the Wrong Sort of autistic that they will be unrelentingly awful towards them.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:47 PM on May 26, 2024 [4 favorites]

In a just world CPS would work and those kids would have been removed. Unfortunately they're white and rich and even though TFA says CPS has been called on them multiple times, they keep leaving the kids with their abusers. I doubt a PoC who hit their toddler in the face in public would be given such leniency. I hope the child care providers in the other house are decent people and poison them in their sleep. But probably they were hand picked to be uncaring assholes themselves.

This article made me sick and furious. It's shit like this that makes me want to go full fash when I am the Evil Overlady of the Galaxy. There will be licensing for people who want to have kids then, oh yes there will, and if you hit your kids or don't keep them warm or, clearly, love them the way primates need their parents to actually care about them - we're not fucking tigers, we're monkeys - you won't have your kids anymore and you won't have any more kids. And then robots will hit you in the face a lot until you get the point. I look forward towards this arc of the universe towards justice.
posted by mygothlaundry at 8:52 PM on May 26, 2024 [8 favorites]

In the previously linked article they described themselves as "secular Calvinists", a more cursed self-descriptor being hard to imagine.

Niall Ferguson is in that number:

I was raised an atheist by my parents who were Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian. But they both left the Church of Scotland before I was born, in a protest against the sectarianism that bedeviled life in Glasgow as it bedeviled life in Northern Ireland. Glasgow was a microcosm of Northern Ireland. So I was raised a devout atheist by two people who were raised Presbyterians. So I was in effect brought up as a Calvinist, but without the comfort of the existence of God.

I see. None of the upside but some of the downside.

Well, there is some upside. The upside is that you are given the Calvinists sense of belonging to the elect. That's important because unlike other faiths, the Calvinist strain of Protestant Christianity, if you do it right, it's guilt free. If you're a member of the elect, you are really not capable of doing bad things. At least that's how it was notoriously inclined to work. So I could never quite understand my Roman Catholic friends or my Jewish friends who would talk all the time about guilt, and how guilty they felt about everything, down to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I was puzzled by this because guilt hadn't been part of my upbringing. But essentially if you get rid of God, if you say as my parents did to me, "It's all just a cosmic accident life, and it has no meaning, there's definitely no afterlife. God is this construct, which is why we're not going to church, although your friends are," then you get some of the operating system of Calvinism because everybody just carries on behaving quite Calvinistically. But you don't have the story of an afterlife, and you don't really have the full ethical framework because you're not exposed to it on a weekly basis.

posted by Apocryphon at 9:49 PM on May 26, 2024 [2 favorites]

Also, eponysterically, there does seem to be an already existing Quiverfull family named Collins, who have the sort of Christian fundamentalist beliefs you might imagine, almost a dozen children, and an active social media influencer presence. On the other hand, they are an interracial family. They ought to meet the Collins from TFA in some sort of panel interview debate, play date, or Family Feud-type game show.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:55 PM on May 26, 2024 [3 favorites]

The biggest blind spot in their "philosophy", if I can call it that, is their confusion over why birth rates fall when education and contraception is available. They think it's a bad thing, these crashing birth rates.

There's not a tescreal cretin on the planet capable of hearing the word "Malthus" without immediately appending "was wrong" and dropping all further thought like a hot potato.

Very few people actually bother to read An Essay on the Principle of Population. Which is a great shame, because despite being over two hundred years old at this point, its observations on the relationship between birth rate and living conditions is still pretty much spot on.
posted by flabdablet at 12:35 AM on May 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I love how vain about the rather pathetic and selective love of ‘data’ this clueless couple is about their own transmissible genes.
The ‘data’ I saw in the article and links is two pale, myopic, eating disordered, generationally abandoned [and thus pre-disposed to health-affecting ACE factors,] infertile etc. Is gullibility also a gene? Because, yeah that too.
posted by honey-barbara at 12:42 AM on May 27, 2024 [5 favorites]

I will say I was impressed by their rationalization of why we can't just, like, bring more immigrants in - the part where it's "unfair" to outsource reproduction. They don't say, of course, that it's unfair to outsource, eg, cobalt mining and recycling hazardous metals and participating in the less regulated kind of medical trial and various kinds of financial chicanery and clothing-making. It may be "unfair" to outsource childrearing and that's why their nannies are impeccably Aryan, or it may be okay and that's why their nannies are working in bad conditions for low wages, we don't know from the article.

