A natalist conference featuring speakers including self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science, apparently including the man behind a previously pseudonymous race-science influencer account, and the founder of a startup offering IQ screening for IVF embryos, will be held at a hotel and conference venue operated by the public University of Texas, Austin.
Details of the conference have emerged as a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions, tech billionaire Elon Musk, lays waste to US government agencies under the banner of his “Doge” initiative, with the blessing of Donald Trump.
Natalism in its current often rightwing iteration encourages high birth rates, and Musk has been a vocal proponent. He also maintains a large compound home near Austin, where reportedly he plans to house some of his children and two of their mothers.
The Natal conference website embeds a Musk post on X, reading: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” Musk, who reportedly has at least 13 children by four mothers, was in recent days confronted on X by musician Grimes and rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair over his alleged neglect of the children he has fathered with them.
The conference, scheduled for 28-29 March, is being organized by Kevin Dolan, who the Guardian identified in 2021 as the person behind a Twitter account that was prominent in the far-right “DezNat” movement, and last year as the organizer of the first conference. It is the second time the conference has been held, and once again, the speakers roster runs from provocateurs who emerged from the “fascist fitness scene” to practitioners of “liberal eugenics”.
Patrik Hermannson, a researcher at Hope Not Hate, a UK anti-hate nonprofit, said that the pro-natalism beliefs informing the Natal conference was one of the crucial planks of “the modern race science movement”.
“It’s about having more babies,” he said, “but it’s important to ask whose babies. It’s about promoting the idea that certain people should have babies that have been improved with positive eugenics.”
Locating the Natal conference
On the ticketing page of the website for the conference, prospective attendees are told of the venue: “Register to see address.” However, in small print on the main page, prospective attendees are told that on day one they can “mingle with speakers and experts for dinner at the Bullock Museum of Texas History in Austin”, and the following day attend a “symposium at the AT&T Conference Center, featuring keynote speakers as well as a closed-door, facilitated ‘unconference’”.
A promotional email sent out by the organization said the conference had secured “discounted accommodations at the AT&T Conference Center for attendees”, accessible with a discount code. Standard tickets are $1,000 according to event’s ticketing page, but buyers are warned that purchases will “require approval”.
The Guardian emailed the University of Texas for comment on their venue hosting the conference.
Jordan Lasker, AKA ‘Cremieux’
One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics.
The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.
On 27 November, Musk reposted a Cremieux comment on falling birthrates, adding: “With rare exception, all countries are trending towards population collapse.”
On 29 April, Cremieux posted: “Only about a third of the world even meets replacement rate fertility. This is the biggest problem of our time.” Musk responded: “Yes.”
Musk has also boosted or responded favorably to Cremieux posts on other rightwing hobby horses such as crime in Portland, Oregon, and allegations that Democrats had created loopholes in the asylum system.
Away from X, Cremieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and IQ. A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.
Those arguments, first made in a book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, are now so discredited that journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society and Psychological Science have retracted articles that relied on the data. In 2020, the scholarly European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association published a blanket condemnation of Lynn’s data alongside its code of conduct on its website, writing: “Any conclusions drawn from these data are both untenable, and likely to give rise to racist conclusions.”
Lynn, whose work Cremieux seeks to defend in the post, was a self-described scientific racist, and is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists”.
Until his death in 2023, Lynn was a key figure in organized scientific racism. He served on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funded “leading Anglo-American race scientists” for decades. He was editor of Mankind Quarterly, a long-standing “pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality”. He held a position on the advisory board of the Occidental Quarterly, a key platform for far-right intellectuals to express pseudo-scientific antisemitic views. He also presented at the American Renaissance conference, a white nationalist gathering where in 2002 he claimed higher rates of psychopathy and psychopathic behavior existed among Black populations compared to others.
Jordan Lasker has also sought to rehabilitate and employ Lynn’s work in papers published under his own name, perhaps most controversially in a co-written paper, Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. One of his co-authors, Bryan Pesta, was later dismissed from his tenured professorship at Cleveland State University over the use of National Institutes of Health data in the paper.
Last October, the Guardian reported that Pesta had joined a video call with a network of race-science researchers who claimed to have “under the table” access to sensitive genetic data at the UK Biobank. Another of Lasker’s co-authors on Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability, Emil Kirkegaard, was the host of that video call.
Kirkegaard is a self-described eugenicist, explicitly advocates “race science”, and has credentialled himself as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization headed by Richard Lynn until his death.
