The Endless PR Stunt

America’s superstar pro-natalist couple hacks the media

Have you heard about Malcolm and Simone Collins? They’re the American couple that have made themselves the poster-family for the “pro-natal” movement, which is an actual thing we have in the U.S. now. If you haven’t heard about them, congratulations! And I am so sorry to break your streak. But they’ve been profiled repeatedly and I know about them, so now you have to know about them, too. They look like this:

They are often pictured with more of their many children. Simone’s rural-trad presentation notwithstanding, this is a couple that famously met on Reddit a decade or so ago and that has been terminally online for years. They have strong “people you would sidle away from at a party” energy.

Regrettably, the Collinses are fascinating both because of their cause (I have previously written about government pro-natal campaigns) and because of how successful they have been at getting themselves and the cause profiled. The current arc of coverage started in January and picked up speed through April, and I have read it so you don’t have to:¹

• April 25th, on NPR, including their explanation of the look they’ve adopted

• April 24th, on CNN, being interviewed by Pamela Brown - a good view into their politics

• April 24th in the Independent, in which they talk about creating a religion, “techno-puritanism”

• April 17th in the New York Times, prominently featured in coverage of NatalCon (more on that below)

• April 1st, on the BBC, in which Malcolm explains their PR strategy

• February 21st in the New York Post, as part of a survey of the Valley’s links with pro-natalism, with an amazing photo of Simone in full puritan regalia, cradling a chicken

• February 4th in the Washington Post, which notes their connections to Peter Thiel.

There are many more from last year and the year before. They may be decent at having kids (four plus one on the way), but they are undisputed world champions at getting into the press.

The Collins’s hold some liberal views (libertarian might be a better word), such as support for IVF and abortion access, but the story they tell about themselves is a standard-issue red-pill journey. From the BBC profile above:

[They] describe themselves as former liberals who became disillusioned with progressive, "woke" politics.

They see themselves as pragmatic and profoundly anti-bureaucratic.

"We are a coalition of people who are incredibly different in our philosophies, our theological beliefs, our family structures," says Malcolm. "But the one thing we agree on is that our core enemy is the urban monoculture; the leftist unifying culture."

Their pro-natal policy and social ideas fall comfortably into an established reactionary/libertarian template. In the CNN interview, they discuss policies for encouraging larger families. The anchor, Pamela Brown, suggests better family leave and Malcom is immediately, “No, not that!” Apparently, deregulation is the answer. People would be having more kids if not for the deadening combination of an intrusive state + woke.

As they say in the excerpt above, their “core enemy” (amazing choice of words) is “urban monoculture” and “leftist unifying culture.” So…it’s a war against the culture, or a “culture war,” if you will. They are passionate about reviving an allegedly lost tradition of veneration of motherhood. This is not a thing I realized had gone away but, as a (((globalist))) urban dad with an immigrant wife and one (1) mixed-race child, I might be tuned to the wrong wavelength.

Malcolm Collins directly addressed suspicions about his and his wife’s politics in an opinion piece titled, “I want people to have more kids. Does that make me far right?”

Absolutely not! Kids are great, and people should be able to have as few or many kids as they like without it meaning anything about their politics! It’s the deregulatory obsession, cultural dog whistles, volkish rural kitsch, interest in “network states,” dedication to home schooling and ferocious disdain for public education that make people consider them far right. The Collinses, who conceive through IVF, are also into “optimizing” their embryos in a way that, while not population-level eugenics, seems like it might be OK with a Eugenicstan travel poster in the breakfast nook.

Also, Malcolm published that opinion piece in The Free Press, which is a poor venue for persuading liberals but a good one for generating sympathy from like-minded conservatives who believe that Woke Has Gone Too Far. It’s like publishing an essay on the theme “capitalism is the worst” in Jacobin. The readers will not be challenged by your point of view.

I am not sure where to place their religion, “techno-puritanism,” on the political spectrum. It feels right-coded to me, but it might just be a huge fountain of Valley woo.² I can’t be bothered to spend time with the scripture, even though it consists entirely of YouTube videos. How we have fallen since the golden tablets.

Lest you consider them misogynist, the Collinses point out that, despite dressing like a 17th century milkmaid, Simone is an ambitious professional. But there is a straight line from restoring a culture of “veneration of motherhood” to believing that a woman’s place is in the home. Add the apocalyptic vision of population decline and there is at least a dotted line to weird evo-psych Internet dudes explaining, Dr. Strangelove-style, why it’s imperative that each man have a brood harem.

But never mind all that! As a PR man with a heart of cigarette butts quenched in plastic bottle gin, I admire the skills! The Collinses have catapulted themselves into world fame through engineered eccentricity and extreme availability. They have made themselves the omnipresent advocates of a niche movement. The recent “NatalCon 2025” reportedly attracted about 200 people. This is what my wife and I had at our wedding, which was not widely considered the vanguard of a popular movement.

