Latest news with #Puritans
Bloomberg
28-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
A Weaker Harvard Is a Weaker America
Imagine if China or Russia tried to destroy a US asset that generates tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, plays a major role in American leadership in science and technology and turbocharges our prestige and soft power. We'd expect our government to go to war to defend it. But in attacking Harvard University, that's exactly what the Trump administration is trying to do. Despite the school's failures and flaws, it remains a vital national asset — and the administration's actions are far more dangerous to America than they are to Harvard. When you tour the UK's Cambridge University, your guide will show you empty niches containing stone fragments. They're the remnants of statues smashed by Puritan fanatics during the English Civil War. But Cambridge survived and flourished. Universities are enormously resilient and count time in centuries, not electoral cycles. Long after the Trump administration is gone, there will still be a Harvard. But an America deprived of everything Harvard contributes will be far poorer and weaker.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How America got so weird: The Pilgrims made us do it
Jane Borden's "Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America" develops a simple thesis: The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult — even if they lacked a charismatic leader — and together with the Puritans who followed them passed on seven key elements of belief that have shaped America ever since. Even as some aspects of their beliefs have faded, these key elements survive in multiple different forms and settings, from pop culture to multilevel marketing schemes and a wide range of spiritual practices and beliefs that migh otherwise seem to have little in common. There are more complex ideas behind this thesis, as Borden draws on a wide range of insightful research, lending nuance and depth to her argument. But her basic argument is so clear and compelling, one can only wonder that it wasn't made before. Even movements led by feminists and Black separatists resonate with the same constellation of beliefs, as Borden demonstrates with harrowing examples. But it's not the exotic extremes that should concern us most, she argues, but rather the fact that the patterns she traces can be found almost everywhere in our culture. Any one of Borden's fascinating chapters could warrant an interview in itself. But I felt it was most important to highlight the range of Puritan credos she discusses, which best convey the full power of her argument. I reached out to ask specifically about those. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. You begin your book with a brief description of the Pilgrims as a doomsday cult, and go on to say, "We've been iterating on its prototype since. We can't stop re-creating our first trauma," although it remains "largely unacknowledged." What led you to see the Pilgrims as America's foundational cult? Well, around 2018 I became very preoccupied by the division in our nation, the cultural and political division. I'd been reporting on cults at the time, and I knew that cults feed off division and that division is fueled by cults in turn. I started to see cultic thinking in America everywhere in pop culture, entertainment and politics, and I just started pulling on the thread. How long have we had this knee-jerk anti-intellectualism? Why are we so obsessed with the illusion of perfection? I just kept pulling that thread and it took me all the way back to the 1620s and 1630s. You write that you find seven of the Puritan credos "to be most pervasive and problematic" and you devote a chapter to each. The first one is about "our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us." You discuss the findings of the 1977 book, "The American Monomyth" by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence. What did they mean by a "monomyth"? Jewett and Lawrence were trying to figure out how Americans could possibly stomach the incredible violence of the Vietnam War, which was coming into their living rooms for the first time. They found something hiding in plain sight, a narrative in American pop culture that they named the American monomyth. It goes something like this: A small Edenic community is under threat and unable to save itself. The police are inept. The politicians are corrupt. What are they going to do? Then suddenly out of nowhere appears this outsider, or sometimes this loner from within the community. This person saves the community through violence. It's always violence, and it's precise violence. There are no innocent casualties. Only the bad guys die, and therefore it's cleansing violence. It's righteous. This narrative is most common in superhero genres, Western genres, we see it in vigilante films, disaster films and doomsday films, but it's even more pervasive than that. I believe ultimately it comes from the Book of Revelation. It's a story of divine rescue, which is what apocalyptic narratives often are, and the Book of Revelation is in particular. The Puritans were obsessed with that story; they couldn't get enough. They retold it in a dozen different ways, and it's still very much with us. Three movies came out just last month that follow this American monomyth: "The Amateur," "The Accountant 2" and "A Working Man." So the second credo concerns "the temptation to feel chosen, which justifies acting on our base desires." You begin with John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the , a utopian religious group in the mid-19th century. How did that differ from the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and how did it continue a main thrust of their thinking? The commonalities were basically this idea that perfection is achievable, that we can reach God in that way. I would say it's paternalism, the idea that the leaders know what's best for everyone else and therefore can act for everyone else, and the idea of being a chosen people, of exceptionalism. But by the time the Oneidans came around, the culture had changed. There was no longer the belief in predestination, the idea that God has already chosen who will and won't be saved and there's nothing you can do about it. Instead, they thought the story of Revelation was maybe a little more allegorical, and actually humans are moving toward New Jerusalem ourselves. God wants us to help get there, and we have the ability to do so. New Jerusalem itself became somewhat more allegorical, no longer a literal city that would descend from the sky, but just the idea of living in perfection with God. So things had changed a bit, but the main foundational thrusts for the same. Noyes believed he had himself become perfect, meaning free of sin, and he declared one day that their community was heaven on earth. They had achieved it. They'd gotten there, and everyone else could, too. All you had to do was be sin-free, and of course he had various ways he thought he could get there, one of which was through having lots of sex. Third is "knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism." In this chapter, you describe cults and as "kissing cousins," noting that America has its own favorite flavor of conspiracy theory, with three key ingredients. The classic American conspiracy theory always has an evil leader or group of leaders behind it, who are unfathomably powerful, typically world leaders. That comes from the story of the Antichrist. The second characteristic is that these evildoers are brainiacs, they're incredibly intelligent. They use that intelligence — which is part of what corrupted them — to prey on more simpleminded folk who are virtuous. That anti-intellectual tradition is still with us, of course, and traces back to the Puritans' culture of the simple. They lionized simplicity of manner and thought. The third element is that there's something we can do about it, gosh darn it. That's the rebellious American streak. I could give you a very long-winded response to that, but I think the shortest way to say is that the word "protest" is in the word "Protestant." Fourth is "our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market." Here you discuss the New Age leader and his Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness as a prime example of group awareness trainings, whose popularity peaked in the 1970s and '80s. How did they relate to earlier examples, and what can we learn from their evolution? Our Puritan forebears believed in the possibility of becoming perfect and one with