In rural Pennsylvania, I’m hiking through the forest with Simone and Malcom Collins and discussing the executive order they wrote for Donald Trump. Just outside their house — beyond the chicken coop, where they gather their eggs for homemade cakes, and the fenced-in part of the yard where their Corgi, The Professor, plays — is a forest, a small river, and some easy hiking trails. It’s a beautiful day in late spring, and among the greenery and the birdsong, we feel very far from Washington. Yet Simone and Malcolm are surprisingly influential in the Trump administration. I’m here to work out exactly how that happened.
As we walk and talk, the day heats up. Malcolm points out a disused mine shaft on the property, and takes us further along to show us the abandoned remnants of railroad leading up to it. Simone suggests we head back to their stone cottage for some homemade lemonade. She’s pregnant with their fifth child; her fourth, one-year-old Industry Americus, is strapped to her back in a carrier. She’s struggling with the walk, but Malcolm insists we carry on a little longer. He likes to show off the scenery.
It turns out that the executive order — the controversial “give out motherhood medals to women who’ve had six or more kids” one that caused such a stir recently — was actually written by Simone alone, with some help from AI. Malcolm manages their five-day-a-week podcast schedule, she explains, while she’s responsible for most of their written output. It makes sense to me that Simone would have been the decider on the medals, I say. After all, she’s the one who carries the children. It seems like she’d be the most opinionated on which number of offspring counts as medal-worthy. And of course, she wouldn’t have chosen five, since she’s already achieved that.
She laughs. “It’s true,” she says, “that would’ve been awfully convenient for me.” Six, she supposes, is a personal “stretch goal,” so that probably did factor in. But of course, her real stretch goal is fourteen.
The Collinses are part of a small but growing movement known as “pronatalism” — the belief that society should actively encourage childbirth, often through incentives or cultural pressure, to stave off civilizational collapse. But they aren’t religious, and they don’t agree with forcing people to have children through rolling back reproductive rights or outright bribes. Instead, they are former Silicon Valley-based tech founders, who use polygenic analysis on their IVF embryos in an effort to select for advantageous traits. There’s some debate about whether the couple — with their bold, thick-rimmed glasses and their penchant for an edgy take — are fringe weirdos or credible commentators. One thing’s for sure: once you scratch the surface of their political connections, it’s clear they have a whole lot of influence for supposed fringe weirdos.
So how exactly does a pronatalist couple living in the countryside get their work on Donald Trump’s desk? The Collinses don’t like to talk specifics, but a little digging reveals that they have multiple points of connection with the current administration. For one thing, Malcolm’s brother Miles is in DOGE, the Elon Musk-founded “Department for Government Efficiency” which isn’t really a department. It is, instead, a group of people handpicked by Musk (who recently left the administration, publicly insulted Trump, then walked it all back) who work inside each sector of government, functioning as overseers. Miles and his wife, Brittany, are pronatalists themselves, though they’re much more private about it than Simone and Malcolm: they’ve never even publicly confirmed how many children they have. They’re also entrepreneurs, just like Malcolm and Simone, and they recently co-owned a series of fertility clinics.
It’s a common thread among DOGE staffers, who clearly have more in common than simply a passion for businesslike efficiency. Musk has to be the most famous pronatalist on earth at this point, having publicly stated for a number of years that he believes he has a moral imperative to procreate as much as possible. And weeks after the birth of his first child, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary and DOGE spokesperson Harrison Fields wrote a Mothers’ Day tribute to his wife that read: “Let’s keep building this Fields Family — the more babies who call you Mom, the better.”
Then there’s JD Vance, whose “childless cat ladies” remark was once considered a faux pas and now looks a lot more like a dog-whistle. The father-of-three has been talking about how he wants “more babies in America” for years. And his brief stint in Silicon Valley — once a bastion of liberal values, now increasingly leaning right — as a venture capitalist made him some friends in very high places. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were all at Trump’s second inauguration in January.
