I am an author, a filmmaker, and an artist. I’ve invited you into my studio today to talk about something that’s serious enough that I’m not just going to extemporaneously hold forth, but I’m going to be doing some reading. So bear with me when I look away at my laptop screens to quote some things you need to hear. A little while ago, I released a short seven-minute video, “Where Did All the Pro-Lifers Go?”
And what I talked about there was the problem of the fact that through JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the others, We are turning our country over to a future of genetic engineered babies. That will take the idea that human beings are created in God’s image and replace it with the idea that human beings should be recreated in Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance’s image.
And the irony is, of course, that JD Vance says he’s converted to the Catholic Church. And yet the entire teaching of the Catholic Church stands for the least of these. In other words, the Down syndrome child that the priest and the bishop will say is a sin to abort because of testing of amniotic fluid during pregnancy. Agree or disagree on that, now we fast forward to a future where Peter Thiel and these other people want babies that are designed to mirror their values. Tech bro values of a certain type of IQ, a certain type of idiot savant, if you want to put it that way, that can code computers and yet has very few human values of the kind that, say, Elon Musk practices having babies with 12, 30, 1,000 different women.
Okay, it’s probably six or seven, but you know what I mean. 14, 18, 20, 1,000 children with different women. And advocating the idea that what he does is test them for genetic capability, for intelligence, for IQ, etc. The stuff of science fiction, the stuff that the movie Gattaca warned against, and these guys sort of take as a blueprint. Okay, but today I want to look at this in a more serious context. I want to talk about a friend of mine, Catherine Pakaluk, who’s an author and advocates child care skills based on moral truths. That don’t change in her point of view because she’s a Roman Catholic. She’s a Harvard-educated associate professor of sociology and research of economic thought at the Bush School of Business at the Catholic University of America.
And Pakaluk wrote a remarkable book about women who choose to have large families, the kind of families Catholics advocate, called Hannah’s Children, The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. And she’s a friend of mine. Pakaluk interviewed 55 college-educated women raising five or more children like herself and reported on their reasons for having large families. Now, by the way, what I’m doing right here, I’m sorry I’m turning around because I didn’t have it ready, is reading a passage from my book, The Gospel of Zip, subtitled A Canine Human Love Story Exploring Why Most Dogs and a Few Humans Live Joyful Lives. And I quote Catherine in that book, and here’s the passage I’m quoting. I read this passage, and it reminded me of how Genie, that’s my wife of 56 years, and I felt about wanting to have a fourth child, which we didn’t have because Genie had a hysterectomy, and we were sad about that.
But Catherine writes, “I suppose it boils down to some sort of deeply held thing, possibly from childhood, a platinum conviction that the capacity to conceive children, to receive them into my arms, to take them home, to dwell with them in love, to sacrifice for them as they grow, and to delight in them as the Lord delights in us, That thing, that that thing call it motherhood, call it childbearing. That thing is the most worthwhile thing in the world, the most perfect thing that I am capable of doing.” That’s from her book, which I love very much. These interviews with 50 women, Hannah’s Children, The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Now. The fact of the matter is, Catherine sometimes gets lumped in with what’s called the pro-natalist movement.
People saying we need more babies because we’re going to have a population decline, etc. All right, put that to the side for the moment. Peter Thiel, JD Vance, all these people talk about that. Well, maybe it’s a pro-life movement, maybe it isn’t. But the fact of the matter is, when you dig a little deeper, they’re not interested in just people having more babies. They, unlike Catherine Pakaluk, who has the traditional Roman Catholic view, actually are into something totally different. And for that, to give us a little taste of that, I’m going to read something from The Gospel of Zip. And here’s a quote from section 33. By the way, I did the whole thing in short sections so that people who don’t read a lot can get into the book.
And I put the whole thing on YouTube for free. All eight hours, you can go there. I’m not trying to make money off you. You can watch it for nothing. Just go to thegospelofzip.com and you’ll find the link on YouTube. But section 33, here’s what I talk about, because I talk about my dog Zip and the correlation between dog breeding and humans and the way dogs and humans relate and what we can learn about relationships and so forth and so on. That’s why I mention and start here. Behind the designing of dogs is a rumble of something awful. The early 19th century breeder’s ambition was rooted in eugenic purity cult. Before that, dogs were sometimes bred for work, but mostly not just for humans, vanity.