God. New Jerusalem, they believed, was quite literal. Later, the idea became more allegorical. In the 1970s, we see the idea of New Jerusalem becoming an inner state. New Jerusalem moves into the mind. People believed that instead of reaching perfection as a community of chosen, as members of the true church, an individual could achieve perfection, specifically through self-investigation and self-improvement. As a side note, the Puritans were also obsessed with self-investigation. They literally made themselves sick with the practice. They were mostly self-investigating by trying to figure out whether or not they were chosen, whether or not they could be a member of the church. They believed no one knew who was and wasn't chosen, but they were pretty sure they were, and that they could find out if they just looked within. So these trials of self-investigation have always been with us and self-help is now a $5 billion industry. It isn't helping. We're less happy now than we've ever been. The fifth Puritan credo that's still with us is "hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin." Here you discuss Amway specifically and multi-level marketing in general. How do these organizations reflect this belief and reveal its destructiveness? The Puritans believed the way to worship God was to work. On the other hand, they also believed that if your neighbor was in need you should give to your neighbor, whether or not you thought you'd get the money back. So I think the Puritans would be very upset with the current state of late-stage capitalism. They'd be very critical of late-stage capitalism and multilevel marketing, which I see as more or less the same thing at this point. Over time, this idea that work is holy became a justification for acquisitiveness. Because if you're working a lot to show how much you love God, you're naturally going to accrue wealth. Isn't that wealth just a sign also that God loves you in turn? And if that's true, wouldn't it also be true that those who don't have money are not loved by God, or are not working enough to worship God? So we begin to conflate the number in a person's bank account with their moral character. Particularly during the Gilded Age, you see a lot of rhetoric around sinners deserving their poverty. Why help them? It's their own wrong thought that's led them to the almshouse. We still see some of that today. A few weeks ago, I saw a GOP congressman on Fox News saying, "You gotta put down the medical marijuana, put down the Cheetos. You have to get up off the couch and work now if you want SNAP benefits." It's the idea that it's the fault of the poor that they're poor. If that's true, if they're sinners, then why help them? Sin should be punished. The flipside of that is this idea that the wealthy deserve what they have. John D. Rockefeller was known for saying that he got his money from God. I would argue we tend to worship the wealthy in this country, where there's the cult of the self-made man, this idea that if someone is wealthy, they did it all on their own, without the backing of government subsidies that are usually happening behind the scenes or generational wealth or whatever other support systems go unacknowledged. How is that reflected in multilevel marketing? With multilevel marketing, what we see is people at the top making a lot of money, because it's a pyramid scheme, it's a wealth redistribution system, and claiming that they got all their money through hard work. In reality, the money was taken from the recruits at the bottom of the pyramid, who are told, "Look at us! Look at all this wealth! If you don't have it, well that must be your fault. You're not working hard enough, or you're not following the plan." These people internalize that shame and keep trying, they keep spending money making people at the top rich. Eventually they burn out and leave, and they don't tell anyone about their experiences because they're ashamed. That's how the system perpetuates itself. I believe there are some really upsetting commonalities with late-stage capitalism — and I'm reluctant to use the word capitalism, because capitalism is great. Adam Smith was a cool dude who had great ideas. What's happening now is something very different. People use the phrase "late-stage capitalism," so I will too, for lack of a better one. But I want to give you some stats. Between 1975 and 2020, $15 trillion have moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent. This is exactly what happens in MLMs — money moves from the bottom to the top. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own about the same amount as the bottom 90 percent combined. Those numbers are nauseatingly similar to a typical MLM, in which the top 1 percent makes the same as the bottom 94 percent. I believe the American dream has become a pyramid scheme. I don't think it was always that way. I think the American dream used to be realizable by a huge and booming middle class, and that's been pilfered. We see this in a variety of ways — lobbying for tax breaks and removing regulations for risky behavior, moving manufacturing overseas. All these things that facilitated the redistribution of wealth occur, in my opinion, because of this doctrine that work is holy and therefore wealth is a sign of being chosen and poverty is a sign or sin. Sixth is "how quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking." But this chapter seems to get at the underlying dynamic behind the whole book: That thinking has origins in our evolutionary past, but our cultural evolution has produced a distinctive Western mindset, expressed most fully in America, which is in tension with that past, and the inclination to join cults reflects a reaction to that. I think that sums it up, but I'd like to hear you elaborate on that. First of all, thank you for noticing that and getting it. There's a lot to unpack there. We could probably do a full article just on that. But the first thing to acknowledge is that cults increase — both participation in individual cults and cult-like thinking at a societal level — during times of crisis. Times of technological upheaval, social upheaval, general crisis, natural disasters, all these things that cause someone's world to wobble and shift can lead us to cult-like thinking. That's in part because cult-like thinking offers a very ordered world. There's a hierarchy, everyone plays a role, there are a lot of rules and boundaries. What people don't often realize is that they're ultimately ceding control to the leader, who 99 percent of the time is going to exploit them. That's also happening at the societal level. When cult-like thinking is being utilized, it's usually by a demagogue who's just trying to activate people to behave in a way that benefits the person pushing our buttons. To get back to the kind of cultural evolution that I cited in the book, I gleaned this from the work of anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team at Harvard. They basically discovered something that they called "WEIRD society," where WEIRD is an acronym: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Because psychologists have, for the most part, studied people from those kinds of societies, in the field of psychology we thought for a long time that was representative of all people. In fact, WEIRD society is a small part of the global population and when you look at all of history, it's brand new. WEIRD society only began developing around the year 1100, give or take.I get into this work in my book, and I would recommend seeking out Henrich's book, "The WEIRDest People in the World." The idea is that we're involved in kin-based communities: your family, your tribe. Everyone knows that. Kin-based communities look a lot like cults. There tends to be one leader in charge, who often has a lot of wives. There's a lot of fear of outsiders. There are firm boundaries. There's a lot of us-versus-them thinking. They're very cult-like. We evolved in these kinds of groups. But what's happening in WEIRD society is completely different. We're all individuals. It's a trust-based economy. It has to be, for markets and contracts to exist. In kin-based communities, nepotism isn't a thing, it's just common sense. But in WEIRD society, we think, "Oh no, that's not fair." WEIRD societies have this obsession with what's fair and not fair. In kin-based communities, it's much more black and white. When I interviewed Henrich, I said that it seems like when we turn to cults in times of crisis, maybe we're just turning back toward the kinds of communities we evolved in. He said that sounded right. Our kin-based tendencies