The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) another fulcrum of influence for radical right libertarians, climate science deniers and fossil fuels, the less than 1% and Austrian-Chicago School of social-Darwinist economics, with its influence continuing via Atlas or Koch Network and ultra conservatives.
MPS has been behind and influenced a network of think tanks globally via Atlas or Koch to promote climate science denial, fossil fuels, deregulation or lower standards etc. then leveraging right wing media, influencers, advisors and politicians to adopt the same policies, see ‘bill mill’ ALEC.
Members allegedly have included Charles Koch, and supported by notables including Murdochs, Evangelical Christian and related donors, with the GOP Republicans adopting MPS and John Birch Society ideas, themes and actions for Project 2025, being developed with Heritage Foundation support.
Like members of IEA Institute of Economic Affairs and MPS, ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan, the economic muse of Charles Koch, Atlas and Koch Network.
Objective, beyond low tax, small government and light regulation appears to be implementing a permanent social-Darwinist ideology used to justify corrupt nativist Christian authoritarianism in the Anglosphere, west, Russia and developing world, for the less than 1%?
The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) was created in 1947 by the free market economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek and advocates “classical liberalism,” an ideology classified by small government and minimal regulation of business. It was named after the location of the group’s first meeting in Switzerland, and the group’s subsequent annual meetings have spanned the globe including Galapagos Islands, Prague (former Czech president Vaclav Klaus is a member), New York, Morocco, Tokyo, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Stockholm. American economist Milton Friedman was also one of the founding members of the Society….
….. Antony Fisher, a former Mont Pelerin Society Member, established both the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Europe, and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. IEA’s other co-founder, Arthur Seldon, was formerly vice president of the MPS.
Membership lists obtained by DeSmog dating to 2010 and, more recently, 2013 show that organizations represented by the MPS have deep ties to the Koch network. Charles Koch himself is a long-standing member of the Society. DeSmog dug into individual member affiliations, and found that Koch foundations have poured more than $100 million into at least 54 groups connected to individual MPS members.
“Neoliberalism is a coherent political movement embodied in the institutional history of the global network of think tanks: the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Institute of Public Affairs (the key Australian node of the network) and their dedicated spin-off counter-science think tanks. All can be traced back to the Mont Pelerin Society, the central think tank of the neoliberal counter-revolution, founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.”
Overland also equates the tactics of climate science denialism with that of the tobacco industry.
“Each component of the neoliberal response is firmly grounded in neoliberal economic doctrine and has its own special function. Similar to the strategies of tobacco companies, science denialism is intended to quash immediate impulses to respond to the crisis, thus buying time for commercial interests to find a way to profit. The think tanks behind the denial of climate change don’t seriously believe they will, in the long run, win the war of ideas within academic science. But bashing pointy-headed elites lends them a certain populist cachet, while protecting the commercial interests of the oil companies, coal miners and gas drillers.
The project to institute markets in emission permits is a neoliberal mid-range strategy, better attuned to appeal to centrist governments, NGOs and the educated segments of the populace, as well as to the financial sector. […]”
Writing at DeSmog, Graham Readfearn has noted that the Mont Pelerin Society has long been home to some of the most ardent supporters of climate change denial……
We observe many governments, especially Anglosphere and conservative, following the ideology of Adam Smith, promoted through Koch linked think tanks, assiduously. The outcomes include less Keynesian influence on government policy and more Smith, or Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan.
The latter cite ‘freedom and liberty’ for society, and economic policies based round ‘public choice theory’, monetarism and small government. Related there is also much emphasis or attention paid to elections, taxes, government budgets and many sociocultural issues including impairment of workers and unions rights, interfering on university campuses, demanding immigration restrictions, ‘freedom of speech’ and using Christianity as a divisive issue to create an ageing conservative voter coalition, especially in the USA.
CPAC US has been in the news for falling audiences and fallings out between different groups and players, while CPAC Hungary will be held 25-26th April in Budapest.
Recently both The Atlantic and SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center have highlighted the links between CPAC and the anti-communist John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, with assistance from others including Fred Koch.
In the past decade we have witnessed a political shift to the nativist and libertarian right in the Anglosphere, but described as ‘conservative’, appealing to the important above median age voter, less educated, more socially conservative, obedient and monocultural, but e.g. in UK leading to austerity measures?
Most of these ideas come from the classical or liberal economists of the past including Calvin, Smith, Ricardo et al. and also includes old eugenics based ideas of dour Christian men like Malthus on population, Galton on social Darwinism or eugenics, and worse, Madison Grant in the US who influenced Hitler.
We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.
This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.
CPAC US has been in the news for falling audiences and fallings out between different groups and players, while CPAC Hungary will be held 25-26th April in Budapest.
Recently both The Atlantic and SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center have highlighted the links between CPAC and the anti-communist John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, with assistance from others including Fred Koch.
We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.
New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors.
Further, historian Nancy MacLean in researching her book ‘Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America’ (2017) she stumbled across the economic muse of Kochs, ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan.
Article on Putin’s Russian attempt to influence US elections after the Brexit EU Referendum and the use of PR public relations agencies.
Relating to Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays who saw PR as in the same ecosystem as propaganda, but brings in the issue of ‘agents’ and foreign agent registers e.g. the US FARA Foreign Agents Registration Act.
We have seen the outcomes of Brexit, Trump, Russian invasion of Ukraine and in Australia The indigenous Voice referendum promoted via right wing or conservative media, influencers and social media.
Further, it has had the desired effect on many of the faux anti-imperialist left who both accuse Ukraine via NATO of being an aggressor versus Russia, then many of the same support Palestine, but avert their gaze from Hamas?
Many, including the right, criticise right wing media cartels like Murdochs’ Fox News, influencers and ‘left’ media of following Kremlin talking points on Ukraine; see Fox News, GOP Republicans including the Koch Network’s ‘Freedom Caucus’, influencers like Farage and Bannon, hard right authoritarian leaders like Orban, Netanyahu etc.
It would appear that Putin’s people have been successful in adopting US Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News, fossil fuel Koch Network think tanks and nativist Tanton Network agitprop, via PR agencies and ‘agents’, to negatively message against Ukraine including anti-semitism directed at Zelensky while describing Ukraine as Nazi?
Another front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of Americans has received little attention in mainstream U.S. media since the election.
BY SUE CURRY JANSEN
The Russian attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, using what intelligence agencies call “active measures,” has dominated U.S. headlines.
There is, however, a second front in Russia’s effort to shape the hearts and minds of U.S. citizens, and it’s received almost no attention in mainstream U.S. media outlets since the election.
As someone who studies the growth of global public relations, I’ve researched the roles PR firms play in shaping public perceptions of international affairs. For years, Russia has been involved in public relations campaigns that have been developed and deployed by prominent, U.S.-based, global PR firms–campaigns intended to influence U.S. public opinion and policy in ways that advance Russia’s strategic interests.
LEGAL PROPAGANDA?
Public relations is an industry that seeks to cultivate favorable impressions of corporations, products, individuals, or causes. A company or public figure might hire a firm to increase visibility, advance marketing agendas, promote strategic initiatives, or manage a crisis.
But things can get tricky when foreign governments get involved. When they hire PR firms to influence public opinion in other countries, they could undermine the domestic values and goals of the targeted nations.
In the 1930s, the PR firm of Ivy Lee–who, along with Edward Bernays, is regarded as a “founding father” of the public relations industry–was accused of circulating Nazi propaganda in the U.S. In response, Congress enacted the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 1938, which required foreign propagandists operating in the U.S. to register with the government. In 1966, FARA was amended to cover people promoting the economic and political interests of their foreign clients.
In what has become an infamous example of political PR, Kuwait hired numerous U.S. and U.K. firms to drum up support for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. As part of that effort, PR giant Hill & Knowlton audaciously created a front group to hold hearings, led by two U.S. Congressmen, on Iraq’s human rights violations. Called the “Human Rights Caucus,” the group wasn’t actually an official congressional caucus.
More routinely, foreign nations hire PR firms to attract foreign investments and promote tourism and trade. Such efforts are completely legal, and business as usual for corporate PR firms and lobbyists. All they have to do is register under FARA.
While foreign government-funded advocacy campaigns are legal, they can be far from transparent. PR strategies are generally designed to hide the persuasive effort because, as the industry saying goes, “the best PR is invisible PR.”
BURNISHING RUSSIA’S IMAGE
Russia’s domestic PR business has grown rapidly since the end of the Cold War, but Russian authorities prefer to use Western firms when targeting Western audiences. Since the U.S. is both a dominant force in PR–15 of the 20 largest global firms are American–and a prime target of Russian influence efforts, it’s not surprising that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces would turn to U.S. firms for PR services.
Industry publication PRWeek reports that Russia has spent $115 million on Western PR firms since 2000, with most going to the U.S. firm Ketchum, a division of Omnicom. (To put that in context: According to the Center for Public Integrity, the 50 countries with the worst human rights violation records have spent $168 million on American lobbyists and PR specialists since 2010.)
From 2006 to 2014, Ketchum had ongoing contracts with the Russian government and its state-owned energy company Gazprom.
According to ProPublica, Ketchum also placed what appeared to be independent opinion pieces praising Russia in the Huffington Post, on CNBC’s website (where links to those stories are no longer active), and in other publications without acknowledging their sources.
That same year, according to Reuters, Ketchum tried to convince the U.S. State Department to soften its assessment of Russia’s human rights abuses. The firm also contacted reporters who cover Russian human rights abuses and urged them to tone down their criticism.
Late last year, Russia’s Minister of Communications Nikolay Nikiforov announced that the Kremlin would be seeking new contracts with Western PR firms this summer to improve its global image, with the intent of spending between $30 and $50 million a year, and possibly more. He indicated that Russia is seeking smaller, less expensive, and perhaps less visible firms than Ketchum.
PRWeek quoted a leading Russian political analyst, Stanislav Belkovsky, who told the publication, “There are a number of schemes that can be used to avoid U.S. accounting rules on lobbying and PR.” In other words, he was pointing out that there are ways to avoid registering with FARA, and thereby concealing the sources of the pro-Russian messaging.
Indeed, the Project on Government Oversight, an independent nonpartisan watchdog group, cites loopholes in FARA that make it difficult to police violations. Even when violations are discovered, prosecution is rare. Instead, lapses are usually remediated by late filing. This is what happened in the recent cases of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who represented pro-Putin forces in Ukraine, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who represented Turkey. Though they had both been working as foreign lobbyists for an extended period of time, they only recently filed with FARA as foreign agents.
And because the U.S. regulates lobbying, and not PR, another common legal loophole involves contracting with firms that have both public relations and lobbying arms. Clients will then channel as much of their business as possible through the PR arm.
THE BLURRY LINE BETWEEN PR AND NEWS
PR as a subject is rarely covered by the mainstream media in the U.S., but nonprofits like ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, the Sunlight Foundation, and NPR fill some of the void.
It’s in contrast to the U.K., where publications like the Guardian extensively cover the nexus of public relations, politics, and policy. During Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure, PR grew rapidly in Britain as politicians and businesses adopted U.S.-style electioneering and promotional techniques. Perhaps for this reason, British media outlets are more attuned to the ramifications of public relations.
The Trump administration’s attack on mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and its promotion of “alternative facts” has rallied journalism to a vigorous defense of the First Amendment, and has led to calls for critical media literacy.
Yet research indicates that as much as 75% of U.S. news begins as public relations. For transparency advocates, this is a problem. By definition, PR is a biased, monetized form of communication that seeks to advance the vested interests of clients. Even some public relations industry figures have recently acknowledged their field’s role in the dissemination of “fake news.”
During the past two decades, the newspaper industry has contracted, with advertisers and readers migrating to the internet. Conversely, the PR industry has experienced growth in both employment opportunities and salaries. In the U.S., there are now nearly five PR people for every reporter. Americans are now being exposed to more public relations than ever before.
While some PR serves worthy causes–promoting health, education, charity, and disaster relief–I believe all PR deserves closer scrutiny because it bypasses the norms of democratic processes: transparency, accountability, and the right of all interested parties to have a voice in civic debates.
To Bernays, the terms “public relations” and “propaganda” were interchangeable. We should think of PR the same way, scrutinizing it with as much critical rigor as we view propaganda.
Sue Curry Jansen is professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College. This essay originally appeared at the Conversation.’
Observed over the past several years confusion and surprise around the success of Trump, GOP etc. and UK Conservatives’ mutual admiration for authoritarian Christian nationalists, including the likes of Vladimir Putin and Russia?
Firsts signs emerged around Brexit promoted by Murdoch led media inc BBC, along with Barclays, Legatum (now behind GB News), Atlas Koch Network think tanks at Tufton Street and nativist right wing influencers including Nigel Farage, Boris Johson etc. and leveraging ageing, low info and regional voters.
Relevant article from the past on methods of media communication, misinformation and shared techniques between Putin’s Russia e.g. IRA Internet Research Agency troll farm, Fox News and related media outlets.
While Roger Ailes was apparently not well liked by Lachlan or James Murdoch, he was left to his own devices at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch to assist in creating narratives and talking points for the right and profits, especially amongst the GOP Republicans, developing mistrust amongst voters.
Analysis via Rolling Stone article on GOP Representatives being informed by and using Russian talking points e.g. to denigrate Ukraine, EU European Union, the west and liberal democracy.
However, this assumes that the same GOP representatives have always been informed well, while avoiding media, influencers, Christian groups and think tanks?
One would argue that no man or woman is an island, let alone purely objective and original as most of our knowledge is gained from media, especially in US and Anglosphere, that is informed by Atlas – Koch Network think tanks, Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News and influencers, while many Christian groups have had long term links with Russia from Soviet times (and influence operations?).
Many nations, at least in the Anglosphere, have experienced disinformation whether related to climate science or fossil fuels, Covid science, education or democracy, and of late witnessed ‘Trussonomics’ in the UK, another version of Buchanan’s ‘Kochonomics’ or ‘radical right libertarian’ ideology.
However, where does this disinformation come from?
According to historian Nancy Maclean it’s a ‘deny and delay’ strategy of Koch Bros. or Koch Network which includes astroturfing, ‘Dark Money’, creating research, gerrymandering, SLAPPs, universities, Christians and conservatives.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine many commentators, journalists, academic and political activists, of both left and right, who have seem to have acted in the interests of Putin’s Russia, why?
Many within or influenced by the US radical right libertarian Koch Network of think tanks and related organisations e.g. Fox News, which have promoted views that seem to support Putin e.g. claims of fake news on Ukraine civilian deaths, blaming NATO, appeasing Putin and demanding no economic sanctions.
Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (CEU Wien) in Russia’s War Against Modernity.
Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.
Observed over the past several years confusion and surprise around the success of Trump, GOP etc. and UK Conservatives’ mutual admiration for authoritarian Christian nationalists, including the likes of Vladimir Putin and Russia?
Firsts signs emerged around Brexit promoted by Murdoch led media inc BBC, along with Barclays, Legatum (now behind GB News), Atlas Koch Network think tanks at Tufton Street and nativist right wing influencers including Nigel Farage, Boris Johson etc. and leveraging ageing, low info and regional voters.
However, much of the then temporal support for leaving the EU and Brexit, was led by the same cohorts via ‘pensioner populism’ and ‘collective narcissism’, to be quickly followed by Donald Trump’s election using similar targets and techniques.
Fast forward to original voter support disappearing due to death of oldies (now being ‘replaced’ by more educated younger generations), negative Brexit and Trump outcomes, the whiff of not just Kremlin propaganda and influence, but Tufton Street Koch fossil fuel Network think tanks, Murdoch media, ‘owned’ conservatives or radical right, and Russians linked to Putin.
Much had been achieved in influencing conservatives who were in awe of Murdoch and related media, with a generational backdrop of anti-immigrant Tanton Network (see Steve Bannon & Nigel Farage) and Putin’s Russia sharing anti-EU sentiments through the Anglsophere’s own propaganda channels or media.
For supposed libertarians and free marketeers, or in fact nativist corporate authoritarians, it’s about shared interests with Russia including need to avoid and break up the EU due to regulatory constraints on policy areas including labour standards, consumer protections, transition from fossil fuels, environment, mobility, liberal democracy and open society.
“RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA HAS MADE ITS WAY into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” That acknowledgement from Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was echoed a few days later by Michael Turner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “It is absolutely true, we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” Among the falsehoods that GOP members of Congress are repeating is the notion that the Ukraine war is actually a battle between NATO and Russia. “Of course it is not,” Turner told CNN. “To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle.”
What makes it even more difficult to see reality plainly is the presence in the GOP of dunderheads like Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who gushed to an Alabama radio show that “Putin is on top of his game,” while scorning U.S. media accounts of Russian behavior. “The propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.” Tuberville may be the dimmest Putin booster on the Hill, but he is hardly lonely.
It has been two months since the Senate passed, in a 70–29 vote (including 22 Republican yes votes), a $95 billion foreign aid bill that included $60 billion for Ukraine. The Republican-controlled House, by contrast, has been paralyzed. Stories leak out that Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently influenced by high-level briefings he’s received since capturing the gavel, has changed his posture and wants to approve the aid. But Johnson leads, or is at least is the titular congressional chief, of a party that contains a passionate “Putinwing,” and so he dithers. This week, Volodomyr Zelensky has warned that Ukraine will lose the war if the aid is not approved. Yet Johnson is heading not to Kyiv but to Mar-a-Lago.
Pause on that for a moment. The Republican party is now poised to let a brave, democratic ally be defeated by the power that the last GOP presidential nominee save one called “without question, our number one greatest geopolitical foe.” One member of Congress has sworn to introduce a resolution to vacate the speaker’s chair if Johnson puts aid for Ukraine on the floor. And the entertainment wing of conservatism—most egregiously Tucker Carlson—has gone into full truckling mode toward the ex-KGB colonel in the Kremlin.
It’s worth exploring how the Republican party, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” became the party that now credulously traffics in blatant Russian disinformation while it flirts with betraying an important ally—along with all of its principles.
To some degree, people’s foreign policy inclinations are reflections of their domestic views. During the later years of the Cold War, large numbers of liberals and Democrats were more sympathetic to leftist regimes like Cuba (see Bernie Sanders) and Nicaragua (see Michael Harrington) than were conservatives and Republicans. I wrote a book about liberal softness toward left-wing authoritarianism and, though I haven’t yet read it, I gather that Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book does some similar spelunking about conservatives’ tolerance for right-wing dictators. Certainly some conservatives were more inclined than any liberal to go easy on South Africa because it was perceived to be a Cold War ally. On the other hand, Republican administrations did push allies to clean up their act on corruption, democratic elections, and other matters where they could (as for example in El Salvador).
Trump’s particular preferences and ego needs play a starring role in the GOP’s devolution. Cast your minds back to 2016 and the revelation that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee. To rebut this damaging development, Fox News conjurers got busy inventing a tale about CrowdStrike, the company that documented the hack, alleging that the servers had been mysteriously moved to Ukraine so that the FBI could not examine them. In his infamous phone call with Zelensky, Trump fished out this debunked nugget and asked Ukraine’s president, who was then already fighting Russia in the Donbas, to do him a favor before he released the weapons Congress had approved:
‘I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. . . . I guess you have one of your wealthy people. . . . The server, they say, Ukraine has it. I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.’
This was bonkers. As the Mueller report made clear, the FBI did get all the data regarding the DNC hack. There was never a shred of evidence that the servers were moved to Ukraine, and in any case physical control of the servers was unnecessary. But what was Zelensky supposed to say? He promised to look into it just as a courtier to a mad king will say, “Yes, your majesty, we will look into why your slippers are turning into marshmallows when the sun goes down.”
As Fiona Hill told me, Tom Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security advisor, tried “a million times” to disabuse Trump of this Ukraine myth, as did CIA Director Gina Haspel, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, and many others, to no avail. It was, Hill notes, “a too-convenient fiction.”
Because Trump regarded any implication that he had received assistance from Russia as impugning his victory, he latched onto the idea (perhaps whispered by Putin himself in one of their many private conversations) that, yes, there had indeed been foreign interference in the election, but it was Ukraine boosting Hillary Clinton, not Russia aiding Trump. Now, it’s true that Ukraine’s friends reached out to Clinton, but why wouldn’t they? Trump’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort, a paid agent of Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Putin Ukrainian leader.
Trump nurtured his misplaced grudge for years. Recall that when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Trump’s initial response was that it was a “genius” move.
I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, “This is genius.” Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine—of Ukraine—Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word “independent” and “we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.” You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.
A non-sociopath would say it was raw aggression of the worst kind. A normal Republican of the pre-Trump mold would have been outraged at the attempted rape of a peaceful, democratic neighbor.
Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.
Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov—who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma—was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.
Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”
Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.’
Many nations, at least in the Anglosphere, have experienced disinformation whether related to climate science or fossil fuels, Covid science, education or democracy, and of late witnessed ‘Trussonomics’ in the UK, another version of Buchanan’s ‘Kochonomics’ or ‘radical right libertarian’ ideology.
However, where does this disinformation come from?
According to historian Nancy Maclean it’s a ‘deny and delay’ strategy of Koch Bros. or Koch Network which includes astroturfing, ‘Dark Money’, creating research, gerrymandering, SLAPPs, universities, Christians and conservatives.
Relevant article from the past on methods of media communication, misinformation and shared techniques between Putin’s Russia e.g. IRA Internet Research Agency troll farm, Fox News and related media outlets.
While Roger Ailes was apparently not well liked by Lachlan or James Murdoch, he was left to his own devices at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch to assist in creating narratives and talking points for the right and profits, especially amongst the GOP Republicans, developing mistrust amongst voters.
Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.
Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.
In the Anglosphere there is still much confusion around Assange, Wikileaks, stolen DNC emails, Russian influence, Russia Report, Mueller Report, Trump campaign, Murdoch’s Fox News, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, Cambridge Analytica, Tufton St. think tanks linked to Atlas or Koch Network, Steve Bannon and right wing grifters, out to defeat Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential Campaign in 2016.
Recently there have been calls and pressure on the Biden Democratic administration, by supporters of Assange in Australia and the U.K., for him not to be deported and possibly pardoned (for charges brought by Trump administration), while many others contest his ‘journalism’ credentials, or at least how unhelpful his cause has been for journalism.
Relevant article from the past on methods of media communication, misinformation and shared techniques between Putin’s Russia e.g. IRA Internet Research Agency troll farm, Fox News and related media outlets.
While Roger Ailes was apparently not well liked by Lachlan or James Murdoch, he was left to his own devices at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch to assist in creating narratives and talking points for the right and profits, especially amongst the GOP Republicans, developing mistrust amongst voters.
Analysis Rolling Stone article on GOP Representatives being informed by and using Russian talking points e..g to denigrate Ukraine, EU European Union, the west and liberal democracy.
However, this assumes that the same GOP representatives have always been informed well, while avoiding media, influencers, Christian groups and think tanks?
Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.
These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values. These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke, anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs.
Alexander Downer, former Australian Foreign Minister in Conservative LNP coalition, Australia’s UK High Commissioner till 2018, visitor to Koch Network Heritage Foundation linked Hungarian Danube Institute (with former PM, now GWPF, UK Trade Advisor and Murdochs’ new Fox Board member Tony Abbott), and source for claims by Trump related people of DNC emails stolen by Russians i.e. George Papadopoulos.
‘Just a diplomat doing his job? A new book puts the spotlight back on Australia, Russia and interference in the US election.’
Relevant article from the past on methods of media communication, misinformation and shared techniques between Putin’s Russia e.g. IRA Internet Research Agency troll farm, Fox News and related media outlets.
While Roger Ailes was apparently not well liked by Lachlan or James Murdoch, he was left to his own devices at Fox News by Rupert Murdoch to assist in creating narratives and talking points for the right and profits, especially amongst the GOP Republicans, developing mistrust amongst voters.
A couple of weeks ago, Josh Marshall wrote about “how Russia’s new defense doctrine is like Fox News.” He pointed out that because of Russia’s economic weakness, they can’t engage in the world via military muscle and have, instead, focused on the asymmetric warfare of psy-ops and disruption campaigns.
As Neil MacFarquhar writes, this goes beyond the possible hacking of the server at the DNC that we heard so much about just before the Democratic Convention. He begins with an example about how Sweden was bombarded with “a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media” as the country was considering whether to enter into a military partnership with NATO. We also know that the same kind of campaign was launched in Britain to spread misinformation about membership in the EU. He points out that Russia uses both conventional media sources – Sputnik and RT – as well as covert channels that are hard to trace.
When it comes to covert channels, you’ll want to read this fascinating piece by Adrian Chen titled simply, “The Agency” to get a picture of what is happening. Chen went to St. Petersburg, Russia to track down one of the locations that seemed to be the source of bizarre stories here in the U.S. about a non-existent Ebola outbreak and a refinery natural disaster. In the end, Chen’s digging into this story wound up leading to him being an actual target of a misinformation campaign.
You may wonder why Russia would want to spread false stories about things like an Ebola outbreak in the U.S. MacFarquhar explains the goal.
The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis…
“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.
“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”
Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said.
“The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”
While Josh Marshall’s piece about all this focused on similar motives for that led to the formation of Fox News and Russia’s disruption efforts, this is what struck me about the similarities. The focus is not on facts, but on building a narrative of distrust – especially in the media. Let’s take a look at how they do that. There is an example of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange being interviewed on RT.
I noticed that one because it was shared on Facebook by someone who is a huge Trump supporter. It’s been interesting to note how many times he shares stories that either originate at RT and/or have clear Russian points of view.
If you watch that video you’ll see Assange creating a whole false narrative about why Hillary Clinton chose Tim Kaine (rather than Bernie Sanders) as her VP running mate. He has a few actual events that he spins into a story that has absolutely zero factual basis. I could do the same thing and suggest (as I’ve seen some actually do) that Assange recruited Edward Snowden to steal secrets from the NSA which were then passed on to China and Russia. In doing so, I could spin a few real events into an explosive story of subterfuge without any actual facts to back it up.
This is the more nefarious side of the “merchants of doubt” that we’re seeing so much of in the media these days. In too many places it has gone from being a Fox News phenomenon to standard practice. All one has to do is tell an explosive story that is wrapped around some actual events and claim that you are simply concerned about the questions that are raised or the “appearance of corruption.” Facts that prove/disprove the narrative are unnecessary. It is very reminiscent of how Heather Digby Parton described the efforts of the group Citizens United.
Citizens United became a clearinghouse for all this shady material, alternating between spoon feeding enticing tidbits to the press and dumping vast amounts of incomprehensible material that sounded bad but ended up being misleading at best when the facts were untangled. This was the essence of ’90s-style “smell test” politics in which many people observed the sheer volume of complicated accusations, threw up their hands and assumed that where there’s this much smoke there must be a fire somewhere.
This is precisely why, over the weekend, Paul Krugman wrote that Hillary Clinton is getting “Gored.” The difference this time is that it is not just Fox News and right wing media that is priming the pump. They now have a partner in Vladimir Putin. If you doubt that, take a look at what Adrian Chen said about what is happening with the social media accounts he’s been tracking for a while now that led to his original story.
Because we value freedom of speech and the press, there is no acceptable way to stop this sort of thing from happening. The best defense is to always look for and demand the facts before buying into a narrative. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to provide here at the Washington Monthly…and will continue to bring to the table.’
Analysis via Rolling Stone article on GOP Representatives being informed by and using Russian talking points e.g. to denigrate Ukraine, EU European Union, the west and liberal democracy.
However, this assumes that the same GOP representatives have always been informed well, while avoiding media, influencers, Christian groups and think tanks?
One would argue that no man or woman is an island, let alone purely objective and original as most of our knowledge is gained from media, especially in US and Anglosphere, that is informed by Atlas – Koch Network think tanks, Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News and influencers, while many Christian groups have had long term links with Russia from Soviet times (and influence operations?).
Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.
Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.
Fox owner Rupert Murdoch allegedly fired FoxNews’ Tucker Carlson which may be plausible, but not credible if one observes other allegations apart from Christian beliefs that have emerged?
Following are excerpts from an interesting article written by Stephen Cushion in The Conversation ‘How UK broadcasting’s key principle of impartiality has been eroded over the years’ with focus and excerpts including BBC, Fox News, US fairness principle, Ofcom, GB News, personalities and public confidence.
In the Anglosphere there is still much confusion around Assange, Wikileaks, stolen DNC emails, Russian influence, Russia Report, Mueller Report, Trump campaign, Murdoch’s Fox News, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, Cambridge Analytica, Tufton St. think tanks linked to Atlas or Koch Network, Steve Bannon and right wing grifters, out to defeat Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential Campaign in 2016.
Analysis via Rolling Stone article on GOP Representatives being informed by and using Russian talking points e.g. to denigrate Ukraine, EU European Union, the west and liberal democracy.
However, this assumes that the same GOP representatives have always been informed well, while avoiding media, influencers, Christian groups and think tanks?
One would argue that no man or woman is an island, let alone purely objective and original as most of our knowledge is gained from media, especially in US and Anglosphere, that is informed by Atlas – Koch Network think tanks, Murdoch led right wing media e.g. Fox News and influencers, while many Christian groups have had long term links with Russia from Soviet times (and influence operations?).
Further, not only is there the shared interest including fossil fuels, nationalism, Christianity, traditional values and autocracy, but deep seated antipathy towards the EU European Union’s minimum standards on labour, consumer protections, taxes, anti-laundering measures, environment, transition to renewable energy sources, liberal democracy, diversity and empowered citizens; see Brexit.
However, many claim that maybe these Anglosphere players had been compromised in past decades (without realising) by Russian influence e.g. UK ‘Conservatives for Russia’, but now being ‘wedged’ into silence or blocking e.g. aid to Ukraine?
Republican Rep. Mike Turner accused some of his colleagues of having “uttered” Russian propaganda “on the House floor” amid Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine.
“We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” the chair of the House Intelligence Committee told Jake Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
Turner’s comments back an earlier assertion by fellow Republican and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul, who told Puck News last week, “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
McCaul blamed conservative media outlets for pushing Russian propaganda, including “nighttime entertainment shows” that spew “identical” talking points being used by Russian state media. He mentioned “these people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda” and said it was “obvious” which of his GOP colleagues had fallen for it. That’s when McCaul’s staff insisted the conversation be moved off the record.
“I mean, there are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which, of course, it is not,” Turner said Sunday. “Vladimir Putin having made it very clear, both publicly and to his own population, that his view is that this is a conflict of a much broader claim of Russia to Eastern Europe, including claiming all of Ukraine territory as Russia’s.”
“To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle, which is what it is,” Turner added.
Republican members of the House, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have recently opposed any additional aid to Ukraine. Greene has threatened to hold a vote to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson if he brings Ukraine aid to a floor vote. Turner said he doesn’t see “any risk” that Johnson will be ousted.’
Bill Kristol on Koch Network’s Heritage Foundation and Hungarian PM Orban:
Still, there is discussion and analysis of Brexit versus the EU and Trump versus Biden’s Democrat administration, with accusations and allegations being made against Conservative MPs, Ministers, some Labour, media, Anglo right wing grifters, US fossil fueled Atlas – Koch Network think tanks at Tufton, related nativist Tanton Network and Russians, including FSB, diplomats, media and oligarch types.
Radical right in Anglosphere and Europe is cited here by Scott in Politico, including the ‘great replacement’ and Renaud Camus, climate science and Covid 19 scepticism.
Symptoms of fossil fuels, oligarchs and <1% supporting corrupt nativist authoritarianism found around (mostly) right wing parties with ageing and low info constituents, informed by talking points prompted by mainstream media, social media and influencers.
Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.
These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values. These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke, anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs.
Alexander Downer, former Australian Foreign Minister in Conservative LNP coalition, Australia’s UK High Commissioner till 2018, visitor to Koch Network Heritage Foundation linked Hungarian Danube Institute (with former PM, now GWPF, UK Trade Advisor and Murdochs’ new Fox Board member Tony Abbott), and source for claims by Trump related people of DNC emails stolen by Russians i.e. George Papadopoulos.
‘Just a diplomat doing his job? A new book puts the spotlight back on Australia, Russia and interference in the US election.’
We observe in the Anglosphere resurgence in conservative Christian nationalism of the right, becoming a central issue in ageing electorates, more in the US, Russia and Central Europe; both an electoral and policy strategy, plus supporting beliefs.
Some of the Anglo links are former Australian PM and now UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott with the ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, Donald Trump gaining support of Evangelical and ‘pro-life’ Christians, the fossil fueled Atlas or Koch Network and their influence on the conservative Christian CNP Council for National Policy, Koch influenced Federalist Society promoting ‘pro-life’ choices for SCOTUS on Roe vs. Wade, then sharing similar values with Orban et al. in Central Europe, and Putin in Russia too?
