Every time a fascist-flirting regime is defeated in an election, more column inches and podcast minutes are devoted to the sense that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. When Trump, Bolsonaro, Sunak’s Tories or the Law and Justice Party in Poland lose elections, the centrist commentariat breathes a sigh of relief, believing its priors to be confirmed. Their vision, however, is too short term: these are likely not to be fascistic deviations from a liberal democratic trajectory. Instead the electoral defeats promise to be temporary relief from the existential threat to “civilisation.”

The neoliberal project underway from the 1940s but truly gaining traction in the 1970s and 80s in the Thatcher/Reagan era was marketed as selling freedom to succeed. In fact, the program was effectively neofeudal. The ultra-rich were in the process of using their charitable foundations to fund projects to remake the law to serve their desires, not the common wealth.

The oligarchs would have freedom from tax and “red tape.” This meant the public would have “freedom” from services such as decent healthcare and education, maintained bridges, roads and, ultimately, staffed services like air traffic controllers and the weather bureau. The public would also have “freedom” from decent working conditions, safe consumables, clean air and water.

The protests that would inevitably result would need to be crushed to prevent interruptions to profits.

The pain created for the vast majority of the public has been immense. Wages have stalled since the neoliberal project gained traction. (CEO remuneration, by contrast, has skyrocketed. Another of the neoliberal activists’ scams was the notion that meteoric executive pay equalled profits.) The middle class has shrivelled, and the precariat grown.

This pain provides a deep well of energy to be mined. Historian Timothy Snyder refers to the process as a function of sado-populism. The more pain generated in the population, the more energy available to breed hate of selected targets. Naturally the oligarchs’ spin doctors make sure the targets are not themselves as the true cause of the pain, but instead vulnerable minority groups.

A system built on maintaining a pool of unemployed so that the poorest workers are frightened to make waves cleverly depicts the unemployed and working poor as moral failures without the diligence to succeed in a society that has actively trapped the vast majority of them in place.

The private education system has boomed: those that can afford it can boost their own children into the enabler class. The public education system has been cut to bare bones: the Civil Rights era proved the threat to the oligarchs of an educated populace without enough debt to chain it to the grind.

In America, the Right is trying to destroy the public education system entirely. Public school education has been hard to control: students have learnt inconvenient facts about societies built on injustice and about climate science. In the post-public school era, anyone who can’t afford to be educated at private or compliant church school can be trapped in poverty-wage labour, replacing deported migrants.

The oligarchs’ spin doctors are replicating this campaign in Australia with the “charter school” movement as their initial fight.

Oligarchs and their spin doctors disguise the dehumanising campaigns against the poor and against vulnerable minorities as “virtue” and “patriotism” instead of the unmerited bigotry it truly is.

The creation of a separate “reality,” where migrants are rampantly committing crimes, Antifa is burning down our cities and abortion doctors are murdering full-term babies, is a mutually isolated space from fact-based civil society. Neither of us sees what the other knows. This allows Trump to win the popular vote in 2024 against expectation.

In this world, climate change is a rort inflicted on us by a “them” that might be Jews or leftists. Any pain inflicted by climate catastrophes – whether a single disaster or inflationary pressures on strained food production – fuels the energy that drives the movement. Conspiracies held by both the undereducated and the partisan explain that the “left” in government is manipulating the weather to hurt their political enemies, or maybe it is Jewish space lasers.

Like Covid, the mass disasters of our era challenge our certainties, making us frightened and angry.

The fact that the climate crisis has only begun to generate the massive numbers who will be displaced as their homelands become uninhabitable is providing an exponentially-growing reservoir of hate and fear to be siphoned.

Meanwhile, both fossil fuel and disaster capitalism more broadly have massive profits opened up to them by melting icecaps and local catastrophe. They have no intention to divert course. The neoliberal project is literally driving us towards “civilisational collapse.”

The oligarchs’ iron grip on career politicians, preventing them acting on the popular will, leads to burning outrage and merited disdain. Cynicism is the logical result. Politicians who are chained and prevented from acting on their election promises of change breed cynicism in the democratic project. Neoliberalism has destroyed faith in large sectors of the public that democracy can work for them because, in a neoliberal world, it can’t.

This cynicism serves the oligarchs: people who do not believe in the power of their vote to improve their lot are much less of an impediment to the powerful’s goals.

In the world inhabited by the radicalising Right, it is not the oligarchs that are hurting them, but selected minorities. In this world it is not poor health care, inadequate education or guns that are hurting children; it is the existence of LGBTQIA+ people.

In this world, women’s autonomy is a threat to the moral order. Firstly women are to be stripped of the right to control what happens to their bodies. They must engage in sexual activity only within sacred marriage with the intent to be impregnated. Then Project 2025 plans that women will be robbed of the right to gain divorce from toxic marriages. Some are strategising to strip women of the right to vote. The agenda is to drive most women out of the civic space, returning it to men.

Here the Christian Right, gathered so closely around Trump, gains support from the toxic cyberspace known as the manosphere. Their violent misogyny, homophobia and racism breed a toxic poison that is poured into the ears of disaffected young men around the world for hours on end in podcasts, YouTube and on social media. This is not a fringe movement: it is inherent to the tech-bro mindset that shapes social media platforms and now the American government.

The billionaire tech-bros’ social media platforms in all their variety have replaced mainstream media as the generator of reality. Mainstream media, meanwhile, has earned the deep cynicism that has resulted from its many failures and accompanied its flailing efforts to retain relevance and financial sustainability in the internet era. The strongest surviving media platforms are those owned and deployed by oligarchs intent on manufacturing the reality they need.

The oligarchs’ media, their spin operations such as the Atlas Network, and their online operations are not bound by truth or decency or good faith. They are splattergun operations that shoot muck at a wall to see what sticks. Humour, cruelty and disingenuousness are easy to deploy when all that matters is victory, power and profit.

The coalition of conspiracists, misogynists, and Religious Right theocrats is being coalesced into a voting bloc that does not care that it is voting for its own immiseration. The oligarchs funnel torrents of money into this project that gives them the political power to shape their world to their desires.

People who care about the well-being of the community and the world’s population more broadly look laughably earnest to the cackling mass of disaffected. Politicians who do offer policy find themselves discredited by oligarch spin as “socialists” or “woke.” Furthermore, in sado-populism policy no longer matters: oligarchs have created a world that has lost faith in the power of government to help them.

Since 2020, the combined wealth of the US’s 614 billionaires has almost doubled, extracting USD2.947 trillion dollars from the common wealth. Neoliberal strategising has served them well: in America, they have stripped every constraint from their ability to extract wealth without interference and have directed the pain against the powerless.

Every extra hurt experienced by the public fuels the Right’s political machine and supercharges oligarchs’ wealth acquisition.

Price-gouging, for example, drives up inflation. This generates profit but also pain to fuel the machine. Incompetent or complicit reserve banks punish the consumer with higher interest rates since they, of course, have no power to tackle the price-gougers. The interest rate rises compound the inflation and the pain.