are always with us. They don't go away and they kind of flare up from time to time. It happens when we feel unmoored, when our world wobbles and all of this trust-based society and structure looks a little unsafe. America is the apotheosis of WEIRD society. It's the most individualistic of all Western nations. Social media, which has divided us even more, has atomized community so much that I think the pendulum has swung just about as far as it possibly can away from kin-based organizations. I wonder if the huge uptick in cult participation and societal cult-like thinking is a result of that — not only of the pendulum swinging so far, but also of us being at a time of huge crisis. You can argue that climate change is the biggest crisis facing humanity. But I would say the most pressing crisis facing Americans is being chronically under-resourced: As I mentioned earlier, 90 percent of Americans are in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, because the 1 percent took all the money. There's nothing that makes your world wobble more than being chronically under-resourced. The last Puritan theme you examine is "an innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, 'Chaos!' and then offering control." You chose a seemingly counterintuitive example: the atypical cult called , whose leader called herself "Mother God" and ended up starving and poisoning herself [in 2021]. Why that group, and what does their example show? A lot of people who found Love Has Won did so after searching for alternative health care. They had been shut out of the health care system and were looking for alternatives. A lack of healthc are is one of the circumstances that can most lead someone's world to wobble, and as a result, lead them to look for some kind of control. Yes, Amy Carlson was a very chaotic and messy leader. You could even argue whether she was a leader at all. By the end she didn't seem to have the reins. Certain members of her community were so eager for control that they began running the show and basically designed a role for her to fit into. Her death — which the coroner said was caused by anorexia, alcoholism and poisoning by colloidal silver — has been called by the director who did a documentary on the group, "death by addiction, aided and abetted by her community," as often happens with addicts. What was so heartbreaking is that there were times when she asked for help, when she was ready to go to a hospital and they wouldn't let her. In part, that was because of this worldview that she'd created, this idea that evil spiritual forces would get her if she were in hospital, and that she'd be safe if she were with them. She created this worldview that ended up killing her. It was very tragic, and I am also interested in the fact that she was anorexic, a disease often associated with anxiety and efforts for control. Anxiety levels are soaring right now as Americans seek order and control. You also note that throughout the book you explore an eighth credo, the divide between "grace" and "nature" that "distinguishes and creates a hierarchy between humans and the rest of the planet." What role does that play? I didn't give it its own chapter because it's so foundational that it's in every chapter, more or less. It's like the foundation of the foundation, the original hierarchy. It undergirds authoritarianism, the search for perfectionism, the illusion of control. Those things are only possible because of this idea of a grace-nature divide, meaning that humans have grace, which is of God and holy, and separate from this evil natural world. Everything in the world is evil, and it can only be made good if we use it to better ourselves. As you would probably notice from hearing that, the grace-nature divide has fueled runaway extraction economics. It's in the mind-cure movement, in the idea that the physical world is false or can be controlled by the mental or spiritual world. And when you pair it with the notion that poverty is a sin, it's also used as a justification to plunder the lower classes, when even groups of people are seen as natural resources. We see that most egregiously, of course, in the transatlantic slave trade and the extermination or resettlement of Indigenous communities. I believe that's what's happening now in the economy. Because we see wealth as a sign of being chosen and poverty as a sign of sin, the lower classes have become sinners in our eyes. They are part of nature, and therefore something that can be mined without compunction. So the grace-nature divide is everywhere. Another reason why I didn't try to explore it more on its own is because some of these tendencies are more common in human nature, and some are more specific to the radical Protestants who founded our nation. This duality of the natural and spiritual world is not wholly unique to radical Protestantism, but it has certainly showed up in a variety of deleterious ways. You conclude a note of optimism, which is evident in your tone throughout — I enjoyed your lighthearted snark. What gives you hope? We're facing some big problems, but I don't think there's been a nation as innovative as ours. I think we are equipped to handle big problems. I think, in fact, that figuring out the solutions to our problems would be relatively easy. The hurdle to the problem-solving, in my mind, is the division. There's not going to be any political will to solve any of our problems — the most pressing being the wealth redistribution we've seen from the bottom to the top since 1970 — if we don't first bridge the division. One of the easiest ways to start fixing the mess we're in is to minimize cult-like thinking and cult participation. And that, in some ways, is as easy as revealing a magic trick. That's what I'm trying to do with this book, to reveal the magic trick. This is how we're being exploited. These are the ideas that bad actors are using to exploit us. And when you see it, when we can acknowledge it and start to recognize it, we stop falling for it. When we stop falling for it, we no longer see each other as enemies. What's happening is that we respond with cult-like thinking when we see a threat, when we see an enemy. But often the threat and the enemy are manufactured. They aren't real. It's an illusion. I just want to point out the illusion. Then I think we can begin to bridge divides. We can bridge cultural divides and political divides, and we can also bridge divides within ourselves, that grace-nature split. When we start to see these splits as illusory — because they are, they don't need to be real — we can view ourselves more as a community and begin to problem-solve and collaborate. Which is what shot humans to the top of the food chain to begin with: cooperation and collaboration. I think it would be very natural for us to get back to that kind of state. Finally, what's the most important question I didn't ask, and what's the answer? We talked about the chronic under-resourcing of the poor, or really of most Americans at this point. I think that's the takeaway I most want to spread. Otherwise I would say it's the conversation around power, and the effects that power has on people psychologically. I say, almost as a joke, that we should consider testing people for narcissism before putting them in positions of power, although I acknowledge that would not really vibe with the U.S. Constitution. But power, I believe, functions like a psychological parasite. When you get some, if you don't have checks on it, it just wants more and more and more of itself. It causes us to behave in ways that seek out more and more power and there is no end. Power can never have enough, it can't be sated. And so when we see something like Jonestown, where 900-plus people were murdered, that is power's ultimate path, because the ultimate exercise of power is control over life and death. When we see the sexual exploitation that happens in cults, that's about power. Financial exploitation — that's power, because money is power. Most of the studies that are done on power are done on wealthy people because they equate so closely to one another. Greed, you could say, is just power seeking more of itself. Cults are situations where there are no checks on power. The reason America has been so successful is because of checks and balances. We learn that in second grade. When you don't have checks on power, that's when everything goes to s**t. Whether you're talking about corporate governance or our current flirtation with autocracy or about a cult who have moved off the radar onto an island somewhere, what you're dealing with is the danger of unchecked power.
