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Lucy Hamilton is Melbourne born and based. She studied humanities at Melbourne and Monash universities, until family duties killed her PhD project. She is immersed in studying the global democratic recession.

The logistics of death and the longterm relationship

I lost my husband, unexpectedly and traumatically, recently. The only way I can make something better of the experience is to pass on suggestions to other people to make their own future catastrophe less crushingly irritating and gut-churning panic inducing. (This is a work in progress: advice from professionals and those who’ve lived through it can be incorporated.)

The death of a longterm partner is hard; all the logistics around it make the experience worse at a time when you least have capacity to stand it. One of you is almost certainly going to leave the other behind. It could be any moment. Work out how to make the bureaucracy of death easier for the relict.

This advice is drawn from experience. It is crucial that your own conditions override this, particularly if you are in a relationship that is unpredictable.

The Australian banking system is one of the least-friendly aspects for a longterm relationship. While mortgage debt can be held by both parties in a relationship, credit card debt cannot. The lack of this option is a failing in the system.

The person on a secondary credit card will have a worse experience of surviving than the primary card holder’s would have been. They will have the card cancelled on them.

If the bills are serviced by standing payments, you as the secondary card holder will now have to set up a whole new payment system for every single cursed account at one of the worst times of your life. Given that it is hard to predict who the first to go will be, there is a gamble in changing who the primary card holder is, or to which person’s credit cards the bills should be attached.

In Australia, thanks to the banking regulator, it doesn’t matter if you have a life insurance payout or assets or a lifetime of banking with an institution; if you are not working at the time of the other half’s death, they won’t give you a credit card. Someone earning $36,000 a year can have one, but you aren’t trustworthy. (It is intensely misogynist in impact.)

So you will be forced to have a debit card attached to a no-interest account, which means you have to monitor the account constantly to make sure that a water or power bill will be covered, or in case a payment takes a few days to be processed and your calculations miss the adjustment.

If you are returning to paid work, you will be able to apply for a credit card after three months of being paid a salary. If you are running a small business, that does not apply to you (but would – illogically – to your employee). Then you will be able to move all your bill payments once again.

Make sure bank accounts have more than one signatory. (Again, if you are in a relationship that makes you uncomfortable in any way, get proper advice about whether this is the best course for you. It is not good advice where financial abuse might be a factor.)

Joint bank accounts can be frozen. Credit cards will be cancelled. Be very careful about when you mention the death to banks, because if probate isn’t settled, you might have a hard time getting to any money to pay the bills.

The bank pretends to care about your loss, mouthing platitudes, but they are ruthless systems that don’t have any give.

Are you co-account holders of every utility? It will be easier to handle if you are. Make sure you both have the access to pay the bills, with passwords if necessary. Some companies are excellent and kind; others are clumsy and difficult to work with. Knowing how to keep the lights on while you sort out the admin is important. (Telstra will have cancelled your authorisation to speak about the account if the authorisation was created more than two years ago. Not sure about other telecom providers.)

Know where the passwords and codes are listed. Do you both know where the birth and marriage certificates are? The passports? You are likely to need certified copies of those as well as the death certificate, will and probate in the weeks after death. Certified copies last as long as the document, so some can expire.

Do you have wills? If you can’t afford a lawyer, look for free advice online. Talk to friends about decisions they’ve made: sometimes they will have thought of a problem you might not have considered. This service takes people in Victoria through the process of setting up their will for under $70, so see if there are similar services within your jurisdiction.

Make sure that your executors and powers of attorney are people you trust; choosing the right secondary person who will look after your widow/er well is crucial, if you are the one primarily entrusted with that power until your death. There are crucial quality of life decisions made by the people with your powers of attorney.

Make sure you both know where the wills and powers of attorney documents are. Who is going to organise probate for the relict? Until you – or someone you trust – has executor standing, lots of things are complicated. You will need the probate document and/or will, as well as the death certificate, to process many of the tasks that follow. (If there is no will, in Victoria Letters of Administration fill the function.)

Ask your superannuation fund or an advisor about binding death nominations for super and insurance. Otherwise a trustee might decide who the dependents should be for you. These nominations are supposed to be refreshed every three years, although an out of date one is likely to be honoured if no circumstances have changed.

The bureaucracy of death is mind-bending in a time where you are seriously unlikely to have the energy or bandwidth to handle it all. Make sure your systems are as catastrophe-proof as possible.

If there is a possible genetic component to a terminal condition, and there are children involved, make sure you have some material – not hair – for DNA testing potential. Normal pathology processes for diseases don’t get any of that and it can be hard to remember to organise it while the hell is in progress.

Make a video of the other half telling you they love you.

Take more video of them in general, not just the kids, or the pets.

Record their favourite recipes.

And while they are here, remember every day that they might not be here tomorrow. Step away from life’s stresses and irritations regularly to tell them you love them and what you are grateful to them for. Go through your old photos while you can still do it together. Remember why you chose each other. Going through a lifetime of memories together without them for the memorial is soul slashing.

Longterm relationships are hard work and it’s impossible to be angelic to each other all the time. Hug, kiss, dance together sometimes when you are tempted to roll your eyes and snap at them. It’s easy to lose the gift of that union in the daily grind of busy households ticking off routines and obligations.

If the worst happens…

Accept help.

The first days are likely to be hell. Everyone responds differently, and your responses will change from day to day. Tell people what you need if you are able to decide.

Some people’s responses will not be helpful. You are entitled to say, “That is not what I need today, thank-you.” You can also say, “I don’t know what I will feel like tomorrow or next week. Can I get back to you on that?”

Post a notice about where you would like the equivalent of flowers to be donated as soon as possible, if you don’t want flowers filling the house. The first two or three bouquets are beautiful. Then we found ourselves eating at the edge of the table while the triffids colonised the rest. The smell of floral arrangements will not be welcome in my house again for some time.

Brace yourself for the “grief lasagne.” Ask someone to empty your freezer or make space in theirs for you. You will be very grateful for the straightforward meals as the days drag by.

Sleep can be hard. Speak to your doctor about what helps. High dose antihistamines and audiobooks eventually stopped me losing my grip.

You do not have to work with the usual funeral options. Think laterally and don’t worry about being judged. The post-religious era of funerals allows a lot of scope to make a memorial more meaningful (and potentially cheaper). We worked with a very small funeral company which had an excellent capacity to meet our needs instead of imposing their systems on us. We valued that the care was so personal. There are also new style funeral providers, so don’t be constrained by the big options that seem obvious. Note that cardboard coffins are not cheaper. It’s certainly helpful to have discussed what the other person would like ahead of time if that is feasible.

Stand firm on what represents the people involved where you need to; this is a memorial for you and the person you’ve lost. (Although you might need to choose ways to make concessions for their parents or children.)

If you need to be able to follow emails sent to your other half, brace yourself: you will be unsubscribing from all the mailing lists that remind you of their passions and dreams for months to come. (If this strikes you as important, it might be worth transferring all your subscriptions onto a disposable email account that can be closed.)

This is a useful list of processes for dealing with the other person’s social media. You will need a death certificate at least for this to take place, so wait for that to arrive before thinking about it. Once someone’s Facebook account is memorialised, their friends will no longer receive painful announcements about their birthday, but you also will not be able to post on their page. Choose your moment carefully if you are using it for announcements about events.

These are the professions that can certify documents for you. You will need documents certified, so be prepared for that in an era when many of us do not have printers at home. Phone apps that scan a document and convert it into a PDF can be very useful for sending certified documents to all the various services that will require them.

It is hard to predict the experiences, songs, flavours, sights that will break you. A parked car can be a good place to howl if you are trying not to scare the children or neighbours.

Smell is particularly hard. It bypasses all the impediments to memory of the other senses. You will be flung somewhere inconvenient by smells that bring them back.

A daughter-in-law suggested taking a photo of the bathroom cabinet in case there was a scent we needed to find later.

Don’t wash their clothes too quickly. My other half was driven into hospital by drenching night sweats, and by the time we realised he wasn’t coming home (on his last day, really) everything had been washed. The smell in his jacket lasted about 3 months, but you’ll do better if you protect the chosen garment against dust. I’m not sure how unlaundered clothing fares in garment bags, so this is just something to consider.