In the Anglosphere there is still much confusion around Assange, Wikileaks, stolen DNC emails, Russian influence, Russia Report, Mueller Report, Trump campaign, Murdoch’s Fox News, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, Cambridge Analytica, Tufton St. think tanks linked to Atlas or Koch Network, Steve Bannon and right wing grifters, out to defeat Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential Campaign in 2016.
Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (CEU Wien) in Russia’s War Against Modernity.
Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.
Good overview from Tamsin Shaw through ByLine Times of how the US and UK politics, funding, networking and campaigning, crosses over with various oligarchs, groups and nations, of dubious outlook.
Influence of Koch Network’s faux libertarian or free market think tanks, joined with nativism of Tanton Network faux environmentalism, media cartels led by Murdoch et al including Musk, Christian Conservatives and influencers, on latter the Council for National Policy.
Return to questions over the U.K. Russia Report, former PM Johnson, Brexit, Conservative government, Russian oligarchs and influence on elections including the EU referendum..
Written by Peter Jukes and originally published January 2023 by ByLine Times, asking questions that are not only unresolved, but actively avoided by the Tories, media and supporters for the advantage of Putin’s Russia and oligarchs, both east and west?
Noah Smith (see his Substack Noah Opinion & subscribe) an accomplished wordsmith, journalist, data analyst and thinker revisits Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, limits to growth and degrowth; still apparent in faux environmental narratives in mainstream media, but are coming from the fossil fuel nativist right.
Missed a few details including ZPG Zero Population Growth, Rockefeller Bros., Rockefeller Foundation, long standing donors like the Scaifes etc., whiff of anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and Asiaphobe sentiments that were channelled via deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and his Social Contract Press; colleague of Ehrlich at ZPG.
Not to forget the roots of this movement including Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and post World War II the Rockefeller Commission, UN Population Division, green revolution, Club of Rome and tracking symptoms of previous high fertility i.e. ‘population growth’ but ignoring decline in fertility globally, to this day.
And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes
Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.
And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss:
When the news program was roundly ridiculed for giving Ehrlich air time, the 90-year-old scholar defended himself on Twitter by citing his academic credentials, and the fact that The Population Bomb had been peer-reviewed:
As many acidly pointed out, the fact that Ehrlich has impeccable credentials and was peer-reviewed is a reason to take a more skeptical eye toward academic credentials and peer review in general. Maybe we’ve gotten better at these things since the 60s, and maybe not. But being spectacularly wrong with the approval of a community of experts is much worse than being spectacularly wrong as a lone kook, because it means that the whole field of people we’ve entrusted to serve as experts on a topic somehow allowed itself to embrace total nonsense.
Anyway, it’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today — i.e., the “degrowth” movement — are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.
Why Ehrlich was so wrong in 1968
Ehrlich’s basic prediction in The Population Bomb was that overpopulation would soon cause massive famines. Matt Yglesias has a good Twitter thread with some screenshots:
Ehrlich also predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s, that England would cease to exist by the year 2000, etc. etc.
Obviously, nothing like this ever happened. But why? In fact, there are a number of reasons. But the most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.
In the case of overpopulation and food supply, two big things happened to make Ehrlich wrong. The first is that a bunch of new agricultural technologies — collectively referred to as the Green Revolution — emerged that boosted crop production dramatically. For example, corn production has more than quadrupled since Ehrlich’s book came out:
The other thing that changed was the number of mouths that had to be fed. Population growth has not remained exponential; it has slowed all around the world, thanks to lower fertility rates. Ehrlich wrote right around the peak; since then, population growth has been more than cut in half.
These two factors, in combination, mean that human beings consume substantially more calories today, on average, than when Ehrlich made his sensational predictions
Nor is this just because a few rich-world people are hogging all the food. Global deaths from hunger and malnutrition have fallen steeply, to about 212,000 in 2019
So whether or not Ehrlich got his math right, the fact is that his assumptions were wrong. But why were they wrong? A bit of it was due to what I might call “quasi-natural” processes — economic growth led to urbanization, which drives down fertility rates. Increasing education, which also tends to accompany growth, reduced birth rates as well. But most of Ehrlich’s mistakes come from his failure to anticipate that human beings would act intentionally to avert most of the trends he was warning about.
Scientists of the 1960s, like Norman Borlaug, knew that feeding the world would be a problem as global population rose; they didn’t need Paul Ehrlich to tell them that. That’s why they dedicated their lives to working on improving crop varieties and fertilizers and irrigation. The inventors of birth control knew that for many families, having one more accidental child just meant one more mouth to feed, and they invented new forms of contraception specifically so that people could choose the family size they wanted. Human ingenuity — what Julian Simon, who famously beat Ehrlich in a bet about commodity prices, called “the ultimate resource” — was one of the stabilizing mechanisms that acted to damp out the runaway trends Ehrlich was predicting. (In fact, human ingenuity was also the reason Simon won the bet about commodities; people worked hard to develop new sources of supply and new ways of using resources more efficiently.)
Another stabilizing mechanism was government action. Concern about overpopulation was what prompted many countries to make new birth control technologies more available to their people, even when it violated their conservative values — for example, worry about food supply prompted Iran’s religious leaders to implement one of the world’s most effective (and totally voluntary) family planning programs in the 1990s.
What about coercive programs? Brutal, repressive policies like India’s mass sterilization program or China’s one-child policy were motivated in part by the overpopulation panic that originated in the West (though in China’s case the key book was The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Of course, China and India hardly needed some American intellectuals to tell them that they were poor countries who struggled to feed their gigantic populations. But these were definitely the kind of brutal totalitarian measures that Ehrlich was recommending.
And yet it’s not at all clear how much of an effect these repressive policies actually had. China’s fertility rate had already declined precipitously by the time they enacted the one-child policy, and further declines didn’t happen until a decade later.
Meanwhile, India’s mass sterilization campaign in 1975 produced no discernible change in the slow, steady downward fertility trend in that country.
In other words, the stabilization mechanisms that made Ehrlich so laughably wrong were generally not the massive coercive top-down government actions that he hoped for. Instead, stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.
There is a lesson here for the modern day.
Ehrlich’s modern-day heirs
In general, my advice to people who want to understand the late 2010s and 2020s is to read about the late 1960s and 1970s. The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but the broad-based social and political unrest that emerged in the late 60s has an obvious parallel with the unrest of the late 2010s. My general thesis is that unrest is a “macro variable” that trickles down and basically infects everything in a society, including what scientists think about and write about.
For many, I think, unrest creates a sense of catastrophic runaway change, which results in a desire to “stop the bus” and slow change down. If you’re a biologist, then perhaps that fear of change manifests in catastrophic predictions about population and natural resources. Ehrlich has caught an especially large amount of flak, but he was hardly unique for his day; Mark Perry has a good roundup of apocalyptic predictions that environmentalists made around the same time, some of which are even more extreme than Ehrlich’s!
Nowadays, as in the 70s, many intellectuals on the left have become afraid of economic growth and resource limitations. This is why Ehrlich is back on TV — wildlife loss is one of the things people are scared of. But the biggest thing people worry about is climate change. And though some environmentalists have embraced the idea of green growth as the solution to climate change (which it is), there’s also a degrowth movement that’s especially popular in the UK and North Europe, and has gained a foothold in some intellectual circles in the U.S.
So far, degrowth’s popularity in the U.S. has been limited due to vigorous pushback from liberals and many leftists, who realize that its proposed solution of massive coordinated global anti-growth planning is A) unworkable, B) would stall the transition to renewable energy, and C) would require developing countries to make untenable sacrifices. But the idea still gets regular exposure in the American press, and sensible folks are forced to be constantly vigilant against the steady drumbeat of degrowtherism from across the Atlantic.
It worth mentioning, though, that degrowthers aren’t just calling for unworkable solutions; they’re also incredibly sloppy in their predictions. For example, degrowthers regularly base their assessments of unsustainable resource use on aggregate measures of material usage.
The British intellectual Jason Hickel also uses aggregate measures of resource use by gross tonnage to support his own jeremiads against growth.
This is a terrible metric, for several reasons. First, it includes materials that are recycled or sustainable (e.g. commercial forests, or farming itself). If resources shift to a more sustainable form — for example, the massive switch from fishing to fish farming — that won’t be recorded in these numbers.
Second, it ignores one of the most important sources of sustainability: resource substitution. When humans figure out how to substitute a commonly available resource for a scarce one, sustainability increases even if the gross tonnage used also increases. For example, if we use widely available magnesium instead of scarce lithium for our batteries, that increases sustainability even if tonnage doesn’t change. Humans are always looking for ways to substitute plentiful resources for scarce ones, and we often find them.
But no matter what metric they use, degrowthers always make the same fundamental mistake, and it’s the same one Paul Ehrlich made: trend extrapolation. The tweet above is just classic “line go up” thinking. And degrowthers treat the past correlation of economic growth and resource use as if it’s a law of the Universe, when there’s no reason to believe that correlation will continue. For example, many countries have managed to decouple their carbon emissions from their GDP growth:
When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.
This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.
In the meantime, however, degrowth might push some countries’ policies in a decidedly foolish direction; I’m particularly worried about the UK. Just as India and China pursued self-destructive policies in response to the population panic, the UK may be tempted to make its grinding post-2008 stagnation even worse in the name of degrowth.
But enviro-catastrophists are not always wrong
Witnessing the follies of environmental catastrophists, from the 1970s to today, it’s tempting to conclude that people who make dire environmental predictions are simply kooks whom we should just never listen to. Indeed, many people do draw exactly that conclusion, especially on the political right. This is a bad response, for a number of reasons.
First, environmental catastrophes are a very real possibility. Climate change is the main example; if we don’t do something to limit emissions (and, probably, pull some carbon out of the air), we really do face a whole lot of extremely negative consequences. Sober scientists who believe strongly in the power of human ingenuity, technical solutions, and economic growth nevertheless recognize both the necessity and the magnitude of the task.
It would be very, very bad to ignore the people warning about climate change. If we do avert catastrophe, technology will be how we do it. But just as with Norman Borlaug, scientists have to be sufficiently worried about the problem in order to be motivated to devote their lives to this project. It’s easy to mock climate alarmism, but without some sort of alarm, people wouldn’t have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to make solar power and batteries cheap. Ingenuity is one of the great stabilizing forces of human society, but it doesn’t just happen automatically.
(So how do we tell the difference between the sober, realistic warnings and the overblown panics? There’s probably not a good general mechanism for doing this; we just have to use our intelligence to evaluate the claims various people are making. But one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions. In general, expertise in identifying a problem isn’t the same as expertise in solving it, so people who insist that mass sterilization is the only solution to overpopulation, or that degrowth is the only solution to climate change, often have a political axe to grind, or are just overconfident people to begin with.)
But there’s one other situation where prophets of enviro-doom might come in handy even when their warnings are overblown. Humans, who set all the policies and invent all the technologies, simply don’t care enough about nonhuman life. We may stop climate change and overpopulation and resource scarcity and air and water pollution out of self-interest, but it’s unlikely that pure self-interest will be enough to stop habitat destruction.
And we are destroying the animals — or at least, many of them. Wild mammals, for instance, have declined by 85% (in terms of biomass) since humans arrived on the scene.
I’ll write a lot more about why this is happening, and how bad it really is, and what we can do to prevent it, but for now I’d just like to note that it’s highly unlikely that human beings care as much as we should about the welfare of non-human living beings. Some people do care, a lot; but the fact that self-interest is rarely a major factor in our calculations about other animals means that we’ll always tend to care less about actions of ours that harm those voiceless, powerless creatures.
This lack of caring can often be utterly chilling. In an otherwise strong post criticizing Ehrlich’s recent 60 Minutes appearance, Cato senior fellow Marian L. Tupy ended with this disturbing assertion:
But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress…Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming.
This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness. It also happens to omit animals’ desire to live, to avoid starvation and pain — wildlife exists not just for humans’ benefit, but for its own. And the idea that the savage necessities of life in the wild provide moral justification for human destruction of wild habitats needs some stern reexamining.
Seeing the prevalence of attitudes like this, I wonder if alarmism like Ehrlich’s isn’t a useful counterweight to human callousness. In economics jargon, perhaps overestimating the probability of a sixth mass extinction is a way to better match the private utility functions of the humans who make global economic policy with the social welfare function that includes all living, feeling beings. At the very least, alarmism might help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.
So I’m not ready to throw the degrowth people and the doomers under the proverbial bus quite yet. I just want them to focus their efforts on wildlife, biodiversity, and habitat destruction, and leave climate change to more sober-minded folk.’
Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics
In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.
However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.
We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.
This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.
In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.
John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?
The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.
Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.
The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.
The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.
Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.
The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.
However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.
Population Growth or Decline?
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Since the 1970s, and earlier with Malthus and eugenics movement, we have been presented with the threat of catastrophic population growth due to fertility rates in the less developed world, then due to ‘immigration‘ from the less developed world when in fact we are facing population decline from mid century; contrary to UN Population Division data which inflates future headline growth?
This ‘misunderstanding’ has been highlighted by science journalist Fred Pearce in ‘The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future’; Hans Rosling in ‘Don’t panic the truth about population’; Prof. Wolfgang Lutz of Vienna’s IIASA and Sanjeev Sanyal demographer at Deutsche Bank.
Article from Michel in TNR The New Republic on the right’s obsession with, respect and desire for authoritarians and dictators, even if corrupt and nativist including Trump and Putin.
While ‘free market’ think tanks, especially US fossil fuel Atlas or Koch Network promote right wing policies for the 1%, and related white nativist Tanton Network entities promote eugenics and the great replacement.
Further, two other central elements include media and ageing citizens; hollowed out legacy media including ‘news deserts’ and now social media being colonised or flooded with far right nativist agitprop to increasing numbers of ageing and/or disadvantaged voters who are less urban, less diverse, less educated and less informed.
Right wing parties, nativists and populists are being used to support both eugenics and corporate friendly policies for the 1% versus 99%, even if against the latter’s interests; see Brexit, Trump and Putin.
For years, an imperialistic, hard-right European dictator unleashing bloodshed across the Continent cultivated supporters across the U.S. This despot claimed he was leading a “unique, anti-Western culture,” and, in so doing, cultivated allies and fellow travelers among conservatives across America, all of whom were disgusted by “corrupt Western liberal values” and who “scorned Western liberalism as a bankrupt ideology.” Nor was this appeal just rhetorical; as investigators later discovered, this right-wing revanchist bankrolled both propaganda efforts and agents on the ground, successfully turning Americans, especially on the right, to his cause.
To modern readers, the story is a familiar one — not least as it pertains to Donald Trump’s affections for Vladimir Putin, to say nothing of how Russian forces have cultivated conservative Americans from Tucker Carlson to the National Rifle Association and beyond. But the aforementioned case has nothing to do with Putin or with Trump. Instead, it took place a century ago, when conservatives across the U.S. flocked to the cause of Germany’s militarist tyrant, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In so doing, as Jacob Heilbrunn successfully argues in his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators, they created a blueprint for how foreign dictators even decades later could cultivate conservative communities to their cause — and could, by the early 21st century, help propel one as far as the presidency. The story of the Americans who worshipped Wilhelm is just one of a range of pro-dictatorship efforts that Heilbrunn excavates, threading a century-long conservative infatuation with right-wing dictators. It’s not only a corrective to the voluminous (if also accurate) investigations on how communist tyrannies fostered leftist supporters in the U.S., but also an able — and wildly timely — effort to stitch together nominally disparate views, from different epochs and eras.
It all adds up to a convincing conclusion: that Trump, in “lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators … wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics,” Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a previously acclaimed book on the history of neoconservatives, writes. “Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”
It’s a tradition that has seen surprisingly little scrutiny, allowing Trump’s treacly fealty to Putin to seem like an aberration. To be sure, there are elements unique to Trump’s personal predilections — not least his history as a luxury real-estate developer, an industry that profited arguably more than any other from the illicit, kleptocratic flows linked to foreign dictators, laundering untold millions of dollars (and potentially more) in the process. Never before could foreign despots so easily, and so effectively, patronize the company of a sitting American president.
But in other far more conspicuous ways, Trump is simply building on a legacy long predating his rise. There were, for instance, the early devotions to the Ur-Fascist himself, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce presented himself not only as a guarantor of order and stability — and a bastion against left-wing forces in Italy and beyond — but as someone who posed “as a defender of whites,” Heilbrunn notes, who prioritized “family values” and who, “in stark contrast to hedonistic America, cherished manliness.” (He also cherished Wall Street with JP Morgan organizing a loan for the Fascist government worth nearly $2 billion in modern currency.) Conservatives in America lapped it up, fêting not only Mussolini but salivating for a similar leader in the U.S. One conservative writer, Irving Babbitt, bleated that circumstances “may arrive when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”
So, too, did plenty of conservative Americans view the rise of Mussolini’s younger brother, ideologically, in Berlin. While the organization of pro-Nazi sympathizers in America has seen more detailed treatments elsewhere, Heilbrunn ropes in other conservatives who freely platformed Adolf Hitler. Germany’s dictator was freely supported by conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst, who “not only admired the Fuhrer, but commissioned him and Mussolini to write for his newspapers for handsome fees.” Later investigations revealed that Hitler’s regime picked up on the kaiser’s previous model, not only covertly funding agents in the U.S. but even slipping pro-Nazi propaganda into official congressional mailings, recruiting some of the U.S.’s most conservative representatives of the time.
The postwar smothering of fascism didn’t seem to slow conservatives’ lust for right-wing strongmen. By the 1960s, the primary home for such reverence was found not necessarily in Washington but in the pages of National Review, where founder William F. Buckley and his claque of writers apparently never found a hard-right despot they couldn’t support. There was Spain’s Francisco Franco, whom Buckley dubbed an “authentic national hero,” Heilbrunn writes. There was Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who wrote in the magazine that he was “fighting for Western civilization and Christian values.” There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whom Buckley viewed as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” (After Pinochet used a car bomb to assassinate a political opponent in Washington, D.C., Chilean officials turned directly to Buckley for advice on how to “sanitize Pinochet’s reputation,” for which Buckley happily obliged.)
Soon, though, such sentiments swelled back into the White House. By the Reagan era, American affections for right-wing despots during the late Cold War blossomed into official policy. The architect for such fondness was Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as an “unabashed defender” of right-wing regimes throughout her tenure. Nor was she picky about the form. Militarists in Argentina, those running death squads in El Salvador, the authors of apartheid in South Africa: Kirkpatrick, with Reagan in tow, succored them all.
But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later, the Soviet Union shattered. America — and liberalism — stood triumphant. Supporting such regimes was suddenly gauche, out of step with this American moment. And the patterns and preferences that propped up American backing of right-wing dictators slunk back into the shadows.
But it never disappeared entirely. As with so much of the paleoconservative architecture of Trumpism — the nativism and the racism, the suspicion of the federal government and the amorality undergirding it all — Heilbrunn identified Pat Buchanan as the figure who kept the flames of such fawning for right-wing dictators alive. Not only did Buchanan refer to leaders like Hitler as “an individual of great courage,” but Buchanan whipped up opposition to American intervention in the Balkans, calling time and again to let Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic have his way and commit genocide.
As Heilbrunn writes, Buchanan — who would later turn his affections toward figures like Putin, even before Trump entered the White House — “longed for a kind of internationalism rooted in those small towns and conservative values and in whiteness, whether in the U.S. or in Serbia or Russia or South Africa or elsewhere.” For years, Buchanan “seemed like a Cassandra,” but as Heilbrunn added, “One prospective candidate for the presidency who picked up on … Buchanan’s unusual history lessons was a loudmouthed Manhattan real estate mogul” — a figure who gave Buchanan’s views the biggest platform yet, carving an entire political movement out of a conservative tradition few Americans had any idea existed.
Thanks to Heilbrunn’s book, however, that confusion is no more. And while the book’s actual writing verges on the overwrought — words like oneiric and pursuivant belong in spelling bees, not mainstream political analysis — Heilbrunn correctly identifies the core of this conservative strain. Trumpists, and those who came before, “are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.” Just as the white supremacist Redeemers before them claimed they were simply advocating a restoration of democracy, so, too, do the Herrenvolk reactionaries of the MAGA world claim they’re simply restoring supposed American greatness — and that right-wing despots abroad should be allies in the fight.
If there’s a fault in Heilbrunn’s writing, it’s that there might be too much emphasis on such ideological affinity. After all, dictatorships’ abilities to inflame and inflate American conservative support can’t operate without a latticework of supporters. And as we’ve learned in recent years, those operatives — the lobbyists and the PR specialists, the law firms and the consultancies, the former congressional officials who leave office and immediately transform into mouthpieces for foreign regimes — don’t require any ideological overlap with their despotic clients. All they need is to get paid, and they’ll be happy to transform into foot-soldiers for tyranny.
Just look, for instance, at the network that serviced Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian thug who ruled Ukraine until Kyiv’s democratic revolution a decade ago. There was Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. But there was also Tony Podesta, who until the mid-2010s oversaw arguably the leading Democratic lobbying shop in Washington. There was even Tad Devine, who helped Yanukovych grab power in 2010 — and who then steered Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was an ideological potpourri, all working at the behest of an autocrat who tried to cement pro-Russian rule in Kyiv — and whose ouster lit a fuse that detonated stability in Europe and that now risks far more devastation.
But that’s all the subject for another book (mine, called Foreign Agents, will be hitting bookshelves in August). In the meantime, Heilbrunn’s analysis of this glorification of right-wing dictatorships is a warning — as if more were needed — of what a potential Trump second term could look like. Whether it’s Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, or even the echoes of Wilhelmine Germany, the conclusion is clear: “Aggrieved … by what they perceived as their own society’s failings — its liberalism, its tolerance, its increasing secularism — conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model of home.” The kaiser would be proud.
Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded. This is not organic.
We have observed the rise of neo authoritarian conservative leaders using nativism and sociocultural issues with media PR support to inform the public, especially voters, suboptimally, including east and west.
However, there are pitfalls for democracy in manipulating access to information by the public or electorate, not just feeding the needs of narcissistic leaders (see article ‘Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons’), but developing societal collective narcissism for populism and electoral advantage aka Brexit, also observed in Hungary, Turkey and Russia.
Interesting article from CARR reflecting conservative parties across the world dealing with demographic change, and especially the Anglosphere of the UK, US and Australia where they have been beholden to corporate supporters from the old economy i.e. fossil fuels, agriculture and industry including assembly lines and construction. Nowadays the new economy of Big Tech, innovation, services and government with more educated and empowered citizens is problematic for the Kochs, Murdochs, DeVos, Scaife et al.
Liberal democracies in western world need to make sure they do not become populist gerontocracies with changing demographics creating elderly ‘Gerrymandering’ where influence and numbers of older voters (with short term horizons) increasing proportionally over younger generations with longer term interests but less voice and influence.
When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?
Across the Anglosphere and Europe many mostly ageing dominant voters, politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.
Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.
The Heritage Foundation has attracted attention of writer Michel in a The New Republic article below for Trump’s admiration of Hungarian PM Orban and how it has become more far right and extreme e.g. anti-Ukraine sentiments.
Additionally, the linked Danube Institute in Hungary is led by former Thatcher aide John O’Sullivan and European contributor for Australian conservative journal Quadrant.
Further, the Danube Institute employs and/or hosts visits of anti-EU former Australian PM Tony Abbott, UK Trade Advisor, GWPF Global Warming Policy Foundation at Tufton Street London, IDU International Democratic Union, opaque Australian (fossil fuel & mining linked) right wing activist group Advance Australia, presents at CPAC events, the US Christian (& allegedly Russian linked) ADF Alliance Defending Families and is now new Murdoch Fox Board member; his advisor Mark Higgie also allegedly works at the Danube Institute.
Both the Danube institute and the linked Heritage have attracted attention and criticism of US conservatives including Anne Applebaum and Bill Kristol respectively questioning others’ ethical, moral and empathy compasses with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine next door.
Once the redoubt of Reaganism, the think tank has taken to promoting Trump’s favorite strongman.
Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made waves by flying to the United States to meet with Donald Trump—but not with sitting president Joe Biden. It was, at a minimum, a severe breach of diplomatic protocol, and one that threatens to unravel Budapest’s strained relations with Washington even further. Even Biden himself commented on the meeting, saying that Orbán—an authoritarian who has effectively unwound Hungarian democracy—was “looking for dictatorship.”
But there was one other meeting that Orbán took while in the U.S. that hasn’t received enough attention—and points directly to how Orbán has cultivated American conservatives to his cause and created a beachhead for Hungarian influence in Washington. On Friday, he spoke at a closed-door meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters in the nation’s capital. Joined by Heritage president Kevin Roberts and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Orbán spoke, according to a readout, in front of an audience that “included renowned U.S. right-wing politicians, analysts and public personalities.” (This article has been updated with responses from a Heritage Foundation spokesperson.)
The event was, on paper, a somewhat dull affair, with Orbán covering matters ranging from Hungary’s “conservative family and economic policies” to the state of the war in Ukraine. Pulling back, however, the talk was nothing short of shocking. Instead of meeting with the White House, Orbán traveled to Washington to sit with the leadership of a think tank, using them as a platform to access and influence conservative Americans about both foreign and domestic policy.
All of which leads to one question: How, and why, did the Heritage Foundation become the go-to vehicle for Budapest’s budding autocracy to target Americans?
The answer follows several different tracks. On the one hand, Hungary has been shedding lobbying outfits for the past few years, dropping a range of P.R. shops and Twitter influencers to focus solely on Heritage. On the other hand, internal transformations at Heritage—and a willingness to shred its reputation as a bastion of Reaganite, and even democratic, credentials—led the think tank’s leadership directly into Orbán’s lap, allowing it to become little more than a mouthpiece for a strongman and a leading proponent for Orbán-style rule in the U.S.
For their part, the Heritage Foundation tells The New Republic that the recent tête-à-tête with Orban is consistent with the organization’s mission. “Heritage independently promotes conservative policies and is not beholden to any public official, candidate, or political party,” a spokesperson said, “While Heritage supports many of the conservative, pro-family, anti-globalist policies of our NATO ally, Heritage President Kevin Roberts has publicly criticized Hungary for its relationships with China and Iran. Heritage has never promoted the interests any political figure or government, which includes Victor Orbán and the Hungarian government.”
Still, for Orbán, seeking stateside alliances with likeminded ideological allies has been an important mission. During the Trump era, Orbán’s government ran one of the most prominent lobbying campaigns in the U.S., almost all of which focused on forging stronger links between Washington and Budapest. This was to some degree understandable: With Trump ensconced in the White House, Hungary became America’s preferred partner in Europe—not least for the authoritarian model Orbán set for Trump. (As Trump said of Orbán last week, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.… He’s a great leader.”) According to the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, database, Budapest inked deals with eight separate American law or communications firms during Trump’s presidency—an unprecedented burst of activity.
Not that all of these lobbying efforts were traditional, or even successful. In one contract, Budapest signed a firm called Strategic Improvisation, Inc. As part of the arrangement, the firm’s president, a Twitter reactionary named David Reaboi, began pumping pro-Orbán content on social media. While Reaboi made tens of thousands of dollars from working as a foreign agent, it’s unclear what, if any, impact his tweets actually had. (Reaboi did, however, produce arguably the most unintentionally hilarious filing FARA has ever seen, revealing that a tweet in which he said he supported Hungary and was “not in this for the money” was, in fact, paid for by Budapest.)
But with Biden’s election, Hungary’s lobbying efforts collapsed. Some of the contracts ended after only a few months, while others—including the deal with Reaboi’s firm—were canceled the day before Biden entered the White House. As of this week, Hungary is one of the few nations without a single active firm represented in the FARA database. (A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation tells The New Republic that they conduct “zero lobbying activity,” and “has not conducted any activities at the request, direction, control of, or that are financed by, a foreign individual, entity, or government.” Indeed, one of the unique things about the relationship between Budapest and Heritage is that they fall outside the purview of the FARA.)
But that doesn’t mean Hungarian influence has waned. If anything, it’s simply shifted—using loopholes and workarounds to dodge disclosure requirements, while nonetheless wooing conservative Americans and staking its ties in Washington almost wholly on a Trump victory this November.
Enter the Heritage Foundation. While Heritage grew to prominence in the 1980s as a font of Reaganite policy, in recent years the organization has undergone a monumental shift in terms of both policy and priorities. Rather than persist in its stolid dedication to conservative values, Heritage has swung in a far more reactionary—and far more authoritarian—direction in recent years. Across the policy landscape, Heritage has become little more than an intellectual breeding ground for Trumpist ideas.
While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.
Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.
Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*
The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.
A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told The New Republic that their arrangements with the Danube Institute is “restricted to carrying out educational research and analysis, as well as related events—none of which involved any financial commitment from either party” and that “at no point did Heritage receive funds from or pass funds to the Danube Institute, the Hungarian government, or the prime minister’s office.”
The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.”
Such focus makes sense in terms of the Danube Institute’s personnel. For instance, the institute identifies arch-reactionary Rod Dreher as the “director of [its] Network Project.” The Southern Poverty Law Center obtained Dreher’s contract, which described him as an “agent” who would connect with a “circle of Christian-conservative contacts” on the institute’s behalf, while also writing publicly in praise of the Danube Institute’s “achievement[s].” Along the way, the Danube Institute began doling out significant grants to a range of other American conservatives, such as provocateur Christopher Rufo, who received tens of thousands of dollars, as well as a number of writers published in The American Conservative.
Most important, however, is the man currently running the Danube Institute: John O’Sullivan, a British conservative who once served as the director of studies at—you guessed it—the Heritage Foundation. “With his extensive connections in the conservative universe, [O’Sullivan] became Orbán’s conduit to the American Right,” Heilbrunn noted.
Unsurprisingly, the key to O’Sullivan’s and the Danube Institute’s outreach to American conservatives has been the Heritage Foundation. A post in early 2023 from the Hungarian Conservative noted that the Danube Institute and the Heritage Foundation had “signed a landmark cooperation agreement, deepening Hungary’s transatlantic relations.” While the formal cooperation agreement hasn’t yet been published, the summary noted that “each year four researchers from the Heritage Foundation will visit Budapest and work with the Danube Institute as visiting researchers” and that Heritage “will also organize more joint events” with the Danube Institute in the future.
The two have already begun operating closely, co-hosting the Danube Geopolitical Summit last September. Featuring both Heritage and Danube Institute leadership, as well as a number of Hungarian officials, the conference centered on many of the aforementioned themes Orbán routinely highlights, railing against so-called “wokeness” in Western democracies. At the conference, James Carafano, Roberts’s key adviser at Heritage, “stressed the importance of building transatlantic connectivity,” saying he was “so proud to be associated with the Danube Institute.”
While the arrangements with Americans like Dreher appear to contravene America’s foreign lobbying laws, the relationship between Heritage and the Danube Institute unfortunately appears to fall outside of the purview of things like FARA. All of which means that we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation—and what this “landmark cooperation agreement” between Heritage and the Danube Institute actually entails.
But we’ve already seen what the arrangement looks like in practice. While the entire relationship between Heritage and the Danube Institute—and between Budapest and American conservatives writ large—can seem like an overwrought, overly complicated series of agreements and associations, zooming out, the links become clear.
In Hungary, a state-funded organization that serves as little more than a propaganda arm for Orbánist policies—and which has already directly funded a number of American conservative writers—has formally partnered with an American think tank that’s collapsed into little more than a bastion of Trumpism. Both have thus provided platforms for one another, reinforcing each other’s efforts and reaching mutual audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. All the while, they’ve done so in a manner that hasn’t required any transparency about finances or expectations and that skirts America’s current foreign lobbying laws—keeping both Americans and Hungarians in the dark about the relationship.
It is, in many ways, unprecedented. While American think tanks have seen a range of dodgy funding streams in recent years, we’ve never seen anything like the partnership unfolding between Heritage and the Danube Institute. All of which makes Orbán’s equally unprecedented trip—when he visited the former president, as well as a pro-Trump think tank, but not the current White House itself—last week that much less surprising. As Orbán himself said an interview with Hungarian media after his talk in Washington, when it comes to the Heritage Foundation, “Hungary has an honored place.”
[This article has been updated with responses from a Heritage Foundation spokesperson.]
* This article originally mischaracterized the nature of this relationship.