There’s an increasing sense among many that the age of straight-up, populist MAGA is ending. Out of the ashes of the final Trump term, some hope, will emerge a tech-adjacent, anti-woke New Right that is ready to lead America, pioneered by JD Vance and financed by the likes of Thiel and Musk. That may explain the fallout between Musk and Trump not long after Musk departed the White House a few weeks ago. It may also explain why Vance’s reaction to the fallout was noticeably muted.
The black sheep of the family
On a tour round the Collins house, Simone points out all the different places where 14 children might be able to sleep if she’s able to bear that many. At the moment, she sleeps in a four-poster bed made of dark wood, carefully made up with expensive linens. There’s a crib in the corner, though she usually co-sleeps with Industry. The other three kids — Octavian George (a boy), Torsten Savage (a boy), and Titan Invictus (a girl) — sleep in a triple bunk-bed downstairs. In a closet under the stairs, there’s a twin bed jammed into the space with three sets of ear defenders suspended above. That’s where they put Octavian sometimes, Malcolm says, because he has meltdowns.
The decor is mainly in keeping with the old house — painted portraits, a lemon-motif tablecloth — with scattered pieces of aggressive Americana (large flags, a mounted AR-15.) Every room is spotless, except Malcolm’s bedroom, which he quickly closes the door on after we’ve taken a perfunctory peek. Inside, expensive video and audio equipment for the podcast is shoved into a corner, empty cans and food wrappers litter the surfaces and some of the floor, and a gigantic screen looms over the unmade bed.
Malcolm explains that he’s always been the “black sheep of the family.” He was once suspended from school and sent to a Holes-style juvenile correctional facility for threatening students. What actually happened, he says, is “I was building explosives in my backyard, building switchblade type things,” in the way of lots of young boys in rural Texas. Word got around, and he ended up in the principal’s office, where he was told: “We’re really concerned about the thing that you’re making, because you could use it to like, kill other students or something.” Malcolm laughs: “I was just like, aghast. I got really angry. I was like: You’re insulting me! That would be such an inefficient way to kill students! If I was gonna kill other students, I’d do it like X and Y and Z.”
Such literal-mindedness didn’t go down well with the school, and the school’s reaction didn’t go down well with Malcolm’s parents. They sent him away to what Simone calls “prison camp” and then, after that, to boarding school — he never returned to the family home after the age of 13. After weeks at the correctional facility, he ended up hospitalized with malnourishment and weighing — at over six feet tall — just 90 pounds. “People tried to kill him at that prison camp,” Simone says.
It sounds like a harsh upbringing and a traumatic experience. Does Malcolm harbor any resentment toward his family for exposing him to things like that? “No,” he says quickly. After all, he turned out fine in the end. The “urban monoculture” will “try to turn people against their natural support network, which is their birth culture and their family, and try to convince them: hey, you should go to a therapist and what did your parents do to you? What’s this trauma you have with your parents?” he says. “I think that there are going to always be malevolent forces that benefit from getting us to blame our parents for things. And I do not think that is good for me to model that to my kids. For example, if I go around talking about, oh, my parents this, my parents that, why would they not adopt the same thing as me? I think it’s on all of us to understand that parents generally try to do what’s best for their kids. And the more that we are tricked into believing anything else, the easier it is for us to be led culturally astray.”
What counts as Malcolm’s “birth culture” is a little complicated. Simone takes an ornamental mug out of the kitchen cabinet and shows it to me: it belonged to Malcolm’s grandfather when he was in Congress. As I turn over the mug in my hands, Malcolm talks about how he comes from “the greater Appalachian cultural tradition,” where “as a young kid, you do blow things up — you’re supposed to blow up army men, you do build explosives, you do make flamethrowers. That’s a sign that you are, within this culture, innovative and vitalistic.” It’s a culture of truck nuts and mud-wrestling, he adds, and it’s very egalitarian: the champion female mud-wrestlers, for instance, are afforded a lot of respect in the community.
