When it comes to issues on which people care way too much about other people’s preferences, the worst offenders have to be steak doneness, and the decision whether to have children.
Like most people, I have strong opinions on both, when it comes to my personal preference. If you make me a steak, for example, then you just need to walk that thing through a warm room, please.
Well that’s not true—you have to sear it, and if I’m at a nice restaurant I’ll take what the chef recommends. But if I’m at a pub or something, it’s always rare, and if I’m at home, I might even go blue with it.
If you’re at my house, though, and we’re having steaks, and you ask for well done, then baby, you’re getting well done. I’ll go past well done, if you like, I’ll take it to congratulations, great work. I’m not going to go Gordon Ramsay on you for it, I honestly don’t care.
The key is that the reason I eat my steak rare isn’t performative. I’m not one of those guys who goes on YouTube with five pounds of steak and a cow’s liver, puts it in a blender, and chugs it. I’m not making a point about myself eating beef close to raw, and neither am I making a point about you. It’s the flavor and the texture, it’s just the way I enjoy it most. I think it goes back to my childhood when my late grandmother would cook and, bless her, I loved her more than anything in the world, but her steaks were like rubber doorstops. I didn’t like steak at all until I was a young adult out of home and, through some mechanism I don’t recall, I tasted a rare one. Knowing me, I was probably just hungry and lazy one day.
But, sometimes, people will still look at my rare steak and be like, how dare you? It’s disgusting, it’s swimming in blood. (Don’t try to explain that butchered meat contains no blood and the liquid is actually myoglobin—it just makes them angrier). The modal opinion on steak doneness is that medium rare to medium is the accepted range and the outliers are heretics who don’t know how to cook a steak.
The well done people cop it a lot worse than I do. I may have been radicalized by well done steaks, but you people on the other side are my kin and I have no beef, if you’ll pardon the expression, with you.
Concern over other people’s steak preferences is performative. What else can it be? It’s certainly not educational. People know their preferences. I always hated well done steak. If you like it, I have nothing to teach you about my soupy myoglobin horror. You’ll politely spit it into a napkin just as I did with those rubber doorstops.
But it’s not just performative, it’s also reactionary. This is the part of the essay where, if you’re a new reader (welcome!), you might be perplexed that I’m making this political, but my long time readers won’t be too surprised. Judging other people for how they prefer their steak is reactionary, it’s kind of classist, there’s a bit of toxic masculinity in there as well. But it’s not too big a deal, honestly, it’s mostly all in good fun. I don’t know if too many friendships have ever broken up over it.
You know what’s really reactionary? The pronatalist movement. That is, the people who are on a mission to have kids and are super pissed off at you if you don’t, or especially if you don’t intend to, have kids.
This is another matter of personal preference, but one that’s much higher stakes, if you’ll again pardon the expression, than how cooked you prefer your beef. People will have you believe that your stance on having kids says something fundamental about your character. The pronatalists tend to believe, at best, that you’re committing a kind of self-harm by not having children, but more commonly, that it makes you an actual bad person.
Elon Musk, probably the most visible member of this movement, claims he won’t hire or work with anyone who doesn’t have kids, because they are bad, immoral, hypocrites.
I’m aware of the fundamental economic reasons that falling birthrates is bad—an aging population means you can’t replace the workforce as people retire, and old people without working kids are more reliant on the welfare system. But the element that people fail to take into consideration when they’re judging each other for the number of times they’ve respectively multiplied is that your children are, in fact, human beings as well. They are individual moral agents, unlike “the economy,” and every time you create one you are creating an entire inner experience that will only ever get one single shot at experiencing the world.
I’ve written about this before but to briefly recap, I’m not a religious person, I believe in neither reincarnation nor afterlife, so what I’m saying here is going to resonate more with people who share that view: I believe we each get One Ride. Each individual is their own universe. When you reach the end of the ride, your entire universe ends. (The best I’ve ever seen this idea explained in narrative is the 2024 movie The Life of Chuck, which I recommend).