When Tony Abbott gave two speeches in Hungary last month, it prompted an outcry from his usual progressive critics. They were alarmed by the former prime minister’s talk of migrants “swarming across the borders in Europe”, invoking the dangerous old notion of immigrants as pests or vermin.
Radical right in Anglosphere and Europe is cited here by Scott in Politico, including the ‘great replacement’ and Renaud Camus, climate science and Covid 19 scepticism.
Symptoms of fossil fuels, oligarchs and <1% supporting corrupt nativist authoritarianism found around (mostly) right wing parties with ageing and low info constituents, informed by talking points prompted by mainstream media, social media and influencers.
Still, there is discussion and analysis of Brexit versus the EU and Trump versus Biden’s Democrat administration, with accusations and allegations being made against Conservative MPs, Ministers, some Labour, media, Anglo right wing grifters, US fossil fueled Atlas – Koch Network think tanks at Tufton, related nativist Tanton Network and Russians, including FSB, diplomats, media and oligarch types.
Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.
These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values. These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke, anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs.
Alexander Downer, former Australian Foreign Minister in Conservative LNP coalition, Australia’s UK High Commissioner till 2018, visitor to Koch Network Heritage Foundation linked Hungarian Danube Institute (with former PM, now GWPF, UK Trade Advisor and Murdochs’ new Fox Board member Tony Abbott), and source for claims by Trump related people of DNC emails stolen by Russians i.e. George Papadopoulos.
‘Just a diplomat doing his job? A new book puts the spotlight back on Australia, Russia and interference in the US election.’
We observe in the Anglosphere resurgence in conservative Christian nationalism of the right, becoming a central issue in ageing electorates, more in the US, Russia and Central Europe; both an electoral and policy strategy, plus supporting beliefs.
Some of the Anglo links are former Australian PM and now UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott with the ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, Donald Trump gaining support of Evangelical and ‘pro-life’ Christians, the fossil fueled Atlas or Koch Network and their influence on the conservative Christian CNP Council for National Policy, Koch influenced Federalist Society promoting ‘pro-life’ choices for SCOTUS on Roe vs. Wade, then sharing similar values with Orban et al. in Central Europe, and Putin in Russia too?
Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.
Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.
Is ‘degrowth’ genuine economics theory or astroturfing for greenwashing the status quo i.e. by demanding degrowth that leaves already wealthy or <1% with existing economic and social mobility or status, but precludes upward mobility for 99%> of future generations?
Why? Creates confusion and delay for the economic, industrial and fossil fuel status quo of over a century to transition away from carbon to renewable sources.
Although not cited by either The Conversation or Grist below, the degrowth, steady state and autarkist constructs are not new, see 1930s Italy and Germany, then fast forward to the Club of Rome which promoted the construct ‘limits to growth’; good things like technology grow linearly vs. bad things like emissions and people grow exponentially.
Aided both the fossil fuel ‘free market’ Atlas or Koch Network and nativist faux environmental movement related to Tanton Network demanding closed borders, immigration restrictions, withdrawal from trading blocs e.g. EU & multilateral agreements in favour of bilateral agreements, that favour more powerful nations and entities over the less powerful; suggests eugenics?
The degrowth movement has become very popular in recent years, particularly among younger people who appreciate its critique of the endless pursuit of economic expansion. The problem with growth, advocates argue, is that it implies the use of more and more resources and energy, as well as ever larger quantities of waste.
Well, the good news for the movement is that one of the world’s leading economies has offered itself up as a case study. If you look past the debate about whether the UK’s recent technical recession is going to deepen or peter out, the economic situation is pretty dire.
One main reason for the UK stagnation is a lack of investment in productivity, which advocates of degrowth would argue is an essential part of moving away from a resource-hungry economy. So what can we learn from the UK’s experiences so far?
The degrowth perspective
Degrowth has become the latest element in a long line of critiques of economic growth. One leading proponent, the Spanish ecological economist Giorgos Kallis, defines it as the “socially sustainable reduction of society’s throughput”, which is “incompatible with further economic growth, and will entail in all likelihood economic (GDP) degrowth”.
Pursuing GDP growth is criticised, both because of its increased use of resources and for “unrealistic expectations” that technological improvement and productivity growth would allow us to stay within so-called “planetary boundaries” (meaning the limits beyond which humanity will be unable to continue to flourish).
Kallis argues that degrowth implies reduced spending on goods and new technology, while distinguishing “good” and “bad” investments:
We will have to do with less high-speed transport infrastructures, space missions for tourists, new airports or factories producing unnecessary gadgets, faster cars or better televisions.
We may still need more renewable energy infrastructures, better social (education, and health) services, more public squares or theatres, and localised organic food production and retailing centres.
Yet this fails to appreciate that a reduction in GDP implies lower investment in technologies across the board, including those underpinning renewable energy. It also misunderstands that modern economic growth is not driven by accumulating and using more resources, but by innovation through investment. Witness what has happened in the UK…
….Degrowth advocates will not welcome this kind of approach, but technological improvement is ultimately likely to be a better way of achieving their goals than impoverishing people.
For nearly 200 years, two transformative global forces have grown in tandem: economic activity and carbon emissions. The two have long been paired together, or, in economist-speak, “coupled.” When the economy has gotten bigger, so has our climate footprint.
This pairing has been disastrous for the planet. Economic growth has helped bring atmospheric CO2 concentrations all the way up to 420 parts per million. The last time they were this high was during the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were 65 feet higher.
Most mainstream economists would say there’s an obvious antidote: decoupling. This refers to a situation where the economy keeps growing, but without the concomitant rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and international organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development celebrate evidence that decoupling is already occurring in many countries.
“Let me be clear, economic growth coupled with decarbonization is not only realistic, it has already been happening,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, or IEA, in a commentary published in 2020.
It’s an alluring prospect — that we can reach our climate goals without fundamentally changing the structure of the global economy, just by swapping clean energy in for fossil fuels. But a band of rogue economists has begun poking holes in the prevailing narrative around decoupling. They’re publishing papers showing that the decoupling that’s been observed so far in most cases has been short term, or it’s happened at a pace that’s nowhere near quick enough to reach international climate targets. These heterodox economists call decoupling a “neoliberal fantasy.”
The stakes of this academic debate are high: If decoupling is a mirage, then addressing the climate crisis may require letting go of the pursuit of economic growth altogether and instead embracing a radically different vision of a thriving society. That would involve figuring out “how to design future livelihoods that provide people with a good quality of life,” said Helmut Haberl, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Rather than fixating on growth, he argued, “We should engage more in the question of, ‘What future do we want to build?’”
The basic idea behind decoupling has been ingrained in mainstream environmental thought for decades. The 1987 Brundtland Report — a landmark publication of the United Nations designed to simultaneously address social and environmental problems — helped establish it through the framework of sustainable development. It argued for “producing more with less,” using technological advances to continue economic growth while decreasing the release of pollutants and the use of raw materials.
Decoupling continues to underlie most global climate policies today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, has spent nearly two decades promoting it under its “green growth” agenda, urging world leaders to “achieve economic growth and development while at the same time combating climate change and preventing costly environmental degradation.” Decoupling is also baked into the IEA’s influential Net Zero Emissions by 2050 policy roadmap, which assumes that full decarbonization can take place alongside a doubling of the global economy by 2050.
That economic growth should continue is simply assumed by virtually every international institution and government. Policymakers connect growth with more jobs and better living standards, and use it as the primary measure of societal well-being. They also point to growth as a way to keep pace with the rising energy demands and economic needs of a growing global population….
….Degrowth advocates say that deprioritizing growth could allow countries to redirect their attention to policies that actually boost people’s quality of life: shorter working hours, for example, as well as minimum income requirements, guaranteed affordable housing and health care, free internet and electricity, and more widespread public transit.
“Degrowth is as much oriented toward human well-being and social justice as it is toward preventing ecological crises,” Vogel said.
Crucially, degrowth advocates mainly promote the concept in high-income countries, which are historically responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. They acknowledge that many developing countries still need to grow their economies in order to raise populations out of poverty. Those existing inequities, they argue, put even more onus on developed countries to shrink polluting industries and cut their consumption, in order to balance out other countries’ necessary growth.
Several experts told Grist it was a “distraction” to ask whether decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth is possible, as this question elides many areas of agreement between green growth and degrowth advocates. Both sides agree that moving off fossil fuels will require a massive buildout of renewable energy infrastructure, and that countries need to urgently improve living standards and reduce inequality.
“The goal is to get to zero emissions and climate stabilization” while improving people’s well-being, said Pollin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor. “Those are the metrics I care about.”
They also broadly agree that it’s time to move past GDP as a primary indicator of societal progress. But that’s easier said than done. We are “structurally dependent” on GDP growth, as Raworth put it. Publicly traded companies, for example, prioritize growth because they’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of shareholders. Commercial banks fuel growth by issuing interest-bearing loans, and national governments face pressure to grow the economy in order to reduce the burden of public and private debt.
Making any meaningful shift away from focusing on GDP would require dismantling these structural dependencies. “It’s massively challenging, there’s no doubt about that,” Vogel told Grist. “But I think they’re necessary changes … if we want to avert a real risk of catastrophic environmental changes and tackle long-standing social issues.”
Reposting a 2012 article from Renew Economy Australia from Giles Parkinson on Jorgen Randers of Norway in ‘Randers: What does the world look like in 2052?’
Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.
The Guardian in article following, is a victim of astroturfing again on the environment, presenting the Club of Rome and MIT’s ‘Limits to Growth’ model as science, and resurrected by media as contemporary, along with obsessions about Malthusian ‘population growth’ (and ‘immigration’) by non-scientists i.e. ZPG and other related ‘theories’ such as Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’.
Following is an article written by presumably a non science journalist Edward Helmore highlighting KPMG’s Gaya Herrington (econometrics and sustainability studies, again not science) who is a researcher and advisor for the Club of Rome predicting catastrophe.
A recent ABC article ‘The day that plunged Australia’s climate change policy into 10 years of inertia’, endeavoured to describe how climate change consensus was broken by former Liberal MP Andrew Robb who claimed he had followed the ‘Limits to Growth’ (LTG) theory via the Club of Rome but changed his mind, hence withdrew support on bipartisan support on carbon emission measures.
In recent years with pressure on fossil fuels and the need to transition to renewable sources, now compounded by Russian invasion of Ukraine, has seen renewed promotion of ZPG Zero Population Growth with Herman Daly and Club of Rome inspired ‘steady-state economy’ and ‘degrowth’ as scientific theories; part of a crossover between nativist Tanton Network and libertarian Koch Network.
While the fossil fuel supported ZPG Zero Population Growth, with Malthusian and eugenics based arguments round the environment, population growth and immigration being mainstreamed, especially by the time of Trump, who were the prime movers of the past?
The following article and excerpts of Berger, looking through Focauldian prism, follows some of the history of this movement including now deceased John Tanton (‘the most influential unknown man in America’), Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) et al. and organisations that emerged from ZPG including FAIR, CIS, US English, then IRLI and SLLI with their links to the Koch Network ‘bill mill’ ALEC, leading up to the Trump White House.
Alexander Downer, former Australian Foreign Minister in Conservative LNP coalition, Australia’s UK High Commissioner till 2018, visitor to Koch Network Heritage Foundation linked Hungarian Danube Institute (with former PM, now GWPF, UK Trade Advisor and Murdochs’ new Fox Board member Tony Abbott), and source for claims by Trump related people of DNC emails stolen by Russians i.e. George Papadopoulos.
‘Just a diplomat doing his job? A new book puts the spotlight back on Australia, Russia and interference in the US election.’
“What he did would have got any other ambassador sacked. It was reckless and self-indulgent and put the Australian government in a very awkward position.”
Strong comments from Malcolm Turnbull. Even more remarkable considering that the former prime minister was reflecting on the performance of Alexander Downer, a fellow Liberal, Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister, a former UN special envoy and Australia’s one-time High Commissioner in London – the job where Turnbull’s barbs are aimed. “Foolish behaviour … blundering … blurting out political gossip … worst possible way to do it.”
Downer’s notorious 2016 drinks with Donald Trump aide George Papadopoulos have again hit the headlines, the wine bar chat said to have triggered an FBI investigation into Russian interference into the US presidential election that year. Or the “Rigged Witch Hunt”, as Trump would have it.
The latest adventure into this prickly history comes via extracts from a newly released book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, by journalist and filmmaker Richard Kerbaj. And the book – canvassing the controversies and intelligence ties between Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand – has quickly caused a stir.
Former UK Prime Minister Theresa May reportedly confessed doubts about continuing a “special relationship” with Washington after unfounded allegations of British eavesdropping on Trump. China, meanwhile, is complaining about details in the book of American pressure on Britain to force Huawei out of the country’s 5G network. Canadian spies are accused of knowing that an informant helped smuggle British teenager Shamima Begum into Syria to join Islamic State, a claim that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now pledged to examine. (Begum is in a long-running legal stoush in a bid to return home after being stripped of citizenship.)
But back to Downer and concern that what Papadopoulos allegedly said at the drinks “should only have been passed on to the Americans via the most discreet intelligence community channels”, as Turnbull put it to Kerbaj.
To refresh the timeline: Downer met Papadopoulos at Kensington Wine Rooms in London in May 2016, hearing, he says, Papadopoulos claim Russia had a dirt file on Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
“It sounded bad, but my attitude at the time was who would know whether this was even true,” Downer is quoted by Kerbaj.
Afterwards, Downer sent a cable back to Canberra reporting the conversation. Some six weeks went by until July when Trump was officially endorsed as the Republican candidate. Downer then decided to bring the Papadopoulos claims directly to the attention of the US chargé d’affaires in London, Elizabeth Dibble.
“He had no authority from Canberra to do this,” Turnbull wrote in his 2020 memoir, “and the first we heard of it in Australia was when the FBI turned up in London and wanted to interview Downer.”
Cue what is by now a long-standing debate.
Some have described Downer’s actions as “those of a diplomat doing what he was paid to do: gather information in Australia’s national interest”. Joe Hockey, who had to contend with the fallout in Washington as Australia’s ambassador at the time and warning it could have put intelligence sharing at risk, has also defended the actions of his former colleague.
Other questions have been raised about the urgency with which the information from Downer’s initial cable was passed on to the Americans (or whether it was passed on at all). Trump pressed Scott Morrison to examine Australia’s role. Papadopoulos, who spent a fortnight in prison for lying to investigators and was later pardoned by Trump, casts the whole episode in vastly conspiratorial terms.
Downer, while admitting he would have voted for Trump, has been dismissive:
‘I’ve had to put up with four years of Trump and some of his fringe cronies claiming I was part of a conspiracy with Hillary Clinton, the FBI, CIA, MI6, Italian intelligence, ASIS, Ukrainian spies and who knows who else, to bring him down. Twitter is full of demands from the hysterical right that I be sent to Guantánamo Bay.’
So, rewind. In 2016 – before the Trump presidency, Brexit, “fake news”, the “deep state” and the passing parade of Putinistas that has turned modern politics into a circus – it might not have been obvious what was about to be unleashed. But in Turnbull’s view, Downer’s action brought into question “the discipline and professionalism of our foreign service”, which was enough for him to be sacked. Why wasn’t he?
“Alexander was a good friend of mine and the foreign minister, Julie Bishop. He is our longest-serving foreign minister, a former leader of the Liberal Party. And at the time we learned of his foolish behaviour we had every interest in keeping it confidential.”
But this raises another enduring and yet unanswered question about this whole messy episode. Why wasn’t Downer’s involvement kept confidential, given the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network is built on trust and secrecy?’
Return to questions over the U.K. Russia Report, former PM Johnson, Brexit, Conservative government, Russian oligarchs and influence on elections including the EU referendum..
Written by Peter Jukes and originally published January 2023 by ByLine Times, asking questions that are not only unresolved, but actively avoided by the Tories, media and supporters for the advantage of Putin’s Russia and oligarchs, both east and west?
US or Anglo led nativism operates in a parallel universe with the, often fossil fueled, libertarian socio economic ideology promoted by The Republican or GOP, UK Conservatives or Tories and Australian LNP Liberal National Conservative Parties, along with many others in media and/or have influence e.g. climate science denial and blaming ‘immigrants’ for environmental ‘hygiene’ issues.
Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.
The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.
Recently there have been calls and pressure on the Biden Democratic administration, by supporters of Assange in Australia and the U.K., for him not to be deported and possibly pardoned (for charges brought by Trump administration), while many others contest his ‘journalism’ credentials, or at least how unhelpful his cause has been for journalism.
Article from the ECFR European Council on Foreign Relations in 2016 describing those aligned or allied with Putin’s Russia on both the European left and right, while the latter are adopted or supported by Putin’s Russia, with recommendations on what Europe could do, warning of Russia’s covert support for populist parties; post Brexit, pre Trump and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
‘Putin’s friends in Europe’
The upsurge of populism in Europe has provided Russia with an ample supply of sympathetic political parties across the continent.
The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.
However, both and often jointly, have direct access to right wing media, influencers and policy makers to slow or stymie any progress especially on Brexit, with allegations of Russian help, to avoid EU regulation on minimum labour, environmental, financial, consumer and other areas; backgrounded by nativist noise or dog whistling of EU, Europe, refugees, immigration and population growth.
In fact both networks, policies and proxies mask the influencers in the background i.e. Koch’s muse James Buchanan who promoted radical right economics, known in some circles as ‘segregation’ or ‘deep south planter’ economics, also behind the Chile experiment of Pinochet.
On Tanton, he was at fossil fueled Rockefeller Bros. Fund seeded ZPG Zero Population Growth with Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich and was called out by the ‘Cafe con leche Republicans’ as a supporter of eugenics; exemplified by Nigel Farage in the UK and Steve Bannon in the U.S.
With ageing demographics and democracy being gamed to vote for retro policies of the 19th century to support elites or the 1% corrupt and nativist authoritarianism?
There are elements of fascism, elements borrowed from the Chinese state and elements that reflect Argentina’s history of dictatorship. But most of the programme for government announced by Javier Milei, the demagogic new Argentinian president, feels eerily familiar, here in the northern hemisphere.
A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?
Milei is attempting, with a vast “emergency” decree and a monster “reform bill”, what the Conservatives have done in the UK over 45 years. The crash programme bears striking similarities to Liz Truss’s “mini” (maxi) budget, which trashed the prospects of many poor and middle-class people and exacerbated the turmoil that now dominates public life.
Coincidence? Not at all. Milei’s programme was heavily influenced by Argentinian neoliberal think tanks belonging to something called the Atlas Network, a global coordinating body that promotes broadly the same political and economic package everywhere it operates. It was founded in 1981 by a UK citizen, Antony Fisher. Fisher was also the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the first members of the Atlas Network.
The IEA created, to a remarkable degree, Liz Truss’s political platform. In a video conversation on the day of her “mini” budget with another member of the institute, its then director general, Mark Littlewood, observed: “We’re on the hook for it now. If it doesn’t work it’s your fault and mine.” It didn’t work – in fact, it crashed spectacularly, at great cost to us all – but, thanks to the UK’s media, the BBC included, which continue to treat these fanatical corporate lobbyists as purveyors of holy writ, they’re off the hook.
Last year, the IEA was platformed on British media an average of 14 times a day: even more often than before the disaster it helped inflict on the UK. Scarcely ever was it challenged about who funds it or whom it represents. The three peers nominated by Truss in her resignation honours list have all worked for or with organisations belonging to the Atlas Network (Matthew Elliott, TaxPayers’ Alliance; Ruth Porter, IEA and Policy Exchange; Jon Moynihan, IEA). Now, like US supreme court justices, they have been granted lifelong powers to shape our lives, without democratic consent. Truss also put forward Littlewood, but his reward for wrecking people’s lives was blocked by the House of Lords appointments commission.
Nothing has been learned: these corporate lobby groups still mould our politics. Policy Exchange, which, as Rishi Sunak has admitted, “helped us draft” the UK’s vicious new anti-protest laws, is also a member of the Atlas Network. We might describe certain policies as being Milei’s or Bolsonaro’s, or Truss’s or Johnson’s or Sunak’s, but they’re all variations on the same themes, hatched and honed by junktanks belonging to the same network. Those presidents and prime ministers are just the faces the programme wears.
The junk tanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.
The dark-money junk tanks, and the Atlas Network, are a highly effective means of disguising and aggregating power. They are the channel through which billionaires and corporations influence politics without showing their hands, learn the most effective policies and tactics for overcoming resistance to their agenda, and then spread these policies and tactics around the world. This is how nominal democracies become new aristocracies.
They also seem to be adept at shaping public opinion. For example, around the world, neoliberal junktanks have not only lobbied for extreme anti-protest measures, but have successfully demonised environmental protesters as “extremists” and “terrorists”. This might help to explain why peaceful environmental campaigners blocking a road are routinely punched, kicked and spat upon, and in some places run over or threatened with guns, by other citizens, while farmers or truckers blocking a road are not. It might also explain why there is scarcely a murmur of media coverage or public concern when extreme penalties are imposed: such as the six-month prison sentence handed in December to the climate campaigner Stephen Gingell for slow-marching along a London street.
But the worst is yet to come. Donald Trump has never developed a coherent platform of his own. He doesn’t have to. His policies have been written for him, in a 900-page Mandate for Leadership produced by a group of think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is – you got there before me – a member of the Atlas Network. Many of the proposals in the “mandate” are, frankly, terrifying. They have nothing to do with public demands and everything to do with the demands of capital.
When Friedrich Hayek and others first formulated the principles of neoliberalism, they believed it would defend the world from tyranny. But as the big money poured in, and an international network of neoliberal thinktanks was created to develop and articulate its demands, the programme that was supposed to liberate us became a new source of oppression.
In Argentina, where Milei has stepped into the vacuum left by the gross misrule of his predecessors and is able to impose, in true shock doctrine fashion, policies that would otherwise be fiercely resisted, the poor and middle classes are about to pay a terrible price. How do we know? Because very similar programmes have been dumped on other countries, beginning with Argentina’s neighbour Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973.
These junk tanks are like the spike proteins on a virus. They are the means by which plutocratic power invades the cells of public life and takes over. It’s time we developed an immune system.’
We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.
New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors.
Wheels within wheels, following is an excerpt from Guardian article on Rishi Sunak’s links to the radical right, also found via Tufton Street think tanks, which have influenced many on Brexit and Tory MPs including Liz Truss, who has presented at Koch’s Heritage Foundation in the US.
The euphemistically described ‘Kochtopus’ has strong presence in the Anglosphere and globally through Atlas Network promoting radical right libertarian ‘public choice theory’ or ‘segregation’ economics of James Buchanan, climate science denialism, with white nativism of Tanton Network NGOs promoting restrictions of refugees and immigrants due to population growth i.e. eugenics.
Australia has had its Brexit or Trump moment on the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, being usurped by a proxy election campaign, with outcomes being divided society, communities and no real solutions.
Further, the ‘architecture of influence’ and modus operandi are the same as Brexit and Trump including Koch Network think tanks at Tufton St. London and Washington, Tanton Network’s NGOs promoting former ZPG Zero Population Growth nativist tropes versus the ‘other’, whether refugee, immigrant, ethnic minority including native and population growth, with Murdoch right wing led media and related social media campaigns, targeting older voters.
Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.
One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.
Below are excerpts from an article by Brooke Binkowski in Unicorn Riot outlining the history of the population control movement of Tanton Network which informs immigration in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.
The far right did not emerge from a vacuum, but ignorance of the history of eugenics, authority, slavery, colonialism, Nazi Germany and post WWII, white nativists, especially in the US, and nowadays ageing democracies and right wing media which adopt the same.
Both Malthus and Galton are central to narratives around population control, identity and eugenics, with strong undercurrent of socio-Darwinism. By post WWI eugenics became a major area of research, not just in Germany via Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, but the US too with slavery, Madison Grant and AES American Eugenics Society.
Due to the holocaust and Nazis treatment of Jews, Gypsies and minorities, including the ‘left’ i.e. being exterminated, eugenics had to be rebranded post WWII as a quasi ‘environmental’ movement, with strong support of same fossil fuel Rockefellers (Standard Oil & Exxon) and auto oligarchs (Fiat & VW) via Club of Rome and ZPG Zero Population Growth.
This movement morphed into what is now known as ‘Tanton Network’, provides the faux academic support for the ‘great replacement’ and ‘environmental constructs like ‘degrowth’ and ‘limits to growth’, advises GOP, Tories and all in Australia.
Fast forward to ‘90s and noughties when Tanton’s people started liaising with GOP Reps and Congressional committees related to promoting the issues of asylum seekers, immigration and borders, to then be used as a foil vs. calls for carbon emissions pricing, trading and robust environmental protections.
Their lobbying was sold on the basis of immigrant equals Democrat voter, but the Cafe con Leche Republicans warned of the nativist trap i.e. attacking potential future constituents and supporters; many as evidenced by Koch’s Heritage for Trump i.e. ‘Project 2025’, next opportunity GOP plans permanent power via SCOTUS, voter suppression, obedient employees etc.?
By the naughteens it was becoming clear, using Jane Mayers’ expression in ‘Dark Money’ explaining the political machinations and media, as the ‘architecture of influence’ with the far right central.
The latter includes Putin’s Russia, US GOP for Trump, UK Tories for Brexit, Murdoch led right wing media channelling Tanton agitprop, which shares fossil fuel donors with the supposedly ‘libertarian’ ‘Koch Network’ and many high profile influencers. They are targeting ageing and regional electorates, via legacy and social media, with nativist talking points, before younger, more diverse, educated and centrist voters emerge to ‘replace’ ageing citizens.
‘Javier Milei in Argentina. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. These are the two latest “populist shocks” – the tip of the “populist wave” that comes crashing against the weakened defences of liberal democracies.
At the same time, former UKIP leader Nigel Farage benefits from the same “funwashing” on I’m a Celebrity Get me out of Here! as Pauline Hanson, leader of the most successful extreme right party in Australia in recent years, did when she was invited on Dancing with the Stars just a moment after her political career plummeted.
The contradiction in addressing the rise of far-right politics in public discourse could not be starker. And yet, it goes far deeper.
It should be obvious to anyone concerned about these politics and the threat they pose to democracy and certain communities, that humanising their leaders through fun reality TV shows or coverage of their hobbies rather than politics only serves to normalise them.
What is less obvious and yet just as damaging is the hyped coverage of the threat. Milei and Wilders are not “shocks”. The resurgence of reactionary politics is entirely predictable and has been traced for a long time. Yet every victory or rise is analysed as new and unexpected rather than part of a longer, wider process in which we are all implicated.
The same goes for “populism”. All serious research on the matter points to the populist nature of these parties being secondary at best, compared to their far-right qualities. Yet, whether in the media or academia, populism is generally used carelessly as a key defining feature.
Using “populist” instead of more accurate but also stigmatising terms such as “far-right” or “racist” acts as a key legitimiser of far-right politics. It lends these parties and politicians a veneer of democratic support through the etymological link to the people and erases their deeply elitist nature – what my co-author Aaron Winter and I have termed “reactionary democracy”.
What this points to is that the processes of mainstreaming and normalisation of far-right politics have much to do with the mainstream itself, if not more than with the far right. Indeed, there can be no mainstreaming without the mainstream accepting such ideas in its fold.
In this case, the mainstreaming process has involved platforming, hyping and legitimising far-right ideas while seemingly opposing them and denying responsibility in the process.
While it would be naive to believe that the mainstream media tell us what to think, it is equally naive to ignore that it plays a key role regarding what we think about. As I argued in a recent article on the issue of “immigration as a major concern”, this concern only exists when respondents think of their country as a whole. It disappears when they think about their own day-to-day lives.
This points to the mediated nature of our understanding of wider society which is essential if we are to think of the world beyond our immediate surrounding. Yet while essential, it relies on the need for trusted sources of information who decide what is worth priming and how to frame it.
This could not have been clearer than when the Guardian launched a lengthy series on “the new populism” in 2018, headlining its opening editorial with: “Why is populism suddenly all the rage? In 1998, about 300 Guardian articles mentioned populism. In 2016, 2,000 did. What happened?”. At no point did any of the articles in the series reflect upon the simple fact that the decisions of Guardian editors may have played a role in the increased use of the term.
We too often view the far right as an outsider – something separate from ourselves and distinct from our norms and mainstream. This ignores deeply entrenched structural inequalities and forms of oppression core to our societies. This is something I noted in a recent article, that the absence of race and whiteness in academic discussion of such politics is striking.
My analysis of the titles and abstracts of over 2,500 academic articles in the field over the past five years showed that academics choose to frame their research away from such issues. Instead, we witness either a euphemisation or exceptionalisation of far-right politics, through a focus on topics such as elections and immigration rather than the wider structures at play.
This therefore leaves us with the need to reckon with the crucial role the mainstream plays in mainstreaming. Elite actors with privileged access to shaping public discourse through the media, politics and academia are not sitting within the ramparts of a mainstream fortress of good and justice besieged by growing waves of populism.
They are participating in an arena where power is deeply unevenly distributed, where the structural inequalities the far right wants to strengthen are also often core to our systems and where the rights of minoritised communities are precarious and unfulfilled. They have therefore a particular responsibility towards democracy and cannot blame the situation we all find ourselves in on others – whether it be the far right, fantasised silent majorities or minoritised communities.
Sitting on the fence is not an option for anyone who plays a role in shaping public discourse. This means self-reflection and self-criticism must be central to our ethos.
We cannot pretend to stand against the far right while referring to its politics as “legitimate concerns”. We must stand unequivocally by and be in service of every one of the communities at the sharp end of oppression.’
Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics. In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.
We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.
This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.
Almost a decade ago in 2013 the ‘Cafe con leche Republicans’ circulated a memo below to warn the GOP of the danger of being misled by ‘Tanton Network’, but it disappeared? Below outlines some of the lobbying for immigration restrictions, while in the background Tanton Network has a history of faux environmentalism, population control, fossil fuels oligarch support e.g. ZPG Zero Population Growth, white nationalism and right wing astroturfing.
While Tanton passed away several years ago his movement became central in the Trump administration, states too, promoted by Fox News, alt right, Steve Bannon, continues to stalk the GOP and inform policy. Also indirectly impacts the Anglosphere right wing parties and UK’s Brexit via antipathy encouraged towards the EU European Union and all things ‘immigrant’, reinforced over decades by compliant media, especially tabloid.
Coincidentally, in the UK the Tanton influenced Migration Watch shares a Tufton St. London address with fossil fueled ‘Koch Network’ libertarian think tanks?
Excerpts from an article by Brooke Binkowski in Unicorn Riot outlining the history of the population control movement of Tanton Network which informs immigration in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.
‘As Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians’
We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded. This is not organic, but political strategists, ideologues and media have been gaming ageing electorates through platforming them and their concerns, then using PR techniques and messaging to reinforce and spread further via related negative proxy issues, for power.
One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.
However, it does show some of the influence that proponents aspire to, whether in media, NGOs, think tanks or politics, constantly reinforce old nativist and white Australia policy tropes masquerading as environmental science, greenwashing both fossil fuels or carbon emissions and eugenics; targets old white Australia sentiments and younger mistaking the movement and proponents as experts.
There were recent comments by the COP28 President in UAE denying climate science around fossil fuels, hence, no need to transition from the same; but no credible support for his claims?
These talking points are very common across right wing media for ageing and less educated voters to support fossil fuel right wing policies, often with ‘Koch Network’ in the background, but simply promoting deflection and conspiracies?
In 2022 Burn-Murdoch showed in Financial Times how following economics makes for fast transition from fossil fuels & carbon emissions to renewable sources, result? Lower emission and higher economic growth.
According to the president of COP28, the latest round of UN climate negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, there is “no science” indicating that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to restrict global heating to 1.5°C.
President Sultan Al Jaber is wrong. There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. I know because I have published some of it.
Back in 2021, just before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, my colleagues and I published a paper in Nature entitled Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5°C world. It argued that 90% of the world’s coal and around 60% of its oil and gas needed to remain underground if humanity is to have any chance of meeting the Paris agreement’s temperature goals.
Crucially, our research also highlighted that the production of oil and gas needed to start declining immediately (from 2020), at around 3% each year until 2050.
This assessment was based on a clear understanding that the production and use of fossil fuels, as the primary cause of CO₂ emissions (90%), needs to be reduced in order to stop further heating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that net zero CO₂ emissions will only be reached globally in the early 2050s, and warming stabilised at 1.5°C, if a shift away from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources begins immediately.
If global emissions and fossil fuel burning continue at their current rates, this warming level will be breached by 2030.