Today, the language of purebred kennel club advocacy and dog shows, as it’s called and breeds, veers into the language of race. Purity. Sound familiar? It should. Our history is darkened by race purity cults when it comes to humans, too, and those purity cults are being resurrected. For instance, according to a recent story in the Washington Post, someone called Noor Siddiqui is the founder of an embryo screening startup. She offers a vision of custom-built algorithms and genome breeding analysis for human breeding that helps make, quote, perfect babies for billionaires. Siddiqui is, quote, a rising star in the realm of fertility startups, according to the Washington Post, backed by tech investors. Her company screens embryos for potential future illnesses, letting prospective parents plan their families with far more information about their progeny than ever before.
And I note this in my book. I’m quoting from my book again, from this book, and it’s free on YouTube. Once again, I’m not trying to sell you a book. If Noor Siddiqui and her clients have watched the movie Gattaca, one of my favorite films, by the way. They missed its warning and concluded that genetic breeding for, quote, perfect babies is a good thing in order to eliminate the, quote, unfit through our knowledge of genetics. Quote, sex is for fun and embryo screening is for babies, Siddiqui said. In a video she shared on X, reminiscent of the way dog breeders talk about breeding dogs, end quote. Okay, now roll the cloth back to the 1970s. And my dad’s book that he wrote with C. Everett Koop, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
This is the book that serious historians say created the evangelical wing of the pro-life movement. There’s my dad. There’s Dr. Koop. And I wrote the screenplay and made the films. I directed them and produced them. We spent millions of dollars. We toured the country. And by the time we were done, Evangelicals were part of the pro-life movement. Okay. Now, dad took his stance seriously. Here he is picketing abortion clinics in Atlanta. Choose life. There’s my dad leading the march. There’s my mother next to him. I think I shot that picture back in those days. I was all in on the whole movement. Okay. What did Dad and Dr. Koop write? They wrote something that predicted, believe it or not, what Elon Musk, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and the other tech bros are doing.
And I just want to say in passing that the only thing that Trump will be remembered for, mark my words, is not Trump’s presidency, which will blow away in the distant past very quickly because he’s just in it for himself and making money, bitcoins and all the rest. Threat of Trump’s presidency is not MAGA and Trump. It’s that he’s opening the door to JD Vance, who is the paid-for and bought creature of the billionaire class, as is Tucker Carlson. And again, irony of all ironies of all ironies of all ironies, they call themselves religious people, and JD Vance says he’s converted to the Catholic Church. But here’s what Koop and my dad wrote all those years ago.
Abusing genetic knowledge beyond the individual’s cruelty to other individuals, why should society not make over humanity into something different if it can do so, even if it results in the loss of those factors which make human life worth living? New genetic knowledge could be used in a helpful way and undoubtedly will bring forth many things which are beneficial, but, and here’s the point they’re making, once the uniqueness of people has created by God is removed and mankind is viewed only as one of the gene patterns which came forth on earth by chance. There is no reason not to treat people as things to be experimented on and to make over the whole of humanity according to the decisions of a relatively few individuals, say our billionaire tech bros.
If people are not unique, write Dad and Koop, as made in the image of God, the barrier is gone. Once the barrier is gone, there is no reason not to experiment genetically with humanity to make it into what someone, say Peter Thiel, thinks to be an improvement socially and economically. The cost here is overwhelming. Should the genetic changes once be made in the individual, these changes will be passed down to his or her children, and they cannot ever be reversed. And then they go on and say that. This point of view rejects the doctrine of creation, that would be Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, JD Vance for all their talk about religion, therefore rejects the idea that there is anything stable or given about human nature. It sees human nature as part of a long unfolding process.
It casts around for some solution to the problem of despair that this determinist evolutionist vision induces, can only find a solution in… The activity of human will, which is in the opposition to its own system, it hopes, can transcend the inexorable flow of nature and act upon nature. Therefore, encourages manipulation of nature, including tinkering with people. Christians who are opposed to the forms of genetic engineering which tinker with the structure of humanity. And others, such as Theodore Roszak and Jeremy Rifkin of the People’s Business Commission, rightly see this genetic engineering as incompatible with democracy. And this is in the late 1970s. Fast forward to 2025. Trump is president. JD Vance is in bed with, and I’m sorry to say, the pimp of the tech bros, masked in false Catholicism.