Despite his efforts to tell a quintessentially Appalachian backstory, it’s clear that Malcolm — who grew up in Texas — is less JD Vance and more RFK Jr. There’s a Collins Rotunda at Harvard, a physical testament to the amount of money Malcolm’s family has donated over the years. His uncle was the former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. In fact, pretty much every relative has been to an elite Ivy League institution and runs a successful startup or works in government. Family gatherings are both intellectually stimulating and brutally dog-eat-dog. When he got into Stanford Business School, Malcolm says, he rang his dad in a moment of great excitement and pride to tell him, and his father drily responded: “Their standards must really have dropped.”
Secret societies and off-the-record retreats
You won’t just find members of the Collins family dominating the upper echelons of public and private sector roles; you’ll also find them, if you’re privileged enough, in the underworld of American secret societies. It’s a world that holds a special interest for Malcolm and Simone both.
Simone was once the managing director of Dialog, a secret society co-run by the billionaire PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. It’s an experience she calls “eye-opening”. It happened in 2020, when she and Malcolm were both looking for jobs “but he, being a white man, wasn’t going to get one in 2020 for sure,” she says. “Even people who talked with him candidly were like: We really can’t hire someone of your profile right now.” Simone, however, was a little more lucky: she got a callback after applying for an interesting-sounding role through a platform called Scouted.
Dialog recruits desirable candidates — based very much on how much money and influence they have — and invites them to off-the-record retreats to discuss the future of America.
“Even among secret societies or even just invite-only societies and ideas festivals, [Dialog] is definitely the most snobby and exclusive,” Simone says, smiling. “I codified their qualifying criteria — and I know now that they’re even more rigorous about it.”
The organization had two levels: “Junior Dialog” and then Dialog proper, “and at that time — so I’m sure it’s more expensive now to attend — Junior Dialog was maybe $6,000 or something” for a three-day retreat, while “adult Dialog was like $15,000,” she says. The Dialog retreats are held in isolated places like the middle of the Utah desert, and they’re “extremely high-touch,” meaning that everyone is expected to participate in debate and conversation — “as in, you get kicked out if you don’t participate.” Every conversation has a chosen moderator, sometimes a Dialog staff member and sometimes a participant, and that moderator will “rate every single participant.” At the end, the ratings are tallied up, and the people with the lowest ratings are kicked out immediately. “They will even kick people out in the middle of the event,” Simone adds. “And these are people who have paid $15,000 to be here.”
In Simone’s opinion, the criteria can be a little harsh. In Malcolm’s, however, they’re completely reasonable. “The main reason you would get kicked out is if [you were trying] to shut down controversial conversations by being like: You can’t talk like this, this is offensive and I’m gonna shame you,” he says, adding that that’s something the urban monoculture does all the time in the wider world. He thinks it’s fair enough to excommunicate someone for behaving that way, “because people were preventing open and honest conversation.”
How does one get noticed by the Dialog staff, and therefore invited to their secret retreats, in the first place? There are “various criteria” that might get you an invitation, says Simone, along the lines of: “Has your startup raised over $50 million? Do you have 500,000 followers on social media plus a huge media impact, or are you a famous international advocate? How many news stories are out about you?” You have to hit a number of these to be able to come along, adds Simone, and even she and Malcolm don’t qualify for Dialog anymore. “So it’s very elite,” Malcolm clarifies.
He would know. The Collins family has long had connections in secret societies, if the rumors are to be believed. The Bohemian Club, an all-male secret society that operates the annual retreat Bohemian Grove and whose members have included a number of US presidents, made the news a year ago when it was reported that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had attended with a billionaire friend. Malcolm’s godfather was supposedly also a high-ranking member.
