When the GOP sends candidates for elections, they’re not sending their best. Meet Simone Collins, who is running for the Pennsylvania state house.
Noticeably missing on her campaign website is the usual flag-waving, God-invoking GOP boilerplate bullshit, or even the obligatory screed about Democrats killing babies at 9 months, blah blah blah. Sure she whole-heartedly supports destroying the public school system, and she believe technology is the solution to bureaucracy, but there’s no God stuff. Her campaign bio lists her education and how many kids she’s had, and how she is a non-profit leader.
Now here’s what her campaign website doesn’t tell you.
Collins is a “pronatalist”, or someone who believes that women should have as many children as possible. She and her husband Malcolm even run “the world’s first pronatalist foundation”, although the website assures us that they are not religious, and they say that they are only focused on science and data.
Hmmmm.
I kept looking for info about “pronatalism” and found this gem:
The fruitful lifestyle that the couple advocate is unconventional but not fringe, counting a coterie of prolific tech billionaires as supporters.
This includes Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, a father of five who in 2022 donated nearly $500,000 to the Collins’s foundation, and dad-of-11 Elon Musk, who warned in 2022 that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming.”
OK, let’s be clear about one thing: “fringe” literally means “a coterie of prolific tech billionaires”. Has the New York Post ever seen this cluster of weirdos? Maybe the Post meant that it’s not fringe for a bunch of socially maladept losers because it’s definitely fringe, even for today’s extremist GOP.
Then over the weekend The Guardian ran a long piece on the Collins family. OMG what a bunch of creeps.
First, they readily admit that they are right wingers, and they think that they and their pronatalist tech friends are next in line to lead the GOP once TFG is out of the picture. Given that their tech friends include Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jaan Tallinn, and the like, this is very concerning. Think about that creepy Blake Masters ad with him caressing a gun.
Second, their rhetoric easily fits in with the white nationalist support for The Great Replacement Theory, and they’re cool with that. There’s no moral judgments, see—it’s all about SCIENCE. For example, here’s the thought process that led to their naming their kids:
Every decision the Collinses make is backed by data. “Nominative determinism is a heavily studied field,” Malcolm tells me, when I ask about his children’s names. “Girls that have gender neutral names are more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees.” Names like Titan and Industry are much more than gender neutral, I say. “We wanted to give our kids strong names. We want our kids to have a strong internal locus of control,” he continues, as Octavian waves a plastic rubbish truck in front of my face.
For the record, the 2 boys are named Octavian George, Torsten Savage, and their daughter is Titan Invictus, and the yet-to-be-born daughter will be named Industry Americus. I have to say that this is less about science and more about straight up bullshit. It’s pseudoscience wrapped in a tech wrapper.
There’s a lot of red flags in the story but here are the 2 that make the idea of Simone Collins holding public office so frightening. The first one is their approach to having the 7 children they want:
Simone has a history of eating disorders that have affected her fertility; she can only get pregnant through IVF. They’ve had the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and are selecting which ones to implant according to how well they score on intelligence and future health. They don’t just want a big family: they want an optimal one.
Preimplantation genetic screening is unregulated in the US. There are several companies that will test embryos for the risks of certain conditions, including the Sam Altman-backed Genomic Prediction, which the Collinses used for health scores. For what they call “the controversial stuff” they took Genomic Prediction’s data and gave it to another team of scientists who claim to be able to predict everything from how likely it is that one embryo will be happier than another one to its future predicted income.
The second thing is how they seem to feel about their actual children, like admitting they don’t heat their home because they put all their money toward their foundation (there’s obviously money for cosmetic dentistry because they both have shiny super white teeth though, so what’s a couple of freezing kids?). Simone says she’s “bored out of her mind” with infants, Malcolm admits he doesn’t like babies. And while out for lunch with the reporter, Malcolm slaps his 2 year old son across the face for kicking the table. They then go blithely on with an explanation justifying hitting their kids.
These people are monsters. Simone Collins should not hold public office of any sort, and someone should look into how those poor kids are being treated. There is so much more–I recommend reading the entire article.
David Bowie’s got this:
