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.