1). “Project 2025: The Right’s Dystopian Plan to Dismantle Civil Rights and What It Means for Women: With careful planning, conservatives today are working to make their policy priorities permanent—no matter what happens in future elections”, Feb 8, 2024, Carrie N. Baker, MS Magazine, at < https://msmagazine.com/2024/
2). “Presidential Administration Academy: Preparing Political Appointees to be Ready on Day One”, Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, 2023, The Heritage Foundation, at < https://www.project2025.org/
3). “The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population: Behind the scenes at the first Natal Conference, where a motley alliance is throwing out the idea of winning converts to their cause and trying to make their own instead”, Apr 28, 2024, Gaby Del Valle, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
4). “Stunning police brutality will ignite a student anti-war movement in America: There is some truth to the popular protest slogan: ‘They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds’ ”, Apr 29, 2024, Joan Donovan, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: There is a struggle going on for the future of life in the U.S. Political Offices are just one aspect of political power, but the far-right finds it worthwhile to win whatever political offices they can and use the power of those positions to attack what most of us care about. The far-right the bully boys and minions of the Billionaire Oligarchs who wield tremendous influence in the U.S. Political System. In Item 1)., “Project 2025: The Right’s Dystopian Plan ….”, Ms Magazine has published a good relatively short analysis of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 that highlights its various action programs. The article is well worth a complete read here are the bullet points for the Project 2025's agenda on Abortion and Reproductive Health Care and human rights, these goals are aimed specifically at the Department of Health and Human Services:“On abortion—
Under threat of funding loss, require 'liberal states' to report to the CDC, 'accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths';
Require treatment of 'fetuses born alive' after abortion;
Withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment, which declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers;
Audit states for Hyde amendment compliance;
Require the CDC to track 'abortion across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers' (based on false allegations of eugenic motivations);
Reverse Biden administration support for travel to get abortion health care;
Prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds and allow states to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans;
Reverse FDA approval of mifepristone or at least go back to the pre-2016 limitation and prohibit the mailing of abortion pills;
Prohibit stem cell research and stop 'the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines';
Affirm 'rights of conscience' to deny medical care;
Declare that abortion and euthanasia are not health care;
Reverse Biden interpretation of The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) that requires treatment of women miscarrying.”
Item 2)., “Presidential Administration Academy: ….”, is the actual web page from The Heritage Foundation's actual website. It is pretty interesting and eye-opening. The web page includes a 1 min 33 second youtube video that I guess inspires reactionaries.
Item 3)., “The Far Right’s Campaign to ….”, is a report on a weird pro-natalist convention held in Austin, Texas. The author attended the convention and talked with various participants, including some men (who were the great majority of those who attended the meeting), and a couple of women. Some real strange stuff here.
Item 4). , “Stunning police brutality ….”, examines and analyzes the ongoing university student actions demanding changes in University inverstment portfolios and related policies. This is a challenging issue for people who want to see Trump defeated in the General Eletion in this coming November. The author writes about the energy of the students and the relations to the earlier Occupy Wall Street movement. Good analysis here.
I don't in any way like Joe Biden, but the alternative is far worse. Trump has never won the actual (popular) vote in the U.S. Only the despicable Electoral College the focuses all the important elections in 7 or 6 “Swing States”, along with vicious purges of voters that oppose the Republicans, and state legislatures over turning votes against Trump electors, and other practices could actually put Trump in the White House again. The right, the billionaire oligarchs, the racists, and the fascists are all fervently hoping they can put Trump into office as President one more time.
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Project 2025: The Right’s Dystopian Plan to Dismantle Civil Rights and What It Means for Women - Ms. Magazine
With careful planning, conservatives today are working to make their policy priorities permanent—no matter what happens in future elections.
Wealthy right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation has published a detailed plan for the next Republican president to use the executive branch of the federal government to attack the rights of women, LGBTQ people and the BIPOC community, by eliminating the agencies and offices responsible for enforcing civil rights laws and placing trained right-wing ideologues in staff positions throughout the federal government.
Called the 2025 Presidential Transition Project—or “Project 2025,” for short—the plan has “four pillars”:
- a presidential personnel database of vetted conservatives,
- a Presidential Administration Academy to train these people to achieve the Project 2025 policy agenda, and
- a 180-day playbook, which is what they hope to achieve in the first 180 days if Trump takes office in January 2025.
To develop this plan, the Heritage Foundation organized a broad coalition of over 90 conservative organizations—a who’s-who of groups that have led attacks on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, gender studies, the Equal Rights Amendment and #MeToo initiatives.