Biden’s government was, despite its horrific partnership in genocide (1), one of the more reformist Democrat governments in America’s history.(2) It was blocked by Republicans on many programs, because it is incumbent upon the oligarchs’ machine to ensure that policy can never be shown to work. The potential parties of the masses cannot win popularity with success. The broken information space ensures that the public mostly never knows about the programs or understands who blocked them. The populace is taught instead to believe the oligarchs’ freedom is its own freedom and policies that would help the masses are repugnant.

We cannot tackle this crisis without understanding the ingenious process that traps our centrist, and even centre-left, governments. We must see its parameters clearly to begin to tackle it.

Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese’s government needs to make some truly dramatic decisions that can pierce the walls that separate realities. Without genuine efforts to address community anger about such blights as profiteering supermarkets or climate inaction, the trap made for them by the oligarchs will be sprung.(3)

Then, we too will return to the fascist-trending politics of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.

(1) The transnational authoritarian project mutually reinforces its fellows here. Both Putin’s and Netanyahu’s wars fed into the success of Trump, whom they knew would serve their goals better. Meanwhile, corporations, as well as Atlas Network partners, fund and support far-right parties, because they can be better partners than liberal democracies. (Until such time as authoritarians stop suppressing protest and investigative journalism, and begin to take foreign assets for themselves.)

(2) Biden’s government has a mixed record on addressing domestic injustice. The Democrats are as captive to the various forces in the economy as any Labo(u)r government, meaning that their actions are piecemeal and peripheral at best. It was more pro-union than most American governments, after the destruction of unions which was a major goal of the Atlas Network spin and strategy machine. This Democrat message was not a consistent project, however, with the destruction of the rail workers’ sick leave campaign emblematic. The Inflation Reduction Act was meant to foster employment at home as well as being the most significant investment in a transition away from a fossil fuel economy in the world. That is not saying much, of course. The appointment of Lina Kahn to break monopolies has proved a much-resented obstacle to the oligarchs’ machinations to control markets.

Republicans voted against many policies that would have helped their constituents, with the rejection of the expansion of Medicare as the most notable generator of sado-populist pain continuing since the Obama era. Republican congresspeople also claim popular policies that they voted against as their own success. The collapse of our information space means that lies become truth, and ignorance prevails.

Arguably, though, the neoliberal consensus has created a deteriorating life for workers where such nuances only tackle the fringes of the injustice: why should they care?

(3) The current bill that feigns addressing money in Australian politics epitomises the Labor Party’s capture. They are voting with the illiberal Liberal Party to prevent new independents from gaining seats from them. Instead of addressing the media, disinformation and integrity crises in a way that might bolster a centrist party in the longer term, they seek to ensure the duopoly maintains power. This, despite the evidence that the last LNP government (with media partners) was working to ensure that a Labor victory would be ever more difficult to achieve. Labor seems to like its chains.

The corporate world is afraid of youth demanding change, particularly as rapacious business practices look set to drive us over the climate cliff into a frightening future. One solution the Right has implemented is the Christian Classical Education movement.

It is an ultraconservative educational fashion from the US. Michigan’s Hillsdale College is its lodestar, celebrated by American Trumpists. Tony Abbott delivered an awkward speech at the National Symposium for Classical Education in Arizona in January.

One of its leading lights, Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute, recently delivered three lectures in Australia. Kern diagnosed us as living in “a broken and fragmented age in which we are going through a crisis of deliberation, of meaning and of glory.”

Our thought began to disintegrate into discord from coherence, apparently, from around 1600, the start of the Modern Age. Now we live in chaos and our education system inculcates children with discordance, a disease. Not only does it lead to disorder in our world, but modern education even drives children to suicide, he alleges.

Kern believe that education’s “primary function” is to be “ordering their minds.” Students’ minds can be ordered by an education that nourishes their soul. Christianity and the treasures of the Western canon are taught to celebrate glory. Latin is taught to provide discipline.

The students tend not to be taught functional Latin to read the works of the ancients, because there is far too much to upset a well-ordered Christian mind there. The language is taught like a puzzle and out of all-consuming “piety,” or reverence for the past.

Teaching the “Great Books” is not an inherently concerning mission; there is much there to be admired. It becomes problematic when the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful, as Kern describes his work, involves trapping people in ideas that cannot change.

Kern diagnoses that study of the “liberating [rather than liberal] arts” was debased into “subjects.” Subjects became debased into “studies,” which were intended to make us into “activists.” The activists are the problem, rather than attempting to solve problems. They reflect and make discord. This is the change conservatism was birthed to prevent.

Tradition, for Kern, is an inheritance to pass on unscuffed. Tradition does not gleam so, however, if one is traditionally oppressed. For this reason, CCE teaching must be bowdlerised to prevent exposing the cruel undercurrents of the story. Not only might students learn that being Black or Queer is not a defect, but they might also learn of traditions of resistance to power.

The schools see themselves as “the last real halls of learning, a bulwark against the barbarian hordes of liberalism and ignorance.”

There are several CCE schools in Australia currently. They are also fostered by the Christopher Dawson Centre for Cultural Studies, a Catholic “intellectual society” in Hobart. David Daintree, its director, organises anti-trans activities and shares climate denial material with his mailing list.

CCE is affiliated with other problematic movements.

One is the “Western Civilisation” movement. This is a trend on the Right that sees White and Christian and Western men as threatened individually, and existentially as an identity, by efforts to incorporate newer voices into understanding the world and our places within it. Mediocre men from comfortable backgrounds have long had an unearned advantage. Some are aggrieved at having to compete in a wider pool of excellent candidates for preferment and for defining reality.

Defending “Western Civilisation” at National Conservative (NatCon) events becomes code for defending White or Christian or Western men against Muslims, against non-White people, against LGBTQIA+ people, against feminists. Life was better before any one of those other “identities” were allowed to hold a microphone in the civic space.

Augusto Zimmerman, in 2018, exposed how the Western Civilisation movement defines itself (through sleight of hand) as the saviour of “indigenous populations from utter annihilation” and against Islam as an inferior civilisation, explaining multiculturalism as an “anti-Western ideology.” He also wants schools to include study of the “crimes of communism.” The CIA roots of Quadrant live on.

The plutocrats’ influence machines are embedded in that movement. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is entwined in this NatCon mission, nostalgic for a world where God and fossil fuels were respected. It intends to reimpose that natural order.

The ARC is interlinked with the Atlas Network. The Australian Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is a likely partner. The Atlas Network has made its partner organisations secret in recent years, but Ramsay now appears alongside the known partner organisations such as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and Mannkal at Atlas-linked events.

Embedding conservative and neoliberal beachheads in academia is a near century-old strategy of the neoliberal movement that created the Atlas Network. It began with the original colonisation of three departments at the University of Chicago in the 1940s.