These days, however, retreats like Bohemian Grove — often referred to as a “summer camp” for the super rich and powerful — are being eclipsed by edgier, weirder alternatives. Hereticon is the most famous, with its own clandestine annual conference — “The Apocalypse Ball” — that wannabe attendees can apply to via Google Doc. Questions on the application include: “What apocalypse are you currently focused on (realizing or preventing)?”
Malcolm says that Hereticon is “the best secret society in the world right now.” Past attendees have said that the annual Apocalypse Ball includes activities like getting tattooed on the spot, taking home your own genetically engineered frog embryo (you get to insert a genetic quirk, such as bioluminescence or albinism or a gene to make the frog grow extremely large, with the help of an on-hand scientist), and attending off-the-record salons with speakers who have been “cancelled” or are “ideological outcasts” in mainstream society. Where Bohemian Grove was a nostalgic summer camp with suits, Hereticon is a technicolor playground for rich and powerful people who insist on their supposed underdog status. Backed by Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders’ Fund, it hosts discussions on issues like how to achieve immortality, “transhumanism” (i.e. enhancing the human body with robotics and other tech), and UFOs. In 2022, Grimes — the musician and mother of three of Elon Musk’s children — posted a selfie from Hereticon, where she appears to have done a surprise DJ set that year, as well as in early 2024.
Was the richest man in the world himself in attendance? It seems likely, but Simone and Malcolm are cagey about anything relating to Musk. In the large, low-ceilinged kitchen of their stone house, Simone looks up a recipe for lemon cake and then starts to make it, pouring from an industrial-sized bag of flour and using eggs from the coop outside. Industry dozes on Simone’s back, clutching a toy scavenged during our slow drift from room to room earlier. A little “Trump 2025” flag is placed conspicuously in a vase on top of the refrigerator, and Malcolm is bouncing a child’s playground ball off the hard floor again and again as he describes how he sees himself as a superhero fighting Thanos when he stands up to the urban monoculture.
They vacillate between domestic asides and political commentary: Simone brings out a black-and-white picture of the owners of the house from the 1800s; Malcolm talks about how transgender people have unfairly taken over the LGBT conversation and put off the “normal gays”; Simone describes how she was brainwashed by liberal thinking after her upbringing in California, and how Malcolm helped her see that during an impassioned conversation on their first date; Malcolm glances out the window and points out some DIY that he needs to attend to outside. Simone is wearing a white bonnet that Malcolm encouraged her to put on after we arrived, because they like to wind people up with exaggerated tradwife-style costumes. Malcolm is dressed in a polo shirt and jeans.
Simone offers round seltzer waters; Malcolm brings out a six-pack of Coors Light for himself and starts on the first. What’s bothering me, I say, is that, despite their various connections in high places, I still don’t entirely understand how they got that draft executive order in front of Trump. Malcolm is clear that he and his brother do not have “career conversations”. He mentions that The New York Times criticized their motherhood medal idea and, in doing so, amplified it. But a newspaper can only do so much, I say. What about Elon Musk? He’s an extremely prominent pronatalist. At the time of the executive order, he was spending every day at the White House. Do you ever have conversations with him?
The mood in the room dramatically shifts. Malcolm trains his eyes on the floor. “He has never funded our organization,” he says, eventually, “and a lot of people believe he has. That’s what I can say about that.”
I push a little harder. I’m not asking about money towards pronatalist causes, I say, but just pronatalism in general, as a political aim without finances involved. Have they ever sat down and had a chat with Elon Musk about that?
Silence again. “What I can say is that he hasn’t funded us,” Malcolm repeats, eyes still on the ground.
I turn to look at Simone, who’s now sitting in the corner with Industry on her lap. “I think I hear what you’re saying,” I say, and she catches my eye and smiles. It’s not a denial, but it is plausible deniability.
Changing society through AI
Simone and Malcolm own another small house on their property, where their neighbors live rent-free so long as they can provide day-to-day childcare. But even with such nearby help, parenting is still hard. Both Octavian and Torsten are autistic. They each have very firm food preferences and eat restricted diets, and they get overstimulated easily. A lot of the time, every person in the house eats a different meal, in different rooms to each other.
