Once upon a time, in the 1920s, the State Fair of Texas hosted “Fitter Family” contests that graded entrants on physical appearance, health, behavior, and intelligence. The winners, according to the eugenicist judges, were most likely to produce offspring deemed genetically superior — and were “invariably white with western and northern European heritage.”
The 1925 winners of the “Large Family” contest happily posed on a series of steps. A yellowed black and white photo from the American Philosophical Society shows a father, mother, and five children, most of whom are barefoot. The family is lean and pale. The father is serious, but the kids are smirking.
These were, according to eugenicists, the best genes imaginable.
Fast forward to 2025.
This weekend, on March 28-29, a pronatalist conference featured self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science at a hotel and conference venue operated by the University of Texas in Austin.
The Guardian reported that the conference was organized by Kevin Dolan, the operator of an account affiliated with the far-right Mormon “Deseret nationalist” movement. (Dolan is a father of at least six, per Politico.) The conference’s speakers included: Jack Posobiec, a far-right media figure and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist who has ties to white supremacists; “neofascist lifestyle influencer” Charles Cornish-Dale, also known by the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist; Jonathan Keeperman, a former lecturer at University of California Irvine who is behind a far-right publishing press; and Jonathan Anomaly, a former academic and proponent of “liberal eugenics.”
Tech billionaire (and father to 14 children by four different mothers) Elon Musk is a prominent supporter of pro-natalist positions. Besides extending an invitation to Musk to attend, the Natal Conference said his staunch advocacy actually inspired the conference. Musk has promoted bogus race science, amplified users on X who assert the biological superiority of people of European descent, and lamented declining birth rates in European countries.
These sorts of ideas were on offer at the Natal Conference, whose website features an X post from Musk that shared a video of Dolan speaking at the first Natal Conference and reads: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.” As the event’s organizer, Dolan has said that eugenics — the belief that white people are genetically superior — and the pronatalist movement are “very much aligned.”
The Natal Conference embraces a set of ideas inextricably tied to eugenics that is concerned with the right sort of people having more children — emphasis on the “right sort.” Tickets to the conference started at $1,000 and went as high as $10,000 for a full-weekend pass. Press access was denied to journalists seeking to cover the event, which also included a matchmaking service, according to WIRED. The magazine reported that it obtained an email promoting a preconference mixer held on Thursday night indicating that matchmaking would play a significant role at the conference and in the pronatalist movement more widely.
“This is a special email to NatalCon attendees who indicated they were highly interested in finding the missing puzzle piece for singles, matchmaking, marriage, and family formation,” according to WIRED’s report on the email, which noted that the conference had organized several sessions to strategize on the issue of matchmaking.
Single registrants were reportedly directed to fill out a survey asking for a desired number of children (listing 1 to over 7 as options), according to WIRED. They were also reportedly asked about their “religious, spiritual, cultural, lifestyle” values. The email reportedly concluded by saying there would be “some ministers attending if anyone decides to take the leap at the conference!”
According to The Guardian, one of the speakers at this year’s Natal Conference, Jordan Lasker, is a long-time proponent of eugenics whose pseudonymous X account, known as Cremieux, who Musk has interacted with and boosted. Lasker has sought to defend the work of Richard Lynn, a deceased self-described “scientific racist” who sat on the board of the Pioneer Fund, a nonprofit established in 1937 “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences” that has been described as racist and white supremacist.
One speaker at the conference, Carl Benjamin, a British YouTuber also known by the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad, made a post over the weekend in apparent defense of Rhodesia, a former white-ruled settler colony in what is now Zimbabwe that has become an important symbol for online white supremacists. One conference attendee posted a photo of Benjamin during his speech, writing: “Marxism’s shift into intersectionality has redefined women’s roles—from childbearing and homemaking to competing with men in the workforce. ‘But if skyrocketing antidepressant use among women is any clue, this shift is not benefiting women.’”
This year’s Natal Conference was held on the University of Texas in Austin’s campus at the AT&T Hotel Conference Center, which is university-owned but operates as a self-funded entity. The university responded to criticism of the event in a statement to the Austin Chronicle: “As part of a public university, the AT&T Hotel & Conference Center is bound by law to schedule events without discrimination of viewpoint consistent with the First Amendment.”
Outside the venue, a group of protesters also exercised their First Amendment rights, carrying signs that read “Natalism is Nazism” and “No Nazis in Austin!”
For the University of Texas in Austin to host a eugenics conference on its campus in the 21st century demonstrates how the long-arch of eugenics history continues to influence Texas politics.
Back in the 1920s, the State Fair of Texas hosted the aforementioned “Fitter Family” contests. Such contests were held at State Fairs across the nation alongside informational exhibits about eugenics, such as ones showing differences in literacy rates across races.
In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics was popular across the political spectrum in the United States, particularly among progressives, who considered eugenics cutting edge science. Major public figures such as President Teddy Roosevelt were proponents of eugenics, which informed laws allowing sexual sterilization, banning inter-racial marriage, and prohibiting immigration by large groups of people from various parts of the world.