The Ramsay centre has established three such beachheads in the University of Wollongong, the University of Queensland and the Australian Catholic University, despite arguments that they would become “weaponised learning.” The first chairman of the board was John Howard who was listed on the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) rolls when they were last leaked. The MPS is the inner sanctum of the Atlas Network. Tony Abbott is also on the board. He has long links with Atlas partners such as the IPA and, more recently, Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute (now affiliated with leading American junktank, the Heritage Foundation).

Andrew Kern spoke in Australia to the Ramsay Centre. Simon Haines, the CEO, began his introduction with, “As usual I’d like to start by acknowledging…” He followed this formula with a pause, then concluded, “our wonderful benefactor, the late, great Paul Ramsay.” This parody of the Welcome to Country is predictable in an organisation whose founding was coordinated by Tony Abbott.

Haines boasted in this introduction to the sophomoric lecture that Ramsay collaborates with those three universities to stage summer schools for Year 11 and 12 students, interviewing 100 of them annually for allocations of Scholar status. Gaining access to secondary schools was important, he asserted, because schooling is “where the foundation is laid for what young people, future university students and future citizens, think of their society and the wider world that they will inherit.” One of Atlas’s strategies has been finding and lucratively promoting the careers of young “conservatives” from university days through into the professions. It seems that the model is now working to ensure school students are prevented from become feisty before university. The “School strike for Climate” movement was no doubt inconvenient for a deeply fossil fuel-funded network.

CCE is also connected to the “charter school” movement. This is a movement that takes public education money for privately run schools. Some of the schools it produces educate well, offering students a better education than they might find in their community. Others are terrible. Some are reputation-laundering philanthropic exercises by exploitative plutocrats. Paul Marshall, scandal-plagued hedge-fund multimillionaire, is a backer of the ARC and was chair and trustee of Ark Charter Schools. As an ultraconservative Evangelical his mission to promote the private use of public school money is suspect.

The transnational Right is at war with public schooling. This American campaign was born in anger at the idea that White students might be educated alongside Black ones, but it has transformed into a fear that public school teachers will undermine the reactionary “truths” the right wants taught. Atlas’s Heritage Foundation is in the thick of trying to dismantle public education in America.

In Australia, this campaign is powered along by the IPA, led by Bella D’Abrera. Trisha Jha has campaigned for charter schools in Australia from as early as 2015 with the CIS. She spoke on them again at CIS’s Consilium in 2023 with Macke Raymond, of the Atlas-partner Hoover Institute. The benign-sounding “school choice” is a wedge aiming to undermine further our desperately underfunded public school system.

Most teachers would embrace a curriculum that nourished students instead of preparing them for neoliberal benchmarks. Most Australians would prefer to see excellence in a properly-funded state school system, not taking that public funding to give to private projects.

As we debate solving the outrageous overpayment of private schools and drastic underfunding of public, we must beware right wing figures disguising reactionary control as educational “choice.”

This was first published at Pearls and Irritations as The Right’s War to Control Education

The Triple Conference took place in Albury in March. Conspiracists and hustlers appeared alongside the well-meaning and self-important to inform a small audience of largely white-haired elders about the North Korean conditions overtaking Australia. We are dark in politics and spirit.

The “triple” in the name referred to the uniting of three distinct events. The third day was dedicated to “The Aussie Wire,” a Red-pilled Right YouTube channel integrating transnational rightwing figures.

The second day was the “Church and State conference.” Church and State describes itself as “grassroots-funded, unaffiliated ‘marketplace’ ministry” founded by David Pellowe. As a political organiser, more recently for Family First, he was frustrated by the fact that Christians were not actively ensuring their priorities were represented in government. It held its inaugural conference in 2018, with former Deputy PM John Anderson as the keynote speaker. Pellowe enjoined the 2023 conference to ensure ultra-conservative, religiously-driven candidates “prevail” in every branch in a “long march” over decades. In 2018, Pellowe orchestrated a speaking tour for two white nationalist agitators.

The first of the three days was the Friedman Conference, an event that has been the droll highlight of the libertarian calendar in Australia since 2013. It was the product of the Australian Libertarian Society (ALS) and the Taxpayer Alliance of Australia (ATA), co-hosted with other Atlas Network junktank partners. It drew together university students with the few keen adults who have not grown out of the faux-intellectual ideology.

There, in better days, representatives of the US Atlas bodies such as Dr Tom Palmer appeared. The event described him thus in 2018: he is “executive vice president for international programs at Atlas Network and is responsible for establishing operating programs in 14 languages and managing programs for a worldwide network of think tanks.”

In 2018, for example, Palmer delivered a patronising lecture to the students on “personal responsibility,” decorated with references to Friedrich Hayek and Aristotle, also advertising the Network’s products including his “snack boxes for the mind.” One such was “The Morality of Capitalism” which had been translated into 43 languages at that time: convenient with around 100 countries now hosting these bodies designed to promote ease of operation for American (and local) corporations.

Tim Wilson has presented from the inaugural conference in 2013 and was a sometime coordinator. In 2015, he was welcomed to the Friedman Conference podium as the Human Rights Commissioner but “better known to all of us here as the Freedom Commissioner.” The MC declared, “In that role, he is actually standing up for real human rights as opposed to what the human rights industry might think are human rights, which is in fact quite the opposite of it.” The human rights he went on to defend after that introduction? “Property rights as human rights.” It was a fitting topic: as a servant of the aspiring plutocrats, he had to defend their right to stage their “tax strike.” Redistribution is theft; taxation is, these figures imply, a slippery slide to a totalitarian state that outlaws private property.

It is hardly surprising that the event brought Grover Norquist out for the 2019 conference. He is the founder of the Atlas anti-tax body, Americans for Tax Reform, responsible for the statement, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” His anti-tax and anti-government mission has been a key component of the massive inequalities that are damaging societies. They are also a producer of the vast sums available to dark money distortion of our politics. The constant campaigning of Atlas partners such as the ATA has helped create an Australia that “has one of the weakest tax systems for redistribution among industrial nations.” Our system behaves like an “emerging economy” such as Chile, Mexico and Türkiye.

Members of the scandal-ridden Libertarian Party, better known as the Liberal Democrat Party have been regular attendees; this is not surprising since the party was created by the ATA’s John Humphreys.(1) David Leyonhjelm spoke in the second year. In 2016, the Atlas-partner Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) celebrated his election as placing someone representing that body in parliament. Climate-conspiracist John Ruddick MP has been a regular attendee too. The party had tried to use pandemic health measures to garner support, intertwining its politicians with the conspiracy sphere. David Limbrick, Victorian Libertarian is part of a “moral” panic that distorts the facts about trans healthcare.

