Trump's New EO and the REAL Reason Elon Musk Prefers to Use IVF

The New Age of Genetic Screening Has Arrived; Can We Stop It?

[Photo Credit: by The White House]

As we all now know, on Tuesday Trump signed a new executive order that directs the Department of Health and Human Services to develop policy recommendations focused on reducing out-of-pocket costs for IVF.

In addition, the administration is also now looking at ways to broaden healthcare coverage for IVF procedures.

While Trump made no secret of his support for IVF on the campaign trail, in spite of the impotent howls of protestation from professional pro-lifers, the extent of the order is somewhat surprising and tells us a lot about the way things are heading.

The order sets a new standard, not only for the GOP itself, but for the federal government as a whole. IVF is now not just something that should be protected and exempted from any pro-life enthusiasms; rather, it is now a positive good that should be actively promoted.

We are truly not in Kansas anymore, are we? When coupled with the recent ‘new right’ (that is to say, more formally, ‘Gay Space Fascist’) obsession with ‘pro-natalism,’ the direction all this is heading in becomes quite clear.

Perhaps no other topic has been more discussed in the past two years than ‘pro-natalism’ in conservative circles. This is not an exaggeration; it’s a genre of writing and podcasting that seems to have taken over everything.

I intend on this being a relatively short post, so I won’t do a deep dive on the subject of birthrate collapse just yet; however, I think I can state a couple of things relatively confidently about the phenomenon: 1) It’s a very real problem. 2) Its causes are a combination of economic and cultural factors; however, it is largely due to the inability or unwillingness of a significant amount of the population to romantically pair off. 3) There aren’t a whole lot of easy policy solutions to the problem that can be implemented on, say, the federal level.

All this being said, it seems obvious that the Trump admin is attempting to ‘innovate’ its way out of what would otherwise be an intractable problem (especially if one rejects the failed liberal idea to address the issue: unrestricted immigration). All other solutions to the problem (economic incentives and the like) have been shown to have, at best, marginal results to the upside. Hence why it's a bit of a ‘no-brainer’ that Trump and co. would choose to pluck the low-hanging fruit of IVF. In vitro fertilization, while currently quite expensive for regular people, has shown an extremely high rate of success with enabling infertile couples (of a variety of ages and sexual orientations) to successfully conceive and bring to term genetic offspring. The use of surrogates (‘hosts’?), a radically new development that seems to have spread with lightning speed over the past five years or so, has only made this procedure more alluring and effective in some ways, allowing many to bypass the physical aspect of motherhood entirely.

Hence why it appears that IVF is going to be pushed by the Trump administration (and likely the subsequent Vance administration as well) as a key part of the initiative to fight the rapid decline in births currently being experienced by the vast majority of the world’s developed nations.

The fact that Vance is a high profile Catholic convert makes all of this somewhat amusing. There is no other figure that carries more of the aspirations of the conservative pundit class with them than Vance. They’ve all put so much hope in him; he is, quite unironically, viewed as the chosen one. The one figure who, it is dreamed, will finally bring balance to the chaos of Trumpism and usher in a new post-liberal golden age.

The best part? Most of this pundit class has some kind of personal connection to Vance. Either they met him on the conference/speaking circuit, or they were in a group chat with him, or he came and had dinner at their house. In any case, not only do most have some kind of personal connection to him, but (more importantly!) he is now a powerful person. A very powerful person. And power, especially that kind of power, is like catnip to these people. It’s what they live for, they will literally do and say anything to be a part of it.

I do not say any of this out of some kind of personal resentment; in fact, the majority of these people I personally like, and, in general, I’ve known to be nothing but kind and interesting. However, I’ve also known them to be profoundly morally weak people. People who tend to be ultimately compromised primarily by their own ambition, a blind force which ends up crowding out all other concerns, including such trifles as truth and reason. To be fair, this characteristic is something that plagues, not just individuals operating in this particular world, but the entire Western meritocratic ruling class as a whole and which is part of the reason why it is ultimately a failed and irredeemable institution

Pictured above: an ambitious member of the conservative pundit class

Regardless, all of this is to say that these people are profoundly and willfully deluded about the various choices Vance will make in the coming years and why (a fuller explanation of what I mean by this exactly will be provided in a future post).

But wait, there’s more!

The best part, in this less-than-humble chronicler’s opinion, is that everyone seems to be missing exactly what is the real problem with this development.

Unsurprisingly, the professional pro-lifers of the conservative movement are out there in wake of the news of Trump’s EO doing what they do best: making bad arguments while completely misunderstanding what they are dealing with here.

So Why Does Elon REALLY Prefer to Use IVF?

Which brings us to the question implied by the title of this post: why exactly does Elon Musk prefer to use IVF when siring children among his ever-growing flock of concubines?

[Disclaimer: we’re going to have to file the following in the ‘things I know’ drawer and not the ‘things I can prove’ one. This is, admittedly, speculation; however, I also think what I’m about to write will almost certainly turn out to be proven correct. Or at least largely correct.]