Lasker’s role in running the Cremieux account has long been a subject of social media speculation, and recent efforts by some writers to further substantiate that identification have not been disputed by Lasker or the Cremieux account.
While previous investigations have focused on Lasker’s alleged history across several Reddit accounts, the Guardian obtained a scrape of the website of the 2024 Manifest conference via a source whose identity is being protected over fears of retaliation.
Last year, the Guardian reported that Manifest was held at a venue that FTX bankruptcy administrators alleged was partly secured with donations from the company Sam Bankman-Fried led into bankruptcy. Lighthaven, owners of the venue, subsequently denied that they had seen the money.
Source code from the site detailing conference registrations indicates that Cremieux, a guest speaker there, registered under an email associated with Lasker.
When the Guardian reached out on that Lasker-linked email to ask about the registration and other evidence pointing to his operation of the Cremieux, Lasker replied with a message containing a promotional code for discounted subscriptions to the Cremieux substack.
Between the Guardian’s request for comment and Lasker’s response, the “neofascist lifestyle influencer” Charles Cornish-Dale, who posts under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist, told his X followers that the Guardian was about to “doxx another anon”, that is to identify another pseudonymous rightwing influencer account.
Cornish-Dale was one of the influencers who responded with dismay after the Guardian identified Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind the “L0m3z” X account and rightwing publisher Passage Press last year. Later in the year, Cornish-Dale was himself identified as Raw Egg Nationalist by Hope Not Hate.
Cornish-Dale is a figurehead of the rightwing bodybuilding scene, and has been a keen promoter of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. He had nevertheless lived with his mother in sleepy south Dorset during the entirety of his career as a rightwing influencer, according to Hope Not Hate.
Cornish-Dale and Keeperman are both also slated to speak at Natal this year.
‘Liberal eugenics’
Other Natal speakers are affiliated with organizations that promote eugenicist ideas and practices.
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 due to its association with racial policies in Nazi Germany, and many critics have attacked it as a pseudoscience.
One scheduled speaker, Jonathan Anomaly is a former academic and an advocate of what he has called “liberal eugenics”.
The Guardian reported in October that he was a senior staff member at Heliospect, a startup offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ even though screening embryos for these traits would be illegal in the UK.
On the podcast of “new right” figure Alex Kaschuta, in an episode published on Tuesday, Anomaly said of his company’s services: “What can you do? Well, through embryo selection, you’re going to be able to calculate polygenic scores that reduce disease, boost IQ at least a bit, and maybe more in the future.”
Diana Fleischman, another speaker scheduled to appear at Natal, is a podcast host and contributor at online magazine Aporia, as well as an academic evolutionary psychologist, according to her personal website.
The Guardian also reported last October that Aporia was at the center of an “international network of ‘race science’ activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics”.
One of Fleischman’s articles at Aporia is entitled “You’re probably a eugenicist”. On her Substack feed she has promoted excerpts from Aporia articles, including one on 29 November that used the Holocaust to bolster the claim that black people are innately less intelligence than whites: “If anti-black racism has such devastating effects on cognitive performance among blacks, why did the Holocaust leave no discernible impact on cognitive performance among Jews?”
The publication is operated by the Human Diversity Foundation, an organization registered in Wyoming by Emil Kirkegaard.
Aporia’s executive editor Bo Winegard was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after, in a seminar hosted by the University of Alabama, Winegard reportedly said “people in colder climates, because the differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.
Aporia editor Noah Carl was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after it emerged that alongside his academic work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism, including Mankind Quarterly.
Returning to Natal for a second year running are also Malcolm and Simone Collins, the so-called “hipster eugenicists” who have become the prominent advocates of pro-natalism. The Guardian reported in November that the Collinses, after being approached by a man posing as a potential investor in their projects, produced a proposal for a city-state on the Isle of Man that “contained ideas that seem plucked out of a dystopian science fiction movie”.
The plan envisioned a society that would “grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents”, and be ruled by a periodically rotated “dictator”. They said the arrangement would make the British crown dependency a center for the “mass production of genetically selected humans”.
The previous month, Hope Not Hate published an investigation, also derived from undercover interactions with the Collinses, showing that “despite [their] rejection of the label, what the couple propose is often reminiscent of eugenics”.
The Guardian reported on the 2024 iteration of the Natal conference ahead of the event, detailing the far-right history of event organizer Dolan, and the prominent place of other speakers in eugenicist and far-right politics.
Politico reporting from the event, and revealed that long-time white nationalist activist Taylor, founder of the American Renaissance conference, had been in attendance.