The connection of “liberty” and conspiracy was reinforced by other political attendees in 2024. One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts presented; his election to politics in Canberra was best described as sad because it “denied a village somewhere in Australia of its idiot.” Victorian Senator and United Australia Party buffoon Ralph Babet also spoke. These parties are guilty of promoting conspiracy theories as part of a message of freedom from nefarious “elites,” as opposed to the mundane big money figures distorting politics against the wellbeing of Roberts’ and Babet’s voters.

Friedman Day was dominated by celebrations of Atlas Network operative President Javier Milei’s “success” at bringing “freedom” to Argentina. There was no sign of other Atlas Junktanks this year, perhaps preferring the posh crowd at the Atlas conference celebrating Gina Rinehart in Perth. When Babet and Roberts are considered exciting guests, the better-connected libertarians have lost interest.

Intellectual heft was granted by the dolorous Augusto Zimmerman, Brazilian-Australian Liberal Party legal scholar and Quadrant-affiliate, who coined the neologism “Wokeshevism.” Social justice concerns and empirical bases for policies are, of course, communist. He asserts the oligarchic threat to Australian rule of law lies in ministers and senior public servants, rather than in the plutocrats. If he had cited Robodebt rather than pandemic responses, his speech might have had resonance for a less niche audience.

Note that Zimmerman’s choice of topic is a trope of the libertarian and radicalising right signalling an intent to fight any law that constrains (corporate) freedom, whatever the cost.(2) Such figures naturally oppose any “democratic regulation of money in politics.” Steve Bannon established two “rule of law” junktanks over Covid, which are held responsible for disseminating anti-China propaganda. Zimmerman’s flippant use of the term “plandemic” for the pandemic was a gift to the conspiracists in the audience, who had been radicalised by that “documentary” when Steve Bannon helped it go viral.

While the 2024 event was organised by conspiracist Topher Field, the ATA continued to play a subdued function with their “Chief Economist” John Humphreys delivering the welcome. The IPA, Ron Manners’ Mannkal and the Centre for Independent Studies were missing after a decade of involvement. Instead the event featured the support of Reignite Democracy, Monica Smit’s anti-lockdown body. On May 4th, Smit and Reignite were convicted “on charges related to running an unregistered fundraiser to pay her legal bills.”

Another sponsor was the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) which has been described as one of several “fake unions” established to contest covid health measures such as mandatory vaccination. Both President Chris Neil and Vice President Duncan Syme spoke.

Professor Ian Brighthope, a doctor who has been platformed by the AMPS, also presented. His prior career in “Nutritional and Environmental Medicine” included treating an extensive range of diseases like cancer with “megadoses of intravenous Vitamin C and other nutrients.” He spoke about how he had experienced a heart attack as a result of breathing in exosomes “because I was too close to too many people breathing out toxic substances from the vaccines.” Gina Rinehart has disseminated his assertion that covid should have been treated with vitamins. So has Russell Broadbent.

In America, it has been established that there are far more excess deaths in states with low vaccination rates.

Predictably, climate action was a target at the conference with the “Gala” dinner named “Nyet Zero.” On the “Aussie Wire” conference day, Joanne Nova spoke. She is a “science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host.” She began her speech on Net Zero complaining that we let “freeloading parasites turn science into a group hug form of neolithic sorcery.”

Smit’s speech on her relationship with God included the instruction that her fellow travellers must stand for the end to all abortion.

Christian activist Kirralie Smith also appeared. In 2017, Smith presented a video for the Islamophobic Q Society. At around that time, she opposed marriage equality. In 2018 after marriage equality was passed in Australia, she rebranded her “Marriage Alliance” group to “Binary Australia.” She had AVOs taken out against her in 2023 for “multiple alleged instances of harassing two individuals.” She sees multiculturalism as a “threat.” In Albury, she continued her anti-trans campaign.

Topher Field’s sermon on Church and State Day promoted a form of theocracy known as “theonomy.” This is the belief that “teaches that Old Covenant judicial laws are the universal moral standard of civil law for all Gentile nations.” Field uses the prescription that the only laws are those given by God to “the Children of Israel.” He asserts there is no basis for the creation of any further laws. Thus any law implemented in modern society that does not function within Old Testament parameters is idolatrous, worshipping man instead of God.

Laws that Field interprets as contradicting Mosaic laws – such as those enabling abortion, preventing conversion “therapy” abuse of LGBTQIA people, and pandemic health measures – demand civil disobedience. Indeed, according to these strictures, paying 10% tax makes the individual a slave.

Field depicts being a Christian in Victoria as being the same as being a Christian in China, feeding the unfounded fear that Christianity is under siege. One slide declared we are beyond “fixing” this with politics.

The uniting of theocrats with libertarians and “cranks” is not a novel phenomenon. The unsavoury Right has exerted a long-term influence on fusion conservatism, despite the intellectual conservatives’ boast about exiling the outliers and bigots.

In 1962, National Review’s senior editor Frank S Meyer wrote an essay called “The Twisted Tree of Liberty” celebrating the allied conservative factions. In response, Catholic L Brent Bozell Jnr wrote “Freedom or Virtue,” a passionate opposition to freedom as the aspiration. There is plenty of temptation to allow individuals to choose virtue in pursuit of salvation; libertarians, he argued, do not need to strip away the legal constraints on sin to earn Heaven. Christians must, according to Bozell, pursue laws that prevent the “sins” they abhor. Government is required, despite libertarian misgivings, to “assist man in this adventure, either with its hobbles or with its crutches.” Both men, like Zimmerman in Albury, accepted that law comes from God rather than the social contract.

Conservatives in the 1950s were able to unite against atheist communism posing an existential threat. The libertarians, theocrats and “cranks” at the Triple Conference were united by the pandemic against “tyrannous” governments. The pandemic and responses were “a dream come true for any and every hate group, snake-oil salesman and everything in between.” The libertarian and conspiracy Right flourished, and some Christian allies declared the vaccine to be “the mark of the beast.”

The factions’ cooperation was, however, visible long before the pandemic. The old paleoconservatives deployed conservative social values cynically to distract from the value-free and cruel libertarian economic policy positions. The post-liberal Right disdains the messy vitality of the diverse, modern world. “Inclusive” is anathema. For some, Christianity drives the mission, pursuing their distinctive definitions of “virtue.” For others, Christianity stands as a cultural signal of White or European or Western Civilisation allegiance. For these, “Christian” functions to divide between allies and outsiders. “Woke” has become the catch-all phrase for the “bleeding hearts” of the empirically-minded world they disdain.

The realignments of the old conservative fusion have pushed the socially coercive and the fringe to the centre of the radicalised movement. This coalition of the free wants only their definition of freedom to be legal. Compliance will be enforced.

The pandemic helped them to galvanise a base hurt and confused by pandemic responses. Now they are working to build electoral success on a strange coalition of actors. They hope to shave off enough votes to win tight races. Groups within the contingent are targeting branches, party structures and elections at all levels of government in Australia.

The Triple Conference might look small and ridiculous. That does not mean we can ignore its message.