The coalition includes Concerned Women for America, the Independent Women’s Forum, the Eagle Forum, the Susan B. Anthony Foundation, Moms for Liberty, AAPLOG (the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists), Students for Life of America, Alliance Defending Freedom, First Liberty and Turning Point USA.
The Heritage Foundation claimed over 400 “scholars and policy experts” participated in writing the policy agenda, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.“
Their main target: what they call “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’”
Throughout “The Conservative Promise,” they rail against “woke progressivism,” “woke culture warriors,” “woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon,” “woke extremism,” “woke propaganda,” the “woke agenda,” “wokeism,” the “woke-dominated system of public schools and universities,” “woke revolutionaries,” the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction,” the “woke policies in corporate America” and the “woke gender ideology.” They describe the Department of Education as a “convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”
They have particular vitriol for colleges and universities, which they describe as an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel.”
The authors invoke their first Mandate for Leadership book series, written in 1979, which guided the Reagan presidency: “In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.”
Like their current leader, Donald Trump, they dehumanize Democrats by likening them to animals.
The plan has four goals:
- Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
- Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
- Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
- Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
The contradictions are glaring:
The authors of “The Conservative Promise” claim to support equality, while advocating for dismantling the government agencies that enforce laws ensuring equality, such as Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
They claim to support freedom and liberty, while advocating for a total ban on abortion, rolling back the rights of LGBTQ people and closing the border.
They claim to support free speech, while advocating for banning any mention of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from schools and other societal institutions.
They claim to support the working class, while calling for tax cuts for the rich, elimination of labor protections and deregulation of big business and the oil industry.
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.“
—Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, p. 4, foreword to “The Conservative Promise“
Throughout “The Conservative Promise,” the authors condemn “ruling elites,” which they refer to as “Washington elites,” “establishment elites,” “Marxist elites,” “socialist elites,” “Hollywood elites,” “entrenched elites,” “globalist elites,” “pro-open border elites” and” cultural elites.”
They explain:
“Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist European head of state, than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.”
—p. 10
They assume the worst of intentions of people they brand elites, whom they charge with “making decisions for us” and working to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.” They describe the “elites” as power-hungry socialists: “For socialists, who are almost always well-to-do, socialism is not a means of equalizing outcomes, but a means of accumulating power. They never get around to helping anyone else” (p. 15).
The irony is that the Heritage Foundation and many of the organizations in their coalition are led and funded by billionaire capitalists, most of whom don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes or be limited by labor laws or environmental regulations designed to protect the public from economic abuse, pollution and climate change. The conservatives criticizing the elites are themselves elites.
They argue that “the Left” opposes equality and liberty established in the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: “It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good—that the ruling class disdains” (p. 14).
Yet this “inalienable right to self-direction” does not appear to extend to pregnant women or LGBTQ people.
They even invoke women’s rights to call for the destruction of women’s rights: “Left to our own devices the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women,mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism” (p. 14).
Yet banning abortion makes women second-class citizens.
They charge the left with trying to control other people’s lives, while they themselves are the ones who propose and champion state-level and federal bans on abortion and gender-affirming care: “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life. They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee” (p. 16).
Yet they want to use the force of law to impose their religious beliefs on others by determining intimate bodily decisions for pregnant women and LGBTQ people. Lawmakers that identify with the political left supports laws to empower individuals to make their own decisions about their bodies and lives, whereas the political right is passing laws limiting people’s ability to make these choices.
They explain what they believe freedom means in the Constitution: “An individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like” (p. 14). Thanksgiving dinners? What we ought? His Creator?
On immigration reform, they say, “The only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys” (p. 11).
On “billionaire climate activists,” they say their concern for the environment “is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue” (p. 11).
Climate-changing oil and gas is not the problem; it’s the solution, they say: “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth” (p. 13).
They condemn socialism and push free market capitalism, private property and deregulation in the name of liberty:
“In socialist nation after socialist nation, the only way the government could keep its disgruntled people in line was to surveil and terrorize them. By contrast, in countries with a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge. People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.”
—p. 15
In reality, free market policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations have generated tremendous wealth inequality and environmental pollution that targets the most vulnerable communities.
Despite a longstanding American tradition that career employees of the federal government are not political appointees, “The Conservative Promise” calls for removing any federal government employee who disagrees with their beliefs and replacing them with conservative ideologues. They boast about “how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of Government” (p. 9).
They promise the total destruction of the federal government: “The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch” (p. 12).
