MAGA family values
Some thoughts on the (alleged!) Musk-St. Clair baby and the tech-trad alliance
There is a kind of boogeyman in the conservative imagination: a man who has children by several different women and, despite being able-bodied and generally in possession of mental faculties, chooses to live off the government dole. This man is a habitual drug user; he is an absent father. Men like this are the subject of right-wing moral panics, the protagonists of anecdotes whose racism is thinly veiled at best. And yet a man with all of these qualities is currently acting as our de facto president.
Over the weekend—on Valentine’s Day, in fact—the right-wing influencer-slash-children’s-book-author Ashley St. Clair claimed that she secretly gave birth to Elon Musk’s baby five months ago. The baby, if he exists,1 is Musk’s thirteenth known child. St. Clair claims the infant’s life has been mostly confined to a luxe Financial District apartment, whose floor-to-ceiling windows she recently showed off to the New York Post. “My son has never taken a walk outside—in five months, I have never been able to take my baby for a walk,” she told the tabloid. “I was terrified that someone would see I had a baby and it would get out.” Musk, who St. Clair claims has covered the rent and paid for a security detail, asked her to keep the whole thing a secret—and has allegedly ignored her for months.
St. Clair’s announcement—issued via a Twitter screenshot in which she both asked to be left alone and included her PR rep’s email for media inquiries, just in case, I guess—was the catalyst for a minor skirmish among extremely online conservatives. Right-wing men like Milo Yiannopoulos2 have accused St. Clair of plotting for years to get with Elon. They’ve called her a grifter, a gold digger, a whore—the usual things men who hate women say about the women they hate. (One account called her “crazier than Amber Heard.”) Some of these insults have been repeated by pick mes like Laura Loomer, god bless her, but for the most part right-wing women’s criticisms have focused on the hypocrisy of promoting conservative family values while having a child out of wedlock with a man who will almost certainly not be in said child’s life.
Like last December’s great H-1B debate, this could be seen as indicative of a fault line on the right, the kind of crack that could eventually lead to a greater conflict. What are we to make of the Musk-St. Clair beef? Not much, honestly.
It’s tempting to think of conservatives’ attacks of Musk and St. Clair—though let’s be real, they’re mostly going after St. Clair—as the movement eating its own, or perhaps as a sign that the coalition that put Trump back in the White House is more fragile than we’ve been led to believe. But the MAGA rift over family values, insofar as it exists, is irrelevant. Sure, some conservatives genuinely believe that having kids out of wedlock is bad; sure, some of them likely take issue with the fact that the (alleged!) child was probably, like most of Musk’s other children, conceived via IVF and therefore required the destruction of unwanted embryos. But this is ultimately about humiliating and punishing a woman; St. Clair is a sacrificial lamb. Musk, on the other hand, is not only the richest man in the world but, once again, is basically the sitting president at this point. He won’t suffer any consequences, reputational or otherwise. Hell, he (allegedly!!) isn’t even taking St. Clair’s calls.
I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing me talk about the Natal Conference I attended in 2023—sorry, I’m going to do it again!—but since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the tech-trad coalition on the right. Debriefing on his podcast after the event, conference organizer Kevin Dolan said each side had something to learn from the other. “I don’t think the trads get out of this mess without bringing at least some of the technological firepower and just problem-solving ability that these people are bringing to the table,” Dolan said. “But I also don’t see a way for these tech people to produce healthy families and communities without somebody from the outside supplying them with some real values, because they’re trying to make them up as they go, and I just don’t think it’s workable. You can’t just believe that having values is useful; you have to actually believe.”
In Dolan’s case, these values are largely derived from religion; at the conference, on his podcast, and elsewhere, he’s said his pronatalism stems from his belief in the value and beauty of human life. I think this is a more compelling argument than those made by people who want to boost the birth rate for the sole purpose of preventing population collapse. In fact, even utilitarian pronatalists like Malcolm and Simone Collins—the much-profiled glasses-wearing couple who have made themselves the poster parents of the movement—describe pronatalism as a quest to preserve cultures and religions. “I don’t care if you have one kid or if you have eight kids,” Simone told me in 2023. “We want to know how many grandkids you have who are growing up in your religion.” To that end, the Collinses have reverse-engineered their own family religion, which they call Techno-Puritanism.
The Collinses’ approach to religion is, much like their pronatalism, more utilitarian and less spiritual than Dolan’s. They see religion as the best way to pass down values to their offspring; if a more optimal mechanism existed, I’m sure they’d do that instead. Products of Silicon Valley, the Collinses have optimized every aspect of their lives—including, crucially, their reproduction. All of their children were conceived via IVF, which is fairly standard stuff at this point, but the Collinses also used polygenic risk score testing to select their embryos. They’ve gotten a lot of attention for this; critics have called them eugenicists for trying to maximize their children’s intelligence and minimize their risk of disease. One of the most salient critiques of the Collinses and other Silicon Valley pronatalists comes from Emma Waters, a senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family:
In the name of their children living their healthiest life, this technological worldview has trained many in Silicon Valley to view the human person as individual parts or raw material whose genetic makeup predetermines their values, beliefs, capabilities, and identity. Nurture plays a secondary, or unimportant, role in the development of each child. Such conclusions, which ignore both religious insights and sociological findings, enable parents to free themselves from the personal responsibility of stewarding their child’s development. At the same time, it heightens their self-imposed responsibility to create and select genetically superior children.