If somebody’s ride ends and they mostly didn’t enjoy it, that’s more than a tragedy, it’s an atrocity. They’re not going to get a second shot, they’re not just going to the back of the line. That’s it. That was their single, unique, entire opportunity to experience existence. That, I believe, is something that needs to be taken into account before making children.
It is my opinion that people need to consider whether they would be a terrible parent before they decide to have children. Consider also that you can be both a good person and a terrible parent, just like you can be a good person and a terrible cook, like my grandmother, who was one of the best people who ever lived but also kept trying to feed me steak that I couldn’t eat without dissolving it with regurgitated enzymes like Brundlefly.
Terrible parents raise kids with terrible life experiences, and I think a terrible life experience is an atrocity worse than whatever might happen to “the economy” if we don’t throw enough human bodies onto the bonfire. Economic hardship doesn’t trump destroying an entire universe.
Pronatalists (and I mean people who are really into this to a judgmental degree, not just people who have lots of kids) tend to dismiss, ignore, or reject the individual human agency and inner experience of their children in favor of the utility of their children. That means treating kids as pawns in the economy, but there’s often a larger and usually unspoken motive that can be summarized in exactly 14 words.
I need to clarify here that wanting kids, or wanting lots of kids, for whatever reason, is not racist. That said, when I look into the individual pronatalists, they’re, yeah, mostly pretty racist.
Take Malcolm and Simone Collins, who became the face of the pronatalism movement in 2024 via their strange media interviews. And they are very strange indeed—they live in different parts of their large house, it’s unclear how often they even see each other, and, absolutely hideous glasses aside, they dress like their entire mission day to day is defeating Moose and Squirrel.
Malcolm looks and sounds about 15 years old, Simone about 35, and they have at least seven kids with the exact kinds of Roman/Tolkien/Ayn Rand hybrid names that pronatalists tend to give their children, like Nero Industry Caeser Pax Leo von Railroad, and Americus Cicero Invictus Sol Palantir Mechanikles.
What the media didn’t really mention is their politics. They run a podcast/Substack called “Based Camp” that they film from two different rooms, which are much less a conversation than they are Malcolm lecturing Simone for an hour (she speaks occasionally) on topics like, you know, which races are the most objectively attractive.
The Guardian article that made the Collinses famous is overly credulous about their dedication to “effective altruism”—a Silicon Valley philosophy that ostensibly seeks the greater good by calculating the most effective use of resources to that end. Their intentions, they say, are to save civilization from drastically falling birthrates. The birthrate of most, if not all, first world countries is below population replacement level, often well below it. A population that cannot recycle itself is a welfare time bomb.
But the article glosses over a very important thing that Malcolm lets slip out that undermines his overall argument: In short, humanity is not actually at risk at all from population collapse. The human population continues to grow year after year. What’s happening is that Western first world countries are experiencing birthrate decline, but poorer countries are not. The engine of human reproduction is not within America or Europe, but both are sustaining their populations via immigration from where the humans are actually being made.
This is a problem because most of the pronatalists aren’t really rallying to save human civilization, they’re really just involved in a cold race war. It’s a mission that seems to me, on the very face of it, absolutely futile: There is a global human economic conveyor belt in operation that works pretty well as long as you don’t mind if your elderly care nurse a few decades down the track is going to be brown. An analogy would be trying to keep the climate stable after shutting down the ocean currents because you don’t want the warm waters and the cool waters mixing too much.
In this light, you can kind of see how the number one threat to American civilization is actually Donald Trump (or, his handler, Stephen Miller) working to deport en masse the very people who were going to look after your old white ass when you’re too poor to afford old people medicine because Jeff Bezos needed a 27th yacht.
Nowhere is the hypocrisy of the pronatalist movement more clearly apparent than in its most prominent spokesman, Elon Musk, who has at least 11 kids and cares about exactly one of them, which is the one he named after one of his companies.