Some of the specific action items include:
Department of Education:
- Eliminate the Department of Education, which enforces civil rights law, including Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education;
- Revert to the Trump administration’s Title IX sexual harassment and assault standards, which placed burdensome restrictions on the ability of survivors to report assault and obtain justice;
- Reverse the Biden administration’s definition of sex under Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity, and redefine sex to mean biological sex assigned at birth
- Increase public funding of religious education through expansion of “school choice” policies and give federal funds to states as block grants with no strings attached.
Department of Health and Human Services:
On abortion—
- Under threat of funding loss, require “liberal states” to report to the CDC, “accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths”;
- Require treatment of “fetuses born alive” after abortion;
- Withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment, which declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers;
- Audit states for Hyde amendment compliance;
- Require the CDC to track “abortion across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers” (based on false allegations of eugenic motivations);
- Reverse Biden administration support for travel to get abortion health care;
- Prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds and allow states to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans;
- Reverse FDA approval of mifepristone or at least go back to the pre-2016 limitation and prohibit the mailing of abortion pills;
- Prohibit stem cell research and stop “the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines”;
- Affirm “rights of conscience” to deny medical care;
- Declare that abortion and euthanasia are not health care;
- Reverse Biden interpretation of The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) that requires treatment of women miscarrying.
On gender-affirming care—
- Block gender-affirming health care
- End Centers for Disease Controls’s collection of data on gender identity;
- Block National Institute of Health research on gender identity and transgender health care and instead fund studies into the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions”;
- Reverse Biden administration’s redefinition of “sex” to include gender identity, sexual orientation and pregnancy status.
Other—
- Add work requirements to receive Medicaid;
- Condemn single-motherhood and same-sex marriage;
- “HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.”
Administration for Children and Families:
- Use TANF (welfare) money to promote “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy”;
- Child support in the United States should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.
Led and funded by multi-billionaires, such as oil moguls Charles and David Koch, conservatives have fought for years to cut taxes, deregulate business, ban abortion, eliminate civil rights protections as well as public health and environmental regulations, privatize government institutions such as public schools and prisons and eliminate welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food assistance.
In 2017, Donald Trump enacted many of these policies, which were later reversed by the Biden administration.
With careful planning, conservatives today are working to make their policy priorities permanent, no matter what happens in future elections.
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Training | Project 2025
Presidential Administration Academy
Preparing Political Appointees to be Ready on Day One
The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration. This academy provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.
What You Will Learn
If you are a former political appointee or you’re exploring appointed service for the first time there is something for you to learn. The Presidential Administration Academy covers topics ranging from how to identify appointee positions for which you qualify to navigating the necessary background and security clearance processes to recognizing and addressing the dangers of the administrative state. Potential appointees will learn the intricacies of the federal budget process, how to work with the media, managing congressional and stakeholder relations, the federal procurement process, and dozens of other topics that provide the knowledge and skills you’ll need to be an effective presidential appointee.
Who Should Attend
If you’re interested in serving the next conservative President, you’ve come to the right place. Presidential Administration Academy participants are professionals at all career levels from across the country and in our nation’s capital who want to learn, engage, get credentialed, and BE PREPARED to serve the next President and the American people by advancing conservative policy at the federal level. Applicants ranging from new college grads to experienced professionals in all career fields are encouraged to apply. We also welcome those who have not previously served in an Administration as well as those who are former appointees.
Program Format
Currently, the Presidential Administration Academy is a fully online program where participants can take courses on-demand. As the presidential election approaches, additional online courses will be added and in-person training sessions will be available. Intense instruction tailored for high-level positions will be in-person.
The Presidential Administration Academy offers individual classes as well as full certificate programs. In order to receive a certificate of completion, all classes within the certificate program must be completed and each quiz must be passed.
Time Commitment
The majority of classes run 30 to 90 minutes. Since the program is largely offered online and on-demand, you can self-pace and cover the material at your convenience over time. Onsite, in-person programs will be intensive learning and run one to two days.
Faculty
You’ll learn from a distinguished roster of former political appointees from four previous presidential Administrations, as well as from policy experts, practitioners, and subject-matter experts representing more than 100 partner organizations. The Presidential Administration Academy faculty is a veritable Who’s Who of the conservative movement.
Other Upcoming Certificate Programs
- Conservative Governance: Managing Federal Personnel
- Grants, Contracts, and the Federal Procurement Process
Still have questions? Send us an email at info@project2025.org.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project paves the way for an effective conservative Administration based on four pillars: a policy agenda, Presidential Personnel Database, Presidential Administration Academy, and playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration.
