My Speech at the Natal Conference

Based and babypilled

Last week I attended the first-ever Natal Conference in Austin, organized by

EXIT Newsletter

and

Bennett's Phylactery

. I spoke at the event, along with friends

Razib Khan

, Charles Haywood, Mike Anton,

Indian Bronson

,

Raw Egg Nationalist

, and

Benjamin Braddock

.

It was super fun meeting cool babypilled couples from all over the country, even from Montreal! There is no one quite as radical as a based French Canadian, folks. A great time was had by all and I want to thank the organizers for inviting me.

The following is the speech I gave on Dec. 1. I gave a modified version of it a few days later at Terry Schilling’s American Principles Project Christmas gala in D.C. But in case you didn’t get a chance to hear me in Austin or Washington, you can read it for yourself: enjoy!

Natalist, C’est Moi

I am a contributing editor for The American Mind, a part of the “far right” Claremont Institute, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. My book, Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, was published in June by Regnery. And you can follow me on twitter @keenan peachy. 

I’m also a convert to Catholicism from secular nothingness and liberal feminism. And finally, I identify as a husbosexual, which means I am only attracted to people who identify as my husband. 

Natalism the Brand

The funny thing about a natalism conference is that the hardore natalists are too busy with their toddlers to come. There are a lot of reasons people aren’t beating the replacement rate anymore, but one of the main ones is that expressing your fertility has become taboo. The big family brand has lost its luster.

Just like Bud Light was destroyed by their new spokesman Dylan Mulvaney, one could argue that the big family brand was hurt by people on TV like the Duggar family and Kate plus eight, and Octomom. They’re circus freaks. Having “too many” kids has been branded the modern day equivalent of getting a lobotomy. Natalism is for the great unwashed, the philistines, the poor, the poorly educated, flyover hicks, and religious fanatics. 

Not a breeder.

And yet, deep down, there is still something incredibly alluring and romantic about the big American family. 

That’s what my book, Domestic Extremist, is about. Unless you are threatened by monogamous breeding pairs, the book has nothing to do with violence or hate. By domestic extremist I simply mean someone who chooses to live more domestically – to prioritize family formation. 

The irony is that trad moms like me are treated like actual domestic extremists by mainstream culture. But I’m not talking about returning to the middle ages or the colonial era. We don’t have to go that far back to recall a time when American culture wasn't this hostile to families. Forget the 1780s—I’ll take the 1980s. 

Home Alone

We watched Home Alone again over Thanksgiving and I finally figured out who all the kids in the movie are. The McCallisters have five children, the uncle has four, and the uncle who lives in Paris has five. John Hughes was a sneaky reactionary. The movie is so good that no one notices that it’s his love letter to traditional American natalism. No one notices because the McCallisters have a dreamy house and a dreamy life, even when they’re leaving Kevin home alone by accident. Deep down, all of us want to be a McAllister kid, with a loving mother who rides across the country in the back of a U-Haul with John Candy to rescue us from being alone.

 But in real life, actual natalists are enemy number one. Some of you may remember how the media rekked Sarah Palin for daring to have five kids. The Washington Post called Sarah Palin “The most flauntingly fecund female politician in U.S. history.” She was reduced to an object of scorn and derision because she’d had way too many kids and worst of all, failed to abort the one with a genetic disorder.

You know who else has five kids? Nancy Pelosi. And you never hear a bad word about it.

Babymaxxing the Old-Fashioned Way

Like Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi and Kate McAllister, I also have five kids. But “natalism” was not something I thought about, ever. I grew up in L.A., one of three kids, which was a standard number for the boomer parents in my neighborhood. 

Whenever I thought about my future, I thought, sure, I’ll have kids, one day. Not yet though! Our goal was to avoid marriage and pregnancy in our twenties, okay? And I wouldn’t have too many—I mean, I wasn't a weirdo. 

I thought I was cool and smart, too cool to have some big messy family. Like, no thank you, I don’t want to buy a shipping container size of corn flakes. No, I don’t want to give all my kids names that start with the same letter. 

But then I started having my own babies and I realized wow, they’re really cute! These guys are great! When it came to newborns, I was a newb, but I knew I had to move fast if I wanted to get more of them, since I got started a little late. So I had five kids in 10 years, one at a time, the old fashioned way: no reproductive technology, no egg freezing, no IVF. 

The French have an expression for this—f*cking your husband. Coitus: it’s a natural, zesty enterprise!

My oldest is a high school senior now and my baby is in second grade—and almost every day I wish I had just one more, but I aged out. 

I live in Los Angeles, and sometimes having a bunch of kids in LA is a bummer. When people find out, I’ll get comments like “Oh, I’m sorry.” Or: “You know there are ways to prevent that these days.” Once when I was pregnant with my third, a neighbor saw me and asked me with a sneer. “What are you, some kind of mormon?” 

When I was pregnant with my fifth, a colleague I was good friends with asked me why I didn’t abort this one, since I already had four. She was genuinely curious. No one could quite understand what I was up to - why would any normal person in their right mind keep going past one or two?