Meanwhile in America, libertarians are campaigning to have employers freed from compulsory meal breaks for child labourers and from compulsory water breaks for the agricultural and construction labourers dying in extreme heat. Arizona’s laws removing protections for child labour were drafted by an Atlas Network junktank, the Foundation for Government Accountability.

Their theocrat friends are ensuring the fertility of the poor is uncontrolled, for religious freedom’s sake. So the desperate will replenish the stock of slave-labour workers, obliging the Christians’ libertarian donors.

The conservative movement is sadly debased. L. Brent Bozell Jnr has been described as “the first theocon.” Individual freedom he characterised as “a revolt against God. Bozell’s son spreads disinformation for the Trumpist Republican era. His grandson was recently sentenced to 45 months in prison for his role in Trump’s insurrection.

We have a crisis of authority. Topher Field’s speech suggests he might argue that the youngest Bozell is accepting with Grace the repercussions for Divinely-mandated resistance to bad laws. This is a dangerous place for democratic projects.

(1) Maybe copied from NZ where an Atlas Network partner, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT), transformed into a political party in the early 90s. It is now in the coalition government with its Atlas-operative leader, David Seymour acting as co-Deputy PM.

(2) The Rule of Law Institute in Australia is a “think” tank that describes itself as a “politically non-partisan” body. It largely functions, however, to muddy debate about legislative action that is antagonistic to the corporate interests of its affiliates such as a charter of rights or the Voice to Parliament. Chris Merritt is its Vice President, and writes on legal issues for The Australian. A person common to histories of Atlas Network partners in Australia, Hugh Morgan, is on the governing committee of its education arm. So too is Bruce McWilliam, a pivotal figure at Channel 7, with previous history working for both the Murdochs and Packers, before his recent retirement.

A shorter version of this essay was first published at Pearls and Irritations as Australian Libertarians and Theocrats unite in Albury.

It is very difficult to predict the future fortunes of the global populist nativism that has been threatening democratic projects around the world. Far-right parties continued to gain ground in the European Parliament elections. Trump is overtly embracing the authoritarian themes set out in the Project 2025 roadmap, while his Republican allies pursue extreme policy outcomes. Whether voters notice or care remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that Peter Dutton’s recent posturing exposes his deep transnational connection with that movement.

Peter Dutton’s energy declaration makes clear that Australia is a petrostate and that the fossil fuel sector operates the Coalition as its political arm. While Labor is making progress on decarbonising, Dutton’s declaration on targets and nuclear energy are both policies made by the fossil fuel sector.

Nuclear energy in Australia is a delaying tactic: slow and costly. Reneging on climate targets sets us away from the empirical-world trajectory and firmly in the alliance of authoritarian petrostates. Even such talk will drive away international renewable projects, pleasing the fossil fuel sector. Further strain on our energy grid will drive demand for more gas. The continued high cost of energy (created by the devil’s bargain where Australia’s east coast pays international prices for our own resource) and strain on energy supply will continue to be speciously blamed on “renewables.”

The fact that this boom in gas consumption comes with minimal benefit, and great cost, for Australians matters not to the fossil fuel sector that governs our fate. If it did, they’d pay tax or allow a true resources rent tax as a tiny percent of their massive profits. They were resentful recently at being called leeches: that is fair. Leeches are too small to convey the parasitical nature of the industry.

Dutton’s advisors are drawing on the two strains of tension in the move towards the illiberal right globally: the cost-of-living crisis, which the right deploys as a weapon on climate action, sometimes called greenlash, and the resentment at immigrants.

In India, Modi’s fascistic politicking demonising Muslims in code worked less well, likely countered by dire inequality demoralising those outside the flourishing cities. His Hindutva bigotry with the refrain that Muslims are “infiltrators,” outbreeding the Hindu population, is dangerous.

The outcome of the European election is unnerving. There are now roughly 160 “extreme right” MEPs. This makes them the second largest bloc in the parliament if they are able to forge a cooperative arrangement. The European far right is interconnected with fossil fuel; it places climate science and action in the loathed category of “socialism” and “woke” that must be defeated for “sovereignty.”

The right in Europe is most strongly driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, although this is compounded by cost-of-living pressures, making the region ripe for “greenlash.” Similar motives are steering America, where rightwing politics is even more overtly powered by the fossil fuel dollar. Australians must watch the trajectory and strategies at work.

Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is openly extreme, and AfD has, for now, been expelled by their far-right European partners. AfD met with neo-Nazis to discuss deportation plans. It has courted scandal by its connections with Russia and China. A further furore erupted over a candidate’s call to reclaim pride in Nazi-era military. It is primarily an “aggressive opponent” of the government on climate and energy.

AfD polled strongly in the former East Germany, making it the second strongest party in Germany, and is predicted to poll well in forthcoming German state elections in that region. One commentator declared that the party “mirrored people’s emotional reality” and thus the shambolic campaign was largely irrelevant. Indeed a good TikTok game helped the AfD to poll well amongst the under-30s.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has shown a dangerous path. As a woman, her persona softens the cruelty of her messaging. Her own civic success tempers her call for “traditional” feminine worth; from a male Prime Minister it would blare misogyny. She did not rush towards banning abortion or criminalising homosexuality. Her first step was to remove lesbian mothers from birth certificates. If the birth-parent dies, her children are technically orphaned. The other mother’s parenting rights are dead alongside her beloved. Ultra-reactionary goals are concealed by this slow trajectory. Our fractured attention spans cannot encompass the incremental arithmetic of “This act plus that act equals something frightening.”

Meloni speaks of her pride in being a woman, not as a wholesome message but as code to declare that LGBTQIA+ people are a threat. She poses as though motherhood was endangered globally by Queerness, even though the only Western step taken has been to allow a loosening of language available, like offering “mother” and “birth parent” both.

France’s Marine Le Pen will have another shot at winning power after Macron’s election declaration. In recent years, she has gained substantial sway over the women’s vote by coding her ethnonationalist struggle for France in the language of French values. Equality and liberty are only available to women, in her narrative, in a nation free from a threat defined as “Muslim men.” Softening her stance on other bigotries such as that against LGBTQIA+ rights has helped Le Pen look more mainstream for now.

Meanwhile genuinely centre-right parties in Europe continue to find common ground with the far-right. The leader of the French conservative party, the Republicans, announced he would like an alliance with Le Pen. He declared, “We say the same things so let’s stop making up imagined opposition.” The Netherlands has just established its furthest right government, with liberals and conservatives entering a 4-party coalition government with extremist Geert Wilders.

The complicated connection of all these parties with Vladimir Putin should come as no surprise. He was fostering Neo Nazism in East Germany from his early career. Succeeding in the 2024 European election, they have immediately begun repaying Putin for his long-term assistance by steering Europe against Ukraine. Both directly and through Putin‘s deputy, Viktor Orbán, these forces work for fossil fuel and against democratic projects. Putin’s support for fossil fuel dominance and his efforts to propel displaced people towards Europe, plus his inflationary war on Ukraine, all grow the European right’s support base.

