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.

The global movement towards authoritarianism took a step forward this week, and faced an experiment in checking its infiltration. In America, a frightening move towards crushing protest was made when the Supreme Court refused to hear the Mckesson v Doe case on liability accruing to protest organisers. In Europe, an international gathering of far right politicians was broken up by a brave (or reckless) mayor and the local police.

The Trump appointment-stacked Fifth Circuit had found that protest organiser DeRay Mckesson was liable for injuries sustained by an anonymous policeman at a civil rights protest against a shooting of a Black man, in Baton Rouge in 2016. Mckesson had no interaction with the assailant and had not exhorted violence, so US legal precedent should have protected his First Amendment speech rights. Unfortunately, inflicting “catastrophic financial liability” on protest organisers is a tantalising project for the Trump Right, and the Supreme Court has, for now, refused to tackle the finding.

The impact is feared to mean that even counterprotestors – such as Neo Nazis – would be included in the ambit of people for whose actions protest organisers could be held liable.

The Atlas Network Project 2025 not only aims to reverse climate action if Trump wins in November. Its most likely impact will be to aid Trump (through Project 2025 populating his administration) to attempt to orchestrate the seizing of millions of “illegal” immigrants.(1) Given the history of protests against Trump’s election victory and the “Muslim ban,” this draconian new possibility would incite massive protest.

Trump’s main support base remains the Evangelical movement. The devastation he has enabled on reproductive rights through tactical judicial appointments is his main attraction for them. It is also his primary vulnerability, since elections continue to show that even Republican electorates reject the extremity of the controls being imposed on sexuality. If Trump is able to overcome that argument and win with his prevarications, it is widely expected that contraception will eventually join abortion on the list of options to be banned nationwide through executive action.

This too, like forecast attacks on LGBTQIA+ existence, will provoke massive protests.

The actors around Trump know that crushing protest is crucial to their Christofascist goals if they can return Trump to the White House in January.

Other Republican states will be eagerly reproducing this legislation, as they have copied attacks on reproductive justice and Queer existence: the ability to bankrupt protest organisers is one of the most chilling of weapons in a longterm mission to crush protest. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an Atlas Network partner and has been key to generating legislation to be reproduced across Republican state senates intent on crushing human rights including protest. ALEC has constructed the pathway for oppressive legislation’s rapid spread.

The intentions of the figures gathered around Trump are clear: they intend to use government tools to enforce “traditionalist goals.” Traditionalism involves strict restriction of sexuality to genital-dictated roles, only expressed within the sacred bounds of heterosexual marriage. Those sex roles are also strictly dictated: passive and submissive femininity with unchecked fertility. Women and children must be subject to dominant masculinity. It is associated with ethnostate goals, aiming to (re)create a mythical unitary culture of the past. This is fascist politics. Alongside the enforcement of such identities by the state must go the unleashing of the industries that have subsidised the movement: in particular fossil fuel. Trump’s first two missions, he stated, are to deport migrants and to “drill baby drill.”

This is a global movement. The ethnostate in question can be Hindu or Jewish, for example.

A Belgian mayor this week took action to prevent the propagation of the global right’s fascistic messaging. This should provoke debate about whether the tolerance inherent in liberalism was meant to encompass tolerance of its own destruction. It has, however, inflated the martyrdom and grievance inherent to the global Right.

The conference in contention was a National Conservatism (NatCon) event. In the anglosphere, the Right-Wing movement that embraces Trump and traditionalism has been working to find a marketable label for its ideology. NatCon, in the US and Europe, is the feigned intellectual version. NatCon spruiks concern for (White) workers and is otherwise at war with everything that can be defined as “woke”: working women, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ existence, multiculturalism and, crucially, climate action. Nationalism and God must be forced into every aspect of the state. Its “grassroots” version in the UK has been marketed as Popular Conservatism or PopCon (probably echoing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in America and Australia) and is intricately intertwined, like NatCon, with the fossil fuel-funded Atlas Network. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is another interconnected product.

The NatCon event, running since 2019, has strong ties with the European and Israeli Far Right, visible in the conference’s list of co-sponsoring institutions. The label is credited to Yoram Hazony, who plans to reclaim the “virtue” of nationalism from the fascist past. The Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF) of which he is chairman was the network that declared the “founding principles” of the NatCon movement. (News Corp’s Miranda Devine was one of the signatories.)

Hazony also runs The Herzl Institute which is embedded in the Greater Israel project of extremist Jewish Nationalism. Two of NatCons’ other sponsors – the Danube Institute and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – are core components of Viktor Orban’s propaganda network, frequented by Australian Liberal Party grandees. It is also supported by a news outlet described as “fascist filth”, funded by Orban: The European Conservative. Another body, Nazione Futura is closely linked to the fascism associated with Giorgia Meloni’s party. All these organisations have connections to the Atlas Network. Orban’s bodies are directly linked to the Atlas creator of the Trumpian Project 2025.