Don’t let yourself be rushed by helpful people into disposing of your partner’s possessions. You can tackle that when you are ready. If you wish to live surrounded by evidence that they might walk in at any moment, nobody should countermand that decision. We all deal with death in our own way.

Get help from a professional if you can. In Australia, Griefline might be a first line of free support. [Call the helpline 1300 845 745 8am to 8pm, 7 days a week, 365 days a year AEDT/AEST.]

People tell me it gets better. You are thrust through a portal into a world you probably didn’t want to be in, although who am I to judge? You won’t necessarily be the same person in this other timeline. Be gentle with yourself while you work out who you are now.

In the meantime, hug your person one more time today than you would have, because I can’t hug mine.

 

Unutterable thanks to all the family and friends who have gathered around us. And to the honest and kind insurance agent, and all the diligent and caring professionals related to the family business who have done so much to help us unknot the chaos of our life in the other timeline.

 

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Sado-populism

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.

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Washington Twilight

Exploring Washington DC in late October 2024 was a surreal experience. In New York, Trump was re-enacting the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Gardens. Centrist commentators on MSNBC debated the fact that notably reticent generals were agreeing that Trump was a fascist-leaning threat to the USA. Meanwhile the sun shone benignly on a calm and pristine civic precinct in the capital.

The violent insurrection of 2021 loomed as an unspoken threat in a city preparing for a standard inauguration as well as the 250th anniversary of a democratic project. Would there be a union to celebrate in 2026?

Tourists are currently kept distant from the west face of the Capitol where gallows were erected to execute politicians. The stands are being constructed for the next inauguration.

The curious are also kept well back from the north face of the White House, where gawkers can usually more closely view the building. Here too, the construction preparing for the celebration of the peaceful transfer of power, the core symbol of the democratic experiment, impedes approach.

Throughout Washington, the construction of grander and larger museums is underway to greet, optimistically, the celebrations of 250 years since independence was declared from Britain. Then again, Washington continued to be built through the Civil War in bullish expectation that there would once again be a united states to govern.

The civic space of Washington is filled with gargantuan buildings and memorials, all designed to chasten the individual in the face of Empire. Many of the government buildings are designed in the classical style and in monstrous scale: no European would be allowed to sneer at this new empire’s hub.

Guides in the Capitol extol the various features, but no mention is made of the insurrection itself. The silence about it forms a looming shadow over the experience. A compulsory film celebrating the democratic experiment that the United States used to represent feels even more like propaganda in the aftermath of that eruption of conspiracist violence.

The guides, employees of the Capitol Architect’s office, tread carefully when hinting at the violence and oppression that pervade America’s settler-colonial and chattel-slave story. Each group to be guided contains people hailing from a range of reactionary states. Any one of those might complain to their representative if a guide delivers actual history rather than the gilded myth. Guides have received reprimands from political representatives for relating the truth that the Founding Fathers kept slaves.

Evidence of the anchor drag of Republican states on American efforts to embrace a more just present is evident. Each state has two statues to represent itself; a state can replace its choice as that becomes desirable. In 2015, Arizona chose to replace their statue of a mining executive with a statue of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was the 1964 presidential candidate who proved to a new breed of Republican that there could be a path to power forged in bigotry; it was this campaign that signalled the Republicans’ turn towards the Trumpian present.

Tribute should be paid to Kansas for holding firm to a statue of Amelia Earhart in a decidedly masculine costume. Such a gender-fluid symbol is unlikely to be welcomed in the current Midwest or South.

The rising tide of Christian Nationalism might be signalled by North Carolina’s choice to update their representation to include Billy Graham this year.

The Smithsonian museums that recognise the dark underbelly of American history and the lasting impact of its victims and survivors are the ones dedicated to the American Indian and African American History. Visits to these are highly recommended.

The others tread very safe paths, largely fostering a sense of morality-free triumph and progress.

The two campuses of the Air and Space museum, for example, celebrate technological advance and achievement. Charles Lindbergh’s contribution to flight is honoured with no recognition that he was America’s most notable Nazi-sympathiser.

Various generations of missile sit side by side at the Udvar-Hazy hangars for growing militarists to marvel at. No note is made of the numbers killed by the American military to enforce its territorial and economic empires. The Jakarta Method is valuable reading to grasp the millions killed to keep the world open for capitalist enterprises to extract cheap resources and cheap labour.

The Enola Gay is not accompanied by images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s dead.

The American partnership in Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians will no doubt be similarly ignored if this current model of memorialisation is allowed to continue as a result of a Harris victory.

Curators of museums such as that dedicated to American History make safe choices so as not to antagonise reactionary visitors, since these can lead to complaints to the museums’ masters in Congress.

Other institutions such as the Folger Shakespeare Library stand as tributes to America’s wealth extracted from across the globe, with obstructions to profit bulldozed by American military forces, diplomatic machinations, and local allies. Some of this wealth then vacuums other nations’ treasures back to America. Why does the Folger need to hoard [automatic article download], and boast of, 82 copies of Shakespeare’s rare First Folio?

The war memorials scattered across the civic zone celebrate, as such constructions are wont to do, the glorious courage and tragic dead. The story told is of American sacrifice, not American harm.

The Korean War Memorial by night, composed of 19 figures of American forces.

The memorial to Korean War Veterans.

This overwhelmingly white architecture of the civic zone celebrates sanitised versions of America’s story, domestic and international. This October, the sun shone. The dearth of tourists made queues rare and venues easy to visit. The construction of relentless normality was belied by a queue of stories recounting shocking announcements from Republicans and supporters on their path to authoritarian illiberalism. Of course, those were largely only notable to audiences looking for them on activist media platforms; mainstream media continued to diminish the cumulative impact of such threats. Right wing media denied, distorted or ignored them.

The conference that drew me to Washington explored the interconnection of the Global North’s authoritarians and religio-ethnostate forces. It barely touched the corporations (and their propaganda networks) contributing to far right parties and organisations. Late-stage capitalism is ever more overt in its readiness to embrace illiberalism to ensure profit. Elon Musk is far from the only oligarch planning to exploit the opportunities.

On my final day in Washington, I was fortunate to see the only mention I’d found of the January 6 insurrection. The National Park Service granted Civic Crafted LLC a temporary permit to display a statue that pays ironic tribute to the “brave men and women” who literally defecated on the Capitol.

The plaque on the memorial to the insurrections, reading: "This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 to loot, urinate, and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election."

The story of the American democratic experiment and the liberty it ostensibly represents is partial, hypocritical and, at times, farcical. It will be much worse – if only for our efforts to limit the scale of the climate emergency – if Trump wins in the coming days or weeks.

The fossil fuel forces who have driven so much of America’s disastrous foreign and domestic policy over the century are funding Trump with the intent to profit.

Will he be signing the executive orders they’ve drafted for him on his first day in office as a dictator?

 

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Australian politicians are party to the ugly NatCon movement

Peter Dutton’s campaign to make Palestinian refugees into figures of fear mirrors the provocations to the recent UK Islamophobic riots. These were inspired by politicians such as Nigel Farage as much as by far-right influencers. Both examples are connected to Donald Trump’s debate amplification of the far-right American lie that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio.

Peter Dutton may be inadvertently playing into an international trend. His prior record of demonising refugees, depicting Lebanese migration as a destructive feature of Australia’s immigration history, combined with his decision to fight the Voice to Parliament in a way that promoted racist abuse of First Peoples, suggest, however, that the more recent campaign is not an accident.

Anthony Albanese’s decision to turn his back on the question about Queer identity in the census and then to exclude the gender aspect of the question were cowardly capitulations to the same politics. Trump also declared in the debate that Harris’s government wants “to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

Around the world, far-right political parties and influencers are fomenting fear of a racial Other – often coded as Muslim – and those not living “traditional” lives. The choice to demarcate racism by a religious label is fitting: it is a movement where ethnonationalism is coded by a dominant religion. The Christian Nationalists of America mean “white” when they battle for a “European” and “Christian” America.(1)

The self-styled intellectual centre of the movement is National Conservatism (NatCon). The statement of principles at its core was devised in 2019 by a series of men with important connections. The driving force in rehabilitating nationalism from its Nazi era is Yoram Hazony. He is a Jewish nationalist who founded the Atlas Network partner, the Shalem Centre. Note that this linked interview is hosted by John Anderson, former National Party deputy Prime Minister, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) co-founder, and YouTube influencer.