And we come to a Wall Street Journal article of just this week. Genetically engineered babies are banned. Tech titans are trying to make one anyway. Startups funded by some of the most powerful billionaires in Silicon Valley are pushing boundaries of reproductive genetics, hoping to prevent disease as well as improve the chances for high IQ and other preferred traits by the billionaires. It’s a serious long piece, and I’m going to read you some of it. For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project, the birth of genetically engineered babies. Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder, CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup called Preventive has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease.
In recent months, executives at the company privately said a couple with a genetic disease had been identified who was interested in participating, according to people familiar with the conversations. Okay, oh, you say, oh, great, eliminate genetic disease. But that’s a first step. The real aim of these tech bros. Are high IQ babies that mirror their own idiot savant type of creation, rather than creating the image of God and about art and music and beauty and the intrinsic worth of human life. This is designer babies made for the same reason that Elon Musk wants a robot army directed by AI to improve the human condition. Oh, and he’s already putting Neuralink chips in people’s brains. The result of experimenting cruelly on thousands of primates that died in the experiment so humans could improve their future, maybe upload our brains to computers and live forever.
Science fiction? Not anymore. What Dr. Koop and Dr. Schaeffer, my father, warned against is now happening. Where are the pro-lifers standing against this? Where is the true movement that is the heart of MAGA that came together to reverse Roe v. Wade? Now we find that it’s not just Roe v. Wade, but actually the vision that came directly out of Germany in the 1930s of the perfectibility of the human race, a master race. Armstrong, the cryptocurrency billionaire, also quoting from the Wall Street Journal still, is leading the charge to make embryo editing. A reality. He has told people that gene editing technology could produce children who are less prone to heart disease, sounds good, with lower cholesterol, sounds good, and stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis. According to documents and people briefed on his plans, he is already an investor or in talks with embryo editing ventures.
And of course, editing means that the ones that are ineditable are discarded. Excuse me. Hello? I thought life was sacred to the pro-life movement. Don’t hear anything much. Why? Because these are JD Vance’s people. This is what JD Vance is in bed with. This is where he’s getting his money. Preventative, which incorporated in May with headquarters at WeWork in San Francisco, worked with the small staff, keeping its plans quiet for nearly six months. Like many DNA startups, at least one employee signed a non-disclosure agreement. The company didn’t openly solicit job applicants and kept its website bare of details. After the journal, that’s the Wall Street Journal, and I’m reading from it, approached people close to the company last month to ask about its work, Preventative announced on its website that it had raised $30 million in investments to explore embryo editing.
That is human race editing for traits they want. The traits they want are more… Elon Musk’s. Less people that donate to museums and to the arts or ballet. Put it that way. High-tech bros interested in what they’re doing, not interested in what the human race has always been interested in, which is being human. Quote, these people are not working on genetic diseases, said Fyodor Yuranov, a director at the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Quote, They are either lying, delusional, or both. These people armed with very poorly deployed sacks of cash are working on baby improvement. So there’s the truth of the matter that this actual scientist notes. It’s not about less cholesterol or bone strength. It’s about baby improvement. Sound familiar?
Now some startups are focusing on a process called polygenic screening, which involves extracting DNA from an embryo, analyzing it with statistical algorithms and generating probabilities for a much wider array of characteristics and diseases the child might have. A handful are already selling these services backed by investors such as Armstrong, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, this is the Washington Post again, and Reddit co-founder and venture capitalist Alexis. Ohanian. Quote, the tech people control so much of their lives. It’s like, why shouldn’t I have the perfect child? Said Dr. Marcel Cedars, the lead physician at the University of California, San Francisco IVF clinic. But children, they come hardwired. I’m quoting him again. And I don’t think you can predict that. The four polygenic screening companies said their methodologies are valid and that the tests offer a valuable insight into.
A child’s future. Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui that I talked about earlier and that I quoted in The Gospel of Zip. I quoted her in that from the Washington Post article that broke the story about her. Counts Armstrong, Etherium co-creator Vitalik Buterin, and 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki as investors. Orchid charges $2,500 per embryo to run a slate of genetic tests to produce risk score for diseases including Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Okay, fine, sounds positive. But Nucleus founder, Kian Sadeghi, along with Siddiqui, is a former Peter Thiel fellow. A grant and mentorship program for college dropouts, he has described polygenetic screening as genetic optimization software. Excuse me? This is how we describe human beings now?
