A high-end hotel in the liberal Texan enclave of Austin is playing host to a conference whose theme is boosting global birth rates, but which will in fact feature racist and eugenicist internet personalities and far-right media figures.
The Natal conference – whose website warns that “by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse” – is scheduled to be held on 1 December at the Line Hotel.
Natal’s website claim the conference has “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren”, but the Guardian can reveal its organizer Kevin Dolan has been promoting the event on the far-right podcast circuit, and has explicitly linked the conference’s “pro-natalist” orientation to eugenics.
Dolan was at one time a social media influencer connected to the far-right Mormon “Deznat” or “Deseret nationalist” subculture and has himself linked the conference’s theme with eugenics in interviews.
On 13 June, Dolan was a guest on the Jolly Heretic podcast, hosted by Edward Dutton, an Englishman who left an academic position in Finland after his university found that a work he co-authored with the self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn plagiarized a student’s dissertation. Dutton once served as editor of the eugenicist journal Mankind Quarterly and is listed as a Natal speaker.
In his conversation with Dutton, Dolan said: “I think that the pro-natalist and the eugenic positions are very much not in opposition, they’re very much aligned.”
Broadly, eugenics is a group of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of a human population. It became the basis of a popular movement from the late 19th century, and led to governments around the world adopting policies such as forced sterilization of disabled and mentally ill people. The field was discredited after the second world war due to its association with racial policies in Nazi Germany, and many critics have attacked it as a pseudoscience.
The advertised program for Natal includes one day of speakers, followed by a private second-day workshop involving “deep and honest conversation (closed-door, no phones) Chatham House rules”, according to the website, which also advises “there will be some light vetting of participants”.
VIP tickets are priced at $1,000 and one-day tickets at $500, according to the conference website, which also offers attendees discounted accommodation at the Line.
The Guardian contacted the Line – one of a four-city chain of fashionable boutique hotels – about its hosting the conference but received no immediate response.
The Guardian emailed Kevin Dolan at an address associated with his company, Exit, to ask him about the nature of the conference but received no response.
Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said the meeting will cement links between the far right and influential rightwing opinion-makers. “It’s not surprising to see far-right folks, eugenicist types and white nationalists joining forces at a conference like this. They have become bedfellows,” she said.
She added: “The far right has long fretted about a demographic winter, and though they don’t necessarily say it openly, what they are referring to most often is a fall in white birthrates.”
Other speakers listed on the conference website have mixed overt racism and “Great Replacement” style conspiracy theories with their views on population birth rates.
The star attractions are Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have attracted significant coverage on both sides of the Atlantic for their warnings about slowing birthrates in advanced economies and how this will lead to “catastrophic population collapse”.
On their website, the Collinses disavow racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, claiming “monoethnic and monocultural countries have the lowest fertility rates”, and “stopping immigration hurts rather than helps local population fertility rates”.
However, their practice and advocacy of selecting the fittest embryos to carry forward into pregnancy have seen them branded as “hipster eugenicists”.
Another speaker at the conference is Charles Haywood, the former shampoo magnate who the Guardian revealed as the founder and sponsor of a far-right network of fraternal lodges, the Society for American Civic Renewal, and who has speculated about his own future as a “warlord” in “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government” in a post-collapse America.
Also listed is James Poulos. On the conference website, Poulos originally listed his affiliation as being with Return, the tech and spirituality newsletter acquired by rightwing Blaze Media last month, according to a version of the site archived in May.
Beirich said: “Aligning with Blaze folks means that this content will get more publicity than may be the case without it.” She added: “Regardless of scandals that have plagued Blaze media, they have a reach, and at times can inject issues deep into the conservative movement. Don’t be surprised if this demographic white winter talk starts popping up more frequently.”
The Guardian contacted the Blaze for comment on Poulos’s attendance at the conference, but received no response.
Other speakers at Natal explicitly describe themselves as eugenicists, and some happily conflate genetic traits and genetic fitness with race. They include Jonathan Anomaly, whose 2018 paper Defending Eugenics called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. That paper led Australian academics to publish an open letter of protest to the journal that published the paper.
Another, Razib Khan, had his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment was announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDARE.
Many other speakers have current or past connections with the far-right Claremont Institute, including Poulos, who is executive editor of Claremont publication the American Mind; Helen Roy, an American Mind contributing editor and fellow at the Claremont Institute for Political Philosophy; and the pseudonymous far-right social media influencer Raw Egg Nationalist, who has published a book with the white nationalist Antelope Hill press, appears regularly in the American Mind, and is now a partner in an online teashop under the umbrella of Claremont-connected New Founding.
Conference organizer Dolan, meanwhile, has a long history as an activist and influencer on the far right.
From 2018 he pseudonymously promoted conservative Mormon and alt-right talking points under the Twitter handle @extradeadJCB. In August 2021, however, his identity was revealed by antifascist activists and subsequently corroborated by Guardian reporting.
Elsewhere in his June conversation with Edward Dutton, Dolan characterized thw Mormon-affiliated Brigham Young University as a eugenic project.
“They wouldn’t explicitly call it a breeding program, but that’s what it is,” he told Dutton, adding that “it hoovers up all of the smartest Mormons all over the world”. He concluded that “in terms of being eugenic, BYU is the gate”.
When Dutton asked him why outsiders should be interested in Mormonism, Dolan said: “I think we actually are going to win. I think we’re going to inherit the earth.”
• This article was amended on 7 September 2023 to change the image for a more recent photograph of Austin.