The Independent
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
They became the internet's most hated couple with their pronatalist lifestyle. Now they're telling Trump how to up the birth rate
Malcolm and Simone Collins have their own religion. They celebrate their own holidays. Three of their kids — five-year-old Octavian George, three-year-old Torsten Savage, and two-year-old Titan Invictus — sleep in multi-level bunk beds in the same room, while the youngest, one-year-old Industry Americus, co-sleeps with their pregnant mother. There's a decorative sword on the windowsill, a prop left over from one of their podcast episodes about Andrew Tate. There are raspberry bushes planted outside so their kids can pick fruit on their way home from daycare. There's a $300 bouncy castle in their living room. Once Silicon Valley progressives who worked in tech, Malcolm and Simone upped sticks to rural Pennsylvania a couple of years ago, in their early 30s. They had become disillusioned with 'the urban monoculture'. They wanted lots of babies. And they envisioned that large family — they're hoping for 14 kids — being run like a domestic operating system, with a religion they refer to as Techno-Puritanism. Oh, and they proselytize through a podcast called Based Camp, with over 35,000 followers. The Collinses are a controversial couple, much profiled but little understood. Not many venture capitalists with Stanford MBAs turn to pro-natalist homesteading. And not many 'new right' tradwives used to work as managing directors of a Peter Thiel-funded social club. Simone wants to set a world record for number of live births via C-section (the current record is 11; she thinks she can get up to 14.) On their first date, Simone told Malcolm she never wanted to get married, and Malcolm told her that wouldn't work because he was looking for a wife. They joke about how most media has painted them as 'complete sociopaths'. By their own admission, they love winding journalists up. Perhaps that's why they've been accused of being everything from delusional to purveyors of eugenics. They wear hipster glasses and capes; they stan Puritans and have an 11-page marriage contract that includes a 'boat clause' and a 'fat clause' (invoked just once, by Simone against Malcolm when he developed a 'little paunch'.) Malcolm once went viral for giving his two-year-old son an open-handed slap to the face for wobbling a table during a media interview. They scan their embryos for personality traits using polygenic risk scores. And they recently drafted a number of executive orders for the Trump White House, including one that would offer medals to mothers with six or more children (for these efforts, they were described as 'people are styling themselves after the villains of a Saturday morning cartoon,' an accusation Malcolm says is 'nutty'.) Simone and Malcolm Collins have a plan — not just for their household, but for humanity. Every domestic choice, from when the family sleeps to how they name their children, is part of a broader effort to design a cultural system that will outlast the civilization they believe is unraveling. Their other suggestions to Trump included the removal of some daycare regulations and the doubling of visas available for au pairs from abroad, so that American parents can access cheaper childcare; the removal of the marriage tax penalty; and the relaxing of car seat regulations (a research paper titled 'Car Seats as Contraception' that showed lower birth rates in places with stricter child seat regulations for cars is much discussed among pronatalist communities, and quoted in Simone and Malcolm's draft executive order.) The fact sheet that they attached to each draft includes stats about how quickly the birth rate in the U.S. is falling, and how disastrous that could be for social security and the country's economic stability. At home, the Collinses' values are stitched into everything from their domestic decision-making (they chose where to live after compiling a long document detailing average earnings and house prices per state and cross-referencing them with maps showing hazard risk scores) to their school philosophy (public school is an extracurricular that you can attend if you want to, but real education happens at home.) 'We're not trying to shelter our kids,' Simone tells me, when she explains why her five-year-old son goes to the local kindergarten. 'We're trying to inoculate them.' Mainstream culture is like a virus, she explains, and you only build up antibodies by exposure. Malcolm echoes that: 'the urban monoculture' is a disease that causes mass mental illness and sterilizes its citizens, he says, and the 'brand new culture' they're building draws variously from Appalachian 'redneck' history, Orthodox Judaism, and Sam Altman-style effective accelerationism. It's easy to read them as walking ragebait, especially in a political environment as charged as this. But scratching below the surface of what Malcolm and Simone say is surprising in itself. Techno-Puritanism for dummies Malcolm Collins talks like a tech CEO with a philosophy major and a Reddit tab open, jumping from Ancient Greece to redneck humor and back again without slowing down. Both ultra-Orthodox Jews and rural conservatives with truck nuts — two groups he draws inspiration from — 'have something in common, even though they seem very, very differentiated from each other,' he says. That is that they 'almost engineer conflict with whatever the dominant culture is for their children.' And that conflict, Malcolm believes, is key to why they have very high fertility rates and very low rates of deconversion. 'So if I'm an Orthodox Jewish kid and I'm dressed very differently from other kids, and I'm named very differently, and I have very different practices, and I go out into school, or I go out into that world and I am teased or punished for this in a way that I am not within my own community, I'm going to have a more positive relation to my community than that external community… It's the same with truck nut conservative culture, which is this culture that is almost reactively vulgar — and it's where the MAGA base is, and Trump has done a very good job of appealing to them — where they really hate almost at a pathological level being told what to do by people who think they're better than them.' This is where Malcolm's ancestors come from, he explains, before taking a hard left into poop jokes: 'My five-year-old apparently makes lots of poop and fart jokes, like scatological humor, at school.' Isn't that just a five-year-old thing, I ask? 'Yeah,' he says, 'but we got complaints. I was like, what other jokes is he supposed to make? He's not making racist jokes. I even said [to the teacher]: Within my culture, I would elevate a five-year-old doing that because scatological humor is rarely made genuinely at the expense of another child. Like: 'Oh, you've got a diaper face.' The other kid — his feelings aren't hurt. But 'oh, your haircut is bad?' That destroys a kid.' Nevertheless, the teacher wouldn't budge. Not only did Malcolm's son tell too many poop jokes, but he apparently also used 'militarized' communication — like holding his two fingers in a gun shape and pretending to shoot kids on the playground. So Malcolm explained to his son: 'Well, these are things you can do at home and not at school.' It sounds like a typical parenting moment. But Malcolm sees it as an opportunity to reinforce a deeper point about culture and authority. Because another parent — one who's more happy to adhere to the mainstream culture — might just have instituted a blanket ban on Nerf guns or fart jokes, at home and at school, and that parent would then become the main enforcer of the rule. 'Then the kid only ends up punished in their birth culture and not in the external world,' Malcolm says. 