The Art of Media Baiting: Inside the Tactics of the Pronatalist Movement

Malcolm and Simone explain why they intentionally court controversy to spread awareness of demographic collapse, even though it can be costly. Controversy acts as "human clickbait" to draw attention, then their genuine wholesomeness converts people to the cause. They share examples of how negativity actually validates ideas to conservative/moderate audiences. Though they lose friends and receive hate, demographic collapse is now mainstream. Using themselves as "meme fodder" pierces bubbles, like how Trump used media bias through controversy. Spreading ideas through hate is effective, but know the personal reputation costs. In the end, saving humanity is worth some family sacrifice.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Now, this issue, because it counters the mainstream narratives around what people should care about, is considered a right wing issue.

That's, that's not, I think, necessarily because it's a right wing issue, it's because the left control all centers of power today, so if you are saying anything that challenges the dominant narrative within society, you are considered a far right activist within today's, informational ecosystem. So we're like, okay, we can use this to our advantage. In fact, negativity, the press shows us in a way that's us with conservative and moderate. Audiences, they see skepticism about reasonable causes as validation of those causes, realism, efficacy, and, and grassroots nature

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: You look like you're actually in some kind of equivalent of a man cave, just like sitting there in the darkness. And like, here I am with my candles over there and the, you know, windows and like, there you are. It looks like

Malcolm Collins: it's two different times [00:01:00] a day in our two areas. We're in different

Simone Collins: time zones.

Malcolm Collins: But I do like my man caves. You know that. I love the dark.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you love the darkness. And like defensible corners, you know? Like, Yes, yes. You gotta know

Malcolm Collins: defensibility is important to me in terms of being comfortable in a room. Yeah, even if we're

Simone Collins: like sitting down at a restaurant, you're gonna want the defensible

Malcolm Collins: seat.

Well, you know, that's what so much of feng shui really is. It's just defensibility.

Simone Collins: Hmm. And

Malcolm Collins: that's why it feels like it works for people because what they're really sensing is how defensible is the space I'm looking at. I mean, I think a lot of aesthetics fall into this category as well. That is a very interesting take.

When people are like, I like this view and it's like, well, what type of views do you like? You know, it's like, well, I like a view where I can see a long way. And there's water, like streams present so it's like, oh, so what you like is a freshwater supply in a highly defensible area where you're on some sort of high ground, [00:02:00] right?

And they're like, no, no, no, no, I also like other views, like, I love views of the ocean. It's like, oh, okay. So you love views of an area where you have you know, a lot of food and, and likely you know, so much of human aesthetics and human pre programming, it's just around defensibility and the things that would have

Simone Collins: caused Will I survive here?

And Yeah. Yeah, that includes both, will I survive if someone tries to attack me, and also, are there natural resources here that will sustain me? And that's beautiful. Hooray!

Malcolm Collins: But we want to talk about something else today, not about human evolution, which is one of our big things!

Simone Collins: But instead, we will talk about one of the things that has been most controversial about our general strategy.

With our non profit very, very controversial.

Malcolm Collins: Which is being intentionally courting controversy. Yeah. Intentionally courting controversy. So why, why do we do this? Why do we intentionally court [00:03:00] controversy? Because a lot of people see this. We've been called, what it was, that Sony documentary on us. It was like, they're human memes or something?

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, like walking

Malcolm Collins: A lot of people just, just for a bit of a background, if you're watching this channel and you're looking at the subscriber count and you're like, you know, I feel like I see these people in the news a lot. Why isn't their subscriber count higher? It's because this channel was dormant when most of our media coverage happened.

So obviously if you look at this channel, you'll see stuff from like 15 years ago, right? Simone used this a lot when she was younger. We had a period where we revived it for a bit, but it hadn't been used in like three or four years. Yeah. When we were, you know, whether it was on Piers Morgan or whether it was on Chris Williamson or whether it was, you know, had the front page piece on us and in the Telegraph or the front page piece on us in the National Post or that big viral insider piece or the elite couple breeding to save mankind piece.

All of that happened when this channel was dormant. If this channel had been active during that period, we would have caught all of that. And this got us to a stance where we're like, [00:04:00] okay, well, we need to reactivate the channel again so we can catch all of that. But we have had, multiple periods where to an extent for different ends, we needed to court a level of controversy to promote something that was of short term utility to us.

The first time we really went viral that a lot of people are familiar with is the Reddit proposal. Which what was the, the old internet magazine that ran it at the most romantic moment of the year? Oh yeah, that was nice. This was Upward? Up?

Simone Collins: I don't know, one of the many bankrupt internet magazines out there.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it was whatever the main one was back then. And, you know, No, the Daily Dot did a piece on us. Mashable did a piece on us. PC Magazine did a piece on us. But this was Anyway, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. This is when we were proposing, and I didn't boast because I know Simone while she doesn't like personally interacting with people or humans in public, she doesn't mind human [00:05:00] attention on the internet.

And so that was my I wanted

Simone Collins: a grand public display, but I also didn't want to be in public. So you nailed it, Malcolm. But it was

Malcolm Collins: also something that I could use to leverage the launch of our first company, Art Corgi, which went through 500 startups. And, you know, we, we, we, we got VC funding for it. It didn't end up working out, but we didn't ever raise that much for us.

So we didn't put too many people out. But that was something where we were like, okay, and that was also in part an experiment for us because we had somebody who had told us before as people know, we go to a bunch of secret society things. And at one, I was like, well, you can intentionally create a viral event.

And they go, no, you can't. This person was a marketing expert. They were seen as one of the world experts in marketing. And I was like no, you absolutely can. And they're like, no, you don't understand. I'm one of the world experts in marketing and you're just some idiot kid who's in graduate school right now.

Right. And I was like, screw you. I'm going to do it. But there was an element of pride in doing that as well. T