The committee includes Hazony who has declared that Meir Kahane is his hero. While distancing himself from the terrorism Kahane advocated, Hazony embraces his ethnostate message. Alongside other representatives from the sponsoring bodies is Associate Professor James Orr who is a Cambridge professor of religion and advisory board member to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (alongside several former Australian prime ministers and politicians).

Nationhood for NatCons is a religious identity. Patriarchal and hierarchical, it demands a unified identity for a state based on a shared culture, language and religion. “Others” within this nation-state must be, at best, suffered not included. The nuclear family is its basic unit and the rhetoric of speakers demands this morality’s enforcement although they tend not to detail how such constrained sexuality and lifestyle are to be enforced.

A deep loathing for immigrants is another central theme, depicting them as failing to share “our values”, code for Muslim. This is predictable for an ideology within the Islamophobic traditionalist spectrum. The free movement of people within the EU (as well as its propensity for regulating errant businesses) make its destruction a core goal for such a coalition.

The Orban’s MCC has a eurosceptic junktank offshoot, MCC Brussels, whose executive director Frank Furedi was in attendance at the contested conference.

NatCon Brussels was predominantly funded by fossil fuel. Viktor Orban granted sponsoring body the MCC a 10% stake in Hungary’s “oil and gas giant” MOL from which it received $65 million in 2022 alone. The NatCon movement has strong financial motivations to link climate denial with its fascistic identity politics.

The efforts to crush protest if Trump wins in November and the goals of the interrupted conference are part of an interconnected global authoritarian movement. Whether we suppress the authoritarians’ speech before they suppress us is a matter we must confront.

(1) Project 2025’s director has declared: “Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces. Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.” Their idea of “deconstructing” involves sacking about 50,000 civil servants and disbanding departments like education and environment. These are to be replaced with approximately 20,000 ideologically-vetted Christian Nationalists, trained to enact the program. The intent is to override congress and steer as much as possible by executive action from those around the White House.

The Project’s Mandate for Leadership has been produced for every Republican contender since the Reagan era by the Heritage Foundation. Both Reagan and Trump implement 2/3 of the relevant edition in their first years. (Heritage, now a prominent partner in the Atlas Network, was founded within the Council for National Policy. The story of the CNP’s role in creating Christian Nationalism is covered in the documentary to be launched on Apple TV on the 26th April called Bad Faith. While it was created by the founders of the Moral Majority, Heritage was primarily a free market junktank until the appointment of its latest president, Kevin Roberts, a Rad Trad Catholic.)

There is no guarantee Trump will work with this Mandate because it has annoyed his inner circle by being too obvious about its authoritarian goals regarding reproductive rights and might alienate voters. It has also been arrogant about its certain and controlling role, annoying Trump. It is, however, likely that Trump will accept the help from a group of his allies doing all the hard work to ensure his “vengeance” is most effective.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Do we suppress authoritarians’ speech before they suppress us?

With Stephen Charles AO KC

The dire state of truth in Australia’s civic space crystalised in 2023. We had seen the waning influence of News Corp’s impact on our elections and assumed it meant that enough of us were becoming inoculated against the propaganda. The defeat of the notoriously mendacious Coalition government might have signalled a ceasefire, a moment for the ‘conservative’ parties to rediscover their integrity. We had underestimated, however, the strategising of vested interests. The year also revealed starkly what happens when the world’s instant communication platform, X (formerly Twitter), is owned by one malevolent billionaire. All these forces converged in a grim battle over the Voice to Parliament referendum.

The overwhelming rejection of Scott Morrison’s Coalition government in 2022 had been in large part an indictment of its lack of transparency and integrity. Revelation had followed revelation about the brazen pork-barrelling undertaken with the help of colour-coded spreadsheets kept in a ministerial office.1 The flood of deception, echoing Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, was such that Bernard Keane assembled a whole book on it.2 Solid gold Liberal seats were lost to community independents known as the ‘teals’ who were focused on climate action and integrity.

Anthony Albanese’s government was sworn in with the expectation that it would move efficiently to introduce the integrity platform it had promised, including an anti-corruption body and whistleblower protections. So, 2023 saw the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) enacted and its commencement. In the first months, it received over a thousand submissions, which it had to cull to the few it can investigate.3 Of course, Australia won’t know which claims of corruption are being tested because Labor was seduced by the Liberals into constraining public hearings: they will only take place in ‘exceptional circumstances’.4 Public hearings are vital for such bodies in fulfilling their primary object of exposing public sector corruption; they educate the sector about the nature of corruption and deter others from future misconduct. The fact that the NACC will only rarely exhibit its work causes Australians to be less confident that corruption is being pursued at all. Other reforms remain stalled. It is scandalous that whistleblowers Richard Boyle and David McBride continued to face court action for their heroic efforts to expose serious wrongdoing to the public. The 2023 Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme was a brilliant demonstration of the debasement of our public service; that the few bravest truthtellers among them should continue to be persecuted instead of celebrated is a blight on Labor’s record.