'Whereas my kid, when he thinks about how my family culture is different than the culture I encountered in school, he sees it as a culture with more freedoms rather than fewer freedoms.' Killing yourself for kids One of the things that Malcolm dislikes most about 'the urban monoculture' is that it's so pessimistic. He used to be an everyday liberal who got invited to lots of progressive New York dinner parties, he says, and then he started to realize how negative everyone was about humans as a species. He recalls someone saying, during a conversation about the environment, that it would probably be better for the world if humans died out. That was a pivotal moment for him in terms of his outlook: he realized that there was a cynical suicidality that had become normalized among his former friends. It reminds me of the famous philosophical problem with utilitarianism — that the logical endpoint of 'the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people' is slitting your wrists in an ice-laden bathtub and donating your organs to five dying patients in nearby hospitals. Yet there is also an apparent suicidality to his own, new culture. Malcolm talks with reverence about Simone's 'sacrifice' in carrying his children. 'Simone is willing to undergo a huge amount of physical trauma and risk to herself in order to do this thing that we both believe is morally good,' he says. 'But she doesn't even think about it that way. I look at her and I'm like, oh my God, you're such a moral paragon. You're willing to go through this, you're willing to do this. And she's like, well, yeah, it's just obvious. This is what I should do. And I'm like, wow.' Considering Simone can only give birth via C-section, and every C-section birth increases the risk of scarring, hemorrhage and other serious complications to both mother and baby, I ask him if it might not be better to stop at five. 'I talked to her about this,' he says, 'and I was like, how bad do the complications need to get before you stop? And she goes: If there was a robber holding one of our kids and another one holding me, and they said we're gonna shoot one of them, or we're gonna shoot your kid if you don't choose, you know what the right choice is, right? You know, I want you to choose that they shoot me and not our kid. And she goes: I hope that you can maintain the moral internal consistency and the logical internal consistency — which are things that we value as in our family — to do the same when it comes to encouraging me to have kids. I can try to talk her out of this, but I understand the moral failure in me doing so.' It's a surprising revelation, one that paints Simone as an ideological zealot and a literal martyr for the cause. 'Maybe talk her out of killing herself with kids,' Malcolm says to me at the end of our first interview, before I speak with Simone. I tell him that's probably not my place, but I'll certainly discuss it. He nods, thoughtfully. 'I mean, if she dies now, we've collected… lots of stuff that can be used for AI training,' he adds. 'So my kids will get to interact with her regardless.' Two days later, I meet Simone for a video interview. Where Malcolm was casually styled (though at pains to let me know that he did his hair), she is striking and sartorially playful, with bright red lipstick, thick-framed glasses and a black cape (a gift from Malcolm). She juggles the first part of our conversation with putting her youngest daughter — Industry Americus ('We went with a Puritan name, like Capability Brown. Plus we were just tickled pink by having two daughters named Titan and Industry') — down for a nap. 'You're going to hate me, but don't hate me,' she murmurs to the infant, as she settles her down into a bouncer and then leaves the room. I ask her if she'd like to reschedule. 'Oh, no,' she replies quickly. 'She has to sleep. For her development.' Asking Simone whether she's willing to die for the pronatalist cause is, of course, delicate. But when I get around to the question, I'm taken aback by her response. 'If someone's like: You will die, or especially: You and the baby are at risk — we're not gonna do that,' she says. 'One, we obviously want to be there for our children, and two, I don't want to put an unborn child at risk… I had one really risky pregnancy and had to have a C-section really early, and had a baby in the NICU. It was all very, very scary. And yeah, I mean, I would never knowingly want to put a child in harm's way that way. I also certainly wouldn't want to deprive my children of having two parents growing up and the support that accompanies that.' A very understandable answer, but one I wasn't expecting. It seems Malcolm's view of Simone — admiring to the point of mythologizing — isn't entirely accurate. In a later interview, which she does while preparing pasta in the family kitchen with Industry strapped to her back, Simone does tell me that she sees the unimplanted embryos they have as 'unborn children' just waiting to be born. 'It is a life-or-death decision for them, whether we have them,' she says. '...To rob them of that experience is something I can't imagine. But a lot of that has to do with our religion.' Clearly, she isn't actually as hardline as her own religious doctrine; a streak of pragmatism runs through the ideology. But it's true that Simone suffers for the cause in a way Malcolm simply can't — carrying the pregnancies; undergoing the C-sections; breastfeeding; co-sleeping (Malcolm sleeps in a different bedroom and gets up at 2 a.m.); carefully preparing separate dinners for the kids, who each have different preferences and sensitivities. If their religion has a saint, it is undoubtedly Simone, and Malcolm is the prophet. Cultural engineering for beginners This isn't a family seeking to escape modern life. It's one attempting to outdesign it. But another issue on which they appear to diverge is the amount of 'designer baby' in their actual babies. 'So many people are like, you think you're genetically superior, so you are selecting among your embryos,' says Malcolm. 'It's like: No, I think I'm genetically messed up. That's why I'm selecting among my embryos!' He laughs. 'The person who hires an editor doesn't do it because they think that they're a God-tier writer!' The reason he and Simone actually did IVF in the first place, he says, is because Simone's mother died of a type of cancer that has a known genetic cause. They have simply been selecting embryos that do not have that gene — 'and then the intelligence stuff and other stuff like that, that really mostly comes out in the wash. Keep in mind, we talk about it to rile people up, because I love it when things go viral, and it's not gonna go viral if you're like: We do this for cancer.' Simone and Malcolm have a number of embryos, all of which have been sent for polygenic analysis. Some of those embryos are carrying that specific cancer gene that runs in Simone's family; some aren't. But they do plan to have all of them. Polygenic analysis has allowed them to rank embryo quality, but ultimately they will eventually come to embryos they know are carrying the cancer gene. How does she square that, I ask Simone? 'Having a kid with a really high risk of cancer now versus two, four, six years from now could be the difference between life and death,' she says. 'We're in this insanely rapidly developing landscape in terms of medical cures. I mean, I bet if my mom, for example, got her stage four ovarian cancer diagnosis a decade later, maybe she would've survived. You know, it's one of those things where a couple years, especially now, can buy you so much time.' The more controversial parts of polygenic analysis relate to personality type and risk assessment for things like autism, ADHD and anxiety. When it comes to their daughters, Titan and Industry, 'both of them had a very favorable scores, at least among all of our embryos, with things like anxiety, inability to deal with stress, depression, brain fog,' says Simone. 