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The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population
Though Dolan opens the conference by talking about the potential economic consequences of a global birth dearth, he and the other NatalCon speakers aren’t primarily concerned with the utilitarian arguments for raising birth rates. “I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan says. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.”
Dolan, a conservative Mormon and a former Booz Allen Hamilton data scientist, resigned from his job in 2021 after a group of self-proclaimed anti-fascist Mormon activists exposed his anonymous Twitter account, which tied him to the far-right Deseret Nationalist movement. Having lost his livelihood and security clearance, Dolan started the EXIT Group, a “fraternity of like-minded men” who are preparing for the supposed collapse of American society — and who, as of recently, have taken on the decline in birth rates as their pet cause.
On his podcast, Dolan says he was first alerted to the problem of demographic collapse by a member of the EXIT Group, which claims to have 171 members. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West. The global drop in sperm concentrations has indeed puzzled scientists for decades and is believed to be one of the factors that has contributed to the global downturn in birth rates. But NatalCon’s organizers and attendees seem more interested in combating social institutions — like corporate employment and the educational system set up to support it — that, in Dolan’s words, have suppressed fertility by being “hostile to life.”
Most of the first day of the conference is spent defining the problem. In a nutshell: Sperm counts are historically low. Our bodies are full of microplastics. Public schools are indoctrinating children against the good Christian values with which they were raised. Dating apps have gamified romance, tricking lonely singles into believing that a better prospect is always around the corner. Women have been convinced that they can have it all — kids and a career and endless vacations and so much more — only to end up unhappy, infertile and alone.
The speakers who lay out this bleak state of affairs are a motley crew of the extremely online right, many of whom go by their X (the website formerly called Twitter) handles rather than their names. Via Zoom, anonymous Twitter user Raw Egg Nationalist warns us about endocrine disruptors in everything from perfume to bottled water. Ben Braddock, an editor at the conservative magazine IM-1776, claims that antidepressants and birth control pills have permanent, detrimental effects on women’s fertility. Together, the speakers paint a dire picture of a society that has lost its way, abandoning fundamental biological truths and dooming itself to annihilation in the process.
The solution, of course, is to have more babies. Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous writer affiliated with the conservative Claremont Institute, urges attendees to “seize the means of reproduction” — as in, to out-breed liberals, who are already hobbling their movement by choosing to have just a couple children, or none at all. “We can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage,” Keenan says. “The other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.”
Here lies the project, spelled out in detail: The people who disagree have bloodlines that are slowly going to die out. To speed up that process — to have this particular strain of conservative natalist ideology become dominant quickly in the United States — everyone in this room has to have more kids, and fast.
But it’s only when the speakers get to who should have babies and how they should raise them that their deeper concerns, and the larger anxieties behind this conference, become clear.
The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is “more, better people.”
But the speakers lack consensus on the meaning of the word “better,” as they do on the subject of using technology to encourage the best and brightest among us to breed.
Keenan, who has previously celebrated her sense that it is now acceptable to say “white genocide is real,” says better means conservative. Pat Fagan, the director of the Marriage and Religion Institute at the Catholic University of America, says good children are the product of stable, two-parent Christian households, away from the corrupting influences of public school and sex ed. (Christian couples, he adds, have “the best, most orgasmic sex,” citing no research or surveys to support this.) To protect these households, we must abolish no-fault divorce, declares Brit Benjamin, a lawyer with waist-length curly red hair. (Until relatively recently, Benjamin was married to Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — the founder of the Seasteading Institute, a Peter Thiel-backed effort to build new libertarian enclaves at sea.) And to ensure that these children grow up to be adults who understand their proper place in both the family and the larger social order, we need to oust women from the workforce and reinstitute male-only spaces “where women are disadvantaged as a result,” shampoo magnate and aspiring warlord Charles Haywood says, prompting cheers from the men in the audience.
Haywood’s final words to the audience elicit raucous applause: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever,” he says before getting off stage. (A few women told me afterward they and others disagreed with Haywood.)
Notably, most of the speakers do not make a case for more immigration to counter the trend of declining birth rates. Immigrants can’t solve our population problem, Dolan says, because they’ll eventually realize they were brought here to pay into Social Security for old white people. (On X, Dolan has used the word “replacement” to refer to immigration.)
