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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Stephen Charles AO KC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Voice to Parliament referendum hijacked by lies

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

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

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

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

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

The essay continues at Meanjin, where a digital subscription is only $5 per month or $50 for a year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world’s fate might rest on this election.

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

Australians should be wondering why the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of the country’s proudest think tanks, has just established a body promoting nuclear energy that appears to have little to justify it. If the CIS truly believes in the project, surely it would have sought a leader with a stellar resumé?

Earlier this year, environmental journalist George Monbiot warned that the chance of simultaneous harvest failures in the world’s major breadbaskets was “much worse than we thought.” He poured his fury onto the old industries deploying as many Atlas Network-style “junktanks (‘thinktanks’), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to drag our eyes away from what counts, and leave us talking about trivia and concocted bullshit instead.”

The 500+ global “partner” bodies of the Atlas Network have, for decades, been forming metastasising entities such as “think” tanks to create the sense of a chorus of academic or public support for the junk science and junk political economies that serve their funders. The primary goals have been to liberate plutocrats from any tax or regulation, and fossil fuel bodies have been amongst their most prolific donors.

By contrast with the billions spent to “stop collapse from being prevented,” the effort to prevent Earth systems collapse is led by people “working mostly in their own time with a fraction of the capacity.”

The Atlas strategy involves networking promising ultra-free market spruikers with the astonishing sums of money that fossil fuel and similar industries spend to promote their goals. The spruikers can be trained and cross-connected. Some are helped to create benign-named bodies that describe themselves as think tanks or academic institutes (beachheads) in universities. They found fake grass roots bodies (astroturfing) to pressure politicians into believing that there is public support for a policy. Youthful scholars or strategists co-opted and funded by the machine go on to export the work into politics and the media.

One Australian example is the founder of the Australian Taxpayer Alliance, Tim Andrews. He was a graduate of the Koch Associate Program, a year-long training program at the Charles Koch institute, and worked at the Atlas-partner Americans for Tax Reform for two years. Koch is one of the most significant figures in the Atlas Network’s spread. Andrews is now a member of the UK Atlas Partner, the Taxpayer Alliance Advisory Council.

High profile mining figures in particular unite many of these bodies. In Australia, Hugh Morgan’s name, for example, is present in many of their histories. He assisted Greg Lindsay in turning the CIS from a “part-time hobby” into the more serious institution that it became. Morgan was described in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1985 as “the most important conservative figure in Australia. He is not merely an outspoken captain of industry, he is at the centre of a large and growing network of activists who are seeking to reshape the political agenda in this country.”

In America there is an extensive web of such networks and bodies that interact together. The Atlas Network is important for its international forays into 100 countries, working to infect debate with this American ideology that overwhelmingly promotes the right of corporations to extract resources at any cost to the nation exploited.

The CIS claims to encourage “debate among leading academics, politicians, media and the public.” It announces itself to be “proud to be associated with some of the greatest leaders in business and academia as visiting lecturers or as CIS members, staff or Directors.”

The CIS tended to maintain the dignity that mission statement conveys. It has traditionally acted in the background by contrast with the blowsy, brawling Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The contrast is even starker with the farcical LibertyWorks Inc which created the local Trumpist circus, the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). These two Atlas partners are best known for devising “low” strategy campaigns identifiable as a “war on woke.”

The HR Nicholls Society, like the CIS, pitched its campaigning as “high” strategy: intellectually framed and directed at the upper echelons of civic debate. West Australia’s Mannkal Economic Education Foundation is tightly connected with the Mont Pelerin Society. Queensland’s Australian Institute for Progress, the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Australian Libertarian Society are all amongst the benign-sounding bodies that have been recorded as partners to Atlas.

The Bert Kelly Research Centre, which was linked to the Family First ultraconservative movement, and the Bennelong Society, which acted to fight any First People policy apart from assimilation, are defunct Atlas-connected operations.

Bennelong (denying First People’s self-determination) and HR Nicholls’ (shackling workers) shared a post box and phone number with the Lavoisier Group which continues to post climate denial material. The websites for Lavoisier and Bennelong were designed by a functionary at the IPA.