Genetic optimization software, and talked of it as part of a, quote, now listen carefully here, neo-evolution, a term he defined in a now deleted post on X as, genetically engineering ourselves at scale. So that’s where these people are coming from. And I want to say again, this is what my father, Dr.Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop warned was going to happen. And they were correct. Where is the pro-life movement now? Sold to JD Vance and his future ambition for money, power. And prestige and don’t remind him that everything he stands for with Peter Thiel in terms of remaking the human race in the image of our billionaires is the very evil, the very demonic evil that my father predicted would happen once the evangelical base of Christianity was abandoned. That’s my father’s point of view.
Well, that’s happened. At the turn of the 20th century, The U.S. and Europe were ablaze with theories about how genetics could be used to cultivate a better breed of humans, smarter, stronger, more successful, whiter, more beautiful, taller, airy, and blonde. Genetic engineering hadn’t been conceived yet, so these pioneers in eugenics advocated for old-fashioned method of encouraging the right people, say, through gas chambers, to breed and sterilizing the quote, wrong people, gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, anybody that opposed the German state, the wrong kind of people, brown people, black people, dark-skinned people, people of non-European descent. They had a vision of the human race. Not too different from the vision of the billionaires right now. According to eugenicists, the movement was progressing along quite nicely.
Until the 1930s when Adolf Hitler, inspired by the eugenicists in the US and UK, irony again, like my dad and Dr. Koop trying to start a pro-life movement that became so successful it put Trump in the White House and now opens the door to JD Vance, which is the only permanent thing that will come out of the Trump administration. Vance becomes president and make us all wish that Trump was back again, who was only in it for himself and hadn’t sold himself out and pimped for the billionaires. And their vision of the future, of stripping the idea of creation in the image of God when it comes to human beings and recreating them in their own image, the same robotics that, I guess, Musk thinks are the ideal way we should operate.
The rising popularity in Silicon Valley and among the sum of our current politicians, JD Vance, and inventors, has echoed the message of the eugenic supporters of the early 20th century. Famous adherents, okay, I’m going to repeat, include Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Pavel Durov, policymakers like JD Vance, and repo tech entrepreneurs like Noor Siddiqui and Stephen Chow. Pronatalists generally claim that reproduction among the best and brightest is a social imperative “to maintain population levels, support economic growth, and preserve cultural and national identities.” But not the author of Hannah’s Children, Catherine Pakaluk, who sees a huge difference between having children because you believe in family and love and beauty and take whatever God sends you, and these, quote, pro-natalists, who are actually pro-natalists only when it comes to the right sort of babies, something I talk about and compare to dog breeding in my book The Gospel of Zip.
And then I offer my own love story with Genie. And we got pregnant when we were 17 and 18, and she married. Somebody groomed to be an by divine, right? That’s me, and I call it that in the book, and through therapy and thinking, and leaving my evangelical background. That taught the supremacy of males over females, and moving to a marriage. That was about friendship and a deep sexual and loving bond that I talk about in the book. And having children because you love children, not because you’re genetically engineering them to be perfect and to represent you well and to make money. That is a pro-natalism that I’m part of and that Catherine Pakaluk is part of,
but it has nothing to do with these modern pro-natalists who are more out of Gattaca and the Brave New World than they are out of anything that could be described as Christian or traditional. But since Donald Trump was sworn in as US president for the second time earlier this year, Elon Musk, who is said to have fathered 14 children, has called fertility decline the biggest danger civilization faces by far. And also he wants to populate Mars, I guess with his kind of genetically engineered people or robots or whatever, and has donated 10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative in Texas, for instance, amongst many others, which conducts research into fertility parenting and future population growth. The U.S. vice president, JD Vance, has also spoken openly about his views on procreation. At an anti-abortion rally, that’s ironic.
