GUARDIAN: Let’s Cancel A Conference On Boosting Birth Rates
09/06/2023
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From the Guardian’s news section:

Revealed: US pro-birth conference’s links to far-right eugenicists

Natal conference, to be held in Austin in December, promoted on far-right podcast circuit and set to host self-described eugenicists

Jason Wilson
@jason_a_w
Mon 4 Sep 2023 05.00 EDT

A high-end hotel in the liberal Texan enclave of Austin is playing host to a conference whose theme is boosting global birth rates, but which will in fact feature racist and eugenicist internet personalities and far-right media figures.

The Natal conference—whose website warns that “by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse”—is scheduled to be held on 1 December at the Line Hotel.

Natal’s website claim the conference has “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren”, but the Guardian can reveal its organizer Kevin Dolan has been promoting the event on the far-right podcast circuit, and has explicitly linked the conference’s “pro-natalist” orientation to eugenics. …

The Guardian contacted the Line—one of a four-city chain of fashionable boutique hotels—about its hosting the conference but received no immediate response. …

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism,

Formerly of the scandal-rocked SPLC.

said the meeting will cement links between the far right and influential rightwing opinion-makers. “It’s not surprising to see far-right folks, eugenicist types and white nationalists joining forces at a conference like this. They have become bedfellows,” she said.

She added: “The far right has long fretted about a demographic winter, and though they don’t necessarily say it openly, what they are referring to most often is a fall in white birthrates.”

Other speakers listed on the conference website have mixed overt racism and “Great Replacement” style conspiracy theories with their views on population birth rates.

The star attractions are Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have attracted significant coverage on both sides of the Atlantic for their warnings about slowing birthrates in advanced economies and how this will lead to “catastrophic population collapse”.

On their website, the Collinses disavow racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, claiming “monoethnic and monocultural countries have the lowest fertility rates”, and “stopping immigration hurts rather than helps local population fertility rates”.

However, their practice and advocacy of selecting the fittest embryos to carry forward into pregnancy have seen them branded as “hipster eugenicists”....

Other speakers at Natal explicitly describe themselves as eugenicists, and some happily conflate genetic traits and genetic fitness with race. They include Jonathan Anomaly, whose 2018 paper Defending Eugenics called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. That paper led Australian academics to publish an open letter of protest to the journal that published the paper.

Another, Razib Khan, had his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment was announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDARE.

Keep in mind that the Guardian and SPLC spinoff have an unmentioned backup in their quest to get this meeting canceled: antifa. If you are a hotel, you have to worry not just about publicity but also about some black bloc thugs showing up and smashing things.

This is why I didn’t give a speech for ten years until the Brimelows bought a secure location in West Virginia.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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