GetUp! was founded to give the electorate a voice against Dark Money in 2005. This challenge to state capture could not be allowed to stand: to counteract the progressive electorate’s voice, figures associated with the CIS established Advance Australia. As Advance, it led the No campaign for the Voice referendum, reflecting fossil fuel money’s fear of First Peoples’ rights working in cooperation with environmental goals. Dr Jeremy Walker highlighted the Atlas connections and strategies involved while investigative journalist Anthony Klan tracked the people and money that connect the various shadowy bodies that spawned from the parent.

It is not CIS’s fault that this tawdry astroturf collective shared founders, funders and “researchers” with the more dignified CIS.

The CIS Communications Director Karla Pincott recently informed that the CIS was not founded nor funded by Atlas, neither of which has been asserted. Amongst the body’s proudly “public record” and “peer-reviewed” research, she claimed that the CIS’s only “carbon research to date has recommended a carbon tax.”

In the light of this comment it is interesting that the CIS has just announced the creation of its new “CIS Energy Program” which “will offer tangible energy solutions to address concerns about climate change, focusing on nuclear power and the clean energy transition.”

With CIS’s proud tradition of proclaimed reputable research, one would imagine that such a program would be led by a notable figure in the energy field, perhaps a leading academic or professional.

The figure selected to head up this project describes himself as “not a professional with any sort of industry inside experience” nor does he have any “particular credentials.” Instead he is a “kind of interested, enthusiastic layperson.” He says he “sort of stumbled across” the Twitter (X) debate and “threw my two cents in.” While he has a physics degree, he sums himself up thus: “I follow things on Twitter a little bit. I’m interested in economics. I’m interested in energy. I’m interested in physical systems. I’m interested in military technology.” When discussing his climb to relevance as a Twitter debater this year, Morrison said, “I barely even know…I know a couple of the energy debaters.” One would imagine that a person selected to head up a CIS research project would know the thought leaders in the field.(1)

Morrison’s latest video production is much more sophisticated than earlier efforts.

Incidentally, a 16 year-old who is another leading voice via “Nuclear for Australia” has been harnessed by Sky News for the Coalition.

Tom Switzer, departing presenter of the ABC’s “Between the Lines” gave the youth the full 55 minutes of his show. Switzer is also executive director of the CIS where he announced his thinktank’s new “Energy Program” as an opportunity to use the “market” to drive clean energy goals instead of “pitting economic growth against climate goals.” He did not speak to how Morrison himself was selected.

The Liberal Party is promoting the “small modular reactor” as an alternative to renewables. It has long been established that this is a distraction rather than an affordable change. It is believed that the LNP and associates’ support for nuclear power is another in the long list of distractions that the fossil fuel industry has funded to delay and prevent change.

Figures from “think” tanks are platformed on current affairs programs and quoted as though they have expertise. Their important or benign-sounding body’s names give gravitas to their declarations. Their donors are generally concealed and thus their intent can be treated with some suspicion.

On the 18th December, Chris Kenny on Sky hosted “CIS Energy Program Director Aidan Morrison” as a “data scientist” who has conducted an “expert review” of the grid planning. Morrison’s study, in Kenny’s summary, “has concluded these documents play all sorts of tricks to try to ensure that renewables look like the cheapest option, when in fact they’re not.” (2)  Kenny stated Morrison’s data science “work has been so impressive he’s just been appointed to head up the Energy Research Program for the Centre of Independent Studies.” Kenny incorrectly accuses that the renewable energy push has “already caused huge supply problems and cost increases in our electricity grid” and is “now set to make problems even worse.” The pair both criticise the exclusion of nuclear as a solution, portraying it as an ideological decision rather than a pragmatic one. Kenny uses Morrison’s work to conclude: “we have expert confirmation that it might not even work. We might not have enough energy available when we need it. An energy rich country without enough energy…What a shambles.”(3)

Australia must legislate to ensure that such bodies are transparent about funding. Charity status should only be granted to bodies that work with integrity. Figures who represent these bodies ought to be labelled at every appearance as representing vested interests if they cannot meet the required standard for integrity.

Fossil fuel has delayed the global community acting in a calm and relatively painless way last century, in order to ensure it extracts profit as long as possible. Far North Queensland is right now experiencing unprecedented floods, another in a concatenation of “unprecedented” catastrophes. It will soon be too late. We are long past tolerating delaying strategies.