'And they have come out such happy, cheerful, genial children.' She knows it might be 'all in their heads' and that nurture comes into it as well, but she's still impressed. Having seen the results, she and Malcolm sent off samples of their own DNA to a company called Nebula that collates similar polygenic scores for living people. Simone is under no impression that the technology is perfect for polygenic embryo scoring. 'I'm not saying we wouldn't [select for intelligence] in the future,' she said. 'But right now, the data on it just isn't that reliable. Like, if you're selecting based on that you might as well use astrology. I mean, it's just not there yet.' Malcolm concurs: he can imagine a scenario in the future where one of his children might be able to select for various traits, he says, and he'd be fine with that. But right now, it's all a bit of a crap shoot. Having such information about your children could only be good for your parenting style, Simone believes. 'Some devastating diseases like schizophrenia can be triggered by things such as high doses of cannabis,' she says, as one example. 'So I think kids are much more likely to listen to you on drugs if you have a good reason. Like: Listen, I don't care if your friend Jimmy vapes a lot of cannabis. He doesn't have the risk of developing schizophrenia that you do. This is real. Look at your score. I think a kid's much more likely to listen to that.' It's rough-and-rowdy parenting with a side of hard data. This is the strange juxtaposition inherent in the Collins' parenting style: it's half 'back to the animal kingdom' (they decided that corporal punishment was fine after going on safari and watching a lioness discipline her cub — hence the infamous, viral slap) and half high-growth tech startup. 'We have to build systems that work when you have ten kids, right?' says Malcolm. 'Because otherwise, when you get to ten kids, the whole system falls apart. So, every parenting system that we're using, every practice we're using, we're thinking about: can this work if we scale it up to ten?' Treating your family like a startup That low-touch culture Malcolm and Simone are building for their kids champions individuality and encourages friction, Malcolm says. And practically speaking, there's one very good reason why you have to double down on that family culture if you're intending to have 10-plus kids: 'You need to be low-effort parents because it's unsustainable financially for most [large] families to be high-effort parents.' Mainstream culture isn't quite ready for what scalable parenting looks like, however: the Collinses have had CPS called on them twice. Once, they say, was because their daycare reported that the kids were always sick and were wearing secondhand clothing. The second time was because neighbors saw their children playing unattended in the yard while they periodically kept an eye through the back window. Both times, they say, an official came round, looked in their fridge, asked if they needed free diapers, and left. As Malcolm sees it, incidents like these prove there's just too much red tape in western society, even as we all face systemic collapse by depopulation. The people who want to have lots of kids should be empowered to homeschool, to put their kids in vehicles without car seats, and to parent a little differently to their counterparts who have just one or two kids. After all, the superprocreators are the ones who are stepping in to try and redress the balance as the country hurtles toward a massive elderly population with barely any young people of working age to pay into social security to support them. Shouldn't we all be grateful? Or at the very least, shouldn't we stop putting barriers in their way? 'Sometimes running this movement can feel like being a lifeboat after the Titanic sank and trying [to] rescue people from the freezing water,' he writes to me in an email after our first interview. In that analogy, he's the one telling everyone: 'Get in the boat or you are going to die,' while they reply, 'Look at that, he threatened to kill me if I don't get in the boat!' or, 'Ask everyone in the boat with you if they are Nazis — I don't want to accidentally get in a boat with people I disagree with,' or, 'Hitler had a boat! I bet you're a Nazi.' While all this back-and-forth is going on, the ship is sinking in the background — and 'then the kid from 4chan flashes an OK sign and claims it's a secret sign for Nazis because he finds the whole situation hilarious.' Defenestrated by the left That constant slide between deadly serious and not serious at all — simultaneously being stuck on a sinking ship and laughing at the trolling humor of a 4chan kid — is a central feature of the 'new right'. That's the way Simone and Malcolm identify themselves, but it wasn't always this way. 'It is very much that pretty much every member of the new right used to be a Democrat until they were…disaffected,' says Simone. '...But I would still argue that, for the most part, this is a very socially progressive culture and a set of people that still accepts that some of the social agenda of the right utterly failed.' It's 'kind of frustrating,' she adds, because 'we came to this movement as progressives… It wasn't leftist but it was progressive and meant to engage progressives. And the reason why wasn't because we were like, well, this should only be for progressives, but because progressives have the lowest birth rates. Most conservative groups — I mean, OK, a lot of them have trouble, but they already have efforts underway to work on the problem. Progressive groups really don't. They're the first to tank, they're the first to go extinct. They're the panda bears who can't breed in captivity.' Both of them refer to being hurt and surprised when they were 'defenestrated' by the left. 'You look at progressives, and if you disagree on just one metric — like J. K. Rowling is the most progressive progressive on literally everything else [except trans issues] — they kick you to the curb,' says Malcolm. 'That becomes unsustainable being that imperialistic as a culture, because eventually you end up losing all your key people, all your most competent people. And now we have a Trump White House where his key lieutenants are RFK Jr, JD Vance and Elon Musk, who all hated Republicans just, like, two election cycles ago. And they just all got kicked out for violating one cultural norm or another. And then they're in this new big tent.' As Malcolm sees it, mainstream leftist culture demands that people deny the reality they see in front of their face, and that ends up making society ironically less progressive. 'The urban monoculture says: I care about diversity. And then it says: But everyone's the same. People from Africa are the same as people from Europe are the same as women are the same as men,' he says. 