The Collinses have friends in the pronatalist movement, people with similarly large families with whom they can trade tips and tricks. Once, Malcolm says, he asked one of those families how they approach a situation where a child really seems to be struggling, such as refusing to eat anything except white rice due to sensory issues. What do you do to tamp down the anxiety? Their response, he says, was refreshing: “Just have more kids!” It reminded him that such modern stressors would never have bothered their ancestors, and that a lot of the time, children work things out on their own.
The pronatalist movement is “very diverse,” Simone says, as we discuss further the families that they know. There are Catholics, tradwife types, tech-forward New Right devotees like the Collinses themselves. It does sound diverse, I say, in some ways. But where are the progressive pronatalists? Do they know any?
They stop talking for a moment and Simone says, “Hmm.” Eventually, they concede they don’t know any, but that there probably are some out there. Maybe they’re too shy to declare themselves because of the liberal order. Perhaps they’ve been blinded by the urban monoculture and feel like they should have fewer children than they really want.
Back from an afternoon with the neighbors, Titan and Torsten come running up the garden path and into the house. Malcolm redirects them into the fenced-off yard, where Titan — a ball of energy with her hair in pigtails — pokes at the chickens in the coop and Torsten — more quiet and reticent — stops to examine my photographer’s camera. Industry is still on Simone’s back, occasionally dozing and babbling to herself; Octavian is at kindergarten, and will come home later on the school bus. As the family gathers together for a photo, Malcolm chases Torsten across the grass and throws him over his shoulder. They’re all wearing yellow shoes, Malcolm and Simone included. Malcolm explains that it’s a family policy, as it’s an easy way to identify each other from afar.
Although Octavian goes to kindergarten at the local public school, Malcolm says, they plan to educate the kids primarily via AI — hopefully through their own educational startup, The Collins Institute, if they can secure funding. With potentially fourteen children in the home, Octavian, Torsten, Titan, Industry, soon-to-be-born baby Tex and their siblings will have very different opportunities to Malcolm, who grew up with just one brother, and Simone, who was an only child.
That’s true, says Malcolm, but his family gave him “no inheritance” anyway — the only thing they did was pay for college. Can Malcolm and Simone afford to do the same and pay their kids through college? No, but college isn’t worth it any more, they say. It’s just a breeding ground for liberal indoctrination. AI will replace it, and that can’t happen soon enough.
The Collinses are confident that AI is going to rapidly change society — politically, academically, and socially — and that the New Right will be at the forefront of that change. Recent developments suggest that they’re correct, and that the current administration is particularly invested. In mid-June, executives from OpenAI, Palantir and Meta were sworn in as Army Reserve officers after the Department of Defense awarded them each multimillion-dollar contracts to build a solid AI component for future “warfighting”. And Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill includes one extremely unusual element: an effective ban on states implementing any AI regulations for at least 10 years.
Malcolm believes that as his kids grow up, they will remain ideologically aligned with him. AI education will help with that; they won’t be indoctrinated by teachers into the urban monoculture, and they’ll be able to explore their own personal interests through the help of a personalized AI tutor. With four kids under the age of five and another on the way, the Collinses have no problem with family rows over politics at the moment. But I wonder what a house full of teenagers as headstrong as Malcolm and Simone will look like in the future.
It’s getting late in the afternoon. As we exit the house and start saying our goodbyes, Titan follows us down the path, shrieking and getting under Malcolm’s feet. She is a rambunctious, happy little girl who bears a striking resemblance to her father. Simone, keeping an eye on Torsten and still hauling Industry, hangs back at the house.
“Do you wish you weren’t born?” Malcolm asks Titan repeatedly, as they stand at the gate and watch us walk towards our car. “Are you glad you’re alive?”
Titan just looks back at him in confusion and laughs. She is, after all, only three years old.