If “think” tanks want to be treated as having credibility, then this new “CIS Energy Program” is a troubling signal.

And we truly hope their mission statement remains: “The Centre for Independent Studies promotes free choice and individual liberty, and defends cultural freedom and the open exchange of ideas.”

Postscript: The Leader made an incorrect assertion about the new Gencost report on a 2GB interview on the 21st December criticising it for examining costs through an investment lens. That incorrect assertion was later repeated by a senior Liberal figure.

———————-

(1) This is Morrison’s full introduction to himself when asked to provide his relevant background to be a guest on a podcast about baseload energy. I have cleaned it up for clarity by removing repetition and most linguistic fillers. The sound was quite distorted at some points but I listened to it repeatedly to achieve the fairest representation of Morrison’s words. “I’m not a professional with any sort of industry inside experience or anything like yourself. I’m a data scientist at the moment. I work writing computer code to trade in futures and other assets. So I don’t have any special technical insight other than [physics degree?] which I suppose helps in deciphering some of these things. So I’m an …kind of interested, enthusiastic layperson. People can hold that against me if they want but I hope they do their best to focus on the arguments and engage with them as opposed to just writing off [people and credentials?] on me. I do have a physics degree. I studied [at ANU…?] I’ve always been a bit of a fan of nuclear power since I studied nuclear physics. I found that it was a really compelling thing. All the solutions to make the problems, which it has, well managed, just seem extremely elegant, extremely satisfying. And I think when you engage with those from a physics perspective, it’s easy to get quite excited by it. But so I follow things on Twitter a little bit. I’m interested in economics. I’m interested in energy. I’m interested in physical systems. I’m interested in military technology. I have a little nascent, fledgling YouTube channel called Miltechntac that I’m working on getting some more videos out for. But yeah, that’s me. I just sort of stumbled across this and threw my two cents in.”

(2) Morrison’s review of renewable’s arguments in the same podcast sounds like this: “Their whole model and what they’ve done there to me is totally opaque and it could be a complete and utter mess. I don’t think I can fix it by just adding in one thing. Maybe it’s right though, and I can’t see exactly other ways in which it’s clearly wrong. I’ve got a few ideas actually. But they need to come back and produce a credible and transparent model that does incorporate all the costs we actually incur for those later stages of renewables, not riding on sunk cost. And there could be other problems still maybe, but they can start with this that they have definitely not included the cost of building the infrastructure up to 2030…”

(3) Threats to the power grid remain rare. The warning in NSW last week was the result of two units at the Mr Piper coal power station being offline, one unexpectedly. The blackout did not eventuate. Power prices have largely resulted in massive windfall profits for the gas sector. The other talking points spread by nuclear boosters are addressed in the latest Gencost report just released.

It is important to remember Brandolini’s Law.

It is no accident that the Australian “conservative” movement has transformed into an echo of the toxic American Right. Fossil fuel money and a giant international network of junktanks bear much of the blame.

Dr Jeremy Walker’s research into the Atlas Network’s Australian partners brought that American body to prominence over the referendum campaign. The media coverage of his academic study into the influence of “think” tanks such as the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) carrying Atlas strategies into the Australian civic discourse raised Atlas’s profile. 

The latest attack by Atlas partner organisations, including (unofficially) News Corp, is a strategic campaign against offshore wind farms.

The model, as Walker reports, for the supposedly grassroots campaign against offshore wind farms on coastal NSW is derived from a related campaign in the United States. Researchers into climate disinformation at Brown University’s IBES first noticed local groups springing up with high production value visual material and matching talking points. While some figures acting in local Facebook groups seem to be authentic (if misled), others seem suspiciously strategic in their interaction.

Sydney University of Technology hosted an international webinar last week that brought together some of the best research voices challenging the climate disinformation industry which is in large part coordinated by Atlas. This sector continues to block any real action to prevent climate catastrophe – indeed is responsible for causing this crisis – as well as escalating the destruction of democratic projects around the world. There is to be no scope for any nation’s public to obstruct their ultra-free market goals.