Since the publication of our Nature paper, scientists have modelled hundreds of scenarios to explore the world’s options for limiting warming to 1.5°C. Many feature in the latest report by the IPCC. Here is what they tell us about the necessary scale of a fossil fuel phase-out.
Fossil fuel use must fall fast
A recent paper led by atmospheric scientist Ploy Achakulwisut took a detailed look at existing scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5°C. For pathways consistent with 1.5°C, coal, oil and gas supply must decline by 95%, 62% and 42% respectively, between 2020 and 2050.
However, many of these pathways assume rates of carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal that are likely to be greater than what could be feasibly achieved. Filtering out these scenarios shows that gas actually needs to be eliminated twice as fast, declining by 84% in 2050 relative to 2020 levels. Coal and oil would also see larger declines: 99% and 70% respectively.
In fact, oil and gas may need to be eliminated even quicker than that. A study by energy economist Greg Muttitt showed that many of the pathways used in the most recent IPCC report assume coal can be phased out in developing countries faster than is realistic, considering the speed of history’s most rapid energy transitions. A more feasible scenario would oblige developed countries in particular to get off oil and gas faster.
A fair and orderly transition
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has added to evidence in favour of phasing out fossil fuels by concluding that there is no need to license and exploit new oil and gas fields, first in a 2021 report and again this year.
This latest IEA analysis also estimates that existing oil and gas fields would need to wind down their production by 2.5% a year on average to 2030, accelerating to 5% a year from 2030 (and 7.5% for gas between 2030-40).
A separate analysis of the IPCC’s scenarios for holding global warming at 1.5°C came to the same conclusion. Since no new fields need to be brought into development, global production of oil and gas should be falling.
A fair and orderly transition
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has added to evidence in favour of phasing out fossil fuels by concluding that there is no need to license and exploit new oil and gas fields, first in a 2021 report and again this year.
This latest IEA analysis also estimates that existing oil and gas fields would need to wind down their production by 2.5% a year on average to 2030, accelerating to 5% a year from 2030 (and 7.5% for gas between 2030-40).
A separate analysis of the IPCC’s scenarios for holding global warming at 1.5°C came to the same conclusion. Since no new fields need to be brought into development, global production of oil and gas should be falling.’
Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.
One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.
Some would not be surprised with the doubts and confusion being created round the COVID-19 crisis, especially by those wanting all economic activity to continue and ignore the human costs.
However, much of this agitprop, astro-turfing and junk science used by non experts has much in common with the information, media and political techniques used by radical right libertarian think tanks funded by the fossil fuel sector and related media, to influence society on climate science to avoid constraints and preserve income streams, with some eugenics in the background.
However, this is neither unique to the UK Conservatives nor dissimilar elsewhere, but it is a long game strategy against grounded science, research and analysis, like Trojan horses to disrupt curricula and universities, why?
Climate science or climate change denialism have been apparent for some decades since the 1970s with Koch Industries being central along with ‘big oil’ of Exxon Mobil etc. in funding through ‘Dark Money’ academia, research, think tanks, media, politicians and PR techniques to influence society. Now we see the results including wide-spread climate denialism, avoidance of environmental protections and negative media PR campaigns; meanwhile the roots of this strategy have become more transparent with legal action following.
Article by Molly Jong-Fast in Vanity Fair on prolific polling and polls on Biden versus Trump in the 2024 Presidential elections, appearing daily in media outlets, but she explains what’s wrong with focus upon polls.
Selective questions, snapshots conducted a year out from an election, media cherry picking outcomes, polls are now deemed to be media ‘events’, ‘horse race coverage’ that ignore substantive policy issues, measurement error and sampling eg. people not picking up phones vs. those who do which is only 1/100.
One would also add, that hollowed out media and resources for reporting not only leads to desk based scraping social media for news, but too much reliance upon polling for ‘news’; becomes circular when media no longer informs citizenry?
The stakes of 2024 are too important for the media to obsess over every “snapshot” of the electorate.
By Molly Jong-Fast NOVEMBER 27, 2023
Pick up a newspaper, turn on cable news, click on Drudge or listen to a podcast and you will encounter multiple stories on polls. Did you know that Joe Biden is polling poorly? Did you know Americans are deeply unhappy with the economy despite its metrics being very good? Did you know that Biden’s weakness among young voters should be taken seriously?
Everywhere you look there are polls, and these polls provide fodder for stories, which then fuel news cycles and shape narratives around the 2024 election, such as how Biden should drop out because of his age. “Voters think Biden’s too old,” says contrarian comedian Bill Maher, and indeed, there are polls, like one from The Wall Street Journal, in which voters are asked if Biden, 81—along with Donald Trump, 77—is “too old to run.” The poll, in which 73% of voters consider Biden too old, was cited in a separate Journal story asking, “Is Biden Too Old to Run Again?”
Of course, polls can be upended when voters actually go to the polls. Reuters gave Hillary Clinton about a 90% chance of winning on Election Day 2016, while the Huffington Post told us that Trump had “essentially no path to an Electoral College victory.” Everyone knows what happened next.
And yet recent 2024 polls, which serve, at best, as snapshots of the electorate a year out, become news events unto themselves, generating reams of coverage and endless commentary. They’re not actually breaking news events, like, say, a train derailment, even if treated as such. They’re more creations of a media industrial complex that longs for easy data points, for things that feel like facts but are actually imprecise measuring mechanisms.
For every piece that is directly about polling, like one from Politico proclaiming “the polls keep getting worse for Biden,” there are others based on the suppositions gleaned from poll results, such The Washington Post examining “Trump’s improved image.” Even pieces downplaying some headline-grabbing polls as the “wrong” ones, may seize on others to make a point.
“The odd thing about media polls is that they are reported as a newsworthy event, but this kind of event ‘happens’ only when a newsroom decides it’s time for one—and when it has the money,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote in an email.
Polls may fall into the category of pseudo-events, a term coined in 1962 by Daniel J. Boorstin and defined as something that “planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.” Just like polls, a pseudo-event’s “relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous.” (This idea was recently discussed by on John Dickerson on Slate’s Political Gabfest episode on polling episode). In this way, a poll may be more like a press conference, something that is created to shape a narrative.
There are other problems with polls, according to Margaret Sullivan, the media critic and recently named executive director of Columbia University’s journalism ethics center. “Polls are, by definition, horse race coverage, which focused on who’s up or down, not substance, ignoring what Jay Rosen calls ‘the stakes,’” she told me. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say never write a poll story but, in general, journalists are bad at predictions and should do some more meaningful reporting instead.”
Rosen has been outfront this presidential election cycle with an “organizing principle” for journalists: “Not the odds, but the stakes.” The focus, he argues, should be “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy.” Placing too much emphasis on polls can shift the political conversation from critical reporting about what’s happening—such as the impact of Biden’s administration’s policies or Trump’s authoritarian plans for a second term—to predictions about what may happen a year later.
G. Elliott Morris, editorial director of data analytics for ABC News’ FiveThirtyEight, noted in an email how “pollsters like to market their work as ‘snapshots in time’—quick, one-off readings of the public’s attitudes that get less accurate the further you get from that moment in time. That means that polls of the 2024 election are of very little utility this far ahead—roughly of zero predictive value, historically speaking, though there’s reasons to believe they’re more predictive now with higher levels of polarization.”
“But they’re also subject to a lot of measurement error,” Morris continued. “Only about one out of every 100 people a pollster calls picks up the phone. Those respondents can be really weird, politically speaking, and are also prone to overreacting to the news cycle. This means we need to be even more careful when reading into a single poll’s results.”
Even if the intention of conducting a poll is to capture the views and sentiments of voters, the outsized coverage of it may distort the picture of what’s going on. As Boorstin wrote, “The shadow has become the substance…. By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.”
Interesting article from The Conversation ‘Politicians believe voters to be more conservative than they really are’ analysing the mismatch between media and politicians versus the electorate and society at large in Europe, US and Australia, why?
‘on a majority of issues, politicians consistently overestimate the share of citizens who hold right-wing views. Importantly, politicians’ overestimation of how many citizens hold right-wing views is consistent across the ideological spectrum. Politicians hold a conservative bias regardless of whether they represent left- or right-wing parties’
While student evaluations or ‘happy sheets’ become routine in higher education and universities, some question both effectiveness and efficiency in using such instruments to assess quality. Further, what is quality in teaching, learning, assessment, technology, administration and student well-being, then how and when should it be applied?
Potential respondents must have the ethics of research explained before any interview or feedback, not only verbally at start of an interview or related interaction, but inclusion on a briefing document explaining study and research, storage of data, along with ethics.
Focus interviews, individual or via a group, based on psychoanalysis, can be very adaptable, allow expression of body language, in addition to concept checking or informal communication which would be precluded by the written form. However, there are disadvantages, interviews can be very time consuming to conduct, transcribe, code and analyse when using open questions to elicit perceptions, attitudes and experience of the research area, plus they can be subjective or prone to bias.
Optimal research is based on triangulation between scholarly and industry research representing a process with related factors, then analysis and coding of key stakeholder feedback according to same process. Thirdly, it can be followed by quantitative data gathering or survey of customers’ attitudes on the factors that emerged, joining the circle or triangulation.
The literature review can highlight research and industry issues or views of marketing and communications for international education or related products and services, leading to an optimal marketing and communications construct to inform strategy and professional practice. Additionally, to inform or validate any construct, qualitative data needs to be collected through focus type respondents from industry or target market, coded and analysed for inclusion of important factors in a survey instrument.
Throughout the world, especially now with social media, the digital volume of information and velocity, all citizens need skills of critical analysis, especially through the education system, community and media.
While newsrooms cut costs, headcounts and resources, many journalists or reporters now have less time and fewer resources to produce more news content. However, this comes with the commensurate risk of media being gamed by corporate and political forces of the right, due to media using heuristic shortcuts on any issue and inherently biassed towards parties of the right.
Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.
One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.
However, it does show some of the influence that proponents aspire to, whether in media, NGOs, think tanks or politics, constantly reinforce old nativist and white Australia policy tropes masquerading as environmental science, greenwashing both fossil fuels or carbon emissions and eugenics; targets old white Australia sentiments and younger mistaking the movement and proponents as experts.
Edward Smith, an advocate of what he calls ‘sustainable population’, has circulated a lengthy critique of my book, Crimes Against Nature. I’m writing this response because his piece exemplifies the populationist methodology, extrapolating from an abstract ‘common sense’ in a fashion entirely impervious to historical or theoretical argument. Further, despite his repeated protestations, his article demonstrates the relationship between populationism and the far right—a relationship centred on a hostility to ordinary people.
‘Population matters,’ Smith says, ‘because the smaller the population, the lower the ecological footprint, all other things being equal. … Eating only as many fish as are spawned is going to be easier with fewer people in the first place.’ The argument appeals because of its childlike simplicity. Why, think of your own home. Does each person there eat a certain quantity of food? Yes? Well, then: if you added a billion or so new folks, where would you get all the fish? QED, natalists! Simple physics alone determines that a material world can hold only so many sweaty physically bodies.
Of course, just as we shouldn’t model economic policy on our personal budgets, we can’t—or, at least, we shouldn’t—develop political theory by scaling up individual experience.
The world is not a household writ large and quite different laws govern the behaviour of human societies.
Unfortunately, though Smith praises my book effusively, he clearly hasn’t understood any of it. Crimes Against Nature does not argue that business exerts ‘a malign influence … on public policy’. Rather, it contends that capitalism, a distinctive and relatively new social system, fundamentally changes the human relationship with nature, commodifying our ability to labour so that our interaction with the natural world manifests as a force entirely outside our control.
That’s the basis of the environmental crisis, a development that can only be understood historically.
Smith posits a straightforward opposition between humanity and nature, so that ‘any population growth at all means more demand for environmental destruction to feed, clothe and house extra people.’
His simple binary, taken from nineteenth century biology, misunderstands the relationship between people and the natural world. Humans might be distinct from nature but we’re also part of it. From the dawn of what we call ‘culture’, , we have manipulated the environment to which we belong. The name for this manipulation is labour: to survive, people must secure food, construct shelter, clothe themselves and so on.
Our labour can destroy nature but it can also sustain and foster it. Though racist Europeans once imagined the native populations of Australia and the rest of the ‘New World’ as almost part of nature, we now know that their societies fundamentally reshaped the land on which they lived for thousands of years. Without the commodification of labour power, they could deliberately and consciously alter their surrounds—and they did so, by and large, in ways that generated flourishing, diverse ecosystems.
Contrary to Smith’s schema, the presence of the Indigenous populations did not mean automatic ‘environmental destruction’. On the contrary, animals and plants flourished precisely because of human beings and their labour. We know this because the arrival of the Europeans almost everywhere brought both massive depopulation and ecological crisis.
If, as Smith contends, humans destroy nature just by existing, the huge drop in the Indigenous population after European settlement (some estimates suggest that the number of people in Australia did not reach its pre-1788 figure until the 1850s) should have been good news for the environment. But, of course, that wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary, because colonisation replaced the traditional systems of land management with the logic of capital, the Europeans spurred massive (and ongoing) environmental devastation.
What makes capitalism so uniquely destructive? It’s a system that directs labour (that is, the means by which people interact with nature) to meet the requirements of exchange rather than for immediate and concrete use. Capitalists must create commodities to sell. Competition fosters a relentless and inexorable expansion of value, only tangentially connected to human need and completely divorced from the cycles that govern natural ecosystems. Capital grows with a large population. It also grows with a small population (using techniques like planned obsolescence, conspicuous consumption etc).
Smith grasps none of this. Like most populationists, he attributes the expansion of the economy to the needs of consumers, and so assumes that, by culling the population, he can render the system sustainable. But that entirely reverses the causal sequence. The necessity of economic growth stems from the internal logic of capital, not the requirements of the populace. Quite obviously, capitalism doesn’t respond to human need—for, if it did, the starving, who desperately need sustenance, would be fed.
That’s why the populationist argument is so muddled. The environmental crisis cannot be attributed to kindly capitalists straining every nerve and sinew to keep every new baby fed and housed. On the contrary, the owners of capital ignore the urgent needs of most the world’s people, since the impoverished don’t provide a particularly attractive market.
‘Population matters,’ says Smith, ‘because the smaller the population, the lower the ecological footprint, all other things being equal.’
‘There is nothing,’ declares Smith, ‘that … anybody … could say that will change the fact that getting the number of fish caught to equal the number spawned will by physically and politically easier if there are fewer people.’ This is an overt declaration of faith, a credo impervious to an actuality in which the impoverished people of the developing world barely see any of the fish harvested by giant corporations. These corporations, in turn, expand year after year not in order to feed the world, but because the logic of competition means that if they don’t accumulate, they’ll go broke.
In Crimes Against Nature, I describe how Thomas Malthus developed populationism not to preserve the environment, but to argue against social welfare (on the basis that it would prevent the poor from starving to death). I also write about how the revival of populationism by environmentalists in the seventies) pushed activists into grotesque alliances with the far right.
Smith objects to what he calls ‘insinuations that concerns about population are a racist, eugenicist, white supremacist plot.’ He also dismisses the history of his movement on the basis that ‘the events detailed … happened before I was even born’.
This is not remotely serious.
As I argue in the book, the association between populationism and the far right is not accidental but stems from an analysis that identifies people themselves as an existential threat, leaching away at the world’s resources merely by being alive. Population theorists look at the teeming masses and say, quite literally: These people should never have been born!
It’s not difficult to grasp the horrific conclusions that might be—and repeatedly have been drawn—from such an argument. If the masses truly threaten the well-being of the planet by their existence, would, say, the emergence of a new and deadly pandemic be such a problem? The more morally squeamish of the populationist crowd might not like to follow that train of thought to its ultimate destination but plenty of others will.
Smith himself provides a good example of how identifying humanity as a curse pushes in a right-wing direction. ‘Australian’s emissions per capita are,’ he tells us, ‘about 17.1 tonnes per person whereas our main sources of migration have much lower emissions (PRC 7.4; India 1.9; UK 5.55; Philippines 1.2; Viet Nam 2.2).’
Now, per capita figures aren’t particularly useful, since they’re predicated on the assumption that emissions are a response to consumers—which simply isn’t true. But, leaving that aside, Smith and his co-thinkers could, in theory, respond to the difference between Australia and other nations by investing in a fleet of ships sufficiently large to transport them, their families and all their friends to a new low-carbon life in the Philippines.
Of course, they don’t. As always, the onus gets placed instead on the less privileged to adapt themselves to inequality.
‘[W]e need,’ Smith says, ‘people to stay in lower emitting countries not because it is fair but because the politics of a lower carbon lifestyle is hardest in high emitting countries. Fewer people with an expectation of a seventeen tonnes of carbon a year lifestyle is useful for the politics of making our planet sustainable.’
Though Smith says he doesn’t oppose refugees, he ends up with the ‘Keep Them Out’ policies familiar across the far right.
He claims to be against coercion, and yet his argument reeks of state paternalism. ‘Our migration program, and so our population policy, is,’ he explains, ‘principally about skilled migrants and New Zealanders—there is nothing wrong with them not migrating. There may even be some benefits as any unfulfilled desires they have in their countries of origin will only add useful pressure to domestic political reform.’
Think about that. If ‘we’—presumably, the Australian state—forcibly prevent migrants from travelling, their resulting unhappiness may add ‘useful pressure’ in their home country to reduce birth rates.
There’s nothing left-wing about this.
As a socialist, I’m for providing people with everything they need to control their fertility. But the key word is ‘control’: that is, the exertion of agency by ordinary women and men, rather than limitations on reproduction imposed by misanthropic ideologues.
That’s because the alternative to capitalist environmental crisis lies in socialist planning. The choice isn’t between economic growth or economic degrowth so much as between a system geared to exchange and one dominated by use. If Indigenous societies could direct their labour to improving the natural world, we can do the same, with modern science and technology guiding our interventions.
In that process, people aren’t the problem. On the contrary, they’re the basis on which a new society can be built.’
Excerpts from an article by Brooke Binkowski in Unicorn Riot outlining the history of the population control movement of Tanton Network which informs migration policies in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.
Of late, UK investigative journalists especially centred round The ByLine Times and New European have discovered the ‘architecture of influence’ at 55 Tufton Street, used to keep the Conservative Party in power, and achieving Brexit.
Australia has had its Brexit or Trump moment on the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, being usurped by a proxy election campaign, with outcomes being divided society, communities and no real solutions.
Further, the ‘architecture of influence’ and modus operandi are the same as Brexit and Trump including Koch Network think tanks at Tufton St. London and Washington, Tanton Network’s NGOs promoting former ZPG Zero Population Growth nativist tropes versus the ‘other’, whether refugee, immigrant, ethnic minority including native and population growth, with Murdoch right wing led media and related social media campaigns, targeting older voters.
John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?
The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.
Fox owner Rupert Murdoch allegedly fired FoxNews’ Tucker Carlson which may be plausible, but not credible if one observes other allegations apart from Christian beliefs that have emerged?
In addition to allegations that Carlson was too Christian, now he went on an unapproved trip to Hungary? Further, other people related to Murdoch including journalists, former politicians and grifters still visit Hungary and attend events including support from MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute (called out by conservative Anne Applebaum)?
While Fox presenters and guests praise or support Putin, Trump, Hungary etc., without sanction from Murdoch, it’s unclear why he sacked Carlson except maybe ‘getting too big for his boots’?
Fox News executives were reportedly unsettled after Carlson openly praised Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán during a 2021 visit to the country.
Tucker Carlson’s rogue trip to Hungary in 2021 could have contributed to Fox News’ decision to can the controversial commentator this spring.
New accounts of Carlson’s prime-time ouster emerged in excerpts from journalist Brian Stelter’s forthcoming book, “Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy,” which were published by The Daily Beast on Monday.
Stelter’s reporting suggests that Carlson was in hot water with his Fox News bosses for years before his exit in April.
According to what The Daily Beast described as “an executive involved with the situation,” Carlson deliberately usurped his superiors when he took “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to Budapest, Hungary, without their permission in 2021.
The week abroad concluded in a cozy chat with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in which Carlson praised the autocrat for his anti-immigration, nationalist approach. During the trip, Carlson also spoke at the far-right political conference MCC Feszt.
Carlson’s “unapproved” trip may have been a tipping point for Fox executives, who already felt like the pundit was heavily flirting with authoritarianism.
“A tug-of-war was underway between people of good faith and all parties who wanted to protect American democracy, and those on the other side of the rope who tugged in an authoritarian direction,” Stelter wrote.
“Carlson’s unapproved trip to Hungary in 2021 was surely in the latter category. Carlson whipped his show up into an infomercial for Viktor Orban’s increasingly autocratic, patriarchal nation.”
The former Fox News headliner almost returned to Hungary for CPAC Budapest in 2023, but instead sent a video message after a Fox higher-up reportedly “reined him in.”
Despite ongoing tension between Carlson and execs, Fox News didn’t dismiss the anchor until after reaching a $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year.
While Carlson repeatedly used his show to push baseless claims about Dominion interfering in the 2020 presidential election, private texts found during pre-trial discovery revealed that he had actually balked at the conspiracy theories that former President Donald Trump and his team were pushing.’
When Tony Abbott gave two speeches in Hungary last month, it prompted an outcry from his usual progressive critics. They were alarmed by the former prime minister’s talk of migrants “swarming across the borders in Europe”, invoking the dangerous old notion of immigrants as pests or vermin.’
Hasn’t Greg Sheridan had fun this past month? The Australian’s foreign editor junketed to both Poland and Hungary, coming away with only sympathy for their conservative political figures so unjustly maligned by the liberal-left media.’
Senior Australian “conservative” figures continue to attend conferences backed by illiberal Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) hosted its 2023 London Summit in late June, featuring Alexander Downer and Greg Sheridan as two of the five speakers. Australians must focus on connections between our Right and Hungarian fascistic politics.
Peter Browne of Inside Story recounted in early June that Greg Sheridan had just spent a week in Budapest again as a visiting fellow to the Orban-backed Danube Institute. This stay was followed by an effusive celebration of Orban’s illiberal Hungary in The Australian (3/6). Sheridan has previously appeared on the Orban speaking circuit, and was a notable part of its first appearance in Melbourne in 2016.
The MCC is superficially an educational institution that fosters conservative students and thinkers.
In fact it functions as a key part of Orban’s efforts to establish a Western and Christian bulwark that proclaims itself a staunch defender of “traditional” values. These nouns are dogwhistle codes meaning white, anti-Muslim and staunchly anti-LGBTQIA+. It is also antisemitic. George Soros, Hungarian expat and Jewish Holocaust survivor is demonised as public enemy No.1.
The MCC is part “think tank” aiming to push anti-EU and far right positions in Brussels. A Hungarian opposition party member described it as a key part of Orban’s “alt-right intellectual universe.” It is also part indoctrinator of conservative youth.
Frank Furedi, director of the institution, described a goal in 2022 to be the publication of an annual “Fear Barometer” measuring “What European people fear.” Orban’s Political Directorchairs the MCC’s Board of Trustees.’
We observe in the Anglosphere resurgence in conservative Christian nationalism of the right, becoming a central issue in ageing electorates, more in the US, Russia and Central Europe; both an electoral and policy strategy, plus supporting beliefs.
Some of the Anglo links are former Australian PM and now UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott with the ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, Donald Trump gaining support of Evangelical and ‘pro-life’ Christians, the fossil fueled Atlas or Koch Network and their influence on the conservative Christian CNP Council for National Policy, Koch influenced Federalist Society promoting ‘pro-life’ choices for SCOTUS on Roe vs. Wade, then sharing similar values with Orban et al. in Central Europe, and Putin in Russia too?
While the U.S. passed gay-rights laws, Moscow moved hard the other way.
By CASEY MICHEL February 09, 2017
Casey Michel is a writer living in New York, and can be followed on Twitter at @cjcmichel. This article is adapted from a forthcoming report, entitled “The Rise of the ‘Traditionalist International’: How Moscow cultivates American white nationalists, domestic secessionists, and the Religious Right,” from People For the American Way.
In early April 2014, as the post-Cold War order roiled in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula—the first forced annexation in Europe since the Second World War—Pat Buchanan asked a question. Taking to the column-inches at Townhall, Buchanan wondered aloud: “Whose side is God on now?”
As Moscow swamped Ukraine’s peninsula, holding a ballot-by-bayonet referendum while local Crimean Tatars began disappearing, Buchanan clarified his query. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and intellectual flag-bearer of paleoconservatism—that authoritarian strain of thought linking both white nationalists and US President Donald Trump—wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today[.]” Despite Putin’s rank kleptocracy, and the threat Moscow suddenly posed to stability throughout Europe, Buchanan blushed with praise for Putin’s policies, writing, “In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.”
Three years on, it’s easy to skip past Buchanan’s piece in discussing Russian-American relations, drenched as they are in mutual sanctions and the reality that Moscow attempted to tip the scales in Trump’s favor during the election. But Buchanan’s article crystallized a paradigm shift in religious relations between Moscow and Washington, and in Moscow’s role within the global Christian right. Before 2014 Russia was largely seen as an importer for Christian fundamentalists, most especially from the U.S. But as the Kremlin dissolved diplomatic norms in 2014, Moscow began forging a new role for itself at the helm of the global Christian right.
And Moscow’s grip at the tiller of a globally resurgent right has only tightened since. Not only have Russian banks funded groups like France’s National Front, but Moscow has hosted international conferences on everything from neo-Nazi networking to domestic secessionists attempting to rupture the U.S. Meanwhile, American fundamentalists bent on unwinding minority protections in the U.S. have increasingly leaned on Russia for support—and for a model they’d bring to bear back home, from targeting LGBT communities to undoing abortion rights throughout the country.
“In the same sense that Russia’s [anti-LGBT] laws came about in 2013, we’ve seen similar sorts of laws proposed in Tennessee, for example,” Cole Parke, an LGBT researcher with Political Research Associates, told me. “It’s difficult to say in a chicken-and-egg sort of way who’s inspiring whom, but there’s definitely a correlation between the two movements.”
***
It’s no coincidence that Buchanan’s column, which outlined the players within the “cultural, social, moral war” between Russia and the “hedonistic” West, mentioned a semi-obscure group called the World Congress of Families. As Buchanan wrote, the WCF listed Russia’s emergence as a “Pro-Family Leader” as one of the “10 best trends” of 2013. Indeed, in order to outline how Russia challenged—and supplanted—the U.S. role as a clarion for Christian fundamentalists, you have to parse the WCF’s role, and the group’s attendant impact on Russian policy over the past few years.
Based out of Rockford, Ill., the WCF is an outgrowth of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. Claiming that it wants to “help secure the foundations of society” by, among other things, defending “the natural family founded on marriage between a man and a woman,” the WCF is run by Brian Brown, who also acts as the co-founder and president of the far right, and vehemently anti-gay, National Organization for Marriage. Just this week, Brown landed in Moscow to, as BuzzFeed reported, help continue constructing trans-Atlantic links between Russia and the American Religious Right.
In the two decades since its formal founding in 1997 the WCF has become one of the primary poles around which far-right U.S. evangelicals have exported their fundamentalism, as well as one of the world’s foremost anti-LGBT organizations. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the WCF “is one of the key driving forces behind the U.S. Religious Right’s global export of homophobia”—not that the WCF would necessarily take offense to the charge. In 2016, for instance, the WCF hosted a conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, in which, as Coda reported, speakers encouraged attendees to “stay firm against homofascists” and “rainbow radicals.” Conference topics ranged from how sexual education “undermine[s] the family and parental authority” to looking at how court systems push “Anti-family indoctrination.” (The WCF did not return multiple attempts for comment.)
But the WCF isn’t a wholly American export; this isn’t simply some effort to push Christian extremism alongside baseball and apple pie for foreign consumption. Rather, the WCF is a product of joint Russian-American homophobic ingenuity. As Christopher Stroop, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of South Florida, recently detailed, the WCF was the brainchild of Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, a pair of sociology professors at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Allan Carlson, WCF’s current president emeritus.
The two Russians, according to Mother Jones, were casting about for a means to stave off their country’s looming “demographic winter”—the idea that progressive legislation, from birth control to LGBT rights, will precipitate civilizational collapse—and stumbled over Carlson’s prior work. Gathering in the apartment of a “Russian Orthodox mystic,” the trio outlined an organization that would help oversee a global Christian right—and restore Russia to a position abdicated during the atheistic Soviet period.
Indeed, while the West saw substantial progressive gains since the WCF’s inception, Russia underwent a stark lurch in the opposite direction. Not only has Moscow, most especially under Putin’s third term, grabbed the rudder of the global anti-gay movement, but it has further unraveled even the most basic abortion rights protocols. To wit, in 2011 the Kremlin enacted an anti-abortion bill that, as The Nation wrote, “many pro-choice activists regard as the first volley in an effort to ban the procedure altogether.”
But this legislation didn’t arise in a vacuum, especially when Moscow was the world’s first to legalize the procedure. Rather, those Russian legislators pushing a domestic abortion clampdown looked to their American colleagues—specifically, the WCF—for inspiration.
After all, the package of abortion restrictions, speared by Duma member Yelena Mizulina, was launched a day after a series of WCF honchos, including Carlson and Managing Director Larry Jacobs, settled into Moscow for a “Demographic Summit,” the WCF’s most substantial assembly in Russia to date. As the head of a Russian women’s advocacy group later said, “It was 100-percent clear that everything [in the anti-abortion legislation] was copied from the experience of American fundamentalists and conservative circles of several European countries where abortion is forbidden or restricted severely.” Or as the WCF would later claim in its promotional material: The WCF “helped pass the first Russian laws restricting abortion in modern history.”
***
Shortly after the summit’s close, Putin announced plans to return to the presidency, supplanting then-President Dmitry Medvedev. Buffeted by a flat economy, Putin shored up his support by tacking to a nativist, nationalist—and resentful—base. In the first 18 months after his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin corralled protesters, smothered many of the remaining independent media outlets, and dissolved the distance between the Kremlin and the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. All of his moves pointed toward a hard-right shift in outlook—to a return to Tsar Nicholas I’s triumvirate of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”
America’s Christian fundamentalists followed Putin’s moves with glee—all the more after then-President Barack Obama earned a second term, and same-sex rights charged forward. In 2013, Moscow pushed an “anti-propaganda law” specifically targeting the country’s beleaguered LGBT population. Despite widespread condemnation throughout the West, members of America’s Religious Right tripped over themselves in supporting the Kremlin.
Likewise, as a Daily Beast report found, the “anti-propaganda law,” like the anti-abortion measures before it, didn’t arise in some kind of retrograde ether, but “had emerged from a years-long, carefully crafted campaign to influence governments to adopt a Christian-Right legal framework”—stemming from the efforts of both American and Russian WCF officials who had “successfully disseminated a U.S.-born culture war that’s wreaking havoc on women and queer folks all around the world.” Even Moscow’s ban on Americans adopting Russian children that year managed to gain support within the U.S.’s far right, with Christian fundamentalists praising Putin’s move as preventing children from living with same-sex parents.
And then, in early 2014, Russia began its invasion of southern Ukraine, claiming Crimea and sparking sanctions, animus and the downing of Flight MH17—the destruction of which almost certainly came at the hands of Russia-backed separatists. In the midst of the greatest breach between the Kremlin and the White House in decades, the WCF confirmed plans to host its annual September 2014 conference in Moscow. Suddenly, though, a pair of the WCF’s biggest boosters in Russia—Mizulina and former Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin—were placed on the U.S. sanctions list. Citing “uncertainties surrounding sanctions,” the WCF pulled its official imprimatur from the conference.
But that didn’t stop WCF higher-ups from attending the conclave, rechristened “Large Families: The Future of Humanity,” or from cementing further links with those close to the Kremlin. Not only have WCF fundamentalists continued building ties with ultra-Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, but, as Stroop told me, the conference “was pretty much what it was supposed to be.” (To get a taste of Malofeev’s views, he believes Orthodox Christians can’t be fascist because “Russians suffered from Nazis more than any other nation in the world.”) As journalist Hannah Levintova wrote in 2014, the conference went off with a “nearly identical title” and took place “in the same location, on the same dates, and with a similar schedule[.]” For good measure, Alexey Komov, the WCF’s official Russian representative, told a Russian media outlet the WCF was still helping organize the conference.
This time, though, something was different. Two years into Putin’s third term, and a few months after the Kremlin upended the post-Cold War order, Russia was coalescing support from far-right forces across the West, ranging from the white nationalists who would buoy Trump’s campaign to political groups bent on fracturing NATO and the European Union. While Washington pushed toward legalization of same-sex marriage, Russia, to Christian fundamentalists on both sides of the Atlantic, suddenly regressed into the world’s primary bulwark for nominally “traditional” values.