These parties all share in Putin’s “traditionalism:” an existential battle to eliminate any perceived threat to a white, “Christian,” heterosexual, patriarchal ethnostate.

In America, the right continues to pursue the most extremist steps. Around the nation, reproductive rights continue to be under attack with the Supreme Court’s men enthusiastically debating quite how close to death the pregnant have to be to deserve emergency treatment. Contraception, women’s access to divorce or even to vote are on the table.

Meanwhile LGBTQIA+ Americans watch Pride Month once again met with Neo Nazi violence. At the same time, the Republican establishment has promised the rolling back of their rights. Marriage equality will have been a short-lived triumph if Trump wins in November.

Trump is also promising to deport up to 11 million non-White people with limited process.

He is characterising immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our nation” in echo of Nazi rhetoric. He is outright declaring his fascistic goals of vengeance on his political enemies.

The theocratic Project 2025 that is likely to be implemented with a Trump victory is written by a coalition of Trump’s allies brought together by a fossil fuel-funded junktank and driven by fossil fuel money. Indeed the fossil fuel sector is crafting executive orders to be handed to Trump for his first day in office in case other fascistic projects distract him.

And yet the election appears to hang in the balance.

Dutton has given up dogwhistles for bullhorns on the subject of immigration. His announcement of a fossil fuel-crafted energy policy is equally consonant with the global right.

The danger for the rest of us is that this forges a feedback loop. The right, fossil fuel-funded and connected, will increase the impact of the climate crisis. That rolling catastrophe provokes price pain and more displacement, which meat the right can feed upon.

The fact-based world needs to work out how we prevent the apocalypse the right is creating.

This essay is an extension of that first published in Pearls and Irritations

The “great patriotic conference in Madrid” has echoes in a flurry of National Conservative (NatCon) activity in Australia. Here too, corporate dollars keep the illiberal project afloat. This is the second in a pair of essays.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) has stepped up its efforts after its October conference in London. Campbell Newman’s ecstatic promise at an Atlas Network-partner event – at the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP) – to continue to develop it here in the meantime has taken form (with or without his involvement).

Marcus Foord has been appointed the Convenor of the “Australian Chapter of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.” His previous work includes functioning as a staffer for Senator Sarah Henderson who has been seen at rightwing “insurgency” events that undermine the efforts to shore up electable centrism in the Victorian Liberal Party.

Word of mouth reports suggest that two fundraising events took place in Sydney and Melbourne for ARC Australia in April. Membership recruiting emails are circulating.

ARC was founded by former National Party leader John Anderson in conjunction with Baroness Philippa Stroud formerly of the Legatum hedge fund’s “think tank” and pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson. The National Party’s pro-fossil fuel “think tank”, the Page Research Centre sends out emails that declare such inaccurate propaganda as

“The rapid build out of renewables paired with the retiring of our coal fired power stations has been rationalised upon two dangerously false calculations.

1. That renewables are cheap and reliable
2. That the world is turning away from coal”

Anderson is the Chairman of the Board for Page. Its new CEO is Gerard Holland who has been working for the Legatum Institute for over three years, and as a paid “researcher” for the ARC according to Stroud’s parliamentary declaration, before taking on the Page role.

Stroud, incidentally, belongs to a controversial church where her husband is a leader, the Newfrontiers church. It has been accused of homophobia, fights abortion access and embraces “joyful female submission.” Stroud was reported to be in Australia for the ARC fund-raising events.

The Atlas Network-partner Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, joined by the range of other domestic Atlas partners, hosted a conference on the 17^th of April with the American network’s Atlas Society. While the Atlas Network denies that its name is drawn from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the Atlas Society is dedicated to celebrating Rand’s legacy. The conference was instigated to award the Atlas Society’s lifetime achievement award to Gina Rinehart, the first female recipient.

In Rinehart’s acceptance speech she reiterated her dedication since the age of 13 to Rand’s puerile “philosophy” that aims to dignify greed and selfishness. Furthermore Rinehart used the “courage” referred to in the speech celebrating her own career as an excuse to celebrate convicted felon Donald Trump. She spoke with devotion of the reason Trump rises each morning to pursue a second term in the White House. It is not, apparently, to quash the plethora of cases addressing his constant criminality and sedition. Neither is it an aggrieved narcissism determined to win and take revenge. It is because, Rinehart quoted, “I love America and I love the American people.” Rinehart concluded that Australia needed more politicians like Trump. If anyone needs proof that success is not linked to intellect, we have it there.

The other speeches at the day reiterated the talking points present at all NatCon events. The war to save fossil fuels from socialist renewables, the war on woke, preservation of an eye-wincingly narrow definition of family, the protection of children from modernity. Vacuous Briton Brendan O’Neill fabricated straw men of “woke” positions, denigrated “climate change hysteria” and claimed that bourgeois self-loathing had led the West to push our children into the “arms of barbarism.” He describes protesting for peace and justice in Israel as preferring “the antisemitic horror of Hamas” to the enlightened gains of our own societies. The implication is that all Palestinians are terrorists. Not even the babies deserve our outcry.

It is not surprising that Janet Albrechtsen was one of the presenters. She was a member of the secretive, invitation-only Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) the last time its membership was leaked. The MPS is the inner sanctum of the Atlas Network and a centre of climate denial activity.

Albrechtsen’s speech was driven by the “injustices” around the Lehrmann case. She celebrated the judicial activism of Antonin Scalia, “conservative intellectual gladiator,” who legitimised the marginal theory of “Originalism” that is underpinning NatCon activity within the American Supreme Court. Her speech nevertheless strongly condemned “activist judges,” a current trope of the rightwing culture war that delegitimises any judicial decision they find objectionable.

Albrechtsen’s determined effort to combat the MeToo movement in campaigning for Bruce Lehrmann and against Shane Drumgold became the primary factor ensuring that legal findings against Drumgold could have “no legal effect.” Albrechtsen criticised media interventions for Higgins, and yet the public has access to thorough detailing of her own extensive “media interventions” against Higgins in Acting Justice Kaye’s judgment.

The Page newsletter cited above also quoted the Mannkal conference’s “evidence” on energy policy.

Elsewhere, Atlas Network partner the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) is rolling out events trying to dignify its embarrassing “CIS Energy Program”, which betrays the boasted academic credentials of the parent “thinktank.” It is an instrument to promote nuclear energy which is widely understood in the Australian market to be a mechanism to delay transition to clean energy, having missed the moment where nuclear would have been a reasonable option. Unfortunately reputable figures are allowing themselves to be made tools in these performances, granting credibility to a disingenuous project.

We must pay attention to these events and “thinktank” activity: there are overlapping figures, organisations and donors – domestic and international – at work cooperating to achieve their goals. They function primarily to free corporations from the regulations that protect us and the taxes that fund society. Now, however, they have pushed to the foreground the illiberal project of the NatCon movement too.