Waters doesn’t mention the Collinses by name, though she does call out Musk, who has called birth decline “one of the biggest risks to civilization.” Musk has done his part to combat the birth dearth by investing in fertility tech and, of course, by having more than a dozen children with four different women (that we know of). But Musk’s pronatalism rings hollow for Waters. “When considering the different kinds of pronatalism—and not all approaches are created equal—I typically rely on a ‘pro-family’ versus a ‘pronatalist’ distinction,” she writes. “Those in the pro-family camp recognize the essential role of family formation, beginning with man–woman marriage, as a part of the solution. In contrast, those who promote a ‘more babies’ pronatalism tend to encourage childbearing detached from its natural role within the family. The pronatalists of Silicon Valley, however, have a distinct goal that supersedes both categories.”
That goal is optimization, one of the founding principles of Silicon Valley culture. Musk isn’t just having a ton of kids because he can; he’s doing it because he believes in his own genetic superiority. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive who had twins with Musk3 told Musk’s biographer. And who could possibly be smarter than the world’s wealthiest man? Much like the Collinses, who strap iPads around their kids’ necks as soon as they’re old enough to walk, Musk seems to believe that his genius supergenes are all a child needs to do well in life. It’s all nature, no nurture. Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children, spent a year fighting for custody of the kids, and claims Musk’s attorneys used her “instagram posts and modeling” to smear her as an unfit mother. “All the while I didn’t see one of my babies for 5 months,” she wrote on Instagram. “And this is only what can be said publicly, since most of my experience these last years should remain behind closed doors.”
All of this is public knowledge. People reported on the Musk-Grimes custody battle. I’m not saying St. Clair should’ve known what she was (allegedly!!!) getting into, but I’m not not saying that either. Still—assuming she’s telling the truth—there’s an obvious power differential between a Con Inc. influencer and the wealthiest man in the world who is also basically the president right now. She could have agreed to have a child with Elon without really recognizing the stakes. The situation she describes is nightmarish, yes, and cruel. But is it hypocritical? Yeah, maybe, but also who cares. I think
put it best:St. Clair is a grifter. You can debate whether Judeo-Christian morality should apply to her or Elon Musk under some imagined “exceptional aristocrat” clause or whether “anyone” would do the same thing given the opportunity—but the more salient point is that everyone with an audience is selling you something or trying their damnest to do so …. In a sentence: That’s showbiz, babe. You go to the St. Clairs of the world to be entertained or validated. You shouldn’t be going to them for moral guidance. Don’t be a mark.
While the online right debates the morality of St. Clair’s (alleged!!!!) child and the left dunks on her for thinking the leopards won’t eat her face,4 basically every branch of the federal government is doing its part to defund Planned Parenthood, a longstanding conservative goal. For groups like the Heritage Foundation—whose most recent mandate for leadership, the much-derided Project 2025, called for a repeal of policies that subsidize “single-motherhood”—this is an ideological project. For others, Musk included, it’s about stripping the government for parts.5 In any case, the outcome is the same. An (alleged!!!!!) out-of-wedlock pregnancy isn’t enough to fracture the tech-trad coalition. Not when there’s real work to be done, real gains to be had.
Last summer, my job sent me to the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, a truly heinous event I had a blast covering.6 One evening, I ended up at a party celebrating the launch of Dark Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen, a correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room. Allen stood on a literal soapbox7 and gave an impassioned speech about the anti-human elements lurking beyond the party’s doors: the techies that had flocked to Nashville to talk about crypto, but also more powerful figures like Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, all of whom Allen described as “every bit as perverse and Satanic” as the George Soros types that receive most of the right’s ire.
“These guys represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to anything like traditional religion and anything like an organic, as we would know it, existence for human beings,” Allen told me over a drink. If he really believed that, I asked, what did he make of MAGA’s burgeoning alliance with our tech overlords? “In the long term,” he said, “I think we are fundamentally opposed. In the short term, politics is dirty business.”
We would all do well to remember that.
I’ve been thinking about eugenics and the tech-trad alliance a lot lately, to the point that I was planning on writing something about it before the Musk baby reveal; divine providence and all that. I recently talked about some of this stuff on the Trillbilly Worker's Party pod, where I also spoke at length about my favorite topic: the eugenic baby contests they used to host at Midwestern state fairs in the 1920s and ‘30s. I also wrote about Musk and MAGA’s war on DEI—and how it’s really about undoing the Civil Rights Act—for The Verge. If you read it lmk what you think
I have a friend who is convinced St. Clair made up either the pregnancy or the child’s paternity. I’m not going to speculate over the existence of St. Clair and Musk’s mysterious (alleged!) baby, but I’d be remiss not to mention that no photos of the (alleged!) child exist and according to my friend, there is no confirmation of St. Clair’s age anywhere on the internet. Odd!
lol remember him?? kind of a hilarious side character who has somehow made his way back into the spotlight
and who, after the St. Clair affair, posted a picture of herself with her kids that could be generously interpreted as a jab at the other other woman
for the record I hate this joke and I think it’s played out
this is an oversimplification, Musk is obviously an ideological actor as well, but his opposition to Planned Parenthood is primarily about it providing healthcare to trans people; abortion has very little to do with it. Maybe I’ll write about that later idk
I’m a real sicko idk
I think it was actually a crate