The 2014 conference, Stroop told me, was “a crystallization of this moment of nationalization and exporting [of nominally ‘traditional’ values] on the Russian side—of Russia taking the lead. … There was a moment when Mizulina was saying that it would be impossible for this kind of conference to take place in Europe or America right now.” Mizulina, of course, was mistaken; the 2015 conference took place in Salt Lake City, just a few months after the Obergefell decision legalized same-sex marriage across America. But in that milieu, in that broader political moment, Russia, to those following the threads of Christian fundamentalism, made a play at wresting control of the global Christian right from the U.S.
And Moscow may well have succeeded—and has now even surpassed its American counterparts in terms of regressive social legislation, recently pulling back criminal penalties for domestic violence. As Stroop added, recalling the aftermath of the 2014 conference, “Russia is taking on the mantle of leadership of global social conservatism. … [That conference] gave Russia the chance to say, ‘We’re the leaders here.’ And people have responded to that, and followed along.”
***
After all, it’s not as if it’s difficult to unearth the fundamentalists fawning over Putin’s putative turn toward God. For instance, according to Bryan Fischer, who until 2015 was a spokesman for the American Family Association, Putin is the “lion of Christianity.” Evangelical Franklin Graham has likewise lauded Putin as someone “protecting traditional Christianity,” while Buchanan only continues praising Putin. Even recent frictions—see: Russia’s recent legislation against non-Orthodox proselytizing—have hardly dampened US fundamentalists’ newfound fervor for Moscow. And if Trump decides to deprioritize rolling back same-sex or abortion rights, the U.S. far right will look to Moscow even further support, ensconcing the Kremlin’s position that much more.
We might not know, per Buchanan’s early questions, whose side God is on. But those in Russia are happy to return the support from America’s radical Christian extremists—and clutch the mantle of Christian fundamentalist leadership as long as they can, even after Trump’s election. “They’re using the history of anti-communism as a means of making a point,” Stroop told me. “They’re saying: ‘We survived communism, and so we know how to resist it.’ And they’re playing right into this whole script, which is a Cold War script, that communism and secularism are the same thing.”
It remains to be seen how the trans-Atlantic relationships among socially conservative Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians shift under Trump, whose pockets, like Putin, are clearly far deeper than his godliness. For the time being, though, there’s a clear head of the global Christian right. As the WCF’s Jacobs said following the 2014 enclave in Moscow, “I think Russia is the hope for the world right now.”’
In the Anglosphere there is still much confusion around Assange, Wikileaks, stolen DNC emails, Russian influence, Russia Report, Mueller Report, Trump campaign, Murdoch’s Fox News, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, Cambridge Analytica, Tufton St. think tanks linked to Atlas or Koch Network, Steve Bannon and right wing grifters, out to defeat Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential Campaign in 2016.
Recently there have been calls and pressure on the Biden Democratic administration, by supporters of Assange in Australia and the U.K., for him not to be deported and possibly pardoned (for charges brought by Trump administration), while many others contest his ‘journalism’ credentials, or at least how unhelpful his cause has been for journalism’
Return to questions over the U.K. Russia Report, former PM Johnson, Brexit, Conservative government, Russian oligarchs, Trump’s GOP Presidential campaign and influence on elections including the EU referendum.
Written by Peter Jukes and originally published January 2023 by ByLine Times, asking questions that are not only unresolved, but actively avoided by the Tories, media and supporters for the advantage of Putin’s Russia and oligarchs, both east and west?’
From ByLine Times: ‘Zamaan Qureshi explores new revelations from the Mueller probe into the leaking of emails hacked by Russian intelligence services to Wikileaks during the 2016 US Presidential election’
Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP, a close associate of former President Donald Trump and now the lead presenter for the new British TV channel GBNews is the subject of newly released documents from the Mueller probe.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and interviewed hundreds of witnesses to lift the veil behind a web of Trump campaign associates and employees who facilitated, aided, and welcomed foreign influence in the 2016 election.
One of the leads Mueller investigated was the attempt to acquire and release the infamous “Hillary Clinton emails” (correspondence from an email address the former U.S. Secretary of State set up with on a private server) as well as the DNC emails hacked by Guccifer 2.0 – a Russian intelligence agency hacker – and subsequently passed on to Wikileaks.
The release of these emails was thought to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump politically. Though Clinton was cleared of wrongdoing by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2016, the Trump campaign sought access to these emails from Wikileaks…
….Most of the redactions that were removed Monday related to Roger Stone, the Trump associate and political consultant, and his attempts to gain access to Clinton’s emails via Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. According to the revealed documents and the Mueller report, Stone believed Nigel Farage may have been able to connect him to Assange to acquire Clinton’s emails.
Nigel Farage’s name appears only once in the Special Counsel’s final report into Russian interference published two years ago. On page 55, the report outlines how Jerome Corsi, an American author and conspiracy theorist and associate of Roger Stone, approached fellow American author Ted Malloch to interview Julian Assange about the leaks.
The original report only outlines how the Special Counsel’s Office understood Corsi believed Malloch had connections or relationships with people in the “orbit” of Nigel Farage, who may have been able to contact Julian Assange….
Farage and Assange
Corsi and Malloch were right about one thing, despite their contradictory statements to federal prosecutors: Farage can get you to Assange. As was reported by Guardian and Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Farage has maintained close ties to Julian Assange. In March 2017, Farage was pictured visiting Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, who has been holed up there since 2012 until his recent arrest. Farage claimed he “didn’t remember” what was discussed in the meeting but within minutes following that meeting, Wikileaks published a new leak.
Farage’s name has been redacted from most 302’s mostly in connection to the now-pardoned Roger Stone. Speculations about the purpose of those redactions appear to fall under the category of protection of personal information or harm to ongoing criminal proceedings. Given that Stone is now pardoned, the information released about him will have no legal weight against him.
Assange, on the other hand, is a controversial figure. While some claim his work exposed government corruption and campaign mismanagement, others feel as though he improperly obtained documents that ended up swaying elections.
Zamaan Qureshi works for The Citizens and The Real Facebook Oversight Board’
Australia has had its Brexit or Trump moment on the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, being usurped by a proxy election campaign, with outcomes being divided society, communities and no real solutions.
Further, the ‘architecture of influence’ and modus operandi are the same as Brexit and Trump including Koch Network think tanks at Tufton St. London and Washington, Tanton Network’s NGOs promoting former ZPG Zero Population Growth nativist tropes versus the ‘other’, whether refugee, immigrant, ethnic minority including native and population growth, with Murdoch right wing led media and related social media campaigns, targeting older voters.
Locally deep seated white nativism promoted by Tanton Network (Sustainable Population Australia), Atlas – Koch Network linked IPA Institute of Public Affairs, CIS Centre for Independent Studies, Murdoch led right wing media cartel and ageing voters in suburbs, but especially regions (subjected to a US GOP mid western strategy); corrupt white nativist and narcissistic authoritarianism to protect <1%, fossil fuels and mining.
Abstract: ‘Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament.
A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%.
This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy.
Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.’
It’s all part of a global playbook from the U.S.-based Atlas Network to protect the profits of fossil fuel and mining companies, argues a Sydney researcher…
…The campaign’s main spokespeople are Indigenous – Warren Mundine and Australian Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – and they have been interviewed frequently in the country’s mainstream media. Yet few Australians are aware of Mundine and Price’s connections to the wider Atlas Network, Walker argues. Both “No” campaigners are long-time contributors to the Centre for Independent Studies, Walker’s paper explains, a conservative think tank founded in 1976 with grants from resource extraction companies such as Shell, Rio Tinto and Western Mining Corporation.
The Center for Independent Studies is in turn a member of the Atlas Network, a Virginia-based organization whose members include hundreds of conservative think tanks and organizations across the world, many of whom are active spreaders of doubt about the severity of climate change.
One of the Center for Independent Studies’ first board members, Maurice Newman, was revealed as an early backer of the organization Advance in 2018, which is now leading efforts against the Indigenous referendum. And Advance’s lead “No” campaigner Mundine is chairman of LibertyWorks, a conservative group also associated with the Atlas Network.
Despite these connections, Advance strongly disputes any association with Atlas.’
Many of the member think tanks of the Atlas Network have supported climate science denial and have campaigned against legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions..
The Atlas Economic Research Foundation (AERF) was founded by Antony Fisher in 1981 with the goal of spreading “innovative, market-based perspectives to issues of public policy” globally…
…The stated vision of the Atlas Network is to “win the long-term policy battles that will shape history, we need freedom champions to create credible institutes – well-managed and independent of vested interests – that use sound business practices to advance sound public policy ideas.”
SourceWatch describes the Atlas Economic Research Foundationas “The Johnny Appleseed of anti regulation groups […] on a mission to populate the world with new ‘free market’ voices.” The mission of Atlas, according to John Blundell (president from 1987 to 1990), “is to litter the world with free-market think-tanks.”’
And one research paper suggests that the network could also have inspired some of the tactics being used by the Voice No campaigns in the lead up to next weekend’s referendum.’
….Matthew Elliott was chief executive of Vote Leave at the time. He is also the founder of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and is on the advisory board of The European Foundation, a high-profile Eurosceptic think tank chaired by Conservative MP Bill Cash, both of which are based in 55 Tufton Street.
Elliott is a key connection between the Tufton Street network and infamous US funders of climate science denial, Charles and David Koch – owners of Koch Industries, the US’s largest private fossil fuel company.
Elliott’s wife Sarah used to work for Koch lobbying vehicle the Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Tax Reform, which Matthew Elliott has cited as a political inspiration.
The Kochs fund the Atlas Network, a Washington DC-based non-profit organisation that works to support more than 450 organisations in 90 countries promoting what it describes as individual liberty and free-market ideals.
Through these ties, Trump and his allies have been able to push their desire to get the UK to lower its food and environmental standards in pursuit of a favourable post-Brexit trade deal. A trade deal the next prime minister of the UK Government may well be desperate to do, seemingly no matter the cost.
Forty years ago this week, Atlas Network held its first event in Vancouver, British Columbia, attached to a larger meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. This milestone provides a good opportunity to reflect on what’s changed and what has remained the same among the community of public policy and educational institutes that engage with Atlas Network to advance liberty…..
….It is notable, however, that this first workshop shows an early appreciation of how technology could change think tanks’ business models for the better. As a small example, Greg Lindsay of CIS Centre for Independent Studies in Australia spoke about how “fundraising by mail” had not seemed cost-effective until the organization invested in a “word processor” that allowed outreach at scale.’
Vale Sloane is Atlas Network’s Strategic Partnerships Advisor. In this role, Vale connects Atlas Network’s community of donors with opportunities to support the 500+ organizations in our global network of partners. This includes providing our donors with regular updates on important partner achievements, identifying investment opportunities to support major partner projects, and keeping donors updated on how their support is making a real difference in the worldwide freedom movement.
Vale joined Atlas Network in 2016 on the Institute Relations team, where he managed relationships with Atlas Network’s global network of partners and directs various grants and awards programs. He also participated in the Charles Koch Institute’s Koch Associate Program in 2016-2017. Hailing from Sydney, Australia, Vale attended the University of Sydney where he received his Bachelors of International and Global Studies (2013) and Bachelors of Laws (2015).
He worked in Australian politics throughout college and after graduation, including on local, state, and national election campaigns between 2009-2015. Vale has also worked in the private sector as Business Development Manager at an eLearning company prior to joining Atlas Network. He lives in Washington, DC, and enjoys reading, traveling, and watching Netflix.’
However, this is neither unique to the UK Conservatives nor dissimilar elsewhere, but it is a long game strategy against grounded science, research and analysis, like Trojan horses to disrupt curricula and universities, why?
It’s both protection for fossil fuels and avoiding climate science (Covid too) while denigrating centre right through left moderate attitudes and policies as e.g. ‘woke’, to energise older right (and too many left) voters including Brexit, Trump and now in Australia ‘The Voice’ Referendum on Aboriginal recognition.
The fulcrum globally is Koch Network think tanks found at Tufton St. London, of course the US, Australia and other parts including links via Atlas Network and in Hungary, Heritage Foundation partnered with Danubius Institute, sharing anti-EU and pro fossil fuels sentiments, shared with Putin’s Russia and fossil fuels oligarchs, also includes the EU’s regulation for environment and financial transparency.
Overall, like Covid and climate science denial, denigration of experts, analysis and universities, with the nativist Tanton Network that shares donors with Koch in the US, is used to deflect from climate science by highlighting immigrants and population growth as environmental hygiene issues.
The end game is more alarming with their and e.g. Murdoch media support for corrupt nativist authoritarian leaders and governments who deny climate science and humanity?
Michelle Donelan’s plan to “depoliticise” science with new guidelines on sex and gender research is a chilling move
The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.
Scientists do not seem too delighted to be defended in this manner. “As a scientist, I really don’t know what this means,” tweeted Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “This is totally shocking and is something I never thought I would see in the UK,” said Buzz Baum, a molecular cell biologist for the Medical Research Council.
What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.
You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity. On top of that, there are the complications of developmental and cognitive biology, which, among other things, can produce intersex individuals and conditions where, say, people with a Y chromosome can be anatomically female.
But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed. Arguably, this is an area where science can’t supply definitive answers to all the germane societal questions.
This is not a case of academic research being trammelled by an imposed ideology, but rather, of a range of differing views among academics themselves. Besides, rather than await clarification, Donelan has evidently formed her opinion already: she called guidance that data on sex should only be collected in exceptional circumstances “utter nonsense” and a “denial of biology”. What is the point of a review if you have decided already what it must say?
More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime. While that might sound a slightly hyperbolic response to a transparently desperate ploy to stoke culture-wars division, the principle is the same: a government deciding an approved position on science and demanding that academics toe the line.
Much as Donelan tries to position herself as a champion of the objectivity and freedom of science, this intervention supplies more evidence of the government’s distrust of academics in general and scientists in particular – it’s of a piece with Rishi Sunak’s assertion that scientists were given too much power during the pandemic. Witness the disturbing way this policy direction is framed. However contested and emotive this particular issue, it is hardly relevant to the large-scale practice of science – yet Donelan is seeking to leverage it to imply that all of science somehow stands at risk from “woke ideology”, as if the integrity of truth itself were at stake.
That is perhaps the most ominous aspect of this announcement. The creation of a fictitious, ubiquitous enemy to scare the population is indeed straight out of the fascist playbook. It was thoughtful of the Conservatives to drive this point home with the spectacle of party member Andrew Boff, chair of the London Assembly, being escorted from the conference hall by police on Tuesday when he voiced protest at Suella Braverman’s criticism of the term “gender ideology”.
The notion that science can be “depoliticised” at all, let alone by an agenda-driven political party, is understood to be nonsensical by those who study the interactions of science and society. Of course political agendas should never dictate research results. But the questions asked, priorities decided and societal implications of advances made absolutely make science inextricably tangled with the political landscape – not least in a controversial area like sex and gender. That entanglement can get messy, but no true democracy tries to control the narrative.’
Philip Ball is a science writer and the author of the forthcoming book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
Article from Nicole Hemmer in The Conversation ‘Explainer: what are the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom?’ relating these organisation to Liberal Party and Christian conservatives in Australia including Tony Abbott and Kevin Andresw, also linked to the US fossil fueled ‘Koch Donors Network’ with links globally via Atlas, including U.K. and Hungary.
In Australia these include the IPA Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne and CIS Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, plus AIP Australian Institute of Progress in Brisbane, while a quasi environmental NGO SPA Sustainable Population Australia, has links with the Tanton Network, via original ZPG Zero Population Growth (Rockefeller Bros. Fund), which shares donors with Koch Network.
Further, the same former conservative politicians also attend events and visit think tanks in Budapest, Hungary, respectively the MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute, led by former Thatcher aide John O’Sullivan and partnered with the Heritage Foundation.
In the background it’s quite a confusing dichotomy or these groups’ public messaging is different from what they quietly promote in private?
American conservative organisations have loomed large in Australian politics in the past week. Former prime minister Tony Abbott delivered a speech in New York to one such group, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). And, on Tuesday, former defence minister Kevin Andrews will be in Washington to speak on Australian security and defence at a gathering of the Heritage Foundation.
Even many Americans don’t know much about organisations like the ADF and Heritage. But these groups play a critical role in advancing conservative policies. Here’s a look at how each is remaking American politics – and what it might mean for Australia.
The Alliance Defending Freedom
The ADF is not quite a lobby group. Originally called the Alliance Defense Fund, it is a legal advocacy group. Unlike lobbying groups, which typically work to influence legislation, the ADF aims its arrows at the judiciary.
Through test cases, legal strategies, and consultation with state legislators, the ADF seeks to promote conservative interpretations of the law, particularly on issues important to the religious right. It has more than 40 lawyers on staff, and has trained more than 1300 law students and 1700 practising lawyers.
It is primarily interested in any cases to do with gay rights or reproductive rights. In 2003, the ADF filed an amicus brief defending the right of states to criminalise gay sex. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled such laws unconstitutional. Having lost that fight, it turned its attention to defeating same-sex marriage laws.
Same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide in the US. So, the ADF has not been very effective on the issue. But, in recent years, the ADF – like a number of other conservative legal advocacy groups – has shifted tactics. Now it carries the banner of “religious liberty”, arguing that legislation expanding same-sex rights or reproductive access infringes on the religious freedom of conservative Christians.
Don’t want to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? Worried that your child’s biology textbook contains references to contraception and sexually transmitted infections? Call the ADF.
On a broader scale, the profusion of “religious freedom restoration acts” (RFRAs) in the US can be traced to work done by groups like the ADF, which consults state legislatures on how to draft RFRAs that have the best possible chance of surviving a legal challenge.
While public pressure has put the brakes on RFRAs in many states, the strategy has had a major impact nationally.
The ADF was the prime mover behind the Hobby Lobby case, which argued that for-profit corporations could not be required to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees if such coverage violated the owners’ religious beliefs. The Supreme Court found in favour of Hobby Lobby and the ADF, essentially ruling that not only were corporations people, but they were people with inviolable religious rights.
The alliance was founded in 1994, in the midst of the culture wars in the US. Leaders of the religious right felt that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had remade the relationship between church and state, pushing religion further and further outside the public sphere.
As a result, Christian leaders like Bill and Vonette Bright (founders of Campus Crusade for Christ) and James Dobson Jr. (founder of Focus on the Family) pooled their resources to create an ACLU for the religious right. Their goal was to use legal arguments, rather than religious ones, to advance their agenda. Twenty years later, the New York Times deemed the ADF the “largest legal force of the religious right”.
The Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a think-tank. It uses policy papers, political advocacy, and public relations to support its conservative policy goals. Its range is expansive, covering everything from free-market economics to decentralised governance to a muscular foreign policy.
Though the Heritage Foundation was founded by members of the New Right more interested in domestic policy, it has had a profound effect on defence spending and military action in the US. Ronald Reagan got the idea for his Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly derided as Star Wars) from Heritage. And Heritage policymakers were at the leading edge of the push for the first Iraq War in 1990.
But Heritage is not as reliably neoconservative as the American Enterprise Institute, another prominent conservative think-tank. For instance, Heritage founder Paul Weyrich became an early conservative critic of the second Iraq War, arguing the US had to be more strategic about the wars it entered. He also opposed the doctrine of pre-emptive war.
Heritage has been one of the most effective policy shops in Washington since its founding in 1973. In 1981, when Reagan became president, Heritage published Mandate for Leadership, which was essentially a blueprint for a conservative administration. Reagan loved it. He passed it out to key administration officials and instituted a majority of its recommendations (which numbered in the thousands).
Heritage also worked closely with Speaker Newt Gingrich on the Contract with America, the agenda that drove the 1994 Republican landslide.
Another more recent measure of success occurred in 2013. Republican Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate to take up the leadership of the Heritage Foundation. Think about that. DeMint thought he could exercise more influence leading a think-tank than as a senator.
Heritage pays a lot more than the Senate, but still. That’s a big move.
So, do these organisations matter?
At a time when all eyes are on the Republican primaries, it’s important to remember that elected officials are only a small part of how policy is made in the US – and in Australia.
That Australian leaders like Abbott and Andrews are spending time at these institutions suggest they understand that. And given that they are visiting some of the most successful conservative organisations in the US, there’s a good chance they’re picking up some ideas to try out when they get home.
Nicole Hemmer – Research Associate, Miller Center, University of Virginia, and US Studies Centre, University of Sydney’
This also suggests the impact of demography i.e. ageing populations living longer, with above median age voters being targeted by not just parties and policies, but consolidated right wing media and US Koch Network linked think tanks at Tufton on broad social economic policies including Brexit, immigration, pensions and health care.
Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Social Research, and Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde
“Class is the basis of British politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” So wrote Peter Pulzer, the former Gladstone professor of politics at the University of Oxford in the 1960s. Nowadays, however, it is age, not social class, that is the biggest demographic division in Britain’s electoral politics.
According to the British Election Study, at the 2019 general election, the Conservatives won the support of 56% of those aged 55 and over, but only 24% of those under 35. Conversely, Labour was backed by 54% of those under-35s who cast a vote, but by just 22% of those aged 55 and over.
In contrast, support for Britain’s two main parties among those in working class occupations was little different from that among those in professional and managerial jobs.
But what underpins this age divide? We typically think of Labour as a party that is more “left wing”, more concerned than the Conservatives about inequality and more supportive of “big government”. So does young people’s greater willingness to support Labour mean they are more left wing than their older counterparts?
Are they more concerned about inequality and more inclined to believe that government should be acting to reduce it? And are they more inclined than older voters to want the government to spend and tax more?
These questions are addressed in a chapter in the latest British Social Attitudes report, published by the National Centre for Social Research. Based on the 40 years of data the annual BSA survey has collected since it began in 1983, the chapter reveals that while younger people have become more concerned about inequality in recent years, this is not accompanied by greater enthusiasm for more tax and spend.
Since 1986, nearly every BSA survey has regularly presented its respondents with a set of propositions designed to measure how “left” or “right wing” they are on the issue of inequality. People are, for example, asked whether they agree or disagree that “there is one law for the rich and one for the poor”, and “government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off”.
Their answers to these and similar statements can be summarised into a scale measure that runs from 0 to 100, where 0 means that someone is very left wing and 100 indicates that they are very right wing.
Young people shift left
When the scale was first administered in 1986, there was no difference between the average score of those aged under 35 and those aged 55 or over. Both had a score of 37.
Equally, 30 years later, in 2016, younger people’s average score of 38 was little different from that of 37 among older people. The growth in Labour’s support among younger people that was already in evidence by then was not underpinned by a more left-wing point of view.
However, a gap has emerged during the last three or four years. In the latest BSA survey, conducted towards the end of 2022, young people scored 28 – ten points below the equivalent figure in 2016. In contrast, at 36, the outlook of older people has barely changed at all.
Yet this does not mean that younger people want more taxation and spending. Every year since 1983 BSA has asked people what the government should do if it has to choose between increased taxation and spending on “health, education and social benefits”, reduced taxation and spending, or keeping things as they are.
In the 1980s, younger people were typically more likely than older people to say that taxation and spending should be increased. In 1984, for example, 42% of those aged under 35 expressed that view, compared with just 33% of those over 55.
But since the mid-90s the opposite has been the case. By 2015, 41% of younger people wanted more taxation and spending compared with 49% of older people.
Meanwhile, the gap has since widened further. Whereas support for increased taxation and spending has risen to 67% among older people – the highest it has been in the last 40 years – among younger people it is still no more than 43%.
Lost faith
So why might have younger people become more concerned about inequality, yet at the same time less supportive of more spending? The answer may well lie in the distinctive economic position in which those in today’s youngest generation find themselves.
The ageing of Britain’s population means that a larger proportion of government spending goes on health and social care from which older people primarily benefit. Meanwhile, while older people are in receipt of relatively generous pensions that have been protected by the triple lock, younger people who have been to university find themselves in effect paying a higher level of “income tax” in order to pay off their student loans.
Meanwhile, although the pandemic posed a greater threat to the health of older people, it was younger people who were more likely to find their educational and economic lives disrupted, and to have found themselves having to endure lockdown in lower quality accommodation. At the same time, home ownership has become more difficult, not least because so many are spending a significant proportion of their income on rent.
There is, then, good reason why younger people have become more concerned about inequality but seem at the same time to doubt that increased taxation and spending would help them.
The challenge to the parties at the forthcoming election could well be to convince these voters that the next government will offer them a brighter future, rather than add to their woes. But to do that they may well need to be willing to think outside the traditional mindsets associated with the terms “left” and the “right”.’
John Curtice, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Social Research, and Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde
Thom Hartmann in Alternet has written a prescient article, ‘What if Trump’s conspiracy was way bigger than we know?’ that both infers from the noise around Trump and also asks, is there something deeper occurring around the GOP, US and transnational politics?
Interesting overview and thesis, withstanding Hartmann has not included related machinations in the Anglosphere, especially U.K., Australia, Russia, Central Eastern Europe and Hungary whether Brexit or Russian influence.
Linked to the latter has been Tufton St. London, US #KochNetwork influence on Brexit, due to antipathy towards EU regulation on environment, fossil fuels, financial transparency and taxes, not to forget open society, liberal democracy and empowered citizens; shared by the Kremlin and right wing Murdoch media.
There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.
This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.
So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?
There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 Election.
Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.
If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.
Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.
They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops had previously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.
Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:
Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.
Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.
Not to employ any riot control agents.
Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.
Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.
Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.
Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.
It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.
If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.
This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence Budgets.
Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning. Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.
A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.
Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi Government.
As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018: “Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.
“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….
“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.” The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”
The Washington Post noted that:
“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing “… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.
“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”
Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).
The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.
The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.
There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.
In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.
On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…
The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline:
“Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.
As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.
Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act.
About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. AsThe Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:
“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”
Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?
That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News”showcased in Hungary?
That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May,voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?
And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?
Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?
Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let Go?
Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?
Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.
The Koch or Atlas Network flagship Heritage Foundation is prepared for any GOP or Trump Presidential victory in 2024 claiming, in an Orwellian and Kafkaesque sense, that ‘leftists’ have taken over institutions, courts, education and public institutions, requiring aggressive action by ‘conservative’ groups including Christians and the GOP or Republican Party to oppose and then implement permanent solutions.
No doubt it will be also justified under the guise of ‘freedom and liberty’ like Brexit, supporting Russia over Ukraine (& conversely critical of NATO support for Ukraine), involved in related events in Hungary, demanding rights for ‘Christians’, highlighting the anti-semitic ‘great replacement’ and stacking the Supreme Court with conservative justices, to in turn legislate and enforce 19th century social outlooks, often informed by eugenics .
Spencer Chretien – Associate Director, 2025 Presidential Transition Project at the Heritage Foundation
KEY TAKEAWAYS
It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.
The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success.
The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration.
Will we be ready for them?
With the Biden administration half over and with the immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington behind us for now, it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.
One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.
The result has been decades of disappointment.
Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.
This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.
The first pillar, the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership, represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.
The second is our online personnel database. This “Conservative LinkedIn” will launch in March and will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.
The third is our Presidential Administration Academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.
The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.
In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.
The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them? That’s where Project 2025 comes in. We have two years, and one chance, to get this right.
This piece originally appeared in The American Conservative’
When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices, they are averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?
Not understood that across the Anglosphere and Europe mostly ageing voters dominating, with politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.
However, in the ByLine Times article excerpts below from AC Grayling, his explanation of how we arrived here cites education as the issue; though this ignores amongst older dominant voters who are informed by activist right wing legacy media, influencers and including US fossil fueled think tanks versus younger who are outnumbered; not education now but the past?
Further, there are attempts through influence and lobbying to dilute education standards from the same fossil fueled Koch Network think tanks, in support of far right policies now adopted by ‘conservatives’ including more Christianity or religion in schools vs. attacks on supposed ‘woke’ or LGBT friendly policies.
However, this masks concerted efforts in the Anglosphere replicating education curricula from less developed authoritarian states including teaching, curriculum syllabi and content e.g. more religion &/or nationalism, less analysis, less maths/science and basically avoiding the hidden curriculum i.e. developing essential soft skills a la Bloom’s Taxonomy and well rounded citizens.
There is a collective need to avoid attempts getting at young people in preparation for when demographics balance out, neutering the dominance of less educated but more active above median age voters, especially in regions.
Too many voters are insufficiently informed and reflective to vote other than tribally or self-interestedly in exploitable ways due to failings in how we conceive of ‘education’, writes
AC Grayling 2 August 2023
Let us ask why so much influence has been exerted by a dishonest and ultra-partisan media owned by non-dom billionaires with a vested interest in destabilising the country so that their preferred version of anarcho-capitalism can flourish. And let us ask why social media has found the British population such a plastic, malleable, easy playground for its bubble-creating, conspiracy-promoting, false-fact-spreading downside.
And then let us reflect on the answer: because well-informed and reflective people would not be so easily duped by either a dishonest press or unreliable and distorting social media, it must be that enough of the British population is insufficiently well-informed and insufficiently reflective – more bluntly: ignorant enough and unthinking enough – to be ripe for serving as their dupes.
How has this happened?
The Need for Active Enquirers
The fact remains that, in 2019, 43% of those who voted chose Conservatives, and enough Uxbridge voters – blaming a Labour London Mayor for Tory policies on the environment – voted Tory in a seat formerly held by Johnson. What explains them? Indeed, even supposing half of these were principled, loyal, Conservatives who had thought hard about the Government of the past 13 years and somehow liked what it saw – what explains how they could?
From among a plethora of answers let us focus on one very central one: the failure of our education system to achieve a good standard of active intelligence in enough of the population.
By ‘active intelligence’, I mean the useful general knowledge and the constructive scepticism that prompts people to test claims and promises made by those who want their money or their votes.
The price we pay is careless voters exploitable by a system and its career politician operatives into putting someone as grossly unfit as a Boris Johnson into Downing Street – to say nothing of the inadequacy of the compeers such an individual surrounds himself with.
To educate – not merely to train in enough basics of literacy and numeracy to qualify as a squaddy in the economic infantry – classes need to consist of fewer than 10 pupils, so that teachers have time to work with the individual grain of each pupil’s mind and personality.
Pupils should be active enquirers, not just passive learners sitting behind desks in a classroom: that means getting out and about, doing, travelling, finding out, making.
The value of musical education and art on general cognitive development, enhancing its capacities for success in maths and applied sciences, has been all but lost in the English education system.
Historical and geographical ignorance, and wholly inadequate levels of competence in a second and third language – plus frequent and active travelling in the countries where they are spoken – make for narrow, parochial, limited mindsets.
I defy anyone to claim that the level of achievement represented by GCSE today is comparable to that of the ‘O’ levels of yore – and even the ‘O’ levels of yore did not pass the test of what is necessary for the informed and thoughtful populace that is the minimum requirement for any version of democracy.
Democracies are being made to fail all round the world today because increasingly larger portions of already significant percentages of populations are too easily taken for a ride by the political and politically-motivated agencies which benefit from their incapacity.
This problem with education means that efforts to explain why some claim or promise does not stack up simply go over the heads of enough people to make it possible for those who claim or promise to get away with it. This happens all the time.
As we know too well, serious newspapers and current affairs programmes get little traction because they speak to tiny minorities only, while tabloid media cleave to the parochial interests and prejudices of their consumers because that is what makes money – with little if any concern to inform or engage beyond the usual sodden fare of celebrity gossip and whatever is the hysteria of the moment.
The landscape of our democracy is accordingly a dismal one indeed. Its poverty and barrenness have been cruelly exposed by Brexit – arguably inconceivable in a better-educated nation (look at Scotland) – and its emblems will forever be Johnson and the gang of coarsely unsuitable appointments he has made over the past three years.
Too many voters are insufficiently informed and reflective to vote other than tribally or self-interestedly in exploitable ways, and a large part of the reason for this is that our education system is too poorly funded to achieve in enough cases the kind of intellects that would be more resistant to such exploitation.
I argue that the systemic failure of our political order, for which this insufficiency of education is responsible, led to Brexit: and that Brexit is the ultimate condemnation of both.’
AC Grayling is a philosopher, Master of the New College of the Humanities, and Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College at Oxford University
Like US group ‘UnKoch My Campus’ have publicised, there have been forays into and attempts to nobble higher education (and K12), due to alleged nefarious but undefined elites, ‘left’ or centrist ideas, women, science, Bloom’s Taxonomy and producing empowered citizens. Much of this has been achieved by attacks to claim support for freedom of speech, but more about promoting anti-LGBT, external curricula or syllabi, content and more Christianity….