Musk, contra much of the goofier speculation online, does not choose to sire many of his children via IVF because he has some aversion to the carnal act itself. In fact, given what we know about his track record, he’s as enthusiastic about it as any red-blooded man. Neither, I would argue, is the primary motivator in choosing IVF an attempt to spare the body of the mother from the burden of childbearing, nor is it some kind of way to maintain a professional relationship with them (as was the cover story given for the decision to use IVF for the children he had with Shivon Zilis).

Now certainly there may be small elements of truth in any one of these stories, but it is surely not the actual reason why this method was chosen.

The real reason for choosing IVF is simple: it allows Musk to practice genetic screening on the embryos in question.

For those not in the know, what we can call ‘genetic screening is, in its simplest form, a kind of eugenics¹ currently practiced by a number of companies (most, if not all, backed by a significant amount of cash from the Thielverse). One such company is called Genomic Prediction, and it specializes in just this practice.

It just so happens that the famous pro-natalist wonder twins Malcom and Simone Collins² employed the company’s services for their own quest to create genetically superior offspring. Simone even interviewed one of the founders of the company as part of their seemingly insatiable drive to put out ever more content. The interview itself is extraordinarily informative and worth watching in its entirety. Hopefully, I will have some time to comment on it in depth in one of my forthcoming pieces on the Collins’.

At a certain point in the video, Simone remarks that, even if she and Malcom had been able to conceive naturally, they would now choose to do IVF anyway, as the procedure is the most practical way for them to practice genetic selection. This is likely the same calculation made my musk and his various concubines.

After all, when you do things the old-fashioned way, you usually end up with only one embryo whose genetic traits are essentially fixed ( a major bummer!). You get what you get. However, when you do IVF, you create potentially dozens of different embryos. Embryos, which are all technically the couple in question’s children. Now, in the past, couples frequently still generally would just get what they got embryo-wise when it came to IVF. What companies like Genomic Prediction have now done however is to allow individuals and couples undergoing IVF to preform advanced screenings on these embryos. In any family, there is a significant amount of genetic variation; siblings are of various heights, have different eye and hair colors, and have sometimes radical divergences in intelligence and personality. The same also goes for IVF embryos (all of which are siblings to one another) but now the parent to be is able to see not only things like genetic predisposition to disease or sex but also even features like height, eye color and estimated intelligence.³

The parent in question then has their pick of, say, 20 different embryos, of which they can then proceed to choose the one with the set of most desirable traits.

This process alone is profoundly radical and will have irreversibly destabilizing effects on the social fabric in the coming years. It is worth noting that this is a technology that is being employed right now; it is not some hypothetical that may or may not come into use in the future (such as the hideous ‘artificial wombs’ already being prototyped by Thiel-backed companies and other, more direct, forms of genetic editing).

And it is here that we encounter the real issue with Trump’s IVF order. It is not simply that it treats children as commodities or leaves embryos frozen indefinitely or ends up destroying them (if only the problem was as relatively innocuous as that!). The real issue here is that at this point IVF is going to be simply inseparable from various forms of genetic selection going forward.

The demand for it is certainly there, especially once IVF itself begins to be covered by health insurance. And if you can screen embryos for diseases, you can also screen for a lot of other things; you can select for eye color and height and IQ too. And people will do this en masse as a genetic arms race begins within society itself, driven by the same loathsome striver culture that has hollowed it out in so many other ways. The end result of this will be to send resentment and hatred between social classes to a, as of yet, undreamt of level. With the upper middle class and beyond increasingly beginning to see themselves as not merely a ‘breed’ apart from the rest but, eventually, as an entirely different species. A claim that, genetically speaking at least, they will have at least some justification for. Fun and games will ensue, likely resulting in a Hutu and Tutsiesque ending

In addition, the idea that the Trump admin or Vance admins (or even more outlandishly, the Democrats) will somehow come to the rescue and impose serious regulations to stop this kind of thing is fantasy talk. The die has already been cast, and on every side, it just keeps coming up Thiel (funny how that works).

But speaking of Hutus and Tutsis, I need to get back to reading ‘Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.’ This was supposed to be a short post commenting on some newsy items, and it quickly got out of control (as so often happens). I will likely be back with a couple more of these sorts of posts before I publish the bigger piece on the various theories of elites which dominate the Gay Space Fascist imaginarium.

1. Now, I realize this term is considered somewhat triggering for Thieloids, as they consider it a way to shut down a conversation without actually having to engage in debate ( like calling someone a ‘racist’ etc). However, I would like to put forward two points in my defense 1) I am using it here merely as a descriptor not as a pejorative. A form of conscious eugenics is simply what is going on in this process. 2) I don’t care.

2. For the record, I find myself enjoying a lot of the Collins’ content, it’s zany and they are somehow likable in their own, profoundly nerdy, way. In addition, they are extremely earnest about their cause. All that being said, the fact remains that their project, as a whole, is profoundly sinister and will have extraordinarily negative consequences for our society in the coming years.

3. For the record the Genomic Prediction founder being interviewed claims in the video that, while the company has the technology to see the eye color, height and intelligence of embryos, the company does not offer this service as it does not believe the world is currently ‘ready’ for such options. I’ll admit that I simply don’t believe this at all. Or, rather, to the extent that I do I’d wager its selectively enforced. Perhaps applied to normies but exceptions are surely made for clients of note.