But yeah, that part where you sort of do the upside down "woke" discourse in the hopes of making liberals feel guilty for supporting immigration, yes. They'd probably try some kind of "poor people have their own culture, it's unfair to make them go to school and eat vegetables you classist" line under the right circumstances.

Also fascinating that they can't install an effective heating system or modernize their house enough to keep it warm because effective altruism, but the biggest effective altruism give would be having fewer kids and sending the money to finding and educating all those mute inglorious Miltons living in awful conditions elsewhere. Of course, effective altruism is just a scrim for "I find it fun to live this way and I like to feel like I control people" so whatever.

It is at least possible that once the kids are older and there's more of them, they may find it a little hard to keep them cold in winter and totally isolated from their peers and that may change things.
posted by Frowner at 6:29 AM on May 27, 2024 [10 favorites]

I still think of "based" as mostly a nazi/4chan thing, but did it at some point achieve escape velocity into wider online youngish culture?

I frequent a few online spaces which contain a fair number of younger people, and "based" did catch on with them for awhile, but hardly anyone says it anymore.
posted by May Kasahara at 8:00 AM on May 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I think it’s a word that’s used almost ironically, like “epic” was in the aughts. Sometimes almost as a mocking imitation of the nazi/4chan types that used the phrase unironically back in circa 2016.
posted by Apocryphon at 8:32 AM on May 27, 2024

OMG, someone sterilize this man immediately.
posted by keep_evolving at 10:04 AM on May 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Thanks for your comment, Halloween Jack; I thought that was very interesting and insightful. I still feel like these people (the adults, not the poor kids) are actually sociopaths who decided to steal the autism label, though. They don't seem to have any empathy for others.
posted by queensissy at 2:09 PM on May 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Hey, wait

@HannahPosted: It is kinda funny that the "pronatalist" couple with the plans for world domination via massive family is a pair of 37yos with 4 kids. The duggars have to be laughing at them, right?

She’s absolutely right. It’s not like this family went Octomom. Their views, ties, and statements are abhorrent but if they weren’t seeking the limelight their cadence of procreation would be unusual but totally unremarkable. Why are we as society even paying attention to them.
posted by Apocryphon at 3:04 PM on May 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

I think what we're seeing is the end product of a lot of self-promotion on their part.
posted by Selena777 at 4:20 PM on May 27, 2024 [5 favorites]

'Pronatalist' parents are under fire after the dad publicly slapped his toddler — and they think the criticism is racist by Katie Balevic. Excerpt:

The couple both said they found the backlash they faced on social media to be racist since, they argued, minorities often hit their children without the same backlash.

"We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy. It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups," Simone Collins said via email, linking to a CNN article published in 2011.

Malcolm Collins said it was "uniquely offensive" to him considering "the majority of Americans practice some form of corporal punishment, as you can see from the statistics with specifically that being the minority groups of Americans. So yeah, I think it's an arguably racist position."

posted by Kattullus at 9:52 PM on May 27, 2024 [4 favorites]

obviously they're reprehensible, but it really is amazing how quick it was for them to cry reverse racism. like, they've been carrying that around in their heads for a while if that's the first defense they're going for
posted by BungaDunga at 10:40 PM on May 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Yeah, somehow it’s both entirely what I expected, but also a disappointment.

Generally, if people have bought into one ludicrous far-right idea, they tend to have bought into many others too, but cartoonishness of that couple is just so boring.
posted by Kattullus at 11:17 PM on May 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Once again the focus is on "optics".

Malcolm Collins said that immigrants doing most of the labour is bad optics.

“And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population – because you didn’t put in labour to support non-working white people – has really horrible optics.”

And the way he rationalise people who object to him hitting his child in the face is

He added: "The only way you could achieve the same effect by hitting a child's wrist is to hit it large enough to cause a significant amount of pain, which I wouldn't want to do, but I can understand why visually people might be, 'Oh, the slight hit on the nose or the face is really bad' because it looks visually bad."

What's going on here?
Does he really not get that people might think something is bad regardless of how it might look bad and affect their reputation?
posted by Zumbador at 11:33 PM on May 27, 2024 [5 favorites]

Dude can't see a difference between real people and imaginary people. You can't really expect him to understand his own children as anything more than vague abstractions.
posted by flabdablet at 2:16 AM on May 28, 2024 [5 favorites]

By his own logic, if he didn't want his kid grabbing at the table legs in restaurants then he shouldn't have named him Savage.
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 AM on May 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

So they are literally saying "Naturally people of color all hit their kids, so it's racist to criticize hitting kids"? Wow, that's exactly the kind of racism you'd expect from his background, just trotting out a big old racist stereotype and then giving a paternalistic, "but that's good actually". I want to note that this is very similar to the "poor people have a culture of not eating vegetables so it's insulting to try to improve the nutrition of the poor" line I predicted they would trot out if it was ever useful.