Musk talks the big talk about how much he loves humanity, but we don’t talk nearly enough about the fact that he wiped out a huge chunk of the third world, deliberately, and gloated about having done it.
This is a scandal that nobody could have gotten away with prior to the 21st century, but things just operate differently now. We are living in a world that wants to be at the end of history so it ignores all the history that’s still happening. Not too long ago, a president could be impeached or removed from office for spying on political enemies or having an extramarital affair. A business empire could be brought down for groundwater contamination in a small town. Today, a president can’t be impeached for anything, including insurrection, and a businessman can openly commit a Holodomor without suffering so much as a dent in his company’s share prices.
That is basically what Musk did last year when he was granted almost unlimited authority over the nation’s purse and immediately used it to unilaterally eliminate almost all foreign aid. That act alone obliterates any claim he might have to adhering to “effective altruism.” For Musk, birthrates in majority non-white countries aren’t a standard to be met, but a competitor to be directly combated. What better method to fight the scourge of immigration than to attack the engine of foreign reproduction at its source? Musk’s heroic effort to end foreign aid spending is on track to kill 9.4 million people by the end of this decade.
Now I might be speaking out of turn but I think the fact that Elon Musk’s foreign policy decisions are estimated to double the death toll of Henry fucking Kissinger is worthy of some god damned media attention. This is a man who sets about his stated mission of saving humanity by committing atrocities, because he only wants humanity saved if the white race “wins.” His plan to inspire white people to breed involves instilling desperation. He wants a welfare crisis in the West, and if choking the third world breeding engine to death before it can create migrants is what that takes, then by god that’s what he’ll do.
There is no element of philanthropy or love in the right-wing pronatalist philosophy, there is only utility, racialism, and competition. There is no conception of children as sovereign individuals with unique inner worlds—they just use the same basic utility argument that people used in the days when a family needed to have 15 kids because they needed at least five to help run the farm and the other 10 were the buffer because they just knew as a matter of fact that a large percentage of their kids would die of dysentery before puberty.
Today, despite Robert F. Kennedy’s best efforts, dysentery and typhoid and other such mass child killers aren’t such a big deal, but there are new childhood mass extinction events that the pronatalists don’t give a lick about, like school shootings.
There are multiple ways to prove that the pronatalists are arguing in bad faith, and most come down to the fact that they are almost all crazy rich—the exact class of people who do not need to worry at all about relying on welfare if they didn’t have a ton of kids. But the bigger picture is that we just don’t live in that farm economy world anymore. If the Musks of the world really are concerned about preserving civilization in the face of a welfare apocalypse then they could simply invest in technologies that would require fewer people in the workforce to sustain the aging population, instead of investing in ridiculous high-concept breeding promotion apparatuses.
In fact, Musk claims to already be doing this! He says his Tesla robot is going to be so ubiquitous within the next 20 years that most of us will never need to work again, and we’ll all collect something he calls “universal high income.”
This is, of course, like all of Musk’s claims throughout the history of his career, utter, utter horseshit. He’s frequently promised there would be a human colony on Mars by about five years ago. But, true or false, there’s no sustainable argument in his camp that doesn’t easily boil away to the vulgar, pitiful, racial supremacy at its heart. I’m all for sending Elon Musk to Mars, just as long as it’s by way of the fucking Hague.
Take that particular ribeye however you like it.
I'm writing a book about toxic masculinity, misogyny, and the libertarian-to-fascism pipeline that has bubbled up on the internet in the first quarter of the 21st Century. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
Excellent analysis -- and I say this as a religious person who does believe in an afterlife. (A childless woman at church has a unique view into performative pronatalism, I can tell you.) Musk & co. are pure unadulterated evil, and the fact that they commit their monstrous acts in the name of children makes them exponentially worse.
If you haven't already, I suggest you watch John Oliver's recent episode about the gutting of USAID and how much of it was driven by racism, classism, and sheer ignorance and stupidity.