The Natal Conference is still happening. This weekend, a group of far-right personalities will descend on the Line Hotel in Downtown Austin to brainstorm solutions to a hypothetical population crash they fear will decimate Western civilization by the end of the century.
A video recently added to the conference’s web page explains that its goal is to “revitalize cultures with the world’s brightest minds and solve the greatest crisis of our time.” The page also claims that the gathering has nothing to do with politics. “Natal Conference has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren,” it reads.
Both claims are a stretch, considering the caliber of the conference’s “brightest minds” – an odd mash of pseudoscientists, anti-democratic agitators, and sworn enemies of the left. Its organizer is Kevin Dolan, a prominent voice in the far-right bro culture on X, who has said that natalism aligns with eugenics, the 20th-century racist pseudoscience used by the Nazis to rationalize the murder of Jews, people of color, queers, and those with disabilities.
The conference’s speaker list includes an odd mash of pseudoscientists, anti-democratic agitators, and sworn enemies of the left.
As we reported last month (“The Eugenic Circus Comes to Town,” Nov. 3) the conference also includes several speakers affiliated with the Claremont Institute, the pro-Trump think tank that The New York Times Magazine calls the “nerve center of the American right.” These include Michael Anton, one of Claremont’s senior fellows; Raw Egg Nationalist, a pseudonymous pusher of raw egg consumption; and Charles Haywood, an anti-democracy catastrophist who enjoys speculating about his future as a warlord after our country’s collapse. Other speakers, like Malcolm and Simone Collins, are less provocative, mainly extolling the value of large families. Still others, like Razib Khan, are science enthusiasts who associate with right-wing personalities to discuss race as a biological reality, despite broad scientific consensus that race isn’t genetic, but “a social category invented to justify slavery,” as a 2021 article in the journal of Evolution, Medicine, & Public Health put it.
Questions remain as to why the boutique Line Hotel would be willing to associate its brand with the motley collection of speakers represented at the Natal Conference – and what level of compensation could induce them to do so. Despite repeated attempts, spokespeople for the Line did not reply to our requests for an interview. When they saw our questions, the Natal Conference also declined comment.
This article appears in December 1 • 2023.