The Atlas Network is funded by a range of beleaguered corporate sectors such as fossil fuel, tobacco and private healthcare. It rewards its funders and activists. An Atlas Network-partner, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) was a finalist for one of Atlas’s grand awards, the Templeton Freedom Award, for its work under Tim Wilson to defeat the so-called “carbon tax.”

When the Atlas Society CEO, wearing a jewelled dollar-sign brooch, presented aspiring-oligarch Rinehart her award, the CEO bemoaned the “incredibly hostile regulatory climate in which [mining] is forced to operate.”

The most significant goal appears to be resisting the energy transition. Whether from Russia, through Orbán, or American donors and their architecture of influence, the money and message promote continued carbon emissions. Orbán is now overtly connecting his influence bodies with the American fossil-fuel funded Atlas Network. The particular partner, the Heritage Foundation, with which the alliance was made is the same one planning the fossil fuel-driven and extremist Christian Project 2025 for a new Trump administration. Tony Abbott’s April speaking tour with Orbán’s Danube Institute, including an event co-hosted by the Quadrant Journal in Sydney, is particularly troubling.

The reactionary goals of the funders are turned into a populist culture war with every enemy labelled “woke.” They aim to elect their illiberal leaders with such a base.

Whether inspired by reactionary religion, like Philippa Stroud appears to be, or clinging to religion as a cultural symbol representing “traditional” values, these groups place religion in some form as a core element of their identity.

Their conventions and gatherings are largely staged out of sight, but the kaleidoscope of figures and issues connected across the networks is aiming to impose strict rules on our societies.

The old “conservative” debate about the primacy of freedom or virtue has relinquished “freedom” as a goal except for their corporations who must operate without regulation. “Virtue” must be imposed on a renegade majority that they perceive to have lost it, producing an existential crisis. Democracy has become a weapon of the enemy.

Their definition of “virtue” is not one embraced by the majority in the societies these coalitions intend to impose it upon. If we don’t watch them, we cannot understand the clues they grant us as they arm themselves for battle.

In Australia and around the world, the far right is actively working and meeting, aiming to recreate their nations in a form most of us do not want. In Spain recently, a “great patriotic convention” was staged, bringing together the far-right parties of Europe and beyond. In Australia, their affiliated networks are working, largely out of the public eye, to ensure they too are able to impose their minority positions against our majority will. Corporations and their influence networks are funding this activity. Part 1 of a pair of essays addresses the international scene.

In late May, the Spanish convention, Europa Viva 24, brought together most notable far-right politicians, and parties, including the Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli. The (temporary) Zionism of the event veils a deep antisemitism, but Netanyahu has long promoted antisemites and antisemitism providing this supports his expansionist goals. Jew-demonising Neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers are only antisemites if they oppose Israeli religio-ethnonationalism from the river to the sea. Or, as Netanyahu’s Likud Party frames it: “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

Any Jewish person who opposes this project becomes the antisemite in this redefining of the term. In fact, Chikli does not consider such a person a Jew. Madrid is only the latest in a series of meetings with antisemitic far right factions that Chikli has promoted in recent times.

This is the National Conservative (NatCon) movement of affiliated religio-ethnonationalisms. Far right Israelis, Hindutva Indians, and Christian Nationalists cooperate to reinforce each other’s project; Muslims and modernity are the designated mutual enemies that bind them. Civilian Palestinians are only Hamas, in the same spirit as this coalition designating all Muslims as terrorists and central to the Great Replacement conspiracy.

The list of figures in attendance at the Madrid convention, and the variety of rightwing bents represented, is telling. They illustrate how a rightwing “popular front” is being forged against everything the coalition defines as “communist.” Extremist Catholics and anti-communists from across the Latin sphere, north and south of the globe, combine in a neo-Francoist movement based in Spain, known as the Madrid Forum. The Vox Party, representing such forces within Spain, hosted the convention.

Italy’s Meloni and Hungary’s Orbán spoke by video link. France’s Le Pen was amongst the many politicians there in person. All were agitating for far-right mobilisation ahead of looming elections.

Europa Viva 24, however, was much more than a European event. CPAC – the trashy American face of the NatCon movement – declared that it had “joined forces” with Vox at the event. The coordinators of CPAC, Matt and Mercedes Schlapp had just come from CPAC Hungary with Chikli, where Tony Abbott presented on his recent speaking tour.

Another Madrid attendee was Roger Severino, vice-president of the Heritage Foundation. Heritage shaped Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism, creating the Mandate for Leadership that dictated 2/3 of the policy of his first year. The 2024 iteration of this Atlas Network-partner’s Mandate has rejected neoliberalism in favour of theocratic illiberalism.

One of the chief targets in Madrid was international bodies that aim to bind nations. The development goals espoused by the UN were framed as an “ecofeminist” conspiracy. Viktor Orbán, by video, delivered the pronouncement that, ‘We the patriots must occupy Brussels.” The EU has been a key target of their fury.

These far-right parties, junktanks and corporate funders are determined that bodies such as the EU or the UN are nobbled if they can’t be broken. Regulations impede profit. The fact that 5-year-old children in the EU are now taller than in Brexit Britain is a telling symptom of the world this coalition wants to create: the malnutrition of Global North children matters as little as the welfare of children in the Global South has to them. They distract with culture war concerns about the EU “poisoning our children with gender propaganda” to cover for their utter lack of concern about children’s life or death struggle for food.

It is not surprising, then, to find the ever-metastasising Atlas Network is involved. As usual there is money to be made from corporate donors and plutocrats’ foundations in fighting the bodies that enable the population to resist predator capitalists who intend to extract every cent of profit from us, without regard for our opinion or pain.

A weakened Brexit Britain, with poverty prevalent in 1/5th of the state, is tempting pickings for predator capitalists. The NHS is devastated by years of Tory activity driven by private healthcare donors and corporate influence networks mostly linked to Atlas, who are working to recreate the USA’s sickening chasm in healthcare for Britain: the plutocrats and enablers will receive excellent care at eye-watering cost. The masses will die young and bankrupt in pursuit of the universal medical care they once enjoyed.

The EU too can offer such rich profits, if only the technocrats devising regulations that protect the people can be removed. For this reason, speakers at the Spanish convention dwelt on the repulsive “socialism” of the EU and focused on the culture war topics such as mythical attempts to change children’s gender as a weapon for their base.

“Sovereignty” is the justification for these attacks on international organisations, and another weapon. The UK Tories have been trying to present the European Convention on Human Rights as impinging on British freedoms to harm migrants. Like Brexit, leaving the convention would be a matter of “sovereignty.” Of course Britons losing human rights protections would suit the corporate interests that drive the Tories. The same Tories, furthermore, are pushing for freeports which grant all untrammelled rights to corporations, abandoning sovereignty.