After the Nazis’ use of eugenic doctrines in the genocide of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups, eugenics was discredited as unscientific and immoral. On scientific grounds, eugenic research has largely been based on false assumptions, methodologically unsound, and frequently wrong in its findings. On moral grounds, eugenic policies of mass sterilization, forced institutionalization, and racial segregation are now seen by the scientific community as abhorrent violations of human rights.
Though eugenics failed as a scientific discipline and served as justification for the horrors of the Holocaust, eugenic laws and practices remained on the books throughout the U.S. for decades: even nonconsensual sterilization of prisoners continued until 2010, according to reporting from Reveal. Nevertheless, the scientific racism that eugenics inspired and made mainstream in the 1920s was gradually pushed to the fringes of academia, where it has long percolated with the support of groups like the aforementioned Pioneer Fund.
Now, that movement is in reversal.
Thanks to figures like Musk, eugenicist thinking — often coupled with pronatalist concerns about wanting to have “the right kids” — is in resurgence via a new strain known as “liberal eugenics” among proponents. It asserts that humanity can be improved through reproductive technology and genetic engineering. And Musk is not the only political figure in Texas to express eugenic thinking in recent years.
In 2023, an expose in the Huffington Post reported that Richard Hanania, then-fellow at University of Texas in Austin’s Salem Center for Public Policy, had used an online pseudonym to argue for eugenic policies such as forced sterilization for individuals with an IQ below 90, denounce “race-mixing,” and advocate for white nationalism.
Last year, the Texas Tribune reported that an event organized by the far-right True Texas Project featured a session focused entirely on the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which posits that the white race is being replaced — and is popular among both white supremacists and proponents of eugenics who use it as a pro-natalist argument to encourage white people to have more children. This year’s Natal Conference marks the second time that eugenics proponents have gathered in Austin — the first was in 2023 — portending a mainstreaming of the disgraceful ideology.
The association of the University of Texas in Austin with eugenic ideas does a disservice to the many legitimate researchers of demography and genetics at the university. A graduate research assistant and PhD candidate at the University of Texas in Austin, Claire Zagorski, penned an opinion piece in the Austin American-Statesman that eugenics ideas and a Natal Conference don’t belong at the University of Texas.
“The tacit approval of a race science conference at UT-Austin, alongside the large-scale defunding and muzzling of American science by a far-right regime, marks a very dark chapter of our history,” Zagorski wrote. “It should worry all of us, not just academics, how quickly we’ve moved away from science, progress and the embrace of diversity.”
Though it may be disturbing that eugenicists are gathering on the University of Texas in Austin campus, it wouldn’t be the university’s first brush with eugenics.
“UT Austin has a very long entanglement with the eugenics movement, and for this to happen now is just part of that long and unfortunate history,” said Dr. Michael Phillips, a historian whose forthcoming book The Purifying Knife details the history of the disgraced concept in Texas.
In the 1910s, University of Texas professor Clarence Stone Yoakum was a central figure in Army IQ studies, which were used to argue for prohibiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe because those groups deemed intellectually inferior according to Army IQ tests.
“He played a big part designing the test and publicizing the results, which caused a panic about immigration that helped result in the 1924 National Origins Act,” Phillips told The Barbed Wire.
Another UT professor in the 1920s, William H. Sheldon, was a part of research into what they believed to be the intelligence of white, Mexican American, and African American children, and concluded that there is a racial hierarchy of intelligence. These studies were riddled with racist assumptions and methodological errors, and have been discredited as mere replications of existing educational inequality and cultural bias.
In 1994, the publication of “The Bell Curve” by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray that relied on work funded by the Pioneer Fund, drew widespread criticism for arguing that there are connections between race and intelligence. In response to the heated critiques of the book, 52 academics signed an open letter originally published in the Wall Street Journal defending the book. Five of those 52 signatories were professors at UT Austin.
Despite Texas’ history of racist violence and “Fitter Family” contests, Texas was not among the 32 states that passed laws in the first half of the twentieth century that allowed for involuntary sterilization of individuals deemed biologically unfit. Today, Texas is the only state that has been a two-time host to the major gathering of eugenic thinkers in the 21st century.
“Eugenics tended to be very successful in those states that invested the most heavily in higher education,” Phillips told The Barbed Wire. “Texas didn’t have that history because it underfunded higher education. Another factor in Texas was that the eugenicists were definitely for the tightest possible immigration restrictions. Powerful Texas politicians like John Nance Garner, who was Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, really pushed against this because they wanted the labor for cotton farms.”
Unlike their predecessors, modern Texan eugenicists are more likely to argue against immigration due to concern over declining birthrates among white people and fear of “race suicide.” But like eugenics proponents of the past, they now have an ally in the Oval Office who apparently shares some of their beliefs. President Donald Trump himself has repeatedly made eugenic comments, saying that there are “a lot of bad genes in our country right now” and that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“I think that the pressure from the Trump administration in terms of trying to use funding to force colleges to reject so-called wokeness and stop studying racial inequity really opens the door to this eugenicist enterprise being reaccepted,” Phillips told The Barbed Wire. “I’m really alarmed about the future of academia and whether this is going to move into the mainstream through financial pressure from a right wing administration.”