Maybe different or lagging in the USA, but research elsewhere is showing the generational move to conservatism from liberal centre has stalled, due to better education and reaction to negative tactics of the right.
Now the US right, like Russia, Hungary, Turkey etc. wants to condition young people to become conservative by indirect means, including disrupting education and conditioning over time; beware of Trojan horses…… inc. external providers like Prager U, but more innocuous, developing and designing whole programs, precluding actual teachers from using other research and content?
Other related issues include the habit of higher education institutions to not just outsource programs including teaching and program design, under the guise of cost savings, but use IT technical personnel with neither teaching qualifications nor experience to do ID Instructional Design for in house courses, maybe referring to a faculty SME subject matter expert, but bypassing teacher practitioners and experts who need to deliver the same?
Other examples are seen in Australia including the Koch Network linked CIS Centre for Independent Studies promoting a report on teacher training including the pedagogy of teacher over student centred, direct instruction vs. discovery to develop analysis; seems to be a way to bypass Bloom’s Taxonomy?
Further, the ACT Australian Capital Territory’s Catholic Diocese is also being promoted to ‘improve’ students outcomes for indigenous communities by claiming their (with no education qualifications vs. business & engineering) approach to teaching, learning and assessment, outside of the system, was better as evidenced by their ACT students (but neither equivalence nor linkage with indigenous?). Discussed in ABC RB podcast ‘Has a progressive education failed‘ (using indigenous as an example of failure).
In the US this seems to be part of a long game and broader need to suppress Democrat, progressive or centrist ideology, thinking and voting, to try garner support for far right or Christian nationalist conservatives amongst young generations, for the GOP and right wing Christian or religious authoritarians to gain and remain in power.
The viral videos from Dennis Prager’s “university” have clocked more than 1 billion views.
In the weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Americans flocked to the internet with pressing questions. Some inquired about immigration to Canada. Others Googled “sanctuary city.” A few wanted to know what a “manafort” was. And millions were newly curious about the Electoral College, which for the second time in recent memory was going to contravene the will of the majority. What was it? Why was it? Could electors defy their voters’ wishes?
People turned to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Fox News, and even the Constitution for answers. But few sources were as widely consulted as “Do You Understand the Electoral College?” a five-minute video hosted by retired lawyer and television pundit Tara Ross. Her genial lecture, illustrated with colorful cartoons and pop-up text—”pure democracies do not work”—can be found at Prager University, an online video portal curated by the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager. The Electoral College video had about 850,000 views before the election, says Allen Estrin, Prager’s producer and consigliere. “Two weeks later, it had 50 million.”
The intellectual quality of Ross’ video is decidedly junior varsity. She doesn’t mention how the Electoral College was born of a compromise with slave states or note the degree to which it skews the will of the majority—for example, by effectively giving a Wyoming resident’s vote almost quadruple the power of a Californian’s. She also claims (bizarrely) that the Electoral College thwarts voter fraud. But never mind any of that. The video is short and memorable, with quick cuts, zippy graphics, and cool sound effects. It sucks you in.
Since 2012, PragerU has posted nearly 300 similarly digestible videos. Some of them dabble in topics like parenting or financial advice, but most cover core conservative doctrines. Delivering tidy arguments without the Limbaughesque acid reflux, they have accrued, collectively, just over 1 billion views—nearly 700 million in 2017 alone, according to marketing director Craig Strazzeri.
PragerU “students” don’t earn degrees, of course. Yet a dedicated viewer might walk away with the consistently conservative outlook of a charming, curmudgeonly 69-year-old radio personality who lacks the ratings of his blustery peers—the Sean Hannitys and Mark Levins and Alex Joneses—but boasts a more reassuring disposition. Despite his chosen profession and Brooklyn upbringing, Prager is no yeller. He welcomes guests with whom he disagrees and is respectful to all callers. “There was a time there when Dennis Prager and Bill Bennett represented to me what talk radio could become, which would be focusing on ideas and intelligent conversation,” says fellow conservative talker Charlie Sykes, who has guest-hosted Prager’s show.
But in a transformation that surprised even some of his peers, genteel Prager has become a die-hard Trump cheerleader, loyally supporting the president and downplaying his boorish conduct. He even went so far as to root for Roy Moore, the disgraced Senate candidate from Alabama. Prager denies he’s changed. His support for these men is a rational, practical matter, he says. You vote for the guy who votes the way you would—character is secondary.
But his other line of reasoning on the subject is both irrational and apocalyptic: Prager is convinced that at this historical moment—not in 1976 when he voted for Jimmy Carter, nor in 2006 when he was a sanguine Bush supporter, but right now—our society is collapsing, and a liberal Supreme Court nominee could portend the final flood. Last summer, he tweeted that Western media outlets “pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.”
Prager explained to me that because “the universities have all but shut down, not to mention demonized, non left ideas,” and the media “are not far behind,” it is his duty to provide a conservative take “on things that matter—economics, good and evil, America, Israel, religion, God, etc.” His goal is to imbue young people with “the principles on which America was founded,” and to demonstrate “why Western society will not survive the death of Judeo-Christian values.”
These instincts—Prager the Genial Radio Host and Prager the Gloomy Prophet—merge in PragerU, whose videos are too gentle in tone for the Infowars crowd and too conservative for committed liberals. Rather, they are engineered to sway those in the mushy middle, especially young people trying to figure out what they stand for. Prager’s radio show has about 2 million weekly listeners (to Rush Limbaugh’s 14 million), but PragerU’s appeal goes well beyond the graying talk-radio audience. More than 60 percent of its viewers are younger than 35, according to YouTube analytics.
Strazzeri estimates that 100 million individuals—almost one-third of the US population—have watched at least part of a PragerU video via Facebook, where the organization has more than 2.8 million followers. (Overall viewer numbers would be even greater, PragerU contended in a recent lawsuit against YouTube, had that platform not been blocking some PragerU videos as “inappropriate” content.) With his move past talk radio, Prager is making a play for the future, for the generations that aren’t listening to AM in the car, if they even drive. By meeting young people on their own turf—social media, smartphones—and addressing them amiably, Prager manages to deliver conservative thought in a package even Never Trumpers are willing to open…..
……The formula is simple enough—a broad range of presenters and topics, a consistent supply of new product, aggressive promotion—but Estrin thinks the real key is brevity. He’s seen the liberal academics natter away in lecture-hall videos, taking for granted that busy people will sacrifice an hour to absorb their views on economics or Plato. Even the YouTube videos in the popular Crash Course series are 10 to 12 minutes—too long. “In the world of the internet, five minutes is the right dosage,” Estrin says. “You can’t get calculus across, but you can get a lot in politics, history, a lot of things.”
It’s not like the left couldn’t do something similar. It might feature Reich, but also, say, Sarah Silverman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and America Ferrera. PragerU views sites like BuzzFeed, Vice, and Al Jazeera’s AJ+ as left-wing competition, but in fact liberals have never mounted such an ambitious, ideologically targeted effort to win over young people. And Estrin is surprised. “I keep waiting for that to happen,” he says. “I have every confidence it will.”’
Interesting article from The Conversation ‘Politicians believe voters to be more conservative than they really are’ analysing the mismatch between media and politicians versus the electorate and society at large in Europe, US and Australia, why?
‘on a majority of issues, politicians consistently overestimate the share of citizens who hold right-wing views. Importantly, politicians’ overestimation of how many citizens hold right-wing views is consistent across the ideological spectrum. Politicians hold a conservative bias regardless of whether they represent left- or right-wing parties’
According to the researchers, they suggest much has to do with right wing voters, even though a minority, are more active and have a higher profile, in addition to the impact of lobbyists and one would suggest, oligarch funded right wing ‘libertarian’ think tanks, especially refined architecture of influence in the US.
The Anglosphere of US, UK and Australia, have become stark in how right wing or ultra conservative and nativism infected politics, economics and society, targeting and developing above median age right wing voters. This has been achieved by supposed free market think tanks and the fossil fueled Koch Network including CNP Council for National Policy, Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute and ‘bill mill’ ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council.
Further, this is supported by white nativism masquerading as environmental solutions of the Tanton Network, which shares Koch Donors Network, funded by but deflecting from fossil fuels, highlighting ‘immigrants’ and ‘population growth’ as environmental issues, then Murdoch led media ecosystem spreads, repeats and reinforces the negative talking points, informed by GOP pollsters and lobbyists.
In the UK the same elements exist with both Tanton and Koch Network NGO or charities sharing Tufton St., while Murdoch et al. are central in media to do the communications; ditto Australia.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a district council election for the first time on Monday. Robert Sesselmann’s victory as district administrator – the equivalent of a mayor – in the Eastern town of Sonneberg comes only a day after Greece’s conservatives clinched an outright majority in the country’s parliamentary polls, topping left-wing parties Syriza and Pasok. Meanwhile, the Spanish left is also bracing for an early general election on 23 July, after losing to the Spanish conservative Partido Popular (PP) and far-right Vox parties in May.
Such developments might send a signal to European politicians to lean further to the right in a scramble to save votes. Yet our latest research, published this month, shows that politicians’ perceptions may not actually reflect voters’ true interests and opinions. Worse still: it appears to be an error that many other politicians have already made.
866 officials surveyed
In an influential 2018 study, David Broockman and Christopher Skovron showed that US politicians overestimated the share of citizens who held conservative views. On questions related to state intervention in the economy, gun control, immigration, or abortion, the majority of both Republicans and Democratic representatives surveyed believed that a greater share of citizens supported right-wing policies than what public-opinion data revealed.
Our findings are clear and straightforward. In all four countries, and on a majority of issues, politicians consistently overestimate the share of citizens who hold right-wing views. Importantly, politicians’ overestimation of how many citizens hold right-wing views is consistent across the ideological spectrum. Politicians hold a conservative bias regardless of whether they represent left- or right-wing parties.
The result of lobbying?
The big question is why politicians perceive public opinion to be more right-wing than it truly is. One explanation provided by Broockman and Skovron for the United States was that right-wing activists are more visible and tend to contact their politicians more often, skewing representatives’ information environment to the right. We tested this explanation in our studied countries, but could not find evidence to support it. The right-wing citizens in our sample are not more politically active, and therefore visible, than their left-wing counterparts. Yet the idea that politicians’ information environment might be skewed to the right can find support in other work.
Earlier research has shown that politicians tend to receive disproportionally right-skewed information from business interest groups. Social media, which politicians use more and more, also tends to be dominated by conservative views, and as politicians spend more time online, and their news media diet is growingly filtered through social media feeds that create interactions and feedback skewed to the right, their views may be accordingly distorted. It has also been shown that politicians tend to pay more attention to the policy preferences of more affluent and educated citizens, and those citizens vote more often and hold more often right-wing views, at least on economic issues.
A threat to representative democracy
Irrespective of the sources of the conservative bias, the fact that it is persistently present in a variety of different democratic systems has major implications for the well-functioning of representative democracy. Representative democracy builds upon the idea that elected politicians are responsive to citizens, meaning that they by and large attempt to promote policy initiatives that are in line with people’s preferences. If politicians’ ideas of what the public thinks – let alone their own party’s voters – are systematically biased toward one ideological side, then the political representation chain is weakened. Politicians may erroneously pursue right-wing policies that do not in fact have the popular support, and may refrain from working to advance (incorrectly perceived) progressive goals.
But if citizens are less conservative than what politicians perceive them to be, the supply side of policy is at risk of being consistently suboptimal and may have broader, system-wide implications such as growing disaffection with democracy and democratic institutions.The recent social unrest in France regarding raising legal pension age might be an example of a policy debate in which governments perceive public opinion leaning more to the right than it actually is.
The situation is not without hope, however, and access to accurate information seems to play an important role. A 2020 study in Switzerland has shown that a sustained use of direct democracy might help politicians better understand public opinion. In the same logic, a recent study of US elected officials show that they tend to misperceive support for politically motivated violence among their supporters. But when exposed to reliable and accurate information, they update and correct their (mis) perceptions. Building on such studies, we believe that more work needs to be done both to understand the sources and prevalence of conservative bias, and to identify additional ways of offsetting it.
Developed nations are ageing with increasing numbers of retirees going onto pensions, but backgrounded by increasing old age dependency ratios while decline in working age cohorts, which pay taxes to support budgets. Many nations now are desperate in attracting long term temporary net migration or churn over of workers, students, digital nomads etc. as ‘net financial budget contributors’ who cannot and will not access services and budgets, open only to citizens and some permanent residents.
See OECD (2023), Australian Old-age dependency ratio(indicator). doi: 10.1787/e0255c98-en (Accessed on 07 August 2023)
Australia’s solution, still in a generational development phase for another generation, was to introduce industry superannuation under a Labor government in the 1980s-90s, tracking the baby boomer ‘bubble’ which is now in transition to retirement; influenced by the US 401(K) employee accounts system.
Rationale was the need to provide retirement income, public healthcare and other services, but keeping pressure off budgets and/or pension funds by introducing superannuation for employees paid by employers i.e. industry, in addition to public/independent, retail or self managed; all invest in mix of shares, property, fixed interest etc..
Employers pay the SCG Superannuation Contribution Guarantee into people’s individual or multiple superannuation accounts, also allows personal contributions, tax breaks or incentives and compounding, for then later to access income streams in retirement.
While the state pension is and has been a citizenship right to apply, especially for single retirees without substantial superannuation funds, it is means and assets tested i.e. if no or little superannuation income, full pension is available, then tapering downwards to zero depending level of Superannuation retirement income stream and thresholds.
Win win for Australians now and into the future, but it has been under constant attack by right wing parties, Koch linked think tanks and media (as a proxy for unions), described as a tax on business, gives funds too much financial power and influence e.g. including those linked to unions, while total now stands at approximately 2 trillion Euros, then conversely the same complain that the system is used as a tax dodge by wealthy…. or demands to allow substantive access at an early age for buying property….. Trying to crash the system.
Following is an article from former Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan in The Daily News owned by giving good analysis and overview of how the benefits far outweigh any costs, keep budgets balanced and retirees comfortable, whether they have superannuation, or not.
It wasn’t all that long ago that for most people retirement meant just getting by on the pension.
No luxuries, no holidays, no spoiling the grandchildren. Such things were the preserve of a very lucky minority with generous pension plans attached to their salaries – airline pilots, professors, bank workers, public servants, police force members, and others.
For the rest, giving up work might mean living on the borderline between sufficiency and poverty.
Today, thanks to industry superannuation, working people can have a decent retirement, too. Ending centuries of age-related poverty is one of the biggest examples of social progress in our nation’s history.
Dare I say, giving people a couple of extra decades of economic security through superannuation has probably advanced the sum total of human happiness more than just about anything else an Australian government has done.
How otherwise sensible people could be opposed to this step forward for our society really is beyond me.
It shows you just how easy it is to forget the realities of life in the past – especially when you have a vested interest or ideological obsession in forgetting.
Ideological opposition
That’s where most of the opposition to industry superannuation is coming from: A small minority with ideological opposition to the equal representation model of unions and employers on a profit-to-member basis.
The main point to grasp is that the performance of industry superannuation funds isn’t what motivates them – because their performance is consistently superior to that of the retail funds. They just think that if unions are involved, it must be illegitimate.
Well, industry super is now middle-aged and after 40 years the first cohort of members who have had industry super for their whole working lives are starting to retire.
Ordinary people understand gains
This is why the opposition to industry super is doomed – ordinary people know what benefits it produces. And those with 40-year-old balances, built up by compounding interest during this era of steady and sometimes accelerated economic growth, are increasing in number every year.
That still isn’t stopping its opponents from trying to pull industry super down.
Without financial arguments to fall back upon, they are resorting to crude and misleading populist arguments that are getting more strident and desperate with every silly campaign. It takes several forms.
On the political right, the current argument of choice involves housing.
Putting money into super, they say, is stopping young people saving for a house. And if only those young people could get their hands on the super in their balances, they could go out and bid more for a house each Saturday morning.
But of course all this will do is bid up the price of housing, and rob them of compounding interest over their working life, meaning they will be worse off and even more exposed to the ups and downs of the housing market. Super helps them diversify their assets – a good thing if ever there was one.
This choice between a retirement and a house is a false choice indeed.
But one can see why the opponents of industry use it.
It’s emotive – and as we know emotion is easier to create than understanding. They know it’s a bloody brave politician who will tell millennials they have to choose between saving for a house and retirement.
But brave they must be, because raiding super for housing is like shutting down schools to pay for hospitals.
Sound investment decisions
The right’s other argument is that superannuation balances are being turned into piggy banks for do-gooders to raid for their pet schemes, like public housing and industry investment.
All funds are required by law to make investment decisions based on their projected returns to members. This law hasn’t changed and never will. Industry funds would never stand for such a change. Never.
On the left, different but no less populist and misleading arguments are being employed with increasing frequency.
One is that industry super, in fact all super, is a neoliberal plot that has effectively privatised the aged pension.
This is another nonsense. Industry superannuation didn’t come at the expense of the pension—the pension was raised significantly during its period of creation, as were other benefits to seniors. The dual existence of industry superannuation and a significantly higher aged pension is a double buffer against the vicissitudes of old age.
In the long-term, this so-called progressive populist critique of industry superannuation is as dangerous as the conservative populist critique it imitates. It’s a case of different sheep costumes but essentially the same wolf.
Far better off
Australians and Australia are far better off for four decades of the equal employer union representation model on a profit-to-member basis.
With each passing year, its future will be more certain, but there is still much work to do to combat the dangerous myths peddled by its opponents.
Fighting back against these misleading campaigns is one of the most important things for Industry fund leaders can do.
Wayne Swan is chair of Cbus. He was also Treasurer of Australia, and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia in the Gillard and Rudd Labor governments.’
A prescient article from Ines Eisele at Deutsche Welle (DW) which is very relevant to the Anglosphere and elsewhere as people struggle to understand the world around them whether politics, science, economics or otherwise, with suboptimal or even ‘gamed’ media.
Especially important currently with climate & Covid science denial, Putin’s Russian invasion of Ukraine and right wing political parties, which all share similar strategy and tactics, i.e. astroturfing media and politics, to then gaslight society, that may not produce beneficial outcomes e.g. Brexit and Trump.
The article touches on cognitive distortions, negative content triggers (pollster Lynton Crosby has said negativity moves voters, positives do not), personal benefits of beliefs versus facts, desire for attention and approval, finally solutions for resilience.
School curricula need to include both embedded and overt ways of avoiding fake news, junk or pseudo science etc. for empowered citizens, but adults in general also need the same training; age, experience or education are not sufficient.
Fake news have become a real threat to society. How do psychological and social factors influence whether we fall for them or not? And what can we do against it?
Whether it’s the war in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic or gender issues, more and more fake news have been circulating on the internet in recent years, especially on emotional and controversial topics. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Other times, they are easier to recognize.
But not for everyone: Some internet users are more likely to accept misinformation and fake news as true information than others. In this DW fact check, we look at why that is.
Cognitive distortions fool us
A term that comes up again and again in this context is “cognitive bias.” It describes faulty tendencies in human thinking from which we find it difficult to free ourselves.
Among other things, our views, and our preconceived worldview, also called “partisanship” or “confirmation bias” in some specialist articles, play a major role in why we fall for fake news.
Cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky from Bristol University explains the phenomenon: “If I hear something I want to hear because it is in line with my political opinions, yes, then I’ll believe it even more.”
So we are always biased. For example, those who are convinced that Germany is taking in too many refugees are more inclined to believe news stories that report on local authorities being overburdened or generally say negative things about this group.
Another important “cognitive bias” is that we often simply trust our intuition. It seems unnecessary to us — and is probably too much of a nuisance — to check something again before we internalize it, comment on it, and forward it. Thus, many users only read the headline of articles, but not the actual text.
The Science Post and NPR, for example, tested this by posting misleading headlines. Readers only learned that the whole thing was an experiment if they clicked on the links — which most of them did not do.
Negative content triggers us the most
The “bandwagon effect”also misleads us: According to this phenomenon, people have a tendency to follow the opinions or behaviors of others rather than forming their own opinion. In relation to fake news, this means that we are more likely to believe information if others do so as well.
When we see a social media post with lots of shares and likes, we tend to trust swarm intelligence just like everyone else. As already mentioned most of them share and like without taking a closer look at the content.
Our memory is also not very helpful when it comes to correctly storing what we have seen or read, also described as “persistence of inaccuracy.” We often do not recall whether something was true or false. It is not uncommon for people to claim that a false piece of information was true, even if it was later corrected, for example in the form of a fact check.
Apart from these biases, fake news works so well because we are guided more by emotions than we realize. The fact that false news spreads six times faster than true information is due precisely to this emotionality, Lewandowsky says. “Fake news tends to create outrage in the receiver, the recipient of the message. And we know that people, whether you like it or not, are engaging with outrage, provoking information… That makes it more likely for them to go viral.”
The question of personal benefit
A study conducted by the University of Würzburg last year, in which 600 participants were asked to assess the truth of various statements, also revealed that dark personality traits and so-called post-factual epistemic beliefs make us more susceptible to fake news.
“To find out about respondents’ beliefs about knowledge and facts, we asked them: ‘Do you trust your intuition when you encounter information? How much value do you place on evidence? Do you believe there is such a thing as independent facts at all?,'” the study’s lead author, psychologist Jan Philipp Rudloff, told DW.
The evaluation revealed that the participants found it more difficult to distinguish true statements from false ones the more they relied on their gut feeling and the less they believed in the existence of facts.
“And then we also looked at the ‘dark factor of personality,’ sort of the core of all dark personality traits, such as narcissism or psychopathy,” Rudloff said. “They’re called dark because those are related to behaviors that we don’t socially approve of.”
For people with a strong dark personality factor, he said, their own advantage is the most important thing. Everything else — and that could be the truth in some circumstances — becomes subordinate to that.
“The question then is not whether a piece of information is true or not, but whether it benefits them, plays into their cards, serves as justification.” Dark personality traits and a problematic understanding of knowledge and facts often go hand in hand, according to Rudloff, and usually manifest themselves at a young age.
The desire for attention and approval
Joe Walther, director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, points to another important aspect that promotes the spread of fake news. He sees liking, commenting and spreading information on the internet primarily as a social interaction: “I think people often engage in social media (behavior) in order to feel like they’re participating and to be recognized for it.”
“So if I send you a crazy story that research has found that short people are more susceptible to fake news than tall people. I doubt such a thing is true, but I think you would appreciate that I sent you that crazy, funny thing and I think people use social media in order to be liked by others, in order to get attention, to be recognized, validated,” he said.
At the same time, this example helps to illustrate that users don’t share fake news necessarily because they fall for it. Rather, they simply want to entertain and amuse themselves and others. Or they share content precisely because they do NOT believe it to be true.
What can we do to become more resilient?
The reasons why we believe fake news are complex. Among other things, they have to do with our personality and our attitude toward knowledge and facts. Fake news is also an appealing vehicle for networking with others and enjoying attention and approval. There are also various cognitive mechanisms that distort our perception.
The question is: How do we become more resilient? The first step is to become aware of how susceptible we are to manipulation and to be aware that we can never be entirely objective. Jan Rudloff advocates providing students with more meta-level knowledge regarding facts and science.
“Ultimately, in science, it is always the case that you can only find a consensus, a kind of agreement among as many experts as possible. But as new information comes in, what was previously considered fact or consensus can shift.”
This is very complex, he said, and it gives some people the impression that facts are arbitrarily determined by politicians and scientists. An example of that is the claim made during the corona pandemic that children would not spread COVID-19 as much — and then it turned out they did.
An approach that goes in a similar direction is the so-called prebunking. With information about fake news and disinformation at their disposal, users can be sensitized even before they encounter it. One idea of that would be to provide an information campaign ahead of an election where a lot of fake news is expected to manipulate voters.’
Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (presently of CEU Wien).
Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.
A link of interest is in Hungary Central Europe where a few entities promote Christian nationalist conservatism, namely The Centre for Fundamental Rights (linked to US CPAC), MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute (linked to the Koch Network Heritage Foundation). Further former Murdoch – Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson would promote both Hungary and Putin’s Russia (vs. Ukraine), with dog whistling of Soros via the anti-semitic ‘great replacement’, anti-refugee and anti-immigration sentiment supported by Tanton Network, with a veritable ‘conga line’ of Anglo conservatives presenting in Hungary, in support.
If one goes back in history with the Anglosphere, much was and is still shared with Russia’s regime and its former empire, including related to the British (& German) royal families, shared conservatism, religious orthodoxy, far right nativism or nationalism, authoritarianism, class order, fossil fuels and oligarchy.
If one then looks at the values, interests and talking points of major Anglo media outlets, think tanks in Koch Network, unspoken but dog whistled class order and eugenics of Tanton Network, are there similarities that make allegations of Russian influence on Brexit and Trump, seem unsurprising?
Using sociocultural issues to deflect and divide electorates for right wing power, e.g. modern immigration, authoritarianism to negate any dissent, then use Orwellian doublespeak for ageing voters to deny freedoms for younger generations, but how does this relate Russia and the Anglosphere apart from these obvious generic traits?
Climate science denial, anti-EU for Brexit to avoid constraints e.g. financial transparency, anti-money laundering measures, workers’ rights & unions, work health & safety, open society and empowered citizens. Central has been the US fossil fueled ‘libertarian’ Koch Network think tanks in US, UK and Australia, with media architecture helped by Rupert Murdoch while still unresolved, but Russian money and influence in UK politics, especially the Conservative party.
Finally the use of events or grifters to inversely present pro-Russian narratives by blaming Ukraine, NATO, the EU and the west for provoking Russia through visitors platformed in Hungary. The highest profile ‘geopolitical experts’ visiting and demanding ‘peace’ included Jeffrey Sachs linked to (originally) fossil fueled Rockefeller Foundation (Standard Oil/Exxon & UN ‘Sustainability’) and John Mearsheimer with the Charles Koch Foundation.
Another important area of shared interests, often presented alongside ‘peace’ and anti-EU platforms, is conservative Christianity, especially the US environment via the Council on National Policy which is described as ‘owned’, like the GOP, by Koch Network donors or investors; over years since Soviet times there have been links whether WCC, WCG or more recently ADF, while energising evangelicals, pro-life, Baptists and Catholics.
Underlying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are existential fears of democracy, diversity, sustainability and the decline of patriarchy
What links Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous March on Moscow, climate denialism, the Nord Stream pipeline and vaccine scepticism with the jailing of Aleksei Navalny, the Russian Orthodox patriarch’s rants against “gay parades,” domestic violence and declining life expectancy in Russia?
In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.
In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna…
….Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.
At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.
“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.…
….Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”
If paleo modernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaia modernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.
Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.
As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.
By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.
Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.
In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”….
….Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”
Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.
Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).
Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.
….Etkind coins the term “stop modernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaia modernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaia modern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.
Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe….
….Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaia modern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.
Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleo modernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaia modern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaia modernity.
Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.
Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.
One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.
Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.”
Article from Patrick Salis CEO of AUSIEX in First Links Australia investment newsletter on the ‘baby boomer bubble’ ending and how demographics are changing, including investment and superannuation advice now needing to focus upon Generation X and Millennials.
As part of his analysis he gives a good overview of past and present demographics in Australia, following are the major excerpts and takeaways.
The intergenerational transfer of wealth in this country is picking up pace. COVID has seen many older people reassess what they want going forward, a big part of which is determining how to provide for the next generation.
Put simply, we’re at the end of the Boomer phase and the beginning of the Millennial/Gen Z phase. The wealth management industry will deal with the Boomers retiring, the transition of Gen X to being the elders of the workforce, and the rise of the Millennials/Gen Z. The way it will do this is to change its products and services, and in today’s digitised world that means primarily through changes in technology.
The generations
While marketers, media and politicians love to talk about ‘Baby Boomers’ and ‘Millennials’ using arbitrary windows of time, it is important to remember that lives are bigger than categories and we can be prone to over generalisation.
That said, ‘generations’ are a useful tool for analysis. This paper uses the definition provided by Australian Bureau of Statistics shown in table 1.
Source: ABS
The defining characteristic of the table is the commencement of the reconstruction era that started in 1946 after the end of World War 2. From that point, the Boomer generation is generally accepted to be a 20-year generational period, and then each generation is a subsequent 15-year generational period.
The best way to understand why the Baby Boomer generation has been so consequential is to look at the total fertility rate in Table 1.
The over-representation of one demographic cohort has been characterised as a “bubble” in the population numbers, which is why the “Baby Boomer bubble” has been a constant fixture in discussions about generations and their needs and wants. It’s fair to say that the Baby Boomer bubble has been the defining force that has cleared all before it, and its members have also collected resources and wealth as the systems changed to accommodate them and their looming retirement and aged care. And for good reason too, as up until now the Baby Boomers have been the largest and most consequential demographic cohort in Australia since the post war era started.
The boom required more resources such as larger houses, schools, hospitals and cars, the economy expanded rapidly as it consumed to catch up to the needs of the new generation, and the infrastructure of the country grew to support it. Then as the Boomers grew up, they needed education resulting in an expansion of the university system. As they then moved into work, the workplace had to accommodate a workforce that was not just larger from population growth but was also larger because the post war era embraced feminism and women’s rights meaning that women were also available for work.
On the cusp of intergenerational change
The Baby Boomer bubble is starting to deflate before our very eyes.
Table 2 shows the percentage of each cohort that will be of working age during our 5 years planning horizon and Figure 2 shows the same data for only the Gen Z and Boomer cohort.
Within 5 years, all Baby Boomers will be eligible for retirement and the Baby Boomer bubble will have all but deflated out of the workforce by 2028. And it doesn’t stop there.
In 2029 the first of the Baby Boomers will reach their statistical age of death (Men 81, Women 85) which means that the Baby Boomer bubble will start to deflate completely.
The impact of this on the wealth management industry is three-fold:
Baby Boomer superannuation balances will start to deflate out of the superannuation system through retirement consumption, followed by disbursement through the inheritance process.
Gen X are now the group preparing for retirement and they will become the large balance superannuation account holders.
With Gen Z fully deployed into the workforce, the predominant demographic groups needing to be serviced by the industry will be Millennials/Gen Z.
Source: ABS
Source: AIHW
Financial flow changes
The exit of the Boomers from the workforce means that for the first time in its history, the retirement system is going to see retirement phase withdrawals from its largest accounts, as those in the 60-64 age group have an average balance of $323,000 compared to the younger generations where those in the 30-34 age group have an average balance of $45,000.
While it is difficult to predict the future and how the money will flow from where, to whom, and where it will end up, we can make inferences based on what we see in the superannuation balance and housing data that we know today. If we start with superannuation balances, we find that the facts don’t really match the prevailing narrative, that super is an inheritance tax planning device.
Research from The Association of Superannuation Funds in Australian (ASFA) shows that while it is true that there are some large accounts, Australian Tax Office (ATO) data in 2018-19 showed that there were only 322,200 accounts with balances above $1 million. This number will have increased given investment returns since that time, however the system favoured the older participants as they had the benefit of a period when contribution limits were not as restrictive as they are for today’s participants, and so the younger generations are less likely to be able to accumulate such large balances, in inflation adjusted terms. Regardless, these accounts are outliers that can be ignored when looking at the mechanics of the system given that the total number of superannuation accounts is 23.3 million….
Cultural changes
It is important to note that as the Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce, the values and motivations of their generation are also leaving with them. It also follows then that the values of the new Millennial and Gen Z generations are going to ascend. It’s a clear generalisation, but no one would be surprised if I said that Boomers expected work environments and those who worked for them to be rigid and hierarchical and social life to be kept separate from work, while Gen Z expects work environments to be fluid and better accommodate their lifestyles and they will blend social and online lives into their work. This alone is a significant cultural change, yet it is added to an environment where the new generations live in an economic world that is far different and more challenging than what the Boomers experienced. Consider the following issues that we can see already.
Baby Boomers exiting the economy creates significant costs for the remaining generations as they stop providing free services such as family-based childcare, and they also require increased medical care. As an example, while accounting for only 21% of the adult population, half of Baby Boomers have a long-term health condition which accounts for 34% of all adults in the population that have a long-term health condition. These are costs that will need to be paid for by the younger generations…..
We have a new generation entering the system that has low expectations of being able to build wealth, strong indicators that suggest that it is indeed true that they have lower economic prospects, and they are also disengaged. This indicates that there will be a considerable cultural shift in how and why the younger generations engage with the wealth management industry, and how the industry attempts to engage with them.
Good overview from Tamsin Shaw through ByLine Times of how the US and UK politics, funding, networking and campaigning, crosses over with various oligarchs, groups and nations, of dubious outlook.