Another designer is John O’Sullivan who is one of the key connections between Australian right-wing politics and media into the Orbán sphere of influence. Tony Abbott, Alexander Downer and The Australian’s Greg Sheridan are the most notable Australian figures in reactionary Budapest.

In his debate, Trump expressed mutual admiration for illiberal Viktor Orbán when asked to name a world leader who admired him.

For an Australian audience, it is also important to note that News Corp culture warrior Miranda Devine is one of the NatCon signatories, identified in that list as belonging to Murdoch’s New York Post. The op/ed pages of Murdoch print publications and Sky News clearly display their role as the primary infiltrators of NatCon ideas into Australian civic debate.

NatCon is a movement that depicts itself as post-liberal. The public cannot be given the freedom to make decisions for itself any longer, personally or politically, because the public has shown that it is dissolute and feckless when it has such freedoms. These “conservative” figures supported democracy as long as they believed there was a “moral” or “silent” majority on whom their politicians could depend for electoral success and the suppression of dissident opinions. Having seen that the majority is more tolerant of difference, these “intellectuals” have opted to be post-democratic.

This aspect of the right overlaps with white supremacist and antisemitic forces, with bigotry of all kinds present. This is veiled in NatCon by the fact that both Jewish nationalists and Hindu nationalists are core to the project. The shared Islamophobia temporarily unites the parties against the inherent fissures.

John Anderson’s YouTube channel, with 633 000 subscribers, hosts his interview with fellow ARC Advisory Council member, Spectator columnist Douglas Murray, where the latter expounds his rampant Islamophobic ideology. Murray was a keynote speaker at 2023’s London NatCon conference. The Anderson interview has been viewed over a million times.

 


John Anderson there re-invokes the shameful “clash of civilisations” trope that asserts a fundamental incompatibility between the (Christian) West and the Muslim world. He asserts here “the great clash…between the fundamental values of the West and radical Islam in particular.” Anderson describes “Waves and waves and waves of immigrants” problematic because “some of them do not share our values at all.” Murray corrects him to say “many.” The “barbarians,” Anderson quotes, “have got through the gate and are in our midst.”(2) Murray claims that many immigrants hate their host country after they “broke in” illegally, and spend their time trying to undermine it. For those who “do not love” their new nation, Murray declares, if they won’t go, “we will make [them] go” because, “We cannot live with these people.”

Donald Trump tweeted his intent to commence “remigration” if he wins in November. This is an ethnic cleansing term he has taken from the European far right.

John Anderson expounds the benefits of “civilisational Christianity” as our “wellspring.”

Typically for this re-invigorating of the post 9/11 “war on terror” mindset and rhetoric, Anderson celebrates Murray’s “moral courage.” NatCon conduit The Australian recommenced the use of the term “moral cowardice” after the 7/10 to describe any support for Palestinian wellbeing. The Albanese government’s shamefully tepid support for Palestinian safety was so characterised by Peta Credlin for example. (“Penny Wong’s Israel speech reveals Labor’s moral cowardice” 11/4/24).

Douglas Murray declares that the war on Gaza is “the civilised world’s war.”

All the religio-ethnonationalist factions propound their identity’s risk of “race suicide.” In Israel, this is manifested in both the apartheid nature of the political system as well as the many genocidal expressions publicised by government politicians. In India, Narendra Modi himself campaigned in this year’s election on the risk of being outbred by Muslims.

As a result, non-compliant women are a key target. Women must, according to this worldview, absent themselves from the civic space and return to churning out babies without access to reproductive rights. Australians would be foolish to trust that this aspect of the project is not on the game-plan for our own politics. The op/ed pages of The Australian feature regular columns dedicated to celebrating traditional roles for (most) women. The woman Peta Credlin believes will “lead the [Victorian or national Liberal] party one day,” former MP Moira Deeming, promotes her anti-trans views but does not boast of her staunch anti-abortion positions.

Some Republicans, much further down the path of this trajectory than their Australian partners, have begun to discuss ending access to contraception, to no-fault divorce and even changing the franchise to a family vote where the father of the house votes for his wife as well as for his children.

Whether Dutton’s campaign against Palestinian refugees reflected a shared investment in NatCon politics or merely rhymed with it is a question that remains unanswered. NatCon’s local and international figures, however, are dedicated to making sure that they build an Australian right wing bloc that promotes its principles and its bigotries.

NatCon has strong personnel overlaps with the Atlas Network’s junktanks. Many Atlas operatives are listed with their identifying Atlas affiliation as signatories to its Statement and as speakers at its conferences. Atlas junktanks (alongside those from the Christofascist Council for National Policy) are at the core of Project 2025.

Like Project 2025, NatCon is a movement meant to prevent effective climate action. Both are supported directly and indirectly by fossil fuel dollars.

NatCon is the pseudo-intellectual body that brings the fascistic politics of the transnational Right to the “conservative” thinkers, politicians and money. The interconnections with other similarly-driven conferences are overt. Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC) and Liz Truss’s PopCon are examples. Alongside ARC, these are efforts to find a name for the radical right politics that is marketable, particularly as a form of conservatism, which they have long ceased to be.

Australia’s tackiest Atlas junktank, Libertyworks, has its CPAC Australia taking place on the 5 & 6 October. The Atlas-affiliated Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is one of its “platinum sponsors.” The other is the Atlas-interconnected Advance body responsible for so much climate denial and anti-Voice propaganda. This page still boasts its defeat of the Voice referendum. National Party politicians join the more fringe Right politicians at this event. The marquee speaker for 2024 is Liz Truss, Atlas operative.

The preeminent local Atlas junktank, the Centre for Independent Studies, has its annual Consilium conference listed for 24-26 October. It continues to promote the nuclear furphy.

It takes place immediately after the inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) Australian Chapter conference on the 22 October, allowing international speakers and guests to travel to both. Niall Ferguson, for instance, is on the ARC Advisory Board and is a speaker at both conferences, with links also to NatCon. ARC launched its first conference in London at Halloween last year.

Peter Costello is listed as a speaker at October’s ARC event, added to the roster of Liberal and National party figures connected to the body.

Jordan Peterson, manosphere influencer and religious evangelist, is also attending the Australian conference. He promoted the British NatCon event in 2023. Like Truss, who seems to feel that “nationalist” is not an adjective that will sit well in the British scene, he has been part of devising his own NatCon-shaped organisation as a co-founder of ARC. The third co-founder, Baroness Philippa Stroud, represents the Atlas Network-affiliated Legatum Institute.

These events happen out of the mainstream. The ARC event is invitation only with no website. Most Australians do not read The Australian, missing the constant NatCon politics in its op/ed pages. We cannot afford to ignore the attempts to make this ugly politics central to Australian “conservatism.” Continuing to allow the term “conservative” to be applied to the politicians and thought leaders espousing it enables the radicalising of formerly conservative voters into fascistic political positions.

We have seen in Springfield, Ohio, just as in the recent riots in the UK that violence and bloodshed can follow this kind of race-baiting political gambit. Healing the divisions created is a monumental task.

Footnote:

  1. It is not the first time that “Whiteness” has been seen more as a religious notion than an empirically-based category.
  2. Anderson declares in a section of the interview dedicated to a “coherent immigration policy” that “We have large numbers of barbarians within our gates,” and immediately segues to the “situation in the Middle East.” It appears that he means Muslims particularly in this depiction of Islam.

 

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The IPA just exploded their argument that the “Atlas Network” is tinfoil hat conspiracy

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has just shown its links to the Atlas Network, the group to which the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 belong. The IPA has been a blight on the Australian scene since some of its senior figures went to a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Hong Kong in 1978 and determined to change it from being a body that promoted the market for businessmen (but with checks and balances) to a much more extreme agenda. Mike Seccombe recounted the story from the old guard’s explanation: “Former IPA head: radicals ‘hijacked’ thinktank.”

This reflects the fact that the IPA was established – in 1943 – before the Mont Pelerin Society first met in 1947. Both bodies grew out of a business world that was terrified by the New Deal and other Keynesian responses to the Great Depression and the Great War. The aristocrats and robber barons were aghast at the thought that they might lose property to the filthy masses as the Russian elites had in the revolution. They perceived government efforts to hold off revolution by offering some support to the population, immiserated by capitalism’s failure in the late 20s, as the first step to their own impoverished exile.

The program was funded and fostered by resource extraction money from the earliest days at both the Mont Pelerin Society and the IPA.

This Cold War bogeyman continues to haunt the IPA. It is campaigning to demonise socialism on social media, using propaganda resources manufactured by its partner organisations in the Atlas Network.

 

Adam Smith Works produced the video shared by the IPA. It is a project of the Liberty Fund.

 

The IPA is terrified of a world where young people have seen the ugliness of neoliberalism. That term is best defined not so much as an ideology, but as the network of people and organisations which have worked over decades to turn us from societies into a global market of consumers. The massive inequality it has fostered since the Mont Pelerin Society’s campaigning moved from the fringes in the 1940s to power under Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet and Rogernomics is clear and miserable. Social democracies seem a much sounder path to a sustainable society and world.

The Mont Pelerin Society first colonised the Chicago School. The laissez faire economics taught there had been fighting monopoly power as a distortion of the free market. Under Friedrich Hayek’s influence, they converted to fighting the antitrust law that impeded monopolists. The new agenda of Hayek’s Chicago School was for the big money to control government. Thus they would shackle their less-connected competitors, and prevent the masses standing in their way. Milton Friedman was their great salesman. His work became systemised, by founder Antony Fisher at Hayek’s instigation, in junktanks that pretended to be think tanks or university centres or phoney grass-roots civil society organisations.

There was no “free market.” That was propaganda. This is visible in the long trajectory of the campaigns the neoliberal network pursues. In America’s Republican states, it is stark. The blocking of union formation is a mission to prevent the worker having any power over their conditions. The campaign does not stop there. This is accompanied by non-compete clauses so that a worker who does not like their conditions of employment, in the most menial of jobs, cannot move to a rival who provides better conditions. Not only that, but state laws (of the kind written by these networks) punish employers within their state boundaries that offer better conditions.

Labor conditions in Republican states are appalling. It is worse in these Confederate states for non-White people. Through a raft of laws that make it miserable to exist, through to an entire infrastructure designed to imprison Black men and hire out their bodies as slave labour, the intent is clear. There is no free market for labour.

The redistribution of society’s tax money to the rich in a variety of ways (think Jobkeeper and Harvey Norman) shows, just as the Republican state experiment does, that the neoliberal experiment is not about “property rights” but “property rights for the rich.” Our property is their property.

If they wish to make our property worthless by fuming poisoned air over it, that is our tough luck.

 

Linda Whetstone was one of the Atlas Network’s “greatest champions,” daughter of its founder and erstwhile President of the Mont Pelerin Society: https://www.atlasnetwork.org/articles/atlas-network-honors-board-chair-and-titan-of-the-freedom-movement

 

When one of the Atlas Network’s favourite IPA apparatchiks, Tim Wilson, was made Human Rights Commissioner by IPA-affiliate Tony Abbott, his public campaign was for free speech rights. Of course Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s free speech was not to be protected. Free speech is for their faction, not the Other.

Behind closed doors, however, Wilson’s primary battle for rights was for property rights. He spoke at the libertarian Friedman Conference with utter scorn of the high-ranking rights experts with whom he was forced to work in that role. His infantilised distortion of the British tradition of liberalism placed property rights as the prime factor. Their more sophisticated (French?) tradition of liberalism treated the rights of oppressed humanity as a higher priority.

Anyone watching the authoritarian intent behind the Project 2025 mission that threatens to accompany a Trump victory in November sees that it protects the property rights of the rich as much as key Atlas funder and strategist Charles Koch could demand. The human rights of anyone who fails to live as the obedient “traditional” identity, however, is under serious threat. The fact that the humanity of the gestating woman or pregnant person is made invisible, a machine gestating the potential humanity of a small ball of cells inside, illustrates the threat. Control of anyone who does not play by their rules is already a life and death matter in American Republican states.

The IPA shared a snippet of video made by one of the American Atlas partners, the Liberty Fund. In this, grim socialist footage of communist Estonia illustrates that “socialism” is ugly, monotone suffering not Bernie Sanders. The youth must be chastened out of the idea that their humanity deserves rights or that they have a justifiable claim for a decent standard of living, even if the plutocrats have to give up a little of their extraordinary wealth. At the bottom of that Liberty Fund page, key partners in the Atlas Network are listed.

The low-rent IPA campaigns on social issues to foment culture war. They aim to distract those most disadvantaged in neoliberalism’s world. They have not, however, forgotten the main game. A more equitable society means the rich must pay their fair share of tax. The financial, legal, governmental systems that they have gamed must be deconstructed. Before 2020, eight men alone owned as much property as that held by 3.6 billion people. Since the pandemic, that situation has worsened dramatically. In the years since 2020, 26 trillion dollars of new wealth has been snatched by the 1%. By contrast the rest of the world’s population gained $16 trillion. A 5% wealth tax on the handful of billionaires could raise enough to bring 2 billion people out of poverty.

Business has always benefitted from tax-funded infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, roads, railway, the internet etc make businesses possible. The bunk economics of neoliberalism denies that fact. Their friends at ultraconservative Quadrant warned that neoliberalism’s zero sum game would destroy the Australian way of life, and they are being proved right.

This impoverished world has been created by the plutocrats’ influence network and their junktanks infesting our public debate, media, academia and government. Neoliberalism was their construction and continues to threaten our survival by their obdurate refusal to transition away from carbon-based energy.

We should thank the IPA for sharing Koch (and Templeton) propaganda. Next time they say that talk of the Atlas Network is tin-foil hat conspiracy theory, we can remind them that they proved our point themselves.

 

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The Atlas Network and the Council for National Policy: America’s global revolution

Twice in a fortnight, the president of the Heritage Foundation has declared that America is experiencing its second revolution. The revolution would remain bloodless (because their side is “winning”) “if the left allows it to be.” The two bodies whose acts provoked the announcements are leading Atlas Network partners; they are, furthermore, listed on the Council for National Policy (CNP) rolls. The two junktanks – and their partner organisations – are also spending millions of dollars in Europe to roll back rights for women and LGBTQIA people. The revolution is transnational. It is working to destroy rights and democratic projects around the world. The relentless pursuit of profit and the determination to impose virtue on an unruly world are united in authoritarian intent.

The Revolution

Both Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts’ announcements were made on Steve Bannon’s War Room broadcast, central to the Trumpist movement and its efforts to remake America from every school board and electoral precinct upwards.

The first announcement of revolution was made on the 22nd June. It functioned as an advertisement for the MAGA audience to take part. Becoming a revolutionary involves undertaking Project 2025’s recruitment and training of loyalists to staff the incoming Trump administration, but also at state and local government levels. Roberts declared they were building not just for 2025, but for the next century in the United States.

Project 2025 is the most recent iteration of Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership. The first was written for Ronald Reagan, spelling out his massive reforms. He implemented two thirds in his first term. The last iteration for Donald Trump’s first term was similarly “business Republican” in tone, and Trump too implemented two thirds in his first year. The newest iteration is, as Roberts describes, revolutionary. It dictates the process for the dismantling most of the federal government as well as setting America on track to eliminate reproductive and Queer rights.

It also sets out the intention to dismantle the vital energy transition work underway as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, with plans to boost fossil fuel production instead. This is fitting as much of Heritage’s funding comes from fossil fuel sources. This is true for the Atlas Network generally, although it has tobacco and other unpopular corporate sectors as donors.

Project 2025 is a joint Atlas Network and CNP project.

The second announcement of revolution was made after the Supreme Court’s dramatic week of judgements. In particular, the one that granted the President of the United States immunity for the vaguely worded field of “official acts.” Naturally the partisan court will make the determination which acts are “official.”

The week also compounded the Trumpist Supreme Court’s norm-violating series of decisions that have rolled back reproductive healthcare access for women across Republican states, further damaged voters’ representation, and frozen programs that aim to address entrenched disadvantage.

In one week, the Court placed itself above the experts in government agencies who define, for example, how much mercury is unsafe to consume. While the relevant judge confused nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxide, he dared to claim that judges were better placed than government experts to determine the minutiae of America’s functioning. This attack on the administrative state’s ability to protect the public from corporate recklessness and malfeasance was a triumph for capital. The court also damaged the SEC’s ability to deal with White Collar crime.

Such gifts to the wealthy were balanced with another judgement that decided a gratuity given after a favour was received would not be determined an illegal bribe. For a court riddled with scandal over oligarch largesse, this was a particularly cynical decision.

As a footnote, the same week revealed a decision that said regions could make it illegal to be homeless. This can provide numbers for private prison operator profits. There prisoners are hired out to businesses for near slave-labour wages.

No matter who wins the election in November, the radical right majority on the court can now prevent action their faction rejects: they have created an imperial juristocracy.

All these decisions have resulted from the years of work by the Federalist Society which handed Trump his literal list from which to choose judges. Republicans had stalled appointments to federal benches over the Obama era, granting Trump the gift of over one hundred appointments; some appointees were considered scandalous.

The years of surreptitious work by the Federalist Society and its Machiavellian leader, Leonard Leo, have been documented by Pro Publica. The body made headlines when it was gifted $1.6 billion by a single donor. The corruption that pervades the Supreme Court features several Atlas and CNP junktanks. Heritage paid Justice Thomas’s insurrectionist wife a secret salary amounting to almost $700,000 between 2003 and 2007. The Federalist’s Leo paid Ginni Thomas through her “consulting” firm. An Atlas Partner, the Islamophobic Center for Security Policy, paid her. Another Project 2025 Advisory Council and CNP member, Hillsdale College, also “employed” her. The coup being perpetrated by the court is funded by plutocrat donors to remove any constraints on their action. It is also used, by the filing of amicus briefs, to achieve goals such as restricting voting rights.

Why are fossil fuel magnates working with Christian extremists?

Both Heritage and the Federalist Society are Atlas Network partners.

They are also Council for National Policy (CNP) members. The CNP is the Atlas-interlinked network that has been driving the Christian Nationalist takeover of America. In 2019, Columbia School of Journalism lecturer Ann Nelson documented that organisation, founded in 1981, in Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. As with Atlas, Charles Koch is a major donor. The CNP has steered the evangelical television and radio media organisations that have helped turn (Heritage co-founder) Paul Weyrich’s Moral Majority from a marginal array of individual churches and groups into a more unified force with coherent policy platforms. The latest leaked CNP membership list from Documented includes several Atlas junktanks as integrated into that network as well as key players in American politics and media ranging from Mike Pence to Steve Bannon. Pence represents the Evangelical alliance that made Trump’s first term possible. Bannon represents both Rad Trad Catholicism and the esoteric “philosophy” of Traditionalism. This apocalyptic belief was explored in 2021’s The War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right by University of Colorado ethnography professor Benjamin Teitelbaum. Bannon was a leading figure in the Rad Trad Catholicism that has been fighting as sedevacantists to say that the Catholic Church has no Pope but has been infiltrated by a socialist. They place Putin as a hero of Christians, with Moscow as the Third Rome. Another of its leaders, Archbishop Viganò, has just been excommunicated.

Charles Koch by contrast has been one of the drivers of the most extreme libertarianism in America. His brother, David, was placed at the forefront of their goals as their Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 1980. It was a disastrous experiment, with its brutal policies attracting a tiny percentage of the vote. The libertarian project needed a veil to win enough votes to enact it. Project 2025 is, likely, ultimately that veil. The Libertarian Party platform is expanded there, but so is the devastating statist authoritarianism of the Christian Nationalist movement. It appears that Charles Koch, unsurprisingly for anyone who has followed his career, will do anything to ensure his own freedom from constraint. Disdain for “woke” talking points might bolster that readiness.

Other key figures amongst the oligarch donors and their operatives appear much more committed to a statist agenda, whereby the government will enforce “Christian” virtue upon an immoral population. Their definition of virtue is distinctive. While the project to ensure women’s inability to engage in sexual activity outside inescapable marriage might not shock mainstream Christians, the concurrent oligarch campaign to prevent employers being compelled to ensure child labourers have a meal break should disturb them. The neofeudal truths at the core of the neoliberal branding are becoming clearer: to believe that employers will act responsibly without enforcement is to be their gull.

Both Heritage and the Federalist Society are run by Rad Trad Catholic extremists. Kevin Roberts has taken the Heritage Foundation from being the leading “business Republican” junktank in America to being at the tip of the spear of the Christian Nationalist attempt to turn the USA into a theocratic autocracy. Leonard Leo, who has orchestrated five radical Catholic appointments to the Supreme Court, is an extremist. The exact nature of the interactions between the two secretive networks is unclear.

The Atlas Network

Atlas has tended to function to create neoliberal conditions in America and across the globe: the purpose of this was to erase every obstacle to American corporations’ profit and growth. Local aspiring oligarchs are enlisted to fund the project within their own terrain for those same goals. While the intent was ostensibly free market, the impact has always been to promote the interests of monopolists and oligopolists at the expense of competitors and the society around them. Some of the junktanks in Atlas have promoted reactionary social messaging as their bailiwick. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty has been the highest profile example. It exists to educate business leaders and academics in “the connection that can exist between virtue and economic thinking.” Leonard Leo joked to the Institute in 2017 about not yet managing to “launch a hostile takeover” of the Supreme Court.

Alejandro Chafuen, Argentinian Catholic, was president of the Atlas Network for 32 years, from 1985 to 2017. His specialisation is Catholic theological justification for business freedom. He is now managing director of Acton.

Atlas’s pre-eminent prize is the Templeton Freedom Award, from a donor who was dedicated to integrating religion with the “free market.” Australian Atlas affiliate the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) was nominated as a finalist for the prize in 2015 for its work destroying Australia’s effective carbon price mechanism.

There appear to be two main intents for this aspect of the Atlas information campaign. One is to conceal the immorality of the “free market” project stripped of any constraints on the actions of business no matter the harm done. To appeal to a sufficient electoral percentage to gain power, they deployed a social message that endorsed individual “virtue.” The strategy was called paleoconservativism.

Evangelicals had worked in cooperation with the interests of fossil fuel (at the expense of First Peoples) for decades beforehand, but the movement that drives Atlas emerges out of the Cold War battle by business that asserts any social wage is a slippery slope to totalitarianism. During the Cold War, communism was depicted as deadly to business but also atheist and immoral: the Manichaean battle between good and evil made a Christian Libertarianism (or religious neoliberalism) the answer. It promoted both ultimate freedom for business and the enforcing of religion and virtue on the population.

This cynical project had the additional important role of ensuring that the damage done to society and family by the Fordist economic model was mitigated by pressure on individuals (mainly women) to fill the cracks in family and community created by ruthless market societies.

The Atlas project, like that of its Mont Pelerin Society inner sanctum, has never been invested in democracy, which leading members saw as a threat to business interests. Democracy was a risk to be controlled or eliminated, not an aspirational form of government.

Investigative journalist at the New Yorker Jane Mayer revealed Atlas’s American operations in Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is trying to buy Political Control in the US in 2016. She used the label “Kochtopus” after the networks’ biggest funders and strategists. In 2018, Duke University history Professor Nancy MacLean documented its longer history in Democracy in Chains: the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. It was only after the book’s completion that MacLean became aware of the network’s secretive global ramifications as Atlas.

Also founded in 1981, the Network systematises propaganda for the Chicago School’s bunk economics, so ably disseminated by Milton Friedman. It now has around 600 partner organisations in over 100 countries, but its global operations remain less obvious because the system is intentionally covert. Local transparency failures suppress information about its funding and impact.

The central “think” tanks foster the replication of more such bodies, providing seed funding if necessary and training in fundraising and public relations strategies to help the local offshoots become independent. They network. The primary function is to sell the donors’ messages by advertising them constantly: in 1985, Heritage Foundation co-founder Ed Feulner told Australian operatives to treat campaigns as if they were for a toothpaste brand that needed constant reinforcing. The messages: low tax, deregulation, small government, dismantling of social safety nets. Together the junktanks, as journalist George Monbiot has labelled them, create a chorus of voices from university centres and civil society bodies reinforcing the wishlist.

Dr Jeremy Walker explained the process by which the Atlas Network architecture of influence operates in the lead-up to the Voice referendum in 2023. His “Freedom to Burn” essay details the intimate connections in Australia between mining goals and the the Atlas Network’s architecture of influence. The sideline in culture war battles promoted by the low-rent Atlas junktanks like the IPA and LibertyWorks, aided by ally Atlas-connected Rupert Murdoch, both divides voters from their economic interests and fosters the demonisation of rights culture. Without rights, women, LGBTQIA people, non-White and non-Christian people can be returned to their traditional subservience.

Quinn Slobodian is tracking the interaction of (Atlas) junktanks and the European far-right. A French investigation has detailed the way that corporate goals are being pursued by Atlas affiliates in Europe. An Italian investigation explored corporate money and Atlas connections supporting far right politics there. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is a leading figure in the transnational movement. Heritage has connections with these far-right parties.

The Washington Post last week featured the damage done in New Zealand/Aotearoa by Atlas operatives in government. Byline Times, academic Dr Russell Jackson and investigative reporters such as Peter Geoghegan have tracked the deep corruption and devastation of Atlas’s influence on the UK through its Tufton Street operations and their American fundraising arms.

Hindsight reveals the way revolutionising political economy and the law to grant monopolist corporations their every goal has failed to produce the economic paradise promised by the Chicago School’s plutocrat economics. This year, UC law professor Mehrsa Baradaran has detailed in The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America the role that Atlas and Chicago School economics played in rewriting the law to oblige plutocrats. Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor has documented how contract law is used to concentrate power in the hands of the wealthy in The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.

In Australia, the presence of these Atlas junktanks has been primarily deployed to reinforce “business propaganda,” but the social messages of disgust for modern, inclusive society are readily apparent too. The interlinked Ramsay Centre seems to be the strongest voice for outright Christian goals. That may relate to the close involvement of Atlas-connected Tony Abbott who is a key figure in the global campaign to place Christianity both as a religion and as a cultural signifier for White Western “civilisation” to the forefront of politics. This is visible in his work with Viktor Orbán and also on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Advisory Board.

Atlas’s extremist connections

The more toxic and bigoted “family values” groups tend to appear interconnected with Atlas rather than Atlas partners themselves. Trump appointee Betsy DeVos, for example, links the two. She has been chair and on the board of two Atlas partners: the American Federation for Children that aims to replace the public school system with privatised charter schools and the Acton Institute. Both her Prince and DeVos families are substantial donors to the anti-LGBTQIA group Focus on Family. Focus is part of the CNP, whose donors include Charles Koch and the Prince and DeVos families.

Atlas is not immune, however, from this extremism. The head of the Atlas Claremont Institute, Ryan Williams, and several other prominent members are part of an extremist group: the Society for American Civic Renewal. Admiration for the Spanish dictator Franco is one notable feature. Claremont itself has become a radicalised force for white supremacy.

Both the extremist Christians and the libertarians are close to achieving their goals in America. Apart from the impact the implosion of the United States government and civil rights framework will have on the rest of the world, this is relevant because the very global nature of Atlas means that its outposts are trying to replicate its work outside the American homeland. These campaigns are reinforced by the fact that America’s homegrown Pentecostal form of Christianity has been an aggressively international missionary project from its earliest days.

The European Parliament conducted a study affirming reporting that $280 million dollars have been funnelled into the EU over the last decade by Atlas and CNP partners as well as by Evangelical mission programs. Heritage and Federalist stand alongside the Cato Institute, the Leadership Institute and Acton as having donated roughly $20 million towards European groups fighting to repeal reproductive healthcare rights and LGBTQIA rights. Another American body, the CNP-connected American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) has also been training European groups in strategy in cooperation with Bruce Eberle a “visiting professor” at the Leadership Institute. The Koch, DeVos and Prince families are named as major sources of the money. (These donations are overshadowed in scale by those from European and Russian sources.)

Atlas and CNP seem to be convening around the National Conservative (NatCon) project. This is a transnational exercise that manifests in various conferences. Some are NatCon, or PopCon or CPAC or Faith and Freedom. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (in large part funded by the Atlas-partner, the Legatum Institute) would fall within the parameters. NatCon is a network of religio-ethnonationalist operators. The Christian Nationalists are supported by, and supportive of, extremist nationalist projects focused on religion as an ethnic identifier. A Jewish nationalist is one of the founders of the movement, and Modi’s Hindutva nationalism is also befriended. The projects all denote Muslims as a chief enemy, with ethnic cleansing implied and even stated. Each dictates a “traditional” identity and social roles as key to their mission. Natalist policies supporting higher birth rates in the approved identity group accompany such goals, often linked to attacks on feminism and LGBTQIA rights. Race suicide is the result of these “evils.”

The message of “freedom” is endorsed for business and the individual. The individual must be free from public health measures of protective regulations by demonised bodies such as the UN or EU or WHO. The freedom of “woke” people, by contrast, is a threat rather than a consideration.

Rod Dreher’s account of last October’s inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship event focused on the extreme Christianity that underpinned it, not surprising since Dreher has converted twice in pursuit of a more rigorous faith. The (Atlas) Australian Institute for Progress reports emphasised that feature too. The populist NatCon events such as CPAC unite conspiracists with libertarians and preachers. Australia saw such a conference in Albury in March.

A key purpose of these events is shaping a communal identity in the face of a manufactured existential threat. The identity being forged stands in opposition to modern, inclusive and knowledge-based societies. The diagonalist ideology visible there too – where left and right attributes are muddied – is drawing Christianity in as a key component for that identity. Russell Brand is not the only influencer to have ostentatiously converted to Christianity recently.

For many of the participants, the identity they are building together is connected to being White. The Atlas Network, like the Kochs, emerges out of the John Birch Society era of American conspiracist racism. Christianity is the code.

Christianity has the added advantage for an extreme libertarian project of demanding obedience and promising rewards for it in the Afterlife.

The NatCon project is often intertwined with fossil fuel money. It is, unsurprisingly, also deeply antagonistic to climate action.

Conclusion

Evangelical groups in Australia are often transnational and importing ultraconservative goals here.

A separate presence of CNP groups is not yet obvious, but it is worth noting that Feulner, speaking to Atlas junktanks in Australia in 1985, would have been as much connected to the CNP as Atlas.

Australia’s Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) mostly leaves the culture war battles on gender and religious virtues to the IPA and their media ally, News Corp. This October’s CIS Consilium event where the Atlas pipeliners intermingle with local and international talking heads is running adjacent to the inaugural conference of the Australian Chapter of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The consecutive timing is convenient for international guests to attend both.

America’s second revolution is frightening. While Trump disavows Project 2025, his current spokesperson is part of the project. It will be difficult for him to step away from a strategy designed by people he has worked with, setting out the steps his people need to take and providing him with the partisan leaders and employees he will need to enact his dreams of vengeance. He is too lazy not to accept the process.

The rest of us must remain focused on the fact that these networks operate transnationally. They share talking points, strategies, people and money. The revolution that Kevin Roberts has declared they are winning in the US is to be reenacted, piecemeal, for all of us.

It’s past time we fought back.

 

A (much) shorter version of this essay first appeared at Pearls and Irritations as The Atlas Network’s Transnational Revolution

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

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Classical Christian Education: the culture wars go to school

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

 

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An Albury conference exposes what freedom means on the Right

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.

 

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Dutton’s petrostate and the global far right

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

 

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“Hungary is our Israel”: Tony Abbott and Orbán’s Danube Institute

It was announced in late in 2023 that Tony Abbott was to be a “visiting fellow” for Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute, a hub of ultra reactionary thought that gathers anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQIA+ speakers who celebrate the Christian Nationalist project. Or, as Abbott describes it, “a point of light to Conservatives around the world.”

It particularly attracts aggrieved “conservatives” who long for the old days when White men ruled and women knew their place, submissively breeding in the home. Confusion of races, sexuality and genders was not a factor in these mythic days of Western Civilisation’s greatness. All metaphoric borders were strictly policed. Furthermore the colonised were silent about their suffering. Good times for those who controlled the narrative and luxuriated in the spoils.

The Institute serves the purpose for Orbán of laundering his reputation, as seen in Abbott’s 3 May interview with the Hungarian Conservative where he commended Orbán for building a fence in 2015 and stopping what Abbott characterised as “a peaceful invasion” of Europe. Abbott denies the empirical evidence of Orbán’s “electoral autocracy,” asserting that it remains a true democracy.

Rod Dreher is one of the Americans who has been drawn to Viktor Orbán’s Budapest. He moved beyond his conversion to Catholicism, which even in its Rad Trad form proved too lax for him, to Orthodox Christianity. In 2023, Dreher wrote an account of the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) for The European Conservativejournal where he described the concurrent multicultural coalition of Brits protesting for peace in Israel, misleadingly, as an “apocalyptic unveiling of vast numbers of pro-terror, antisemitic Muslims.”

Celebrating the milling crowds of ARC’s lobby as the most interesting part of the conference, Dreher recorded fellow attendees mulling over establishing isolationist “intentional Catholic communities” in the countryside, modelled on Dreher’s own The Benedict Option. Others he reported as debating emigrating to join him in Budapest. One apparently declared, “Hungary is our Israel.”

Around the same time as Abbott’s Danube Institute role was announced, he was also exposed as a member of ARC’s Advisory Board. ARC is both anti-climate science and theocratic in its goals.

April 2024 has been a busy month for Tony Abbott in his role with Orbán’s circle. On April the 8th, The Danube Institute and Quadrant Journal co-hosted an event at the Fullerton Hotel in Sydney. Quadrant hosted its first Orbán circle event in Australia as early as 2016.

Abbott’s speech at the Fullerton was focussed on contrasting the left and right populist movements, calling for a better political option. He evinced disgust for the “climate zealots” and “identity-obsessives” of left populism. Of course “identity” here is intended to dismiss the experience of anyone who does not experience life as a White, heterosexual, Christian man. Abbott also disdained the Trumpist Right.

He set out a series of global enemies beginning with “apocalyptic, death-to-the-infidels Islam” currently manifested in Iran, and which threat he suggested launched its “opening gambit” on the West in the 7th October attack on Israel. “Communist China” is another. Orbán, as his effective co-host, will not have been delighted that Abbott included friend Putin as “a revisionist nuclear power, as-yet unpurged of its militarism, set on restoring the Russia of Peter the Great.”

Abbott is also on the board of the climate-denialist junktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Based in London and funded by fossil-fuel money, the body has been fighting climate action since 2009. It is thus hardly surprising that Abbott’s speech pillories the “climate cult” and positions policy to deal with the climate catastrophe as the threat rather than the catastrophe’s disasters.

Aside from the predictable attack on people who don’t accept his limited view of acceptable gender and sexuality, Abbott also expressed his condescension for the First Peoples of Australia whom, he claims, lived in a country that represented “a Hobbesian state of nature” before Western conquest.

Not long after, Abbott delivered two speeches in Budapest. The first was for the Danube Institute, where he pontificated on the defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum: he depicted it as a conquest over “identity politics.”

Unsurprisingly, he continued to parrot inflammatory misinformation about the power of the proposed advisory body. He also depicted it as separating First Peoples in Australia from the rest of the population. While Abbott admits there is continued suffering amongst Indigenous people, he posits that those living in cities and towns are “reasonably well integrated into the general community.”

Abbott argues that the “considerably worse educational, employment, incarceration, health and housing outcomes” are a result of outback living. The point of the Voice was to allow First Peoples to exercise self-determination about the solutions for the determined problems. It would build a new structure intended to allow collaboration with affected communities to shape the best policies to address needs. Instead Abbott argues that secondary students from First Peoples communities should be systematically sent to boarding schools to assimilate into his definition of Australia.

In a new, hopefully less abusive (or murderous), version of the old boarding school establishments, First Peoples’ youth are to be stripped once again of their culture to become “tradies and professionals” who might return to Country as workers, or only rarely on holiday or in retirement. Abbott’s paternalism is breathtaking.

Fittingly for someone nostalgic for Thatcher and Reagan, Abbott’s only solution for structural problems lies in aiding the individual.

Abbott spoke at CPAC Hungary on the 25th April, spruiking Australia’s success to the religio-ethnonationalist audience as the “only country in the world that’s successfully stopped a wave of illegal immigration by boat.”

He celebrated Orbán’s Budapest: “This conservative fusion of freedom, family and nation, this understanding that ‘politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of religion’ is still contentious in the Anglosphere, but not here in Hungary. Hence the colony of English-speaking public intellectuals, that’s sprung up in Budapest, keen to devise a modern formula that can ‘unite the right’ and end the civil war inside established centre-right parties between their conservative and their progressive wings.” It’s worth noting that “Unite the Right” was the US neofascist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Rather than blaming the toxic neoliberalism that has increasingly driven political economies since the Reagan and Thatcher era (and resistance to its cruelty), Abbott blames “green-left governments” for “crumbling services, declining productivity, stagnant wages, growing street crime, disruptive and intimidatory protests that are becoming routine, propaganda masquerading as education, emasculated police and armed forces, and an uncertain response to dictators-on-the-march.” Apparently only a true “conservative” politics can solve those problems.

The network of organisations that interweave through these events ought to be remarked. They are all loosely part of the National Conservative (NatCon) movement that aims to prevent climate action because it is fossil-fuel funded. And they aim to prevent change through populist nativist nationalism.

We must watch Abbott and his friends at their elusive gatherings because they watch us. They are demonising us as “cultural marxists” and believe it is only by enforcing our compliance with their values that they can “conserve” their mythical narrative of the past.

This essay was first posted at Pearls and Irritations

 

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Don’t ignore the flurry of activity by Australia’s radicalising right

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 17th 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.

 

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The international radical right is built by the corporate dollar

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.

 

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Chalmers’ babies and Dutton’s migrants: Australia’s population debate

What kind of population does Australia need? Jim Chalmers recently informed us that Australian citizens ought to have more babies. Commentators on various blogs and fora have returned to dwelling on Australia’s “carrying capacity” as though this is a farm and we are grazing cattle. Peter Dutton, in his Budget Reply, stated his intent to cut immigration.

All these questions tease at a tricky problem: Western nations are struggling to find people to do the low-paying jobs that the citizenry won’t undertake, at least at such paltry wages.

In Australia, we face skill shortages in critical areas. Without immigrants we cannot fill the roles.

Jobs we refer to as “low-skilled” are crucial for the wellbeing of our nation and their absence has a material impact on citizens’ standard of living – or even lifespan.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the 8th of May that the elderly of West Virginia are learning to their cost what it means when there is nobody available to care for them, dying younger than they might have if their state wasn’t so racist. Virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy means that they have far too few to care for them as they age.

Britain is facing a similar crisis. Bigotry drove much of the Brexit vote that sent so many low-paid workers back to central Europe. The jobs are still being done, but many more of the immigrants filling those roles are coming from the Indian subcontinent. It is ironic that the Brexiteers must now choose to age unsupported in their unchanged diapers or accept help from the Brown people that they voted, so unsuccessfully, to exclude

Peter Dutton appeared to be pandering to the Australian equivalents of those Brexit voters when he claimed last week that Australian immigration must be cut. Apparently now he is in opposition, he cares about Australians’ standard of living, and Dutton blamed the discomforts of inadequate infrastructure investment over decades on the existence of migrants in the country.

Of course, Dutton’s speech included a cut to Australia’s humanitarian visa numbers that he labelled “generous.” Australia’s humanitarian intake is only “generous” in that we have somewhat higher numbers than other countries of people cherry-picked from the hundreds of millions trapped in indefinite “warehousing” in refugee camps around the world. In fact, most countries count their substantially higher humanitarian intakes from people who arrive irregularly, seeking asylum.

The Albanese government had merely returned our stingy intake of refugees closer to what it had been pre-Abbott. We remain one of the international laggards in doing our share in accommodating the displaced, as with so many of our international responsibilities.

The number of displaced around the world is, of course, only set to multiply as Australia helps industrialised nations to continue to depend on our fossil fuel exports. Every 1/10th of a degree of warming means that an additional 140 million people will live enduring “dangerous heat” – or die, or flee.

By the end of the century, 2 billion people are projected to dwell in the unsustainable zones created by 2.7 degrees warming. Almost half of climate scientists recently surveyed believe that our global failure to cooperate means we are more likely to hit 3 degrees.

When even nighttime temperatures remain over human body temperature at 38 degrees or more, our bodies struggle to function. As science writer Gaia Vince explained, “This extreme heat literally cooks your body. We’re made of animal cells. It starts to denature the proteins of our cell membranes. It’s a horrible way to die.”

So it is not only in the context of our failing infrastructure (and prohibitive cost of living) that Treasurer Chalmers’ exhortation to have more babies is foolish. Plagiarising Peter Costello’s “have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country” is a recipe for additional burden on climate systems that are beginning to fail.

Not only does population in industrialised nations add disproportionately to carbon emissions, but each additional child will create financial stress on families as food shortages and resultant price hikes become the norm rather than the exception.

Right-wing parties in Western nations are becoming ever more nativist. Some of these politicians are blatantly ethnonationalist. Others speak the bigotry in dogwhistle codes. “Sustainability” is one of the codes used by such figures. “Carrying capacity” is another. Both mask the bigotry in this greenwashed cypher. The fortress-mentality policies that result have been labelled “border fascism.”

One of Donald Trump’s primary goals is to deport 11 million non-White people from America. His team has just announced a group of “Gun-owners for Trump” who need their guns because “no American is safe from a [mythical] violent migrant crime-wave” provoking the shooting of non-White people.

Australians have seen the difference in Peter Dutton’s attitude to White au pairs compared to people from non-White backgrounds. His success in targeting First Peoples through the dirty referendum campaign, it appears, has emboldened him to begin once again targeting (non-White) migrants as the supposed cause of our discomforts.

The actual cause has long been the tax-strike being executed by the richest. The neoliberal project driving it has stripped our countries of the resources needed for infrastructure. Indeed the taxed common wealth of the masses is being funnelled into the pockets of the rich through sector subsidies and gifts such as shrugging off the repayment of Jobkeeper by highly profitably corporations.

It is crucial that governments and thought leaders begin the big discussions that scientists and policy researchers are demanding. We need transparency from politicians that claim to act in our interests. They must explain our workforce requirements in realistic terms. They must address the policies that keep “low-skilled” jobs an intolerable prospect.

They must discuss what continuing to foster fossil fuel industry demands means for Australians and for the world. Governments need to inform the public clearly what climate heating will look like here and in the zones that will be decimated by the climate catastrophe.

They must explain the codes the “border fascists” use to distract the electorate from the true culprits for our discomforts, fighting the inherent bigotry.

They must discuss the impact of influence networks which work to promote continued fossil fuel consumption, growing inequality, and ethnonationalist goals.

Allowing the bigotry of the Right to dictate policy, for example by calling on Australians to have more unaffordable children, destroys our chances to discuss the shape of our nation. It is only in having honest discussions that our politicians and journalists can enable the nation to address our needs and responsibilities.

If the Albanese government wants to be re-elected, it must become more honest.

 

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Corporatocracy

It’s time we reckoned with what it means to become a corporatocracy. Our governments exist to enact the desires of their corporate masters. Some of these politicians, like Madeleine King, appear to do so with alacrity, while others appear lost in the perceived demands of party and pressure groups. The end result will be an uninhabitable world.

This week, the Albanese government appalled much of its voter base by renaming the Coalition’s “gas-led recovery” out of Covid as the all-new Future Gas Strategy.

In it, Minister King asserts that gas is a transition fuel. This ceased to be true many years ago. As Professor Bill Hare, author of “numerous” UN climate reports explained: “It’s one of the main contributors to global warming and has been the largest source of increases of CO2 [emissions] over the last decade.”

In the policy, the government commits half a billion taxpayer dollars to finding new fossil fuel deposits through Geoscience Australia. Deposits found at our expense will be handed to mainly foreign corporations for their profit. These funds are additional to the roughly $11 billion in subsidies and tax breaks currently granted to the sector annually. Bernard Keane reminds Australians, revisiting Gough Whitlam’s words from 1974, that Australians are still “paying to be exploited” by mining corporations.

The fossil fuel sector has been found to pay “less tax than the typical Australian worker” and many of the corporations “barely pay any tax at all.”

Crikey has also established that the government’s announced raise in the mining rent tax is basically spin with pennies accruing to the commonwealth from ballooning profits.

Labor’s announcement also promotes the farcical climate capture and storage technology as a solution to the rise in carbon emissions they are creating with the policy. It remains, however, an “abject failure” and a “rort.” If the technology becomes viable, it will be one tool in a range of technologies deployed in our race to limit atmospheric carbon rather than this purported offset. This is fossil fuel sector spin, not a policy, least of all a solution.

This surge in gas production was announced on the same day that scientists warned that the world was on the edge of a “climate abyss.” They are expecting the climate to “soar” past the international target of 1.5C, with 80% of the experts surveyed predicting a rise of “at least 2.5C.” Every fraction of a degree means millions of deaths in the Global South. We are approaching crucial tipping points that could worsen the current predictions. Without urgent, substantial effort, a hostile climate will devastate us.

The Australia Institute’s Matthew Ryan warned that, according to “conservative estimates adopted by the US government”, our current exports – which bring us about 2.3. billion from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax – will ultimately cost $74.9 billion in damages “here and around the world.” Australia also granted approval for Chevron’s “massive expansion” to the Gorgon project on the same day as the gas policy announcement. That 3 billion tonnes of emissions alone could cause $1.9 trillion in damages using an estimate published in Nature.

This is particularly disastrous for our Pacific neighbours who will be displaced by ever-worsening climate impacts. It is not just northern Australia that could become unliveable in the next 50 years. Large tracts of Western Sydney might be abandoned within 30 years.

It is not only the corporations that contribute so little to the Australian economy that are pressuring the government to act. The Saturday Paper’s Mike Seccombe revealed the ugly degree to which the Japanese and Korean governments are pressuring the Labor government to boost gas production to compensate for those nations’ failure to transition to renewables. The disgraceful sea dumping bill was introduced at those nations’ demand. Part of the gas announcement addressed that coercion, declaring Australia is committed to being a “reliable trading partner.”

It is important to note that these trade deals do little for us. Japan’s biggest oil and gas producer, INPEX, for example “employs few people, pays very little company tax, zero petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT) and gets our gas for free.” Between 2013 and 2022, it made $41 billion from Australia’s gas.

The global problem, however, remains centred on the corporations which handcuff the politicians and governments, and muddy the debate.

In America, the fossil fuel-backed Heritage Foundation has set out the fossil fuel-based plan for a second Trump presidency in Project 2025.

One of the main projects that make Biden anathema to the sector is his massive investment in the transition away from carbon-based power to renewable technology under the umbrella of the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans are determined to destroy these steps and The Washington Post reported that last month at Mar-a-Lago, Trump set out his promises to the sector in return for a demanded one billion dollars committed to his campaign.

Despite the loathed restrictions imposed by the Biden administration, American oil companies are producing a record number of barrels and boasting “bumper” profits. This will not suffice, and they are also reported to be drafting “executive orders and other policy paperwork” for Trump to sign immediately on regaining office. They fear his Super Tuesday commitment to “drill baby drill” might be lost in the chaos of his plans for vengeance and his other prioritised commitment to deport 11 million non-White people.

Right wing forces in America are working to crush protest rights. In Australia, Labor state governments are imposing similar restrictions. In fact, in 2023 South Australia’s Labor government rushed through laws to silence protest outside the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) conference. The resources minister told the gathering that his government was “at your disposal.”

We will not be allowed to inconvenience the corporations for which our politicians work, even at their conferences.

Renewables are quickly becoming cheap and gaining market share on that basis. Without corporate distortion of the market, using their politicians to funnel taxpayer money away from the community’s needs into subsidies to boost their profits, we would be moving in the right direction.

With government money deployed not to subsidise our own destruction but towards renewables, we can boost our chances of success.

Madeleine King’s resources ministry and this announcement are probably partly sops to West Australian Labor voters who believe their prosperity is dependent on gas. Albanese’s team is gambling that the rest of Australia is as susceptible to the long-outdated argument that gas is a transition fuel. Australia’s regions, served by Sky News propaganda free-to-air, may be filled with manufactured doubt about the prospects for renewables to ramp up relatively quickly and reliably to meet energy needs.

In the better-informed cities, however, Labor might just have been forced to kill its own government by corporations that would prefer the Coalition was back in power.

We must hope that quality independents and small parties can free us from the golden-handcuffed party hacks, pushing Labor into minority government.

 

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Neoliberalism dreads an educated electorate

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.

 

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