That’s ironic. People who want to profile and genetically engineer the human race and discard thousands of embryos that don’t want to match the investment opportunities Peter Thiel holds out for. Elon Musk advocates pro-life. This is pro-life. Come on. JD Vance is as pro-life as Planned Parenthood is. And he declared, I want more babies in the United States of America. Yeah, but what he didn’t add is more babies paid for and pimped out to the tech bros so they can perfect the human race and recreate it in their image instead of God’s image. How will that fly next time you have an audience with the Pope? The Trump administration’s been prioritizing family too, sort of, I guess, in between. Being accused of molesting women or griping them by the pussy, as he put it.
And the pro-natalists on the far right and the geneticists are buoyed by this and they hope that it’s a sign of things to come. But I’m not one of them. And The Gospel of Zip is not a pronatalist book, although it’s about the beauty of having children and the love I have for my children and the parenting I’ve done for my grandchildren and the joy I get out of childcare in the same way that. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s book, Hannah’s Children, is about her joy in children. So in President Trump’s executive order today, there’s been little apart from the order on IVF that could be seen directly as pro-family. And of course, that’s really more pro-tech. But pro-natalist thinking may be starting to influence policy that is less explicitly about fertility and more about genetic engineering.
And that’s our future. And if JD Vance becomes president. Vance’s version of pro-natalism will become Thiel’s America, Musk’s America. They have bought and sold Vance. The question is, will you allow him to buy and sell you if you call yourself pro-life? Maybe there are still traditional people on the right, on the evangelical and Catholic right, that will stand against this, but I doubt it. Because somehow they’ve decided that Trump is a gift from God and everything that comes from him, including JD Vance and his genetic engineering opportunists that are financing him, must be somehow right, and they don’t want to see no evil to the right, in the same way that the Heritage Foundation decided that Tucker Carlson interviewing a Nazi was okay, because we see no evil to the right. But where are the pro-lifers?
Where are your principles? Where are the principles my father and Dr. Koop fought for? Aspects related to genetics among some of the tech right proponents is something that is here now. It’s something that has prompted concern in particular around the ethics of this on all sides of the political spectrum. But absolute silence when it comes to the MAGA movement calling out JD Vance on this. Hey, listen, let me just tell you something. If a Republican runs for president, who stands up on this issue and faces Thiel and Musk and tells them to go to hell and take their technology with them, I’d be more likely to vote for that woman or man than I would for a Democrat who doesn’t get the seriousness of this issue. My parents and Dr. Koop write about this.
This is a threat to the continuation of the human race as we understand it. And it puts the direction of our future in the hands of the worst possible people. You really want the human race recreated in the image of a man who paid for the experimentation on thousands of suffering primates. So he could put chips in people’s brains and eventually be part of a movement that could upload brains to computers. So these billionaires could live forever in their delusion? Is that your future? The question remains is, where does all this leave pro-natalists? Well, it leaves me and Catherine Pakaluk with our two books. Right where we always were. We love our children. We love our families. We feel sorry for people who put careers ahead of family, but that’s another issue.
And the great joy of my life is childcare for my grandchildren. That’s what my book is about. The great joy of my life is learning to be a good husband instead of an asshole. That’s what my book is about. That’s what The Gospel of Zip is about. And the last thing it’s about is re-engineering the human race in my image. I’m trying to convince in my book, not get your embryos and turn them into a mirror image of me. That’s a different project. And so I want to ask you, as I conclude here, this rather long 28-minute, 30-minute video, were you like me and didn’t see this coming? I didn’t. I didn’t see the baleful view of the pro-life movement actually being vindicated in this period of history, not because of Roe v.
Wade being overturned, but because my father and Dr. Koop and other people who warned about where this would go, the dehumanization of the human race, predicted. Do you really want a clone of Musk’s robotics future? Thiel’s ambition to remake the human race in his image? A kind of pro-natalism that doesn’t want just anybody to have children, but the right people to have children? White Christian nationalist babies anyway? Is that what we’re talking about? I hope not. Where are the men and women of principle who are Christians or atheists or Jews or agnostics or Muslims? Who will unite. Maybe this is an issue that we of the left and the right can unite on. The left because we believe in human freedom and agency. The right because it believes human beings are created in the image of God, at least some do, both Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
Where are our voices? Do not be silent. JD Vance must not be president. Peter Thiel should go to hell, where he will be bound if he continues on this wrote, according to the theology of my father, which I no longer believe in, but it’s ironic, isn’t it? And Elon Musk, what of Elon Musk? He has a trillion dollar pay package, but perhaps does not have a soul.