Influence of Koch Network’s faux libertarian or free market think tanks, joined with nativism of Tanton Network faux environmentalism, media cartels led by Murdoch et al including Musk, Christian Conservatives and influencers, on latter the Council for National Policy.
Now, post Brexit and Trump analysts are seeing the architecture of influence using technology to help its cause whether in legacy media, online or social media to promote deeply nativist Christian authoritarian policies, as ‘conservative’, to help the cause of oligarch donors or investors, flying under the radar or astroturfing.
Inspired by Anne Nelson’s book, Tamsin Shaw dissects the history of America’s Council for National Policy and its connections to Brexit, Trump, Russia and the revelations of Edward Snowden
Everyone in Britain should have heard of America’s Council for National Policy (CNP). Anne Nelson has shown in her vital book Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, that the most powerful leaders on the radical right in America emerged from this secretive organization. Lists of members have sometimes been leaked.
They include Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Ginni Thomas, Ali Alexander, and other supporters of the 2021 attempted coup in the States. The core of its membership has been constituted for decades by America’s big billionaire families, the DeVoses, the Princes, the Kochs, the Mercers and so on. This concentration of power and influence might be reason enough for the British people to be aware of the CNP. But its members have also been surreptitiously active in the UK for over a decade, with undeniable impact.
Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, both CNP members, will be known to readers of Byline Times for their involvement with Cambridge Analytica, (Mercer owned it; Bannon ran it), which was responsible for the data operations behind Brexit and the Trump campaign. But their operations on the ground in the UK are much more extensive. Bannon has often said that Brexit and Trump’s election were “one event”. The groundwork had been laid for a long time.
Bannon started grooming Nigel Farage around 2011. Farage loved it, of course. Although he’d enjoyed several years of being amused by his own speeches in the European Parliament, as a right-wing nationalist provocateur he was treated like an oaf by his weary multilingual colleagues. In 2012, just after Bannon had been appointed by Andrew Breitbart to be executive editor of the right-wing website Breitbart News, he invited Farage to Washington and New York to meet his powerful American friends.
When Farage later told a New Yorker reporter, “I have got a very, very high regard for that man’s brain,” it was hard not to hear it as an exclamation of gratitude. After all, Bannon set him on a path to having a successful show on RT (formerly Russia Today), having meetings with the Russian ambassador to the UK, being the victorious champion for his cherished cause, Brexit, and on first-name terms with the President of the United States.
But while Bannon is known for cultivating people like Farage, Raheem Kassam of Breitbart, even Boris Johnson, it was Robert Mercer who paved the way by astroturfing a transatlantic right-wing movement.
Peter Jukes is one of the few people to have exposed this aspect of their activities. Mercer sponsored the Young Americas Foundation and its offshoot, the Young Britons Foundation, with a typical American far-right agenda. In 2013, Jukes tells us, they met for a conference in Cambridge and discussed, amongst other things, their preferred candidate for Prime Minister, with Boris Johnson being the favourite. Raheem Kassam and other prominent Brexit supporters were amongst them.
2013, Jukes points out, was a critical year for establishing the influence campaigns they would benefit from. As Putin was making plans to take Crimea, Yevgeny Prigozhin (now notorious for being head of the Wagner Group) set up the Internet Research Agency to deploy social media influence operations. In Britain, Chris Wylie and Alexander Nix were setting up the Cambridge branch of SCL Group, the strategic communications company that would become Cambridge Analytica.
It was also a critical year for the relationship between the US far right and Russia. The affinity between the views of the American right and those of Putin was openly declared by self-described “paleo-conservative”, Pat Buchanan, who shocked many traditional conservatives with the claim that he, like Putin, saw Obama’s America as the greatest source of evil in the world. Putin is an ally, he wrote, in the struggle against “the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.”
The passage of anti-gay legislation in Russia, as well as a shared loathing for the liberal Pope Francis, created more common ground. Buchanan particularly praised the joint American-Russian organization, the World Congress of Families (WCF), for pioneering cooperation. The chair of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (a far-right Catholic organization of which Bannon is a patron), Italian politician Luca Volonte, is a WCF official, as is the Institute’s trustee and former Breitbart contributor, Austin Ruse.
But though Buchanan was then the face of this US-Russian relationship, he was far from being the fulcrum on which it would turn. To understand the real power brokers, we have to go back the CNP and their decades of activism.’
Return to questions over the U.K. Russia Report, former PM Johnson, Brexit, Conservative government, Russian oligarchs, Trump’s GOP Presidential campaign and influence on elections including the EU referendum..
Written by Peter Jukes and originally published January 2023 by ByLine Times, asking questions that are not only unresolved, but actively avoided by the Tories, media and supporters for the advantage of Putin’s Russia and oligarchs, both east and west?
‘Nothing less than the future of democracy is at stake’ says Caroline Lucas as a cross-party coalition and The Citizens win an unprecedented hearing over electoral safety and national security
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his all-out war on Ukraine almost a year ago, the Kremlin’s long-term plans for imperial expansion have come under closer scrutiny, particularly its use of ‘alternative measures’ to undermine the EU through propaganda and the funding of right-wing Eurosceptic parties in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. But what about the UK?
Though dismissed or ignored at the time, Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee’s 2018 report on disinformation and fake news outlined the impact of the Russian Embassy in London, and state-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik, in supporting the Leave campaigns.
It also revealed the role social media operations such as the Internet Research Agency and the now defunct Cambridge Analytica had in promoting Brexit. A year later, in 2019, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee concluded in its ‘Russia Report’ that Kremlin interference in elections was the “new normal” and there were “credible attempts” to meddle with the UK’s democratic processes.
For whatever reason, Boris Johnson succeeded in delaying the publication of the Russia Report in the run-up to the 2019 General Election. When – against Johnson’s wishes – it was finally published in July 2020, the report also contained the staggering admission that there had been no official investigation into the potential damage done to our democracy by what was, by then, clearly a hostile foreign power.
Johnson’s apathy over our democratic national security was not new. While Foreign Secretary in 2017, Johnson claimed there was “not a sausage” of evidence of Putin meddling in Brexit, despite his nominal role overseeing GCHQ at the time, which had been working with the FBI’s Special Counsel Robert Mueller on precisely that. Mueller had named Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud as a Russian agent in London. As the Observer and Byline reported, Mifsud met Johnson to talk about Brexit.
Alexander Temerko, a Soviet-born oligarch and a major Conservative donor, told the journalist Catherine Belton that he and Johnson spent time drinking wine while Johnson was at the Foreign Office, plotting the overthrow of then Prime Minister Theresa May. According to Temerko, Johnson had finally been persuaded to back Brexit in 2016 by a group of “eastern European businessmen”.
Evgeny Lebedev was controversially elevated to the House of Lords by Johnson in 2020 – as Baron of Hampton in Richmond upon Thames and Siberia in the Russian Federation. His father, Alexander, a former senior KGB officer, is alleged to have been present when, as Foreign Secretary, Johnson left his security detail behind to travel to the Lebedev’s Umbrian villa following a NATO briefing on the attempted murder of defector Sergei Skripal by Russian military intelligence using the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury. Johnson denies any official matters were discussed, but Paul Caruana Galizia has reported for Tortoise that Johnson was offered a back-channel to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov….
….In response to this glaring and potentially compromising lack of electoral and national security, a group of parliamentarians took the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last March, with the support of campaigning journalism organisation The Citizens. The cross-party group of MPs – including Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, Labour’s Ben Bradshaw and the SNP’s Alyn Smith – claim the Government is infringing our “right to free and fair elections” by failing to act on the findings of the Russia Report.
The court in Strasbourg has now indicated the case both has merit and may be designated an ‘impact case’. It has written to the Government inviting it to respond in detail to the allegations by 26 April.
Electoral Security – Not Reversing Brexit
The European Convention on Human Rights, though often falsely associated with the European Union, was set up in the aftermath of World War 2 to enshrine human rights across the continent with the support of politicians including Winston Churchill, François Mitterrand and Konrad Adenauer….
…..To Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion, nothing less than “the future of democracy is on trial”. She points out that in the two and a half years since the Russia Report, the British Government “continually turned a blind eye to its jaw-dropping findings”. “With a general election on the horizon, and with Russia’s war on Ukraine showing no sign of abating, the stakes have never been higher,” Lucas adds.
Ben Bradshaw, MP for Exeter, agrees that the Governments failure to investigate Russian interference “constitutes a very serious breach of its obligations to the British people”. “A number of us have been warning about Putin’s real intent for more than 10 years,” Bradshaw says. “We know that his long-term strategy has been to destabilise and divide Western democracies and nothing that’s happened in recent British history has done more to destabilise Europe, and Britain’s relationship with it, than Brexit”….
….“Following the 2016 EU referendum, but long before the ISC Russia Report, there was a considerable and growing body of evidence that Russia was interested in and acting to disturb Western election processes,” Ricketts continued. “It is a matter of public record that both the U.S. election in 2016 and the French election in 2017 were subject to Russian interference…. Given the evidence that has now amassed of Russian interference, it is important to establish once and for all whether Russia attempted to interfere in the EU Referendum and subsequent UK general elections.”
Another nativist Christian front promoting a conference with a whiff of fossil fuels, climate science denial with Anglosphere right wing grifters and ‘freedom and liberty’ supported by Legatum, and no doubt indirectly linked to Koch Network, like Brexit and its deep pocketed foreign supporters.
Alliance for Responsible Citizenship includes prominent Brexit voices and Bjørn Lomborg, who has questioned the urgency of the climate crisis
The former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard are among six Australians who have joined a global group fronted by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and backed by a pro-Brexit hedge fund billionaire and a Dubai-based investment group.
The group – The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) – has been gathering high-profile figures from politics, industry, academia and think tanks for an inaugural three-day conference in London in late October.
Peterson has said the conference would look at “issues metaphysical, cultural and practical” and “issues pertaining to the meaning of life” but also to “become practical with regard to the realisation of policy”.
The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg and the American commentator Michael Shellenberger, who have both questioned the urgency of the climate crisis compared with other global problems, are on the group’s advisory committee.
Also on the committee are Australia’s shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie, and a former deputy prime minister, John Anderson.
One of Legatum’s four founders, the billionaire Christopher Chandler, told the Guardian in 2018 he made “hundreds of millions” from investments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and at one point owned 4% of the gas giant Gazprom with his brother Richard Chandler. The businessman was already rich when he invested in Russia soon after the end of the USSR…
Both nations, like elsewhere, are ageing, but dealing with campaigns opposed to immigration to ameliorate working, tax revenue and budget stress, while many retired and elderly voters have short term horizons or simply vote for their own future security.
However, as this issue continues to become significant, especially Japan, there is little political will to deal with it openly and honestly, hence, working age and younger generations will need to deal with it, while having low expectations of state social security support.
Meanwhile in Australia, there has been two decades of nativist ‘dog whistling’ (undefined) immigration and population growth, via legacy and independent media to persuade voters, yet media and policy makers seem not to understand the demographics, immigration, population and economic effects?
While there is below replacement fertility, fewer youth, working age has passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, more retirees and increasing old age dependency ratios, that should settle by mid century; in the meantime temporary net migration inc. international students, maintain the working age cohort, pay taxes and for services, while supporting budget health.
Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida used a policy speech at the opening of the 2023 session of Japan’s parliament, the National Diet, to declare that Japan was ‘on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions’ due to the country’s population crisis. The country’s median age is 49 — the second highest in the world.
In the 2021 House of Representatives election, the median age of those who cast a vote was 59. The centre of gravity of Japanese electoral politics has shifted from taxpayers to pensioners, with the potential of the elderly exerting more political pressure over policymakers as the population ages.
The majoritarian decision-making model suggests that self-interested aging voters are likely to support increasingly generous social benefits for themselves, even at the expense of other generations.
In Japan, voter turnout has consistently been higher and is steadily increasing among older people. The age gap in Japan’s voter turnout is exceptionally high, with an OECD study finding a gap of 25 percentage points in voter turnout between voters 55 and older and voters under 35, compared with the OECD average of 12 points. Assuming that high turnout is a reflection of political interest, this implies that elderly voters influence politics in a self-interested way, to the detriment of younger generations.
But no studies have yet found clear evidence of such self-interest among Japan’s elderly voters. In the early 2000s, the Japanese public became seriously concerned about the country’s apparently unsustainable level of social security expenditure. The elderly, more than any other cohort of the population, consider social security issues to be important factors in casting their votes.
Japan’s older people may not be as explicitly self-interested as the median voter model would predict. A series of surveys conducted by Japan’s Cabinet Office and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare found that elderly respondents supported policy constraints on social security just as much as other age cohorts.
Internationally, the Japanese elderly are seen as more accepting of intergenerational equity than the elderly in other countries. Cross-national surveys on those 60 and older, conducted by the Cabinet Office in 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020, asked whether government policy should prioritise younger people over older people or vice versa. Japan had the highest percentage — 31 per cent — of respondents agreeing that ‘young people should be prioritised’ —compared to 14 per cent in the United States and 17 per cent in both Germany and Sweden.
On this evidence, self-interested voters seeking to maximise their own benefits seems less applicable in the case of the Japanese welfare state. But other factors might also be at play..
The primary factor influencing public attitudes toward social security is demographic changes. In the early 2000s, the urgent need for social security reform in response to Japan’s population crisis captured public attention. The debate that followed played a significant role in influencing the attitudes of the elderly toward social security benefits.
There is undoubtedly a distinctive generational difference in political attitudes. The dankai baby boomer cohort born between 1947 and 1949 experienced turbulent events in their youth — Japan’s rapid economic growth, anti-establishment student movements, industrial pollution and the Vietnam War among them. These dankai-specific experiences bred life-long progressive political attitudes and a propensity to embrace the common good rather than sectional interests. In the 2009 general election a plurality of 49 per cent of voters aged 60–69 voted for the Democratic Party of Japan, which toppled the conservative Liberal Democratic Party.
Japan’s elderly cohort also has the highest labour-force participation among the OECD countries. Nearly half of Japanese men aged 60–70 and one quarter of those aged 70–75 are still in the workforce. About three-quarters of the Japanese elderly workforce work in non-regular positions and consider social security issues important to their votes.
Despite having less secure employment, elderly voters do not necessarily influence politics in a self-interested way to the detriment of younger generations. Employed elderly people continue to find security in belonging to a particular company, which dissuades them from organising around their own interests with others beyond their company ties. Employed elderly people are more likely to identify with the interests of their younger co-workers.
Japan’s public, mandatory long-term care insurance has had a significant impact on the elderly. The dramatic rise of the costs of its operation has undermined its fiscal stability and this universal system weakens the interest in political activism by the elderly. Eligibility is not based on income or family situation but purely on age and physical and mental health.
Anyone 65 or older, plus those aged 40–64 with aging-related diseases, are eligible for institutional or community-based care.
Self-employed individuals, of whom 40 per cent are 65 or older and have no mandatory retirement age, hold opinions aligned with the protection of their small businesses, often against the interests of elderly consumption.
The aging of the Japanese electorate may not have led to politically charged generosity for the elderly at the expense of younger generations, but there are still many puzzles to unravel about how the elderly in Japan are affecting policy choices and political outcomes.
Yasuo Takao is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University, Perth.
Authors: Stephen Clibborn and Chris F Wright, University of Sydney
Australia has been widely regarded internationally as an exemplary ‘nation of immigrants’, with migration policies that effectively serve the national interest. But since the mid-1990s, Australia’s migration system has shifted away from the long-term provision of skills for nation-building towards a guest worker model aimed at satisfying the short-term demands of business.
The Parkinson Review identified three general principles to return to a sound migration system: tripartite involvement of unions and employer associations with government in designing and implementing policy, universality of regulation for migrants and mobility for migrants to transfer between employers. The government announced it will now undertake a major reform of the migration system using input from the Parkinson Review.
The government’s single concrete immediate policy announcement in response to the review was increasing the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold (TSMIT), which was justified on grounds that it would help reduce exploitation of workers. This policy increases the effective minimum pay rate for some classes of migrant workers from AU$53,900, where it has languished since 2013, to AU$70,000. That means employers sponsoring temporary migrant workers under the Temporary Skill Shortage scheme from 1 July 2023 must pay a minimum annual salary of AU$70,000. This is a compromise between recommendations from business groups — AU$63,000 — and the Australian Council of Trade Unions — AU$90,000.
The government has stated that simplifying the migration system, delivering skills needed by business and reducing exploitation of migrant workers are its main priorities. Many of the Parkinson Review’s recommendations will help achieve these goals. Recommendations such as removing restrictions on temporary skilled migrants’ mobility between employers and independent assessment of skills demand are helpful. But other recommendations potentially undermine them, such as continued reliance on the TSMIT and creating three tiers of temporary labour migration. This may further complicate the system, reduce labour supply and maintain exploitation.
Historical and comparative research suggests that the government’s goals can be best achieved by strengthening ties between migration and employment regulations. Many problems with the migration system can be traced back to the expansion of temporary visas in 1996. Prior to this, the migration system was relatively simple. It supplied skills to business efficiently and migrant worker exploitation was lower. Complementary migration and employment regulations contributed to these outcomes.
Three changes would better align migration and employment regulations.
First, abandon the TSMIT pay threshold. Minister O’Neil’s headline policy announcement — raising the TSMIT — places excessive faith in salary level as a measure of skill and worker power. The Parkinson Review’s recommendation to build a three-tier system of employment regulation around salary levels does likewise on the basis that those workers paid above the TSMIT are likely to be at limited risk of exploitation. The policy focus should not be on the level of the threshold but its very existence.
For many years, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs has had the power to set the TSMIT, resulting in pay rates being determined by political considerations rather than labour market assessments. This contrasts with the methodical and transparent way the Fair Work Commission’s Expert Panels set minimum wages.
Maintaining the TSMIT risks reinforcing separate labour markets for migrants and citizens, undermining the government’s objectives. An increased TSMIT could also price out some skilled jobs in sectors with pronounced labour demand, such as health, social care and hospitality. This would likely generate political pressure for new job-specific visas to address Australia’s skill needs, further complicating the migration system.
Second, independently assess skills needs. The Parkinson Review recommended using Jobs and Skills Australia, a new Commonwealth agency, to better align migration and labour market regulations. This agency will help to ensure migration better complements the education and training system. For decades these policy areas have been at cross-purposes, despite their mutual objectives of supplying necessary skills.
Using Jobs and Skills Australia to strengthen coordination between migration, on one hand, and education and training, on the other, will help ensure skills and workforce needs are assessed and addressed more reliably. This approach will give employers more confidence to invest in developing their workforces.
Third, enforce employment regulations more effectively. Without this, unscrupulous employers will continue to underpay and mistreat vulnerable temporary migrants, gaining a competitive advantage over honest operators. Without effective enforcement, businesses are discouraged from seeking to succeed through quality, innovation and productivity improvements, which are essential for Australia’s international competitiveness. The assumption that a certain level of pay in the TSMIT and a proposed higher-paid visa tier equates to individual worker power to resist underpayment is misplaced.
In implementing the Parkinson Review’s recommendations, the government must ensure migration regulations are better integrated with wider employment regulations. This will help achieve the government’s triple goals of simplifying the system, supplying skills more effectively and reducing worker exploitation. This will ensure the migration system continues to support Australia’s international standing as a successful ‘nation of immigrants’.
Stephen Clibborn is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Sydney Employment Relations Research Group at the University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney.
Chris F Wright is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Sydney Employment Relations Research Group at the University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney.
Recently there have been calls and pressure on the Biden Democratic administration, by supporters of Assange in Australia and the U.K., for him not to be deported and possibly pardoned (for charges brought by Trump administration), while many others contest his ‘journalism’ credentials, or at least how unhelpful his cause has been for journalism.
Convenient timing, as one observes how this also segues into criticism of Australia’s newish Labor government for not doing enough on his release, but ignores inactivity by both the former LNP conservative coalition government and the UK Conservative government, over many years to reach a solution; they didn’t even try?
Many supporters of Assange ignore salient facts of how he used Wikileaks, or at least went off piste on protocols when releasing material, links with Russia, Trump’s team, FoxNews, murder conspiracy theories and Assange’s vendetta towards Hilary Clinton, favouring Trump and the GOP.
Worse, many of the same supporters also share talking points with RWNJs, FoxNews/RT, Koch’s GOP Freedom Caucus, Trump, conspiracy theorists, pro Russian invasion, anti-vaxxer, anti-Covid science and related health measures.
For context, the experience of the same, including Assange cannot be compared to the risks that journalists, activists, politicians, NGOs and young people take in Russia, Turkey or elsewhere, where they are routinely censored, threatened, beaten, arrested, convicted, long gaol terms and simple murder or assassination.
The prosecution of the conniving WikiLeaks founder poses a threat to American journalism. Julian Assange deserves condemnation. He doesn’t deserve extradition.
Last week, Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who remains imprisoned in England, received bad news. A British judge ruled in favor of a US government request that Assange be extradited to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act for having published classified diplomatic and military cables. This was a troubling development for anyone who cares about journalism and free speech.
The court decision was the latest turn in a long-running global legal battle. In April 2019, an indictment against Assange was unsealed in the United States. The charge was relatively minor: conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The maximum possible sentence was five years imprisonment. It stemmed from his alleged effort in 2010 to help Chelsea Manning, then a US soldier, hack a classified database from which she obtained 750,000 secret military and State Department documents that she slipped to WikiLeaks. But weeks later the Trump administration further indicted Assange under the Espionage Act for having publicly posted the material WikiLeaks received from Manning. For that, he faces up to 170 years in prison.
This prosecution poses a serious threat to democracy. I’ll turn to that in a moment. But one PR problem with the case is that Assange is a highly unsympathetic character, for he is partly responsible for the damage done by Donald Trump during his presidency: 400,000 or more preventable deaths of Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic; the lack of action to address climate change; the promotion of disinformation and lies to incite a violent attack on the US Capitol; a tax cut that favored the wealthy and added to the national debt; right-wing appointments to the Supreme Court that could lead to the severe curtailing of reproductive rights for women; the spread of bigotry and racial hatred; the suppression of voting rights; cutbacks in government health programs; creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism; and so much more.
The United States has suffered greatly because of Assange. In 2016, he collaborated with the Russian attack on the US election to help Trump win. As has been detailed by several government investigations—including in special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report and in a bipartisan report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year—after Russian intelligence teams hacked Democratic targets, they passed the stolen emails and documents to WikiLeaks, which then publicly disseminated the material.
The Senate report notes that Assange’s group “timed its document releases for maximum political impact.” That is, WikiLeaks wasn’t acting in a noble information-sharing manner. It sought to weaponize the information pilfered by Vladimir Putin’s operatives to cause harm to candidate Hillary Clinton, whom Assange and WikiLeaks had disparaged as a “sadistic sociopath” and a threat to the world. (“We believe it would be much better for [the] GOP to win,” WikiLeaks had tweeted.)
In disseminating the stolen information, WikiLeaks behaved more as a political hit squad than a media organization. For example, when the Washington Post on October 7, 2016, published the Access Hollywood video showing Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy,” half an hour later WikiLeaks began releasing emails Russian hackers had swiped from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This was a counterblow, an attempt to rescue Trump with a distraction. And to inflict the most pain it could on the Clinton campaign, WikiLeaks did not dump all the Podesta information at once (as it had done with its previous release of Democratic Party material at the start of the Democrats’ convention that July). Instead, the group doled out the documents in batches, almost daily, to ensure there would be a steady stream of negative Clinton stories for the final four weeks of the campaign. Assange and WikiLeaks were full partners with Putin in a plot aimed at electing Trump president.
And Assange tried to cover up Russia’s role in this perfidious operation. As the Senate report states:
Assange and WikiLeaks undertook efforts to obscure the source of the stolen emails, including through false narratives. Assange’s use of such disinformation suggests Assange possibly knew of and sought to hide Russian involvement. One narrative from Assange involved a conspiracy theory that Seth Rich, a DNC staffer killed in a botched robbery, was the source of the DNC email and had been murdered in response. On August 9 [2016], Assange gave an interview on Dutch television implying that Rich was the source of the DNC emails, and that day WikiLeaks announced that it would be issuing a reward for information about Rich’s murder. In a subsequent interview, Assange commented about the WikiLeaks interest in the Rich case as concerning “someone who’s potentially connected to our publication.” The Committee found that no credible evidence supports this narrative.
Assange was pushing a baseless and odious conspiracy theory (which caused tremendous distress for Rich’s family) that was also being championed by conspiracy nutter Alex Jones, Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and Russian intelligence. His apparent goal was to hide the Kremlin’s role in the pro-Trump/anti-Clinton hack-and-leak scheme that WikiLeaks was facilitating. This is not how a legitimate news organization functions. (By the way, the Senate report also issued this indictment of the Trump campaign: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” That is, Trump and his crew aided and abetted Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election.)
Assange and WikiLeaks connived and lied to help Trump vanquish Clinton. The Podesta information dumps were a steady drag on the Clinton campaign in the final stretch, often preventing it from gaining traction for its own messages and themes. These releases also served as a constant reminder to the public of her own email controversy—and as an effective setup for the last-minute revelation from then–FBI Director James Comey that the bureau might have unearthed missing or previously destroyed Clinton emails. (It hadn’t.)
Given how close the election ended up, the Russia-WikiLeaks operation was one of several factors that determined the outcome. Remove Putin’s hackers and Assange’s outfit from the picture, and Clinton probably would have won. (Ditto for Comey’s move, as well as for Clinton’s own decision not to do more in several swing states in the last week.) Assange can (proudly?) claim a degree of ownership of the election results. That means he also partly owns what came afterward. He and WikiLeaks opposed Clinton, they contended, because she was a warmonger. There is no way of telling whether she would have started any wars had she been president. But it’s a damn good bet that had she been in charge during the pandemic, far fewer Americans would have perished.
Assange ought to be punished—if only ostracized and widely denigrated—for his 2016 skullduggery. But the extradition case at hand does not address that. Focused on an earlier episode, it is an excessive use of legal force by the US government—first the Trump administration and now the Biden administration. The Obama administration considered charging Assange for releasing the Manning material under the Espionage Act—which was intended to be used against spies and their collaborators—but it was concerned about a negative impact on journalists. Obtaining and publishing classified documents—and asking sources to provide such material—is a common activity for many news organizations.
When Assange was indicted on these espionage charges, John Demers, then the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said Assange was “no journalist.” Given Assange’s underhanded partnership with Russian intelligence, that may well be an accurate statement. But the actions for which he has been indicted under the Espionage Act are the actions of reporters. And media organizations are correct to worry about a precedent being established. (Most Espionage Act cases have involved government employees who leaked classified information.) As the New York Times reported at the time of the Assange indictment, “Notably, The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government—the act that most of the charges addressed… [I]t is not clear how that is legally different from publishing other classified information.”
Media outlets and free speech advocates have justifiably howled about this case. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted, “The Assange prosecution threatens these basic elements of modern journalism and democratic accountability.” And the Committee to Protect Journalists last week issued this statement: “The U.S. Justice Department’s dogged pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder has set a harmful legal precedent for prosecuting reporters simply for interacting with their sources. The Biden administration pledged at its Summit for Democracy this week to support journalism. It could start by removing the threat of prosecution under the Espionage Act now hanging over the heads of investigative journalists everywhere.”
Considering all the devastation Assange enabled with his 2016 plot against America, it is tough to embrace him as a free-speech martyr. But those who care about accountability and excessive government power don’t always get to choose the battles that must be waged to preserve First Amendment freedoms. Assange mounted a damaging attack on the United States and facilitated a profound subversion of its political system. Still, his prosecution under the Espionage Act is another assault on American democracy.
Assange’s attorneys say they will appeal the decision, which calls for a lower court to send the case to the British home secretary for a decision on whether Assange ought to be extradited. Meanwhile, Assange will remain in Belmarsh Prison in London. He spent almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, ducking extradition to Sweden for a sex crimes case, which was dropped in 2015; he was arrested in 2019 related to bail-skipping charges and the extradition warrant from the United States.
Assange did help put in the White House a wannabe authoritarian who demonized reporters and dangerously claimed the media was the “enemy of the people.” (And the ingrate paid Assange back by indicting him.) Yet now his personal fate is tied to the protection of First Amendment rights. The Biden administration ought to drop Espionage Act case against Assange—not for his sake, but for the rest of us.’
It’s the opposite of UK PM Sunak’s policy idea of mathematics till the end of secondary school, due to issues with maths literacy in society, amongst adults, who also need education.
However, on Asian capability, school is important along with general society, especially our influential middle aged elites in media, politics and the corporate world of ‘skip’ or Anglo-Irish heritage of the past decade, many seem to have shared antipathy towards the region?
An example is how many Australians have been to Bali, but neither understand that it’s part of Indonesia, nor the significance of the Indonesian economy now and in future i.e. it is expected to become the 7th largest economy in the world by 2030.
For Australia’s influential elite cohorts, many seem more interested in the ‘Anglosphere’ of UK and USA, than Australia’s role in our region?
Asia capable initiatives that only target adults and young adults leaves it far too late – it has to start in our schools
By Chris Higgins, University of Melbourne
As the world becomes progressively more connected and interconnected, it’s increasingly important for all people to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to engage with different cultures and countries.
This is particularly important for our young people who are growing into an increasingly complex and dynamic world.
More than ever, they need to possess the capabilities to navigate a fast-changing and diverse world and work together to overcome complex global challenges.
For Australia, the world’s largest island, physically located in the Asia-Pacific region, this is of paramount importance.
Our diversity is reflected in our cities, towns, communities and homes, where people from diverse cultural backgrounds live side-by-side, sharing traditions, customs, languages and experiences.
The Australian government has long recognised our multiculturalism, the benefits of social cohesion, respect for cultural diversity and our place in the Asia-Pacific region.
In 2012, the Australian Government released the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, which outlined a vision for Australia to deepen its engagement with the Asian region and the advantages of the region’s growth and rising influence.
The White Paper called for a comprehensive approach to developing Asia capability across all sectors of Australian society, including government, business, education and the community.
It also highlighted the need to increase language skills and cultural awareness as well as knowledge of Asian markets and regulatory frameworks across the ‘whole-of-nation’.
Since the release of the White Paper, the Australian Government continued to support development of Asia capability in many areas including initiatives like the New Colombo Plan, which provides funding for Australian university students to study and undertake internships in the Asia-Pacific region.
But, all too often, initiatives like this focus on economic priorities and adults in tertiary education or the existing workforce.
Rarely do they support our young people who will become our adult learners and workforce of the future.
Asia capable initiatives that only target adults and young adults leaves it far too late. There needs to be support for our young people to develop Asia capability.
Australian schools and classrooms reflect the very multicultural and diverse nature of our nation. Our students and teachers represent a broad diversity of cultures, languages, experiences and perspectives – which are becoming more diverse each year.
Students need the support to develop these essential skills.
Often economic explanations are cited as the main arguments for developing Asia capability
Young people who develop Asia capability will be well-placed to take advantage of the opportunities to collaborate and prosper from shared regional growth and influence.
As Australia’s relationships in the region deepen, it’s important for our students to develop an understanding of the strategic and geopolitical dynamics of the region, as well as the cultural and linguistic skills necessary to engage with people and organisations.
However, these explanations miss the far more relevant and immediate benefits. Asia capability promotes cultural understanding and social cohesion. By developing an understanding of different cultures and languages, our young people can develop empathy and respect for different ways of life – building bridges between different communities and promoting social harmony.
It’s essential our students and teachers are supported to have the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes to create cohesive, inclusive, diverse schools. In turn, they will become adults who have the capabilities to support cohesive communities, societies, nation and a shared, prosperous Asia-Pacific.
But they are often perceived as add-ons, the responsibility of other discipline areas like languages. Many teachers don’t have the resources or time to embed them in their classrooms or don’t feel they have strong Asia capability.
Investing in supporting our Asia capability, by making teaching knowledge and resources available to the entire Australian school education workforce is crucial to achieving the intention of the Australian Curriculum and the Australian government’s priority of whole-of-nation Asia capability and strengthened ties with the region.
The Asia Education Foundation has released a Pre-Budget Submission to the Australian Government calling on the Commonwealth to support Asia capability in all schools.’
The Australian Migration Review Report has been published, based on narratives and submissions, but little meaningful grass roots feedback or data to support any grounded analysis for good future reforms?
This post will focus on NOM Net Overseas Migration and major source or factor i.e. international education and students, but for now, not the other main factors including WHV Working Holiday Visas (2nd year) and temporary workers.