'And we're like: No, no, no, no, no. Actually, everyone's super different… And that's actually a really good thing. Because diversity would have no value if everyone was secretly exactly the same, even if we're just talking about from a cultural perspective. And so weirdly, I think that diversity is our strength when we allow for it.' Part of their enthusiasm for diversity has led them to designing that new religion, with its own specific holidays. They include Future Day, which happens in January and sounds like a prank: The Future Police show up, steal your toys like mischievous reverse-Santas, and leave behind 'future debris' in their wake. To get your toys back, you must write a letter explaining how you'll make the future a better place. If the case is convincing, the Future Police return your toys — plus extra. Then there's Lemon Week, a holiday in May that marks the beginning of springtime and involves planting lemon trees, putting up lemon-themed decorations and eating lemon curd, lemon pie, lemon chicken, and other citrus treats. Lemons are bitter, but they can be delicious in the right context — and that's why they're central to the holiday. Because during Lemon Week, each member of the family who's capable of doing this is supposed to engage in a concept that they find to be highly offensive. When you're offended by something, the Collinses believe, that's because 'something is credibly threatening your worldview.' When you feel offended, 'that's a sign to lean in' and to learn more about it. At the end of Lemon Week, each family member shares what they learned while investigating something they felt intuitively offended by. One year, Malcolm chose radical feminism. Future Day and Lemon Week are high-concept but also unexpectedly quaint for a couple who, in Malcolm's words, are aiming to be 'low-touch, rough-and-rowdy' parents. But when Malcolm and Simone do something sentimental, it has to have an orthodoxy. Their homegrown religion — Techno-Puritanism — is based on the idea that 'humans, millions of years from now, will more resemble gods than humans'. They are quick to point out that they don't want everyone to join their religion — they're not looking to become cult leaders. Instead, they'd rather people take ideas they like from Techno-Puritanism and develop their own, personalized cultural practices. The ultimate aim, Malcolm says, is to have a community of people with diverse backgrounds and religions who are all united by the pronatalist cause. He envisions schools and summer camps, and teens 'living in' with their boyfriend or girlfriend's family while they're dating ('It's what the Puritans did,' he adds, and it worked well because it gave teens an element of independence at a time when they're naturally seeking to separate themselves from their birth family.) Maybe, he says jovially, there might be some kind of 'loose arranged marriage' scenario in the future. Malcolm is clear that that doesn't mean he wants blind obedience from his progeny, however. On the contrary, he wants his kids to disagree with him. He wants them to be smart, anti-authority, argumentative, free thinkers. Just not to the point that they decide to leave the culture he's made, I ask? He smiles. 'A Jewish father is going to love when his child with education and knowledge disagrees with him about what the Torah says,' he tells me. 'You know, if he's like: No, line X and line Y and line Z — you haven't cross-referenced Maimonides on this recently.' That same father, bursting with pride when his son puts his Torah practice to the test during a heated discussion with his elders, is not going to be quite as thrilled if his son announces he's leaving the religion entirely. There's a lot of complexity to their personal mythmaking. Even though they revel in baiting reporters and drawing attention to themselves through shock-jock tactics, then, is it not a little irritating that lots of people only know surface-level stuff about them? Malcolm doesn't see a problem with that. The people who are actually interested in the movement will keep digging and will discover what they need to about pronatalism, he says. The people who don't will die out within a few generations anyway, and 'I don't really concern myself much with the people who are little more than evanescent statues of dust about to be blown away by the winds of time.'
USA Today
21-04-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Harvard shunned conservatives. It deserves to be defunded by Trump.
Harvard shunned conservatives. It deserves to be defunded by Trump. | Opinion President Donald Trump is trying to reform an education system that excludes conservative students and faculty while promoting a leftist agenda that most Americans have rejected. Show Caption Hide Caption Harvard protests Trump's threats to international students Harvard students and staff push back against Trump administration threats. Aljazeera President Donald Trump has escalated his fight with America's premiere university by freezing billions in federal grants and threatening to revoke Harvard's nonprofit tax status. The Trump administration has even threatened to block the university's ability to enroll foreign students, who are a lucrative source of revenue for colleges across the United States. Trump's fight with Harvard escalated after the university rejected the administration's demands that it change hiring and enrollment policies to elevate merit-based admissions and employment over efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. It's ironic that a university founded nearly 400 years ago by Puritans has sunk so deeply into the progressive swamp. It's even more ironic that it's Trump, an Ivy League graduate who became a reality TV star and then president, who is championing hiring and admissions decisions based on merit rather than progressive ideology. Conservatives aren't welcome at Harvard University Yet, Trump is on to something vital in trying to reform a higher education system that has long excluded conservative students and faculty while promoting a leftist agenda that most Americans have rejected. Harvard, with an endowment of more than $50 billion, has received billions of dollars in federal grants over the years, ostensibly for research. But since money is fungible, those federal dollars have helped administrators and faculty tout ideologies that are anti-American and anti-Israel. Opinion: Shapiro attack was more than political violence. It's about antisemitism. Trump isn't wrong to leverage taxpayer dollars in an attempt to force Harvard to course correct. He challenged Harvard administrators to review the ideological diversity of administrators, faculty and students. That pressure is rooted in a desire for fairness, not in a random power play. While Harvard's leaders claim to value diversity, it's clear that conservatives need not apply. A 2022 Harvard Crimson survey found that more than 80% of the university's faculty self-identified as liberal or very liberal, which was a 6% increase from the previous year. Less than 2% of faculty said they are conservative; no faculty members identified themselves as very conservative. The ideological divide is so vast that The Harvard Crimson in 2021 proclaimed that conservatives are "an endangered species" on campus. Opinion: I'm tired of being mocked and hated because I'm a conservative woman Your taxes help subsidize Harvard's ideology It would be one thing for the university to favor progressives over conservatives in hiring if it didn't receive federal money. But American taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund a university where tens of millions of voters wouldn't be welcome because of their political beliefs. Liberals are portraying Trump's threat to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status as an abuse of power. Although the president shouldn't try to govern by fiat, there's something deeper at work here. Harvard allowed antisemitic protesters to terrorize Jewish students. It also has excluded certain American speakers because of their political beliefs. And it did so while raking in billions of dollars from the federal government. Trump is not anti-higher education. He's not even anti-Harvard. He is against taxpayers funding universities that teach America's young people to hate our country and Western values. Nicole Russell is a columnist at USA TODAY and a mother of four who lives in Texas. Contact her at nrussell@ and follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @russell_nm. Sign up for her weekly newsletter, The Right Track, here.