Walker led the program hosted by former senator Scott Ludlum. Duke’s Professor Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains expanded on her investigative history of this movement. Professor Timmons Roberts from Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab and environmental journalist Brendan DeMille, executive director of the crucial DeSmog blog, detailed their work and resources. (Unfortunately Amy Westervelt of the outstanding Drilled site and podcast was called away.)

The two hours of the webinar was filled with densely conveyed information and access to resources such as the collection of fossil fuel industry documents illustrating that they knew carbon would create a climate disaster from the 1950s but decided from the 1980s to destroy the civic debate instead of changing business model to avert the catastrophe. Desmog provides extensive information about the Atlas Network’s functions and its partners around the globe. Roberts gave a link to the CDL site to contradict fossil fuel-funded disinformation about offshore wind energy. (The latest series from Drilled focuses on the criminalisation of climate and environmental protesters, and its crushing of free speech.)

Walker outlined the history of the Atlas phenomenon, pointing out that international oil industry manoeuvring began in the earliest years of the 20th century, even before widespread universal suffrage in democracies. Their goal to override national sentiments and constraints in supranational treaties and trade deals is central to their power and profit. 

Walker pointed out that the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) acts as the inner sanctum of the Atlas Network. It was founded in 1947 with oil connections from the outset, and neoliberalism can be dated from its inaugural conference. Atlas founder Anthony Fisher’s daughter Linda Whetstone was a director of his prototype “think” tank the British Institute of Economic Affairs, president of the MPS in 2020 and chairman of the Atlas Network from 2016. 

As of the last leaked membership list of the secretive MPS in 2013, former Prime Minister John Howard was a member. John Roskam (Executive Director until 2022, now Senior Fellow, at the IPA) and News Corp’s Janet Albrechtsen were listed. Director and Founder of the CIS, Greg Lindsay, was a former president of the MPS. Ron Manners, founder of Atlas connected “think” tank the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation is a current director of the MPS. Maurice Newman, around the time he was chair of the ABC, was also listed. He helped found the CIS and was a seminal backer of Advance Australia which led the campaign against the Voice to Parliament.

The notorious Charles Koch took over orchestrating Atlas’s success after Fisher’s 1987 death, not to mention being a member of the MPS. Koch Industries was identified to be a “kingpin of climate science denial.” Without the Kochs and Rupert Murdoch, the Tea Party which morphed into Trump’s MAGA movement would have been stillborn. In 1980, when his brother and partner David ran as a Libertarian Party candidate, father of American conservatism William F Buckley described their politics as “Anarcho Totalitarianism.”

MacLean’s presentation highlighted the fact that the figures who held these “public choice” theories, devised by James Buchanan and largely funded by Koch (and peers), knew their ultra free market ideas would not win majority votes and so set out secretly to cripple democracy by any “technology” they could devise. MacLean drew attention to global attacks on democracy and surging autocracy, featuring the Atlas-connected money and “think” tanks that drove the Brexit vote as well as promoting far-right and neofascist politics in Europe. Both movements are tied to climate denial.

The Atlas Network’s main goal, as Demille summarised it, has been to spot and train global talent in the ultra free-market libertarian field and connect it to the free-flowing money that the alliance functions to assist. They now have at least 515 partner organisations in over 100 nations. The contributions of donors and even the fact of bodies functioning as Atlas partners, have been hidden as part of making any account such as this look like a conspiracy theory. They know that the impacts of complete deregulation – tainted water, air, dangerous workplaces – will be unpalatable even to the people inculcated to believe deregulation is desirable. The secession of the rich from civil society, particularly in paying tax, has meant ever fewer services and deteriorating infrastructure for the electorate. Secrecy is key for the corporations and plutocrats funding this model, structuring replicating “think” tanks and funding academics and spin doctors to sell what the backers can’t say.

George Monbiot, environmental and political journalist, describes these “think” tanks as “junktanks.” Included are those like the CIS that prefer to remain in the background targeting “high” strategies at politicians, CEOs and journalists. Also included are bodies such as the IPA which play to the “low” strategies at least in their public facade. The IPA fosters every idiot ball distraction that fuels the grievances and resentment in the culture war ignition of an enraged base. Those idiot balls are framed by their colleagues in America and imported lightly tinkered for the Australian market. Much of this is channelled through News Corp mastheads and Sky News, now funnelled free-to-air into the regions. Many idiot balls, such as the tantrums about EVs ruining the weekend or the threat to gas stoves, serve fossil fuel interests. 