There are generic review report issues e.g. lack of direct support for many narratives and recommendations, does not explain budget issues of ageing i.e. more low or no tax payers in retirement as baby boomer bubble transitions vs. decline in working age cohort of PAYE taxpayers, to support more Australian retirees.
Further, barely references ‘black swan’ event Covid and the effect it had on Australia including closed borders, preceded by under-resourced and slow processing of most visa types onshore and then via the NOM education, tourism, travel etc. simply caught up?
The focus of this post is the potential reform of limiting or capping the NOM Net Overseas Migration which shows a suboptimal understanding i.e. it’s a ‘barometer’ not a visa or migration program that can controlled by any specific or exact measure, but only by capping education enrolments or Working Holiday Visas?
This would be a repeat of the Gillard government’s response to ‘wedges’ by media and right wing NGOs’ dog whistling of the NOM (quietly expanded in 2006 by the UNPD) spike, ‘Big Australia’, supposed environmental hygiene issues of modern ‘immigrants’, appointing a Minister for Sustainable Australia and giving higher education (higher value) advantage over the VET Vocational sector; but worse in the UK.
The UK also uses the same ‘nebulous’ UNPD defined NOM formula to quantify border movements, but also misrepresented as ‘immigration’, followed by media headlines and dog whistling in late ‘90s, ‘wedging’ UK Conservative PM Cameron into action on reducing ‘immigration’, from The Guardian (11 January 2010):
Cameron complained of the media ‘banging on about (EU) immigration’ then pledged to reduce the NOM dramatically, hence, immigration, but the numbers then rose and was compelled to call the European Referendum, that led to Brexit over immigration and identity, again by the media and far right; negative Brexit outcomes, not dividends, are still occurring with working age decline.
Summary through excerpts of the introduction and later focus upon NOM Net Overseas Migration:
Reviewers and the Department of Home Affairs Migration Reform Taskforce (containing
secondees from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury, Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Jobs and Skills Australia, and Boston Consulting Group).
(inc. indirectly Prof. Peter McDonald, demographer at University of Melbourne who also made a one page submission that a media outlet, like most, misrepresented immigration and population data due to a lack of data literacy, but this has been occurring for decades?)
We identified five objectives, discussed in further detail in this report, on which to
build the program:
1. Building Australia’s prosperity by lifting productivity, meeting labour
supply needs and by supporting exports
2. Enabling a fair labour market, including by complementing the jobs, wages
and conditions of domestic workers
3. Building a community of Australians
4. Protecting Australia’s interests in the world.
5. Providing a fast, efficient and fair system.
The unique complexities of migration and the gaps in our understanding of the
effects of our migration system – on migrants and Australia – highlight the critical
need for better data, more program evaluation and research to inform better
program design. We can’t stay on track if we don’t know how we are going, nor can
we drive improvement or share data with stakeholders who are trying to make a
difference too.
Australia is not focused enough on capturing high potential international students. This chapter considers the success of the Student visa in supporting the export of Australian education, but also the missed opportunity to better support and select the best and brightest students as skilled migrants’ (motherhood statement?).
Reform directions for Government to consider
Through the course of the Panel’s deliberations, we arrived at a set of reform
directions that could be considered by Government as it decides on its approach to
the migration system. These are set out below, and described in greater detail
throughout the report.
Possible reform directions:
Redefine how Australia determines the size and composition of the migration program
6. Plan migration based on net overseas migration (which accounts for both permanent and temporary residents), rather than simply relying on permanent migration caps (p. 8).
5. AUSTRALIA NEEDS LONG-TERM AND HOLISTIC MIGRATION PLANNING (p. 41)
Today, Australia mainly relies on the annual permanent migration cap to manage migrant numbers. This is a poor tool for driving predictability of overall migration flows. Government needs to consider the optimal size and composition of migrant intakes (temporary and permanent) over the medium to long term in the best interests of Australia.’
‘If the supply of infrastructure and housing does not keep up with demand created by migration, the quality of infrastructure and housing services may deteriorate, and prices may rise. As a result, material and non-material living standards of the local population and newly arrived migrants may be undermined (unsupported by any research evidence?)
Without appropriate policy responses, large and unanticipated increases in labour supply, or sharp falls in demand, can lead in the short run to both falling real wages and higher unemployment.
Social cohesion can also be undermined if the pace of migration is greater than the time it takes for migrants to settle, integrate and become part of the community. Costs imposed on local communities (housing, labour market impacts) can also reduce cohesion and have an impact on migrant integration and prosperity.’ (unsupported by any research evidence?)
There is no evidence provided, and apart from the media encouraging dog whistling to reinforce negative perceptions and attitudes, there isn’t any? In fact opposite, from Foster’s surveys in ‘Immigration and the Australian economy’ (2012):
‘William Foster’s surveys over 200 studies on immigration and wages. He found there was, “a marginally favourable effect on the aggregate unemployment rate, even in recession”.’
‘Migration planning needs to remain flexible to changing economic
Environments (pp. 47-9):
‘During periods of high NOM, like 2006–09 and 2016–19 (Figure 15), there were
increased concerns about congestion in cities, as infrastructure and other support
did not keep pace with population growth in some areas. This led to falling support
for the migration program (not supported by research evidence?).
This experience helps provide guidance for a recommended NOM level* relative to
population growth, given the current levels of investment.’
Since when can the NOM be micromanaged, simply evidence of suboptimal understanding of the NOM and the multiple factors it’s derived from, acting as ‘barometer’? Neither Figures 14 or 15 etc. highlight a significant demographic event related to the NOM, i.e. UNPD’s expansion in 2006, which spiked the NOM, hence, estimated resident population.
‘Reform directions
The Panel suggests Government consider moving beyond reliance on the permanent migration cap as the only tool for managing migration flows. Specifically, there might be value in developing ways of better managing temporary migration, alongside permanent migration. This likely means government would be attempting to manage NOM – which is the truer measure of migration’s impact on population growth, communities and the economy.’
On international education – indirect contribution from peak bodies or stakeholders via submissions, yet international education is the largest source of NOM captures or border movements 12/16+ months, but ignored the expansion and inflation in 2006?
Also largely ignored the impact of Covid and slow onshore visa processing by the previous LNP government, like the UK may have been to discourage those hoping for substantive residency visas.
Warning to the Australian government, be careful what you (are encouraged to) wish for, by trying to control population via the NOM they are falling into a ‘nativist trap’?
Article from the ECFR European Council on Foreign Relations in 2016 describing those aligned or allied with Putin’s Russia on both the European left and right, while the latter are adopted or supported by Putin’s Russia, with recommendations on what Europe could do, warning of Russia’s covert support for populist parties; post Brexit, pre Trump and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The upsurge of populism in Europe has provided Russia with an ample supply of sympathetic political parties across the continent.
Fredrik Wesslau 19 October 2016
The upsurge of populism in Europe has provided Russia with an ample supply of sympathetic political parties across the continent. These parties – mostly from the far right but also from the far left – are pursuing policies and taking positions that advance Russia’s agenda in Europe. They tend to be anti-establishment parties ― some on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum ― that challenge the mainstream liberal order in Europe. Many of these parties are working actively to undo the European project. They are generally suspicious of the United States and want to reduce its influence in Europe.
In June ECFR carried out the first comprehensive survey of ‘insurgent’ parties in Europe. It found that, despite their differences, a majority of them are positively inclined towards Putin’s Russia and pursue policies that promote Russia’s interests in Europe.
While Russia is not responsible for the emergence of these pro-Russian parties, it has embraced them, especially as relations between the West and Russia have deteriorated. The parties are useful for Moscow in that they help legitimise the Kremlin’s policies and amplify Russian disinformation. At times they can also shift Europe’s domestic debates in Russia’s favour. But it is their politics of disruption – underpinned by their scepticism towards the European Union – that does most to destabilise European politics.
It would be a mistake to portray these parties as Russian stooges. The parties’ pro-Russian policies are underpinned by conviction and an affinity with ideological tenets of Putin’s Russia. But while the parties are not under Moscow’s control, the extent to which Russia directly supports them has become an increasingly important question, as tensions rise between Russia and the West. Russian influencing efforts in the West have come under particular scrutiny since the leak of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails in July was attributed to Russian meddling in US politics.
Alignment with Russia
To what extent do the insurgent parties align with Russia? A majority of the 45 insurgent parties identified by ECFR were favourably inclined towards Russia and sympathised with Russian positions. The most pro-Russian of these parties (of a significant size) on the far right are: the AfD, FPÖ, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, France’s Front National, Italy’s Northern League, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (VB). On the far left, the most pro-Russian parties are Cyprus’s AKEL, Germany’s Die Linke, the Czech Republic’s KSCM, Podemos in Spain, and Syriza. The Italian Five Star Movement and the Human Shield Party in Croatia also belong to the pro-Russian camp.
Voting patterns in the European Parliament shows that on issues such as Ukraine, the human rights situation in Russia, and association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, the Dutch PVV leads the pack in pro-Russian votes. UKIP, the Sweden Democrats, Italy’s Northern League, and France’s Front National come in a shared second place. Insurgent parties from the far left – Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza, and Germany’s Die Linke – are not far behind.
All of these parties, with the exception of Syriza and PVV, oppose EU sanctions on Russia and none believe that the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with Ukraine should be implemented in full. All the parties are Eurosceptic to varying degrees.
The pro-Russian stance of these parties derives largely from conviction and from an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia. On the far right, many are attracted to Russia’s socially conservative values, its defence of national sovereignty, and its rejection of liberal internationalism and interventionism. On the left, many of the insurgents are attracted by Russia’s antipathy towards globalisation and its challenge to the US-dominated international capitalist order, as well as a nostalgic link to the Soviet Union. Both fringes tend to see Russia as a counter to the United States.
Friends with benefits
These parties have proven useful to Moscow in various ways. They have provided convenient sources of legitimisation domestically – and to some extent internationally – on issues such as Crimea. The Kremlin is able to point to them as “evidence” of Russia not being isolated and of there being supportive voices in Europe. This was seen during the referendum in Crimea in March 2014. While the OCSE did not send observers to Crimea, a group of European politicians from far right parties, including from the FPÖ, VB, FN, Jobbik, and Northern League, went there as observers. This was presented by Moscow as international legitimisation of the referendum.
They have also proven capable of shifting the centre of political discourse in Russia’s favour. In France, for example, former president and presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy, who belongs to the political mainstream has taken an increasingly sympathetic line towards Russia as presidential elections in 2017 approach. He has called for the lifting of sanctions against Russia and argued that Crimea has a right to become part of Russia. This line is part of his election strategy to adopt positions from the National Front in order to co-opt their votes.
But it is not just in matters of policy that these parties’ sympathies with the Kremlin are revealed. In them Moscow has also found convenient and willing conveyors of its anti-Western, anti-globalisation narratives. Several of the far right leaders, such as Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, are frequent guests on Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, with Farage reportedly having been offered his own show on RT.
The “Operation Liza” case in Germany, where a false Russian story of a 13-year-old Russian-German girl having been raped by immigrants was picked up and spread by members of the far right AfD and Die Linke, which has close ties to Germans of Russian descent, was a prime example of the role these parties play in amplifying Russian disinformation.
Finally, the anti-EU and anti-NATO strand of insurgent parties benefits Russia by weakening Western consensus and institutions. The Dutch referendum on the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine in April 2016 was an example of how insurgents in the minority were able to obstruct EU policy to Russia’s benefit. But this was most clearly seen in UKIP’s leading role in Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, with several Eurosceptic parties in Europe now following in UKIP’s footsteps and pushing for their own referendums on EU membership. Several parties, including AKEL, Die Linke, FPÖ, Golden Dawn, KSCM, and Jobbik are also opposed to the NATO alliance.
Russian support and the populist upsurge
But while it is clear that Moscow benefits from the pro-Russian stance of populist parties in Europe and in some cases uses them for propaganda purposes, it is less clear to what extent there is collusion. The notion that Russia might be funding agents of influence by providing financing to sympathetic parties in Europe has become more salient as relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated.
The most well-publicised case of a European political party receiving funding from Russia is the loan to Front National, which has aligned itself with Russia on a range of issues. It has recognised Russia’s annexation of Crimea and event sent observers to the Crimean referendum, providing international legitimisation for the Kremlin.
Leaked SMS exchanges indicate that the Front National’s stance on Crimea was the subject of correspondence between Russian officials, who agreed that the party should be “thanked” somehow for recognising the results of the referendum in Crimea. While Front National has denied that there was any quid pro quo, eight months later the party received a loan of €9.46 million from the First Czech Russian National Bank ― a financial institution with links to the Kremlin. Marine Le Pen has publicly acknowledged the loan – equivalent to the Front National’s total revenue for 2013 – citing the party’s inability to secure financing from European sources.
The founder of Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has also received a €2.5 million loan through his company Cotelec, from a Cyprus-based company that is owned by a former KGB agent who was expelled from Britain in 1985 on charges of spying.
The loans to Front National seem to be a rare case of acknowledged Russian financing of a party. But does it amount to collusion? Not necessarily since Front National would probably have taken pro-Russian positions in any case. But the money does act as an enabler.
There is circumstantial evidence and rumours of covert support for other radical parties in Europe, but little solid evidence exists in the public domain. The lack of information may not be surprising since this sort of activity typically belongs to the opaque world of intelligence services.
But even if one assumes that Russia does not provide financial support to any other party, the way Moscow uses them to legitimise its own narrative and spread disinformation is in itself a cause for concern. They become ― wittingly or unwittingly ― part of an increasingly assertive and hostile Russian foreign policy towards the West.
So what should Europe do?
To begin with, European leaders should recognise that dealing with domestic populism is the greater challenge. Today, anti-establishment politics are a fact throughout Europe. And the political tides are still moving in their direction; several more may find themselves empowered after elections in Germany, France, Netherlands, and possibly Italy, in 2017.
But while Russia is not behind the growth of populism, it is certainly benefiting from it. Insurgent parties have a right to take positions that align with those of Russia, within the limits of democratic politics. But covert Russian actions to support these parties and to spread disinformation undermine the democratic basis of European societies.
European law enforcement agencies should prioritise looking into Russian covert support for populist parties and taking steps to counter such support. European governments should consider publishing intelligence on this in the public domain. Voters have a right to be informed about whom they are voting for.
European governments should introduce stricter regulation of political party financing, notably when that financing is from foreign sources, and increased transparency requirements in relation to funding. A stricter implementation of national corruption and money laundering legislation would also go some way to countering illegal money transfers.’
We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.
Not only does this network exist in the US, it’s global via the ‘Atlas Network’ of think tanks especially influential in Canada, UK and Australia. On the latter ‘charity’ i.e. IPA Institute of Public Affairs Australia, both US Bradley & Olin Foundations had been funders in the ‘80s and ‘90s, while a key funder now is mining magnate & heiress Gina Rhinehart.
Further, in the UK journalists have researched similar links centred near and around Tufton St. think tanks influencing Conservative Party policies and behind Brexit, including Taxpayers’ Alliance, IEA Institute of Economics Affairs, Global Warming Policy Foundation or Net Zero Watch, Policy Exchange etc. and a ‘Tanton Network’ anti-immigrant NGO Migration Watch. The ByLine Times published an article several years ago describing ‘Brexit & Climate Science Denial: The Tufton Street Network’ (2019)
Following are key excerpts from an excellent DeSmog article outlining not just Kochs, but the invisible donors in the background:
The shenanigans of the “Kochtopus” have garnered most of the headlines — including here — pertaining to reviews of New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money.
But the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries’ right-wing family foundation network are far from the only big money influencers featured in the must-read book which has jumped to #4 on the Best Sellers list at Amazon.com.
Enter the Scaife, Olin and Bradley family fortunes, all three of which have served as key nodes through which the right-wing have tried to reshape the public policy landscape within (and beyond) the U.S. in the years following the Cold War until present day. If those family names sound familiar to DeSmog readers, they should: we have a profile in our database for Scaife and have written fairly extensively about Olin and Bradley…..
Scaife, “League to Save Carthage” and ALEC
In 1964, Richard Scaife — namesake of the Scaife Family Foundations, whose money came largely from the Gulf Oil fortune — helped create a group called the League to Save Carthage, harkening back to the city conquered and colonized by the Roman Empire now situated as a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia.
“This little-heralded group was just the first small step in what would become an improbably successful effort by one of the richest men in the country, along with a few other extraordinarily wealthy conservative benefactors, to cast themselves as field generals…in a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics,” Mayer wrote.
Eventually, the Scaifes would call one tentacle of their Scaife Family Foundations the Carthage Foundation. But its origins in the League to Save Carthage are crucial if, for no other reason, than how one of its members, Lewis Powell, became a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
Before joining the Supreme Court bench, Powell penned the so-called Powell Memo which, at the time, was marked confidential. Written on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and officially titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Powell’s treatise called for Big Business to pour money into universities, the media, think-tanks, the conventional political apparatus and other key institutions as a means to fend off what Powell described as the ongoing onslaught against the free enterprise system.
Mayer cites a historical letter by ALEC founder Paul Weyrich’s aide in her book, in which the aide thanks Scaife for his support of the corporate bill mill for the statehouses.
“ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts,” wrote the aide in 1976, a few years after ALEC got off the ground in 1973, according to the letter cited by Mayer.
Olin & Law and Economics
Another influential family fortune featured in “Dark Money” is that of the Olins and in particular John M. Olin.
Jaded by his experience as a student at Cornell University, Olin believed universities served as brainwashing centers for liberals and the Left. So, Olin made it his life mission to spread conservative ideology onto U.S. college campuses.
Like Scaife and Gulf Oil, Olin made his bucks in part from the fossil fuel industry via the Olin Corporation, which manufactured blasting powder for coal mining companies. Olin Corporation found itself embroiled in a DDT production pollution scandal in the 1970’s, culminating in the federal government forcing the company to shut down its DDT unit.
In documenting several other environmental catastrophes that Olin Corporation perpetrated, Mayer suggests that the regulatory crackdown that occurred due to these incidents may have influenced the self-interested anti-regulatory posture taken by Olin and the foundation he created, , from a business point of view. Former Olin officials denied to Mayer this was the case.
Olin would move to endow the still-influential “Law and Economics” curriculum in law schools nationwide, which calls for a system of jurisprudence in which judges and lawyers incorporate free market economic analysis into their legal decisions and arguments.
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Though covered in less depth than other families, the Bradley Foundation also earned a section in “Dark Money.” Just as Olin Foundation shuttered its operations, its Executive Director, Michael Joyce, was hired by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which had enjoyed a huge financial boost resulting from a corporate merger that catapulted the Bradley Foundation into the top 20 largest foundations in the U.S.
Harry Bradley, was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society alongside the Koch Brothers’ father, Fred Koch. According to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel investigation, between 2001 and 2009 the Bradley Foundation “doled out nearly as much money as the seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined.”
A recently published paper titled “The Koch Effect”, by Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and Harvard government and social policy PhD student Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, describes the impact these family foundations, and in the case of their paper, the Kochs in particular have had on public policy in the U.S.
“In a disciplined way, the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders,” they wrote. “The overall effect is to re-set the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.”
Another case in point: the Kochs formerly funded (and some of its executives served on the Board of Trustees of) the Democratic Leadership Council, a think-tank and advocacy group pinpointed as pushing the Democratic Party rightward under President Bill Clinton.
If anything, this rightward “force field” created by the influence of big money, serves as the genius and long-lasting impact of the Koch-Scaife-Olin-Bradley oligarch network’s donations and advocacy.’
While media, governments, think tanks, NGOs and politicians highlight, stress about, gaslight and promote negative tactics to stop refugees e.g. British government’s policies on channel crossings and using Rwanda as an offshore detention centre, there are gaps growing in the working age cohort due to demographic decline.
Not only is much of agitprop this drawn from old ideology by right wing or nativist politicians, while holding libertarian views on much else, a clear need for temporary and/or permanent immigration to plug employment gaps, pay taxes and support budgets for more retirees and pensioners using social services, is apparent.
Good examples are Britain and other OECD nations which share below replacement fertility, fewer youth and demographic decline in working age i.e. has passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’, but more retirees and ever increasing old age dependency ratios.
In short, we need well and better supported budgets for more retirees needing the support but they vote against their own interests e.g. Brexit?
OECD (2023), Working age population (indicator). doi: 10.1787/d339918b-en (Accessed on 20 March 2023)
However, nativist politics and talking points, targeting older voters on refugees, immigration, population growth and purported negative issues, then precludes the solutions i.e. increase net migration, temporary or seasonal workers as ‘net financial budget contributors’ and more modest numbers of permanent migrants, going onto citizenship.
Following analysis explains immigration and employment issues for the EU, from The EU Observer:
It’s not news that Europe wants fewer migrants reaching its borders. What is less visible is that at the same time Europe is scrambling to get more migrants — to fill dramatic labour shortages, with little consideration for workers’ and human rights. The approach so far has been hypocritical, harmful — and self-defeating.
EU migration policies have long been promoting a narrative of migration as a threat, and something that should be tackled with a defensive and punitive approach.
The 2020 EU Migration Pact, still under negotiation, is billed as overhauling the EU migration system, but instead just expands existing measures like detention for anyone coming to Europe via irregular routes, including children, and speeding up deportations, while lowering human rights safeguards.
The never-ending fight against irregular migration
Last week, the European Council asked the Commission to fund border surveillance technology and to step up the use of visa agreements as a tool to pressure other countries into accepting swifter and more deportations of their citizens. Throughout 2022, several agreements were struck to increase joint policing at common borders, including between France and the UK, Germany and Switzerland, and Czechia and Slovakia.
The proposed revision of the Schengen Borders Code would allow border guards to stop and check people crossing borders internally within the EU if they believe that the individuals can’t prove their right to enter the country. There is little doubt that this amounts to legitimising racial profiling.
The demand for workforce
While Europe cracks down on migration, it also discreetly tries to get more migrants to fill ever more dramatic labour shortages in key sectors from hospitality to construction, from transportation to health care.
In practice, this means granting residence permits to people already living in the country through ongoing or new regularisation mechanisms, and creating work permits for people to come to work in the EU from abroad. Yet many of these measures may be driven by the demand for workforce, with little attention for workers’ rights.
France is negotiating a regularisation scheme for shortage occupations — but it’s been criticised for focusing on workers employed in the most physically demanding professions, while leaving out other key sectors and skills.
In January 2023, the right-wing Italian government increased the number of available permits for non-EU workers from 69,700 in 2022 to 82,705 but more than half are for seasonal work, which is often extremely precarious and rife with exploitation.
The 2020 Italian regularisation was largely prompted by fears that the country’s fields would remain without workers due to COVID-19 restrictions on international travel. The regularisation kept workers dependent on their employers, and conditions to apply were extremely strict and burdensome. The result is that only a third of the applicants managed to regularise their stay….’
Interesting analysis from Grattan Institute in Melbourne on how to improve Australia’s migration system, especially for temporary entrants.
However, although one agrees with the broad argument and sentiments, many assumptions and factors cited including the need to make more temporary residents permanent, would require raising, for now, the modest permanent cap, guaranteed to kick off a negative media campaign.
Further, one thinks it overestimates the desire for ‘temporary migrants’, caught under the ‘nebulous’ (Ian Dunt UK) NOM net overseas migration, to remain in Australia permanently after studies, travel, work etc.?
On high numbers of temporary residents in Australia it misses important dynamics including Covid, precluding departures and department budget or headcount cuts which significantly slowed immigration processing?
We have observed a generation of dog whistling all things immigration and population growth to the point where many Australians, including employers, view ‘immigrants’ and supposed ‘population growth’ as negatives to be avoided, or with antipathy?
House prices and/or rentals may not be related to ‘immigration, especially as no analysis exists apart from FIRE sector’s agitprop in media using PR factors as indicators of market health eg. ‘prices’ not ‘real value’, advertised ‘prices’, auction clearance rates, claims of ‘high immigration’ etc.; but now prices are dropping?
Capping temporary visas would be chaotic i.e. who decides, ignores multiple types and complexity of visa system, and Australian citizens also; nativists have argued for decades a strictly nativist ‘one person in, one person out’ border regime?
Warnings of employment perils for temporary migrants, but local employees share similar issues, i.e. non compliance of awards and conditions by employers, with support from unions?
Nominating a median level salary threshold for any skilled entrant ignores the need for unskilled employment gaps to be filled too?
At least this starts asking some questions and challenges long held assumptions on the benefits, or not, of immigration to Australia. By coincidence Euractiv published an article titled ‘Sisyphus’ skills shortage’ that challenges the fixed or ‘steady state’ view of employment, insights include:
‘In politics, it’s normal to think about jobs as if there were a fixed amount of potential jobs that society should aim to fill. In this mindset, labour force shortages are half-empty glasses that we need to fill.
The danger of looking at labour markets in such a way is that there is always a danger of overflowing, in which new water pushes out the water already in the glass. This is the picture politicians have in mind when they warn that migrants might steal the jobs of locals.
However, the picture is not only dangerous – it is also wrong. An economy is not static, as a glass of water, an economy is dynamic…
…Companies and governments should do all they can to invest in getting the skills they need, be it through educational programmes, making it easier for women to take part in the labour force, or through labour-friendly immigration systems, even if it is a Sisyphean task.
Labourforce shortages are a sign of a thriving economy, skills shortages point to an innovative economy. Only in a depression is there no skills shortage.
Or, as French philosopher Albert Camus put it: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”’
Commissioned by the Albanese government last September, its task is to identify reforms that will increase economic productivity, address challenges such as an ageing population, and make Australia a more desirable destination for highly skilled migrants.’
But perhaps its thorniest job is how to provide temporary migrants with clear pathways to permanent residency and citizenship. This won’t be easy, given how much the number of temporary migrants in Australia now outstrips the permanent visas on offer.
It’s impossible to run an uncapped temporary migration program with a capped permanent program and offer all long-term temporary visa holders a road to permanent residency.
Something has to give.’
No, as temporary entrants or residents, described as migrants is incorrect, as most are international students, and understand that long term permanence requires an application for migration, which comes under the permanent cap; many are content being temporary residents but baulk at permanent.
‘Simple arithmetic: demand exceeds supply’
No, as temporary entrants or residents under the NOM net overseas migration, being described as migrants is incorrect, as most are international students who understand that long term permanence requires an application for migration, which comes under the permanent cap (they understand this system better than Australians).
‘This is far in excess of the cap on permanent visas offered. In 2019, the Morrison government reduced the cap from 190,000 to 160,000 places a year. The Albanese government raised it to 195,000 for the 2022-23 financial year. It remains to be seen what will happen in future years.
The queue is getting longer
Not all temporary visa-holders want to stay in Australia, but many do. Most migrants are already in Australia on a temporary visa when they receive their permanent visa.
But with a greater number of temporary residents vying for permanent residency, the wait times are rising, and migrants’ prospects of success are declining.’
Contestable as temporary migration is a solution used as ‘churnover’ of ‘net financial budget contributors’ (not staying long term nor accessing social security later), slow or no processing may be ideologically driven e.g. cutting department head counts or costs and creating uncertainty for applicants i.e. ‘hostile environment’ with suboptimal employment conditions, while Covid helped in backing up both applications and temporary residents onshore.
‘Many employers are reluctant to hire international graduates on temporary visas, instead hiring applicants who already have permanent residency. This helps explain why a quarter of recent graduates (on temporary graduate visas) are either unemployed or not looking for work. Most that do work earn no more than working holiday-makers, despite being more qualified.’
Much of this confusion can be blamed on local and imported nativist agitprop inspired by the original US fossil fueled Malthusian ZPG Zero Population Growth movement viewing (locally), post 1970s ‘immigrants’ as an environmental ‘hygiene’ issue and foil to demands for carbon pricing and transition to renewable sources; most media in Australia unwittingly reflect or even encourage similar attitudes of antipathy towards immigrants.
‘What to do about it?
Offering a permanent visa to every long-term temporary migrant who wants one would require an enormous, and unpopular, increase in Australia’s permanent intake.
Even a smaller, more realistic, increase in the permanent intake would come with costs – notably more expensive housing.’
On housing, there is little compelling evidence or analysis when house prices are falling, even more so in real terms, while most real estate data are PR factors?
‘Capping temporary visas would reduce pressure on already-rising rents. But it would also make it harder for some employers and mean fewer international students paying fees to universities.’
Create chaos through more bureaucracy being applied to foreign entrants i.e. takes decision making of education institutions out of their hands, plus individual students, backpackers etc. and requires an entry approval system a la nativists’ ‘one in one out’; increasing hurdles for everyone including Australians if too many want to return in a short time?
‘So what should we do?
We should continue to give priority to younger, skilled migrants for permanent visas. Pathways to permanent residency should not be automatic nor based on how long temporary migrants have been in Australia. A guaranteed pathway to permanent residency in Australia will only encourage more people to come here on temporary visas, and those already here to stay even longer.
We should also avoid creating new temporary visa programs for less skilled workers in areas such as agriculture or the care economy, because they only add to demand for more permanent visas down the track.
We must acknowledge that not all temporary migrants can stay in Australia, even if they want to.’
Fair, but why is it about doing something about migrants versus ensuring coverage and compliance of employee wages and conditions by employers, with unions, regulators, peak employer groups and local councils for both locals and migrants?
‘Change the selection criteria
The current policy grants permanent skilled work visas on the basis of occupation. This should change to whether migrants can earn a good wage – demonstrated by a sponsoring employer being willing to pay them at least A$85,000 a year.
Another reform would be to allow temporary skilled migrants to work in any occupation, provided they earn more than A$70,000 a year, so they can build their skills and careers in Australia before securing permanent residency.’
Why the arbitrary near median salary threshold when there is a need not only for highly skilled temporary immigrants, but also low skilled below median salary, as our demographic decline does not discriminate between skilled and unskilled occupations and employees, nor does mortality?
‘Creating a better system for points-tested visas – which is how many students secure permanent residency – would also help. The current system encourages migrants to gain points through spending thousands of dollars on low-value courses, or by moving to regional areas where there are fewer job opportunities.
Instead, there should be a single points-tested visa, where points are only allocated for characteristics that point to a migrants’ future success in Australia.
The aim of the migration system should be to create clearer pathways to permanent residency in Australia. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who wants to stay can do so.’
Population, Immigration and Net Overseas Migration NOM
Interesting article on immigration and NOM net overseas migration by former Australian Department of Immigration Deputy Secretary Abul Rizvi endeavouring to insert some understanding and clarity round the ‘immigration’ debate when most misunderstand, misinterpret or misrepresent immigration and population data.
This is manifested in media, political and public narratives that focus upon the NOM and the false notion that it is both unusually high and can be micromanaged; underpinned by lack of detail or ‘solution’ to lowering the NOM (without assessment of broader societal impacts).
Drastically reducing net migration would be neither easy nor wise, says a former senior official.
How governments manage migration is a big deal. A perception of too many arrivals drove the Brexit result in Britain, helped define the Trump presidency, and fuelled the rising populist vote in Europe. Japan’s ageing population is driving its government to increase immigration — but ever so cautiously, recognising the likely backlash from its largely homogeneous population. And the same demographic forces have driven China to try to attract back part of its huge diaspora.
Yet, despite our long immigration tradition, Australia’s immigration debate is tortured and surprisingly poorly informed. Until very recently, this was not helped by the Turnbull government’s eerie silence on immigration levels and population policy. Immigration minister Peter Dutton’s tentative foray late last week should therefore be welcomed.
Given the complexities, immigration ministers have an obligation to be accurate with the data and honest about the range of issues to be considered in significantly reducing the intake. Dutton was neither.’
Issues and Critique of Net Overseas Migration Statistics and Data
The NOM is a measure of movements, not designed as an ‘immigration’ target but merely measures numbers of people (irrespective of nationality, visa status and includes Australians) who enter Australia with the intention of remaining longer than 12/16+ months (ABS, 2017).
Rizvi cites several variables or inputs that would be required to control or lower the NOM. This would include restricting rights of Australians marrying foreigners, restricting numbers of international students, preclude second year visas for working holiday makers doing agricultural work, close the refugee program, limit New Zealanders and seek out overstayers.
Other issues or features neither understood nor highlighted:
Few nations use the same NOM as a measure to estimate resident population apart from Australia, UK and NZ then e.g. in the EU Schengen Zone it’s impossible due to free movement and that most nations appear to estimate from e.g. residency registration or census data (UN, 2015).
Rizvi also fails to mention the cumulative statistical impact of an ageing population of citizens and permanent residents (includes