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump's expulsions are jaw-droppingly cruel. But they're part of an American tradition
The recent expulsion of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a protected legal resident who had committed no offense, is only the latest example of the Trump administration's unbounded efforts to detain and rapidly expel any immigrant, undocumented or not, who may come into its grasp. Although expulsions – often known as deportations – of undocumented men, women and children have been regular features of life under Democratic as well as Republican presidents in recent years, those of the new administration have been jaw-dropping in their cruelty and utter defiance of federal law and judicial due process, in their heralded scale and in the lust with which they have been carried out. And we would be mistaken to believe that immigrants will be the only victims of what is in effect a widening campaign of political expulsion. After all, Trump has just requested a sixfold increase in funding for detention facilities. Unprecedented as they may appear, the expulsive policies that Trump and his supporters relish, in truth, have a very long and worrisome history in this country. Indeed, they have been integral to political and cultural life since the colonizing settlement of the early 17th century, almost always expressing the will of a self-designated 'community' against those accused of threatening its security and integrity. Puritans had barely established the colony of Massachusetts Bay before they expelled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams for challenging their religious doctrine and civil authority. Others, of less notoriety, would follow them, not to mention the many women who suffered lethal expulsions owing to witchcraft accusations before the century was out. The enlightened republicanism of the 18th century offered little respite and, in some cases, further provocations. Thomas Jefferson expressed the belief that slavery could not be abolished unless the freed Black population, whom he regarded as inferior to the white, was expelled to some foreign territory. His perspective, soon sanitized as 'colonization', would be embraced by most white people in the antislavery movement, including Abraham Lincoln, until well into the civil war. During the revolutionary and constitutional periods, those holding objectionable political views could be treated to tar-and-featherings, ridings on the rail and other well-known rituals of humiliation and expulsion. The early republic and Jacksonian eras, when political democracy appeared to be on the march, were in fact awash with violence-laden expulsions. The targets included Catholics (long associated with 'popery'), Mormons (not seen as Christian), abolitionists (accused of promoting miscegenation) and Masons (reviled for their political secrecy) as well as Native peoples who were subjected to the largest mass expulsion in all of our history, forcibly driven out of their homelands east of the Mississippi River to 'Indian' territory in the west. Both Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln feared at the time that the tyranny of public opinion and the rule of the mob, found north and south, were eating at the vitals of the young United States, and threatened to turn the country into a despotism. Yet, over time, expulsions became more common and widespread, almost routine methods of resolving problems as communities – however large or small – saw them. For African Americans, expulsions came in the form of segregation, political disfranchisement, red-lining, the destruction of their settlements (think Greenwood, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida), and the brutal treatment of those who attempted to find housing in white neighborhoods. For unwanted and politically radical immigrants, expulsions came in the form of deportations, vigilante violence and federal repression. And for the poor, expulsions have long come in the form of turning-outs, confinements to workhouses, the denial of political rights and housing, and arrests for vagrancy. At all events, expulsions depended on paramilitary enforcement, whether by armed patrols, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, citizens' associations or neighborhood watches. Mass incarceration is but the awful culmination of an expulsionism that has been at the heart of criminal punishment since the advent of the penitentiary in the early 19th century. Enlightenment-inspired social reformers had begun to insist that convicted offenders be removed from their communities rather than punished in public, apparently to the benefit of all. From the first, however, those incarcerated were disproportionately poor and Black (wherever they were held), and subject to close surveillance and coerced labor, even when slavery and involuntary servitude were under attack. Recall the 'exception clause' of the 13th amendment, which allows for slavery or involuntary servitude as criminal punishment. Expulsive incarceration was deemed an appropriate solution to growing social disorder and was quickly embraced when racial unrest became of concern to politicians and policymakers, who then roused an easily frightened public with warnings about crime and demands for law and order. The expulsions were political as well as social, disenfranchising felons not only during their time of incarceration but often for years thereafter as they fulfilled parole requirements and attempted to repay debts contracted while they were locked up. The state of Florida now has nearly one million formerly incarcerated people who are still expelled from the arenas of American politics. Race-based gerrymandering, which denies the Black representation that a state's population would have required, has enabled Republicans in some legislatures to in effect define themselves as a political community, set their own rules, establish rights that members could claim, and expel those who push back. In Tennessee, the general assembly recently expelled two duly elected Black legislators – and nearly expelled an 'unruly' white female legislator – with some of the most explicitly racist language to be heard in public these days, clearly performances for their white Republican supporters. But they were only following politically expulsive traditions begun during the turbulent days of Reconstruction, when Black elected officials were expelled from their seats in legislatures, regularly run off after assuming local office, or murdered if they determined to stay in power. This long history helps us understand how easy it has been for Donald Trump to attract millions of supporters by offering expulsions – soon, perhaps, of political opponents as well – as a solution to their fears of economic decline, diminishing opportunities, racial replacement and social unrest. As was true in the past, Trump has described 'communities' under siege from internal and external enemies alike, and has encouraged summary punishments for those who have 'invaded', either from within or without. And as was true in the past, these are ethnic and political cleansings that should warn us of the illiberal cast infusing our democracy and of the dangerous road to its possible collapse. First they came for those who could be declared 'illegal' and were accused of 'poisoning the blood of our country'. Then … It would be difficult to find a precedent for Trump's expulsive policies in their potential reach and ambitions. Yet, frighteningly, in one form or another, they have happened before in America. Steven Hahn is professor of history at New York University and author, most recently, of Illiberal America: A History