Some at the conference are interested in the genetics of the children they believe everyone should be having. Evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman and writer Jonathan Anomaly argue that genetics are destiny. (“I shouldn’t say Good quality children,” Fleischman says after speaking at length about how people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting some children are indeed biologically better than others.)
Razib Khan — a geneticist and science blogger who in 2015 was hired and quickly fired by the New York Times opinion section after Gawker reported on his ties to racist far-right publications — illustrates the problem of current demographic trends in the West compared to other regions by pointing to Ethiopia, which had nearly as many births in 2020 as the entire European continent. “This is the future we’re already in,” says Khan, who is Bangladeshi-American. “Many of you have young children. … They will live to see this world.”
Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together — gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters. Though few speakers explicitly mentioned race, the conference provided an opportunity for those with genuine concerns about population decline to join forces with, and perhaps be influenced by, those who espouse racist or regressive views. During the second day of the conference — a closed-door, phone-off event dedicated to brainstorming ways to reverse the population crisis — VIP ticket holders mingled with Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, according to multiple people in attendance who wanted to remain anonymous because having their name linked to the conference would jeopardize their work.
The following day, I talk with Malcolm and Simone Collins, the husband-and-wife founder of Pronatalist.org who went viral in 2023 after the Telegraph dubbed them the “elite couple breeding to save mankind.” They are entrepreneurs and investors and previously served as co-CEOs of a travel agency company; Simone is also currently running for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
The Collinses tell me they want to promote a plurality of cultures and protect everyone’s right to be “weird.” Malcolm says they want to make their movement a “big tent” and were initially worried about what kinds of people the conference would attract. “Are they going to be like, ‘[No] transgender people reading kids books?’ Are they going to be racist nut jobs? It’s a real concern,” he says.
The Collinses — parents of four children — present themselves as rationalists, techies trying to solve the looming depopulation crisis by any means necessary. (Simone was pregnant with the fourth child during the conference. That baby, Industry Americus Collins, was born in April.) With their third and fourth children, the Collinses used a preimplantation genetic test that allowed them to select an embryo with optimum genetic makeup.
But they, too, are far more interested in the cultural implications of declining fertility rates than their fascination with reproductive technologies might lead you to believe. The couple is committed to fighting the “urban monoculture” that they claim has tricked a generation of young Americans into spending their most fertile years chasing professional achievements and personal fulfillment at the expense of building a family.
“The monoculture is not an evil thing,” Malcolm says over panang curry and pineapple fried rice at a Thai restaurant the day after the conference’s VIP event, but, he continues, it’s built on false promises. “It promises people, if you join us, you can do whatever makes you happy, so long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s quality of life, and you can be affirmed for whoever you want to be.” In reality, though, they become casualties of an elitist scam.
The urban monoculture, Malcolm explains, breeds childlessness and therefore must poach other people’s children to survive. It lures them out of small towns and into large cities, encourages them to eschew their religious upbringings in favor of hedonistic secularism, and then leaves them to die alone.
Malcolm compares the “urban monoculture” to the boarding schools the Canadian government forced Native children into, in which indigenous children were forcibly assimilated into white culture. (The U.S. government had similar boarding schools.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to convert them to a culture that’s closer to mine — what you’re doing is wrong,” he says. When I tell him the boarding schools were a state program, not a voluntary form of acculturation, Malcolm becomes animated. “This is a state project! What’s going on in the public schools is a state project! The mechanisms that the urban monoculture uses to de-convert people are primarily a state funded educational system,” he says. (In a subsequent email, he describes the urban monoculture as “one of the descendants of European imperialism.”) The most important and effective way to fight the monoculture, Malcolm later tells me via email, is building “school systems not dedicated to cultural genocide.”
The goal, though, the Collinses tell me, is not to convert the childless, or even to counteract the phenomena that contribute to the “unplanned childlessness” that has become endemic among millennials: it’s to encourage people with a lot of children to have even more. “Some people matter less than other people in getting fertility rates up,” Malcolm says. “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”
Ultimately, this is what unites the Collinses with the more “trad” wings of the natalist movement, from the nativists to the Christian nationalists: pushing back on social and cultural changes they see as imposed on them by outside forces. To do that, these conference attendees have coalesced around a solution that won’t require them to persuade skeptics to join their cause. If everything goes as planned, the competition will go extinct on their own. All the natalists have to do is have enough kids so that, in a generation or two, they’ll be the ones who inherit the earth.