This year, Peter Dutton’s Opposition could have chosen to build itself up as a more electable proposition by developing policy directions and proudly declaring that corruption was in the past. Instead, Dutton put all the Opposition’s chips on the culture wars: the Albanese government was to be made a one-term proposition by defeating the Voice referendum using whatever weapons were available. Dutton’s party worked alongside activist groups and News Corp to foster chaos and confusion.

The fact that disinformation and misinformation around the referendum seemed so often to tie back to the mining sector was revealing. Clive Palmer spent $2 million of his own money on swaying South Australia and Tasmania in the final weeks of the campaign.5 Gina Rinehart attended the glamorous ‘No’ team victory party at the Hyatt Regency in Brisbane.6 While some of the mining sector supported the Voice as part of their environment, social and corporate governance goals, behind the scenes the fossil fuel sector continued to play its long-term wrecking game.

The war on the Voice – and the chance it might strengthen First Peoples’ protection of their Country – is emblematic of the long game of alliances of sector interests, big donors and canny strategists. The battle against the regulation of tobacco from the 1950s became the campaign to disrupt certainty about the science of climate change.7 The goal was public confusion. Now, epistemological chaos is set to damn us all. Information has been weaponised to divide the public and steal victories for vested interests. The damage done to democracy by cyclones of disinformation tearing through social media is only compounded by the leaders who legitimise it.

Just as US Republicans tried to ride the tiger of populist nativist fury to power over the Obama years, the Coalition in Australia is hoping to regain power by fuelling suburban and rural anger at the so-called ‘inner-city elites’. Conspiracists enraged by pandemic health measures united with culture warriors against ‘woke’ to fight any project that signals empathy, justice, expertise or inclusion. This year also brought to public attention the growing Christian right takeover of ‘conservative’ party branches that has infused Pentecostal cultish ideas into that mixture.8

The Voice to Parliament referendum hijacked by lies

The shame of 2023 was the No campaign against a Voice to Parliament becoming enshrined in the Australian constitution alongside an acknowledgement of First Peoples’ existence in the country before European settlement. The plan to place the Voice in the constitution rather than merely legislate it emerged from the long consultation that formed the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart. First Peoples representatives asked Australians to grant them a permanent body to advise on matters relating to them. By placing it in the constitution, the body could be reformed over and again, but not axed without another referendum.

The decision of the National Party to oppose the Voice took place before the wording was finalised. The Liberal Party, in the wake of Peter Dutton’s embarrassing loss in the Aston by-election, declared its intent to follow and campaign against the body. These choices were not surprising. The fossil fuel sector has a decades-old architecture of influence working assiduously to muddy debates; one of its targets is Indigenous communities taking environmental action to obstruct resource- extraction projects. The Coalition has acted for decades to deter genuine climate action in Australia, and its attack on the Voice was, in part, another gift to the fossil fuel sector.

The right’s lies about the Voice began when the Uluṟu Statement was first issued in 2017. It was almost immediately labelled a ‘third chamber of Parliament’, a ridiculous mischaracterisation.9 In 2023, the Opposition’s parliamentary leaders depicted it as an inchoate power grab with ‘insufficient detail’. Experienced politicians know that the constitution only provides the barest outline: the working consequences of a constitutional amendment are forged by legislators, which would have happened in negotiation with First Peoples representatives. The inaugural legislation could be renegotiated as limitations or problems became apparent.

The Voice had approximately 60% support before the referendum campaign began. By the end of the campaign, the No majority stood at roughly 60%. A percentage of that No contingent was a ‘progressive No’ that believed Treaty should come first or that no cooperation with the coloniser could be helpful. The Voice was to have no ability to compel action; the very modesty of the proposal – likened to a school student representative council – drove these voters to campaign against it. The Yes campaign faced the typical challenge of Australia’s hesitancy regarding constitutional change. Moreover, it would have inescapably faced social media disinformation about the body, but the decision of political leaders around the country to fight – and fight dirty – was disastrous. What should have been a campaign above politics was dragged into the culture wars, with First Peoples as the most damaged casualties.

