A sparse audience listens to a panel on fertility at the Reboot 2024: The New Reality tech conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

Some attendees of Reboot 2024 could not understand why fertility was being discussed at a tech conference.

The Heritage Foundation was one of the main sponsors of the Reboot 2024 tech conference in San Francisco.

At first, Reboot 2024: The New Reality, a conference hosted at Fort Mason last week, seemed like your typical San Francisco tech gathering of people in T-shirts discussing the possibility of AI sentience. Between panels, attendees hunched over laptops in the lobby, either checking on Slack or tapping away at programming projects in Visual Studio.

Until after lunch, when things suddenly made a sharp turn to the right.

The conference’s secretive “special guest” for an afternoon session on “Tech and the American Republic” turned out to be Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation — the ultra-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, the plan to undo American democracy should Donald Trump win the presidential election in November.

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Roberts had little of substance to say while being interviewed by podcaster Dwarkesh Patel about the tech topics that had until then dominated the stage. In response to Patel teeing up a question about Big Tech being “one of the greatest institutions in this country,” Roberts responded: “They’re not the greatest institutions in this country. The greatest institution in this country is the nuclear family.”

Cue some scattered, if confused applause.

It was awkward, but nothing compared with what was about to come.

A panel of three white men, with one woman moderating, took the stage and began to puzzle out the supposed problem of people not making enough babies.

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One participant, Samuel Hammond from the Foundation for American Innovation, who looked like a JD Vance clone, argued that low fertility is a problem because........

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