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Stunning police brutality will ignite a student anti-war movement in America | Joan Donovan
University students across the US have been protesting since 7 October 2023 with vigils, rallies and marches asking for a ceasefire in Gaza and for their universities to divest from Israel. While some of these protests led to heated fights about foreign policy, the most prominent events have involved university presidents’ abysmal congressional testimony. This week’s arrests of more than 100 Columbia students reinvigorated the student movement and now it’s kicking off everywhere.
As a sociologist of social movements, I study how movements select and shift tactics to elicit a response from their opponents. Over the next few weeks, we will see dozens of other university encampments spring up because activists have found a tactic that gets the administration’s attention at a critical time: during finals and commencement.
In 2011, I was an organizer at Occupy LA and ended up writing my dissertation about distributed networked social movements. The Occupy movement’s growth was aided by social media, then an emerging technology popular with young people, and the invention of the smartphone, capable of using apps and streaming video.
With the global wave of Occupy protests, the mobile phone was converted into a political tool imbued with the powers of narrative and broadcast. Occupy protesters were not able to control the narrative about the movement, but they certainly could share their own reality and invite other social media users to do so too.
Every person with a smartphone who entered these Occupy encampments behaved like a journalist, documenting everything they saw. Some even defined themselves as “citizen journalists” and formed ad hoc network of streamers across the globe. Activists became micro-celebrities online and some were able to make money by broadcasting live, monologuing about everything they were seeing.
But, what kicked off Occupy’s popularity was not their messaging about the economic crisis, it was viral clips of police abuse and suppression.
In late September 2011, all eyes turned to Occupy NYC, located in Zuccotti Park, as a clip circulated on Twitter of a group of young women getting pepper-sprayed by the NYPD. Alongside the video was the hashtag #OPpigroast, urging the online crowd to identify the officer behind the violence. A photographer had taken a picture of that same cop earlier in the day, with his name tag visible. Digital sleuths, known collectively as anonymous, got to work, unearthing everything they could find about him, his family and his employer.
For the final months of 2011, I visited a number of Occupy encampments and interviewed hundreds of protesters about what inspired them to get involved. Many recalled this video of police violence which made them sympathize with the protesters. Several interviewees remarked that they initially had come to “witness” what was happening at their local encampment and then stayed for various reasons, including believing in the movement’s message, meeting new people, and finding a role they could take on.
Since then, I’ve studied many other movements and noted, like other social movement scholars, a chilling pattern between state violence and movement participation. For example, Indigenous activists have organized for environmental issues for decades, but the general public only became aware of what was going down in Standing Rock after Democracy Now shared footage of protesters being attacked by officers with guard dogs and pepper spray.
That catalyzed several hundred solidarity protests across the US and Canada under the name #NoDAPL. The civil rights movement’s lunch counter sit-ins, Bloody Sunday in Selma and the freedom rides, culminated in media coverage of police violence. Even the spread of the Occupy movement was inspired by state violence against protesters in Tahrir Square.
Media mobilizes movements, so coverage of police repression of peaceful protest is often met with more protests. At times, the protest itself may morph to become focused on the immediate issue at hand: the state’s use of violence as a means to punish without due process and deter future activism.
For today’s anti-war protesters, they have all the infrastructure they need to broadcast a narrative about their beliefs directly to a global village. Individually, they’ve been practicing for this moment for years by becoming accustomed to using their phones as political tools. While the Occupy movement and advances in technology inspired new journalists to publish lots of raw and unfiltered content in 2011, generation Z was born in it and are more digitally savvy than any group before. In many respects, the youth of today have a ready-made infrastructure to shift control and buckle institutions, but the key will be for students to sustain the pressure to ensure they meet their goals. It’s hypocritical for universities to be bastions of knowledge and guardians of free inquiry, who then will not disclose certain relationships with donors; including corporations and governments.
Today’s student protesters struggled to find a tactic that could escalate their grievances to the upper echelons of the administration, where students – and even most staff and faculty – often have no insight. Critically, students picked a critical time as administrators want the grounds to look as pristine as possible with commencement coming up. While all tactics eventually expire as the opposition learns to counter the moves of the protesters, student protesters have the upper hand now. If students can find a way to build momentum throughout the summer months, it’s possible this issue will be a major factor in November’s election.
The aftermath at Columbia University should be instructive for other universities facing similar protests, the repression and suspension of students leads to more sustained protest and broader participation. More students join in, if only just to witness. By suspending so many students, they now have very little to keep them from organizing and drawing attention to the encampments popping up across the US. Activist tactics are mimicked, like memes: when they hit, they resonate, but the effect can be short-lived unless it gets remixed.
There is some truth to the popular protest slogan: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
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