But sometimes I get to own a childfree lib in real time. Some unsuspecting wine aunt will see me in Trader Joe’s with my youngest. Usually it's a middle aged feminist who still has I’m With Her pins on her NPR tote bag. She'll smile and say, is she your only one? I try not to rub my hands together when this happens. The look on their faces when I tell them is a mixture of horror and disgust. 

But the most pushback I get is from normies with two kids. If you have more kids than they do, they get angry, even defensive. They decided long ago that two was the smart number, and now your very existence is calling their wise decision into question. The peer pressure to keep your family small can be crushing. It is the Longhouse ethos, out in the wild, a shadow cast over young couples, who live in fear of enraging the anti-natalist tyrants.

There seems to be something primal and threatening about a woman who has “too many” kids. This is the vibe I get from women who chose differently. Is it FOMO? Does my refusal to stop at two make them reconsider getting their tubes tied after their last baby? Is it a reminder that actually, they could have kept going?

 Or do they really think people like me are enslaved to domineering husbands, who probably beat them. People like this tend to react with panic and then immediately try to talk you out of having any more. After I had my fourth kid, every single person I met asked me the same question. “You’re done right? Please tell me you’re done.” They needed me to be done having kids. I would always answer “not yet, I’d love a few more.” Cue the screeching. 

Scaling Up Fast

But here me out: we can use their visceral hatred of big families to our advantage. The other side is not reproducing! The anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves! They’re getting on the pill at 14 and staying on it past 40. They’re even sterilizing their own kids with puberty blockers, wiping out their own chance at grandchildren. Imagine fighting a war in which the other side decides to shoot each other instead of their enemy. 

This is our opportunity to seize the means of reproduction. But this moment won’t last forever—we have to act fast. Because it’s not like the people aligned with us are having tons of kids. 

In many cases, pronatalists and the people who agree with us have the same low birth rates as the other side does. Even now, the main group of people who are walking the walk and not just talking the talk are the religious fanatics.The trads. The real ones, not the ones on TikTok. And here’s their secret: their attitude to kids is, I’ll have as many as God wants me to have. They’ve leaned all the way into natalism in a way that few are prepared to do.

But we are not going to get where we need to be if we wait for the trads, and the based elites here today, and Elon Musk to repopulate the county. A tiny fringe of smart, competent people having four or five kids is going to take too long to reach our goals. It doesn’t scale fast enough. And we need to scale. We need to 10x returns, as the finance bros say. 

We send our kids to a classical catholic school. There are multiple trad families at my kids school who have eight,  nine, even 13 kids. But the trads can’t do this alone. To turn the tide, some of the big brains in this room are going to have to find ways to market natalism to the Midwits.To the clueless girl bosses before they start freezing their eggs. To the Swifties. To the bourgeois strivers who aspire to leaving a legacy. Having a big family needs to be rebranded as not just something the very rich or the very religious can do – into an aspirational, living your best life, must-have. 

But we have to be careful – we do not want to market natalism to progressives. The people maxxing out their fertility should be people who won’t raise  their kids to be gender-neutral furries who join Antifa. The good news is that the fear of climate change will keep liberal women’s birth rates low–forever. Thank you, Greta Thunberg! 

The only way forward is to make motherhood a must-have. To make siblings a status symbol. And to make children a hotly desirable currency. This trend is actually already starting— as with all other trends, with celebrities The model Chrissy teigen has four kids. Actress and showbiz darling Blake lively has four. Blake’s come a long way since she was banging Leonardo Di Caprio, I’m proud of her.

Our job, and everyone in this room’s mission therefore is to make motherhood great again. We need to seduce more high quality Uterus Havers into starting their own great American dynasties.

There are obstacles in the way of course—everybody’s too fat, too single, too poor, too depressed, too addicted, too online. But after walking around Austin yesterday I am happy to report that there are still enough healthy, fertile looking candidates to take up this mission. The ones on the E-bikes. They are gettable. They just need a gentle push, like I did. This is going to be our great project to push them – off the e-bikes and into minivans full of toddlers!

Because mark my words, once Taylor swift gets pregnant with Travis Kelce Jr, millions of millennial women will suddenly cry out in terror—and go off the pill. They’re going to realize, maybe too late, that they’re tired of being Home Alone with just their cats to keep them warm in their old age.

When maternity maxxing becomes a full blown trend, and it will, we are the ones who have to lead the way. Right now the road ahead is clear, and there is no one behind us. And so, we start the war from here. 

To those who think becoming domestically extreme is out of reach – do not reject it as a luxury lifestyle. We don’t have that luxury. You go to war with the ovaries you’ve got. 

Here’s a Saint Joan of Arc quote for a little inspo:

“Courage! Do not fall back; in a little the place will be yours. Watch! When the wind blows my banner against the bulwark, you shall take it.”

And finally, I ended my book with this bit of Tennyson, if you don’t mind me reading a little poetry to you:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

So please, go forth and be extremely domestic. 

Thank you.

—Peachy