I see the Collins’ life as an endless PR stunt designed to make them an object of perpetual media fascination. And, Malcolm essentially says that to the BBC:

"The easiest way to [spread the word about pro-natalism] was to turn ourselves into a meme... If we take a reasonable approach to things and say things are nuanced, nobody engages. And then we go and say something outrageous and offensive and everyone's into it."

Mission accomplished! The NPR profile also got into the strategy:

"My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now — it's intentionally cringe," [Simone] Collins told NPR between other press interviews at Natal Con.

They also gave their children outrageous names: Industry Americus, Titan Invictus, Octavian George and Torsten Savage, which read like the major arcana cards in Curtis Yarvin’s tarot deck.³ Industry Americus is a girl. What if she marries fellow pro-natalist Elon Musk’s son, Techno Mechanicus? Imagine the wedding invitation!

The Collinses’ children are prominent in the press coverage. The ur-profile that launched the family was in the UK’s Telegraph, in April 2023, with the epic headline, “Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind.” They hadn’t quite worked out the full techno-puritan trad presentation, but they were already deep into the eccentric baby names:

“[Simone’s] five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest.”

It’s great to give kids distinctive names! But my legal first name is Diccon, and I can tell you from experience that a weird name can be a burden in ways other than sexism. There are plenty of gender-neutral names in the space between “Tiffany” and “Titan Invictus.” Asher? Quinn? Riley? Take your pick! But I guess little Riley Collins isn’t going to generate the same press interest.

Thinking of the Collinses presentation as PR performance art made me revisit some of the old articles about them. A profile in The Guardian, in May 2024, included this:

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Later in the profile, Malcolm tries to contextualize it for the journalist, talking about how tigers discipline unruly cubs. The slap, and the explanation, generated tons of discourse online. At the time, I considered it a PR fail. But looking back, maybe my candy-ass, liberal urbanist standards are irrelevant. It might be a cynical reading even for me to see Malcolm smacking his kid specifically to drive PR. But it certainly had that effect, and I am not sure it played badly with his core audience.

The Collinses have been successful at using themselves to draw attention to their movement. But that’s not the same as generating popular support for the movement. The problem with “turning yourself into a meme” with extreme fashion and lifestyle choices is that, while you might draw attention to the idea of having lots of children, you also make it look like something for weirdos in bonnets. That’s not a recipe for mass appeal.⁴

But it is a recipe for promoting your adjacent products to like-minded audiences. Some of those products are their podcast, “Based Camp” (random recent episode: “Why are Muslims poor?”), their books, and their long-gestating online school, the Collins Institute for the Gifted. The school’s web page explains their view of traditional education:

The school system as we know it stems from a bureaucratic process designed to produce interchangeable colonial administrators for use within the British imperial empire. It was optimized to ensure any graduate could be slotted into a globe-spanning bureaucracy, competently replacing any other individual. In short, it was optimized to turn humans into replaceable parts.

They should have hired a gifted copy editor. But do read the whole thing. It’s a journey.

I believe the Collinses are sincere about pro-natalism. No one has five (or more) children as a gimmick. That is a commitment, even for wealthy people. But the extremely performative way in which they have gone about it has helped them to achieve an extraordinary level of visibility and notoriety. To the extent that has deepened their relationships with a conspicuous new strain of reactionary American wealth and power, and promoted their media and education empire, it’s a success.

As the NPR profile said, the Collinses have courted press coverage by being "intentionally cringe." And, I would add, intentionally extreme. Maybe it’s all tactics in the interest of self-promotion. But at what point do they become prisoners of the performance? Do they have to find ever new levels of extremity to maintain the momentum? Can they wind it back without alienating the audience they have been cultivating? Or are they riding the tiger of “techno-puritanism,” unable to dismount without being devoured?

Of course Simone Collins can take off the bonnet and chunky glasses any time and go back to her before look. But Industry Americus and her siblings are going to carry their names for a long time to come. I hope it was worth it.

1. I pulled this one from the list because it’s not really a profile, but it was part of that wave of coverage. April 23rd in the Guardian, being brutally kneecapped by columnist Moira Donegan

2. As someone who was born in Santa Clara, grew up in San Francisco and Palo Alto and built a career in the global tech industry, including at the company that literally put the silicon in the valley, it annoys me no end that “the Valley” has become shorthand for a whole set of deranged neo-millenarian and techno reactionary belief systems. But here we are.

3. The Collinses interviewed Yarvin on their podcast last November, on the links between communism and the civil rights movement. Watch at your own risk.

4. An analogous figure is entrepreneur and longevity biohacker Bryan Johnson. He has been serially profiled by media, but lots of the coverage boils down to, “what a weirdo!” I am not sure he’s convinced a broad swathe of American men to track their nightly erections, as he famously does.