Leaving aside how many Americans of any race or background ever do use any kind of physical "correction" on their kids - I have never heard of anyone, not even the worst evangelist who advocates real beatings for babies, suggest hitting your kid in the face to "teach" them to be quiet in restaurants. I have never heard of anyone advocating raising young kids by telling them "if you are trivially disobedient, remember that daddy will hit you". I'm sure there are people like that, but I'm equally sure that even most people who do, eg, spank their kids over what they view as serious infractions would view hitting a little kid in the face over being noisy in a restaurant as abuse. Most people think the Pearls and other "hit your kids regularly over petty things" advocates are abusers. At least you can say for the United States that there is no consensus that it's normal and okay to be hitting your kids all the time.

It's like they're aiming for that whole fascist "say an obvious trolling lie with a smile to derail your opponents" thing but they're not astute enough to do it right.
posted by Frowner at 5:25 AM on May 28, 2024 [4 favorites]

This man casually hits a two year old male child—and it's reasonable to assume his other children below the age of five—and doesn't heat the house. If nothing else he is in for a reckoning the likes of which he can't imagine in about 14 years. Stickman McNoodlearm is in no way prepared for the level of violent rage he's cultivating in his own household, and he doesn't appear to have the cult structure in place to suppress or divert it.

If he's getting in there eugenics-izing big strapping strong white lads, he didn't really think his strategy through very well. It might work for tigers or some shit because they a tiger, son. You a piece of linguini trying to hit like a tiger, and there's consequences.

I sure as shit hope someone intervenes well before it gets to that point, but given how seriously middle-class child abuse is taken in this country, I despair for these children. Hopefully, should all else fail, they find their own way to hope—even if that way involves breaking a twig in half, far too late.
posted by majick at 7:32 AM on May 28, 2024 [4 favorites]

Tigers swat their kittens and have limited language skills to explain why the kittens should or should not do things. You yell alarmingly and wave your arms at toddlers so they learn the stove is OMG Hot! Once children have language, your options expand. Reflexively hitting your kids is horrible. They are so delighted to be horrible people; it's quite creepy. I've never seen a future proposed by eugenics fans that seemed at all sustainable or decent.

Keeping your kids in what appears to be shelving is also creepy.
posted by theora55 at 9:54 AM on May 28, 2024 [7 favorites]

As Wordshore indicated, this was a recycled piece. The author of the orginal is Julia Black, who commented today:

I think I’m a pretty generous reporter. I’ve talked to reporters at other publications who build on my work, given people tidbits for their books, etc.

But seeing my work practically copy-pasted into a more “name brand” publication w/o acknowledgment always feels terrible.

The NYT is notorious for this type of journalism. I wasn't aware that the Graudian is, but now I know.
posted by Dashy at 12:29 PM on May 28, 2024 [8 favorites]

That's awful, thank you for posting that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:48 PM on May 28, 2024

I think it’s a word that’s used almost ironically, like “epic” was in the aughts. Sometimes almost as a mocking imitation of the nazi/4chan types that used the phrase unironically back in circa 2016.

"Based" is currently ("currently" as in "today, the day I am typing this") being used on Twitter in an entirely unironic manner to signal a certain package of far-right beliefs (anti-feminist, anti-trans, anti-immigrant, pro-Nazi, pro-eugenics, etc.).

When someone comments "based" in reply to a tweet about yet another anti-trans policy being enacted, they're not using it ironically.
posted by Lexica at 4:05 PM on May 28, 2024 [4 favorites]

"based" is AAVE
posted by capricorn at 9:05 PM on May 29, 2024

Are you black, capricorn? I am, and I think it's just slang.
posted by Selena777 at 10:02 PM on May 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

I'm not so I'll defer to you on this one.
posted by capricorn at 3:39 AM on May 30, 2024

I can’t believe that dude claims he loves his unborn children as much as he loves the children who currently are breathing in front of him. And if that is true, then it means he doesn’t actually love the children he currently has. I’ve seen several pictures of this couple during the performative husbandly kiss on the wifely cheek. No we will absolutely not put in decent heating for the winter but sure we will buy a second house that is probably also freezing and let some desperate people live there for free and return for some kind of servitude involving child care. Honesty, these people are scary.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:07 AM on June 2, 2024 [3 favorites]