News Corp was at the centre of the media campaign against the Voice. While the organisation claimed to be explaining both sides…

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After the Super Tuesday results signalled Trump would become the Republican presidential candidate in November, a first promise was that “We’re going to drill baby drill.” One of the most important reasons to watch American politics this year is that a Trump victory will push the world faster towards catastrophic climate heating.

The global community is currently failing to meet this challenge. Petrostates have become the venue of choice for COP meetings, signalling governments accept that the forces of disruption will allow no interruption to their profits until the crunch. Whether that crunch is some technological breakthrough or the start of civilisational collapse remains to be determined.

We have, however, the global structures where the majority might choose to cooperate to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg.

If America finds itself governed by the Republican Party in 2025 the chances become very slim indeed. The GOP now consists of Tea Party disrupters and rank opportunists, all dedicated Trumpists. Fact-based policy is irrelevant. Antagonism towards climate concerns is intense, one aspect of the loathed “woke” threat they intend to destroy.

Project 2025 has been depicted, with caveats, as the game-plan that Trump’s government would follow as it did in 2017, when it enacted two-thirds of the earlier iteration. Trump himself has little interest in any project apart from his own revenge. A set of policies, structures and people that will effectively enact his vengeance will prove attractive if he wins.

Project 2025 is hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a preeminent Atlas Network thinktank. Heritage has consistently fought climate action adhering to the Network’s fossil-fuel donor’s goals. Its new Christian Nationalist president, Kevin Roberts, has made it more extreme. Heritage brought in key actors from Trump’s previous administration to run Project 2025 so that it would look duly MAGA, and not like an establishment body trying to hijack Trump’s victory. As a result, this is the most radical Roadmap in four decades of production. The 800 pages of the 2025 Mandate is the sum of work by 400 contributors with 50 thinktanks from the Atlas Network and the Christian Nationalist Council for National Policy cooperating. It represents the merged thinking of the Trump-complicit Right.

There will be no global action on climate, or any other goal: they are not so much isolationists as unilateralists who want to act unchecked by international bodies or allies. Robert’s introduction to the Mandate states that the Left’s “supranational organisations” seek a world “bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.” He demands that the next Republican administration will abandon “International organisations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty.”

This fossil fuel-funding is evident. Roberts enjoins that “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offence, asserting them around the world. America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth. American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for ‘we the people.” Environmentalism is depicted as “anti-human.” The overwhelming scientific evidence is meaningless. Roberts preaches: “‘Cheap grace’ aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptise liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”

Biden’s crucial Inflation Reduction Act which “unleashes at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, batteries, heat pumps, and more” is likely his most significant achievement. Repealing it has become a Republican obsession. Project 2025 aims to dismantle the American administrative state: all departmental action to constrain pollution would be under attack alongside laws.

Fossil fuel corporations have long shown that they cannot be trusted to act in our interests without government regulation. Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) goals which had pushed some companies to consider broader stakeholder wellbeing have fallen out of fashion. This is in part because they have been prone to cynical deployment, functioning as “greenwashing” rather than a driver of actual change.

More concerning, however, is that corporate interests have been directing campaigns to discredit ESG investing as “woke” and an intrusion on their corporate liberties. Sky News, like Fox News in the US, has campaigned against the attempt to introduce corporate morality. Rowan Dean, for example, railed against it as “just pure socialism being introduced through the back door.” The scope of plutocrat campaigns against morality in business was revealed in emails from an Atlas Network-interlinked junktank in America recently. It was not just the ability to act regardless of environmental considerations these corporations and plutocrat foundations were funding: it was also campaigns to free up child labour, even to strip healthcare and food support from America’s most desperate.

These “conservative” actors demand adherence to Milton Friedman’s “shareholder theory” that insisted a corporation’s sole concern must be to maximise returns to shareholders. Putin’s war on Ukraine has enabled huge profits for fossil fuel companies and they are being driven by “insistence from shareholders that companies keep record profits flowing and stick to their core business.” Thus Shell has become the latest company to announce that it has resiled from its zero carbon commitments, extending timelines and lifting limits.

Even the 2.5% of the global oil and gas industry’s capital spending currently investing in renewable energy is resented by shareholders. BP was threatened by a hedge fund for depressing its share price by this “irrational” spending.

Lacking any moral framework, this shareholder model demands government regulation to behave responsibly.

It is likely that a Trump victory at the end of this year will leave one of the world’s largest economies expanding its fossil fuel sector, cutting back every limit on carbon energy and stripping incentives promoting clean energy. Any regulation mitigating the immorality of shareholder capitalism will be stripped away. It is possible that China or India might step into a gap left on the global stage by America, but the damage to international cooperation will be extensive.

The world’s fate might rest on this election.

This essay was first published at Pearls and Irritations as A Republican victory in 2024 will be a climate disaster