Vox, the Spanish far right party, was represented by its leader. He declared that an international alliance was the only way these parties who “defend our national sovereignty” can succeed. Only a “global alliance” can defeat the “shared threat” of “globalism and its socialist soul.” This is the century-old “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy persisting.

Milei is the figure who most clearly illustrates the change in the Atlas Network. He spoke as a staunch advocate of neoliberalism, as an Atlas apparatchik should. He appealed, however, to the theocratic bent prevalent in this NatCon movement: “let’s not let the dark, black, satanic, disgusting, atrocious, carcinogenic side – which is socialism – defeat us.” It is this existential crisis that ought to unite the attendees over “the differences we may have on this side in life.”

In America and around the anglosphere, the Right is radicalising, committing to “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” The “Highest Good” is God’s mandate – as they define it. The Europeans gathered with them in Madrid agree.

And when God is dictating the rules this forcefully, the marketplace of ideas is dead. This is civil war for the soul of the nation: no quarter will be given.

And the corporate dollar is very happy to subsidise illiberalism that will allow it uninterrupted profits.

Those with a dedicated interest in maintaining the status quo fear education in the wrong hands. America’s current moment illuminates trends in Australia’s education: from the draconian repression of US student protests against the probable genocide taking place in Gaza to the Republican campaign to destroy public education, we must take note.

Campus protests against the war in Gaza have been troubling university administrators. At a Columbia University protest in January, for example, figures reputed to have links to the Israeli Defence Forces are alleged to have been responsible for a “chemical attack” on students protesting for peace in Gaza. The university initially responded by condemning the student protesters.

The protest movement has exploded this week after Columbia and several other institutions escalated their repression of protest. Student editorial boards at the universities condemned the actions. At NYU, 128 students, staff and community members were arrested. The college had constructed a plywood wall around students to keep the protest from even being visible.

The attacks on non-violent speech have resulted in students across the nation setting up encampments, occupying buildings and ignoring demands to leave. Now staff at the University of Texas Austin staged a strike against the militarised response to peaceful, planned protest. City police and state troopers with tear gas and guns were deployed against students who had organised a day of teach-ins, pizza and an art workshop.

It is becoming clear that in America, there is no protected way to protest America spending tens of billions to enable the destruction of the Palestinian people and society without being depicted as a supporter of terrorism. This is despite the fact that many (sometimes most) of the protesting students are Jewish. Their bloc is a valued component of the coalition. When students resisting peacefully are carried away by police or banned from their college campuses as a result, these protesting Jewish students are certainly not made safer.

Protest is labelled “antisemitic” because, it appears, Palestinian lives are worthless. While economic sanctions were the peaceful protest that helped bring down South African apartheid, the same tool being used against Israeli apartheid is punished.

Neocon warmonger now journalist David Frum tweeted that student debt forgiveness must be denied those protesters obstructing others’ learning. As commenters pointed out, this made clear the Right-Wing interest in using chilling measures to suppress student dissent and to enforce compliance. The rich do not need debt forgiveness; as usual, their speech is elevated.

Part of the problem lies in university administrators being terrified of losing their jobs because of the threats by politicians and donors if they do not shut down protest supporting Palestinians.

A group of Jewish faculty members at Columbia rejected the Congressional attack on the university’s leader as a “weaponization of antisemitism.” They also condemned it as part of “a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of ‘woke indoctrination‘.”

Educational opportunities at the primary and secondary levels have been revolutionised by public education, but that revolution is now troubling Republican thought leaders. Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in her executive order to stop the teaching of Black history (misleadingly referred to as “critical race theory”) emphasised that education must be to prepare students to “enter the workforce.” Understanding the lasting impacts of a segregated nation might lead to workers questioning their conditions. Ignorance is powerlessness.

Huckabee Sanders is just one of many Republicans dedicated to dismantling public education to replace it with (religious) private education. Ascendant Christian Nationalism has meant that a narrow moral education is taking over from other concerns.

The unifying message is the fear of free speech, despite the First Amendment. In the country that treats its constitution as sacred, the forces of the Right are frightened of the change that might be ushered in by youth challenging dogma, whether in class projects or university protests.

Many of the figures that have held power in conservative governments of recent years lived through the 1968 era of youth revolution. That moment of turmoil and rejection of the status quo was terrifying to those holding firmly to the venerated past.

Political descendants such as Tony Abbott, who began university in the late 70s, pitched themselves as right wing brawlers against such “communist” infiltration. News Corp journalist Greg Sheridan left his junior seminary because its “social activism” disturbed him and went on to fight “communism” at university instead. Issues of justice continue to be labelled “communism” by such figures.

It is common in our flawed democracies for those in power to allow debate and protest about topics that have not troubled them overly, such as marriage equality or what time nightclubs close. It provides a useful distraction and outlet for the public to feel its voice is heard and even incremental change made.

Issues that might impede core projects are treated in very different ways altogether. Profits – whether in resource extraction or in the military-industrial complex – are sacrosanct. As the climate crisis begins to destroy Australian lives, state governments are dramatically escalating repressive laws to crush protest. The right-wing architecture of influence galvanised to prevent the Voice to Parliament in case it obstructed or delayed mining projects.

Under Whitlam, university education was made more available, more stimulating, and free. Bob Hawke enabled the foot-in-the-door introduction of Thatcher and Reagan’s neoliberalism; as part of that, he was the prime minister who reintroduced a barrier payment to education through HECS. Coalition governments have continued to damage education quality and attempt to raise its cost.

Now a medical degree is costing students $366,739 dollars at a moment when a fifth of junior doctors are considering leaving the profession. Monique Ryan MP is leading a campaign to tackle the crippling nature of HECS debt, where an Australian earning $60,000 a year will “see their debt increase by $1,177, despite having paid off $1,200 over the year.” The debt burden is a powerful tool to control the citizenry.

As for public schools, the huge disparity in subsidy continues under the ALP. While 98% of private schools are overfunded, only 1.3% of state schools are fully funded. Our schools don’t enable social mobility; inequality is entrenched.

It is more likely that the Albanese government fears middle class electorates’ backlash rather than believing itself to be dedicated to the cause of crippling social movement and critical thought; it must however have the courage to rebuild Australia as a place where we value a fair go. We must have governments working in cooperation with the country, not requiring the electorate silenced while they enact destructive goals for resource extractors and military contractors.

State schools and overburdened teachers here are decried as “woke” by right-wing activists, echoing their American models.

If children aren’t told that jarrah and marri forests in Western Australia are dying, mountain ash forests in Victoria are dying, snow gum forests in the high country are dying, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, maybe we can pretend there is no climate crisis underway.

Private school children, one presumes, have enough investment in the status quo to deserve such disproportionate sums.

John F Kennedy warned in 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Vested interests plan for there to be no protest at all, no matter how many lives its absence will cost.

This was first published at Pearls and Irritations as Silencing Resistance.