We must work out how to demarcate junktanks from think tanks doing genuine research. We must remove tax free status and ensure that their donor lists are made public. Every journalist or politician that emerges from or remains allied to such a junktank, every interviewee representing them, should be identified as such whenever they make a pronouncement. These disingenuous actors will, of course, feign outrage, pretending that bodies with integrity such as The Australia Institute are their mirror image “on the left.” 

We must draw attention, constantly, to the asymmetric warfare at work. While one part of our civic space functions according to old (flawed) rules, the new Right respects no rules, traditions or norms. One of their strategies is projection: every political actor, researcher or “enemy” media body is as belligerent as they are. They also act to nobble the referees. Pretending that factcheckers, media bodies or public servants are as politically-driven as themselves is one of their weapons.

Our politicians and independent media figures need to speak about this architecture of influence and its anti-majoritarian goals.

This is no minor skirmish. The divisions in society that they are working to create can lead to authoritarian regulation and civic violence.

For some of the oligarchs behind and strategists working for the Atlas Network and interrelated bodies there is a genuine reactionary yearning for an older white society governed by strict “biblical morality.” Christian Libertarianism is a description of America’s perverted libertarianism that desires statist control of bodies. For other cynics in the network, religious Right factions provide a voter bloc and cover for the free market and climate-denial activities. For these reasons, the forces work in concert with and fund Christian Nationalists.

The autocracies promoted by these forces around the globe promote fossil fuel production and consumption. Ultra free-market concepts are matched with repression of individuals and the end of rights and freedom of conscience. Citizens who are content to earn and consume may not notice the difference until climate disasters make their food unaffordable or unavailable. Those who aim to protest the breakdown of our societies under the manifold pressures of the climate catastrophe and economic injustice, combined with the brutal treatment of climate refugees, will be branded extremists or terrorists and will suffer.

The irony is that the people targeted by the strategists into becoming part of the climate denial and delay movement – such as the conspiracists who join the NIMBYs to fight renewables like offshore wind farms – are almost right. But this conspiracy is tracked and piled high with peer-reviewed academic study.

Atlas’s credo is: “We believe that all individuals have the right to pursue opportunities, enjoy success, and live a life of freedom without coercion or persecution. And so we tirelessly aid in the unshackling of individual liberty, free enterprise, and voluntary cooperation to prevent future poverty.” This pablum is actually intended to disguise the impoverishment of the vast majority of humanity, indeed its destruction in the climate catastrophe, while the 0.1% enjoy the liberty that statement celebrates.

Atlas and partners like the CIS hate attention. We must not let them hide.

A shorter version of this essay was published at Pearls and Irritations as Secrecy and the climate disinformation industry

West Australia’s council elections seem a strange place to pinpoint a warning about American radicalising political games infiltrating the Australian landscape. While it is strange, it is nonetheless important.

American conservative and commentator Andrew Breitbart declared a (contested) doctrine that “politics is downstream from culture.” According to his institutional heir, Steve Bannon, this means strategists must change culture to open up the possibilities in politics. From his time as Breitbart News editor to Chief Strategist of Trump’s White House, he fomented culture war. He continues the goal through hosting his War Room podcast and video.

It is crucial not to underestimate the importance of podcasting in the conveying of “news” and the creation of information bubbles. Bannon’s War Room podcast and video has become a major influencer in the international Right. It continues to chart in the top 10 political podcasts in the USA and the UK. In Australia, it is charting at No.11. Naomi Klein’s important book Doppelgänger describes how crucial the podcast is to the Mirror World inhabited by the radical and conspiratorial Right.

Bannon’s message is anti-democratic, ultraconservative religious and conspiracist, with his podcast performances pitching him substantially to the right of Fox News, playing to the Trumpist CPAC crowd. His production is described as the “top spreader of misinformation in the conservative media ecosystem.”

Bannon’s repeated advice to his audience is that every possible election must be controlled and contested by their faction. In America this means sowing chaos in school boards and library boards, fired by the energy of outrage against pandemic measures and infiltrated with QAnon talking points about “groomers” in schools and libraries.

It is not clear that Bannon’s approach will work. It has varied outcomes in America. What is true is that it is motivating coalitions on the Right to coalesce and contest the most minor of elections where they can have more impact, shaping decisions on culture war issues.

The group behind Perth’s council campaign is called Stand Up Now Australia which was established by Peter Harris. It runs Community Connect, where candidates who know to keep their “mouth shut when it was needed,” campaign on more mainstream issues, concealing their conspiracy agenda. The group claims to have achieved between 11 and 20 successful candidates, with potentially 3 or 4 of the 9-member Busselton council emerging from the program.

They represent conspiratorial positions opposing the 15-minute or smart city idea, as well as promoting sovereign citizen fantasies.

The other category of special interest targeting council elections, just as it targets state and federal contests, is the Pentecostal movement. West Australia’s experience illustrates the degree to which these two movements are intermingled. “Freedom” movement’s Harris was the founder of, and a key donor to, the federal “Family First” party and a member of the Assemblies of God church in South Australia. Harris claimed in 2005 that his political position was not aligned to the American Christian Right, but around the party’s founding in 2004, it was claimed that the many candidates around the country were “coy” about their religious beliefs “on advice.”

It is noteworthy that the Christian Right gives permission to “lie for Jesus.”

In Australian councils, winning elections means taking steps to gain influence over the “economic, social and cultural development” of the community. Instead of fringe figures bullying councils to the point that they have taken their meetings online, conspiracists would become part of shaping what groups and events the region chooses to fund.

A quorum of 3 councillors allows the setting of agenda as well as considerable sway. The role can also, as in Moira Deeming’s climb to state politics, help build profile.

Anything that could be defined as “woke,” such as events tied to First People or multicultural groups could be challenged. This includes libraries which have become a focal point for conspiratorial opposition to LGBTQIA+ celebrations.

Solving the problem of understanding what Australia must do to address the crisis of candidates contesting our elections with anti-democratic goals is not simple.

Much damage can be done in one term. Trusting democracy to remove problematic representatives at the next election allows harm to be done in the meantime.

A group that secretly plans to deceive the electorate about their intentions could be considered to commit the crime of conspiracy. It is very unlikely that an Attorney-General or Director of Public Prosecutions would act on this, not least because of freedom of speech (or silence) objections. States with an obligation to truth in political advertising might have more scope to pursue such a false impression, even produced by omission.

We need changes to the electoral laws to prevent people from lying or hiding their intentions.

Our media is clearly not capable of conducting the appropriate level of investigation and revelation so voters know what is at stake. The ABC does not have the funding to carry out its core mandate, let alone adding this task to the portfolio. It would, however, have the benefit of being a relatively trusted source by those who care enough to research their candidates’ views and intentions.

Nor are our commercial networks the trustworthy bodies to task with this project. Ninefax is compromised by its leadership, not to mention understaffed. Moves on Australian Regional Media (radio) and Australian Community Media (The Canberra Times etc) in recent weeks need monitoring for the impact on their integrity.

News Corp clearly is not a contender. Added to its integrity crisis is the fact that News Corp bought the body that published our suburban and regional mastheads. In 2020, it stopped printing them, putting 76 online and closing 36 permanently. It cut the number of journalists covering local news to a third of the former force. News that used to be delivered to most homes is now unwritten or locked behind paywalls. In Australia, 2.8 million people remain “highly excluded” from internet access. Online news can also limit access to reliable news for some older Australians. These actions by News Corp function as another of its major blows to Australia’s democratic project.

We require a database across the three levels of government so that voters can see what relevant commentary and affiliations our candidates are disguising. This is not something easily tackled by a civil society organisation. It constitutes a substantial workload. A crowdsourcing platform, for example, would require constant monitoring to prevent defamatory submissions remaining on display.

This is a debate Australians need to have urgently, so that voters can know the crucial facts about the candidates they must elect. Democracy demands transparency.

This essay first appeared in Pearls and Irritations as Deception: radicalised groups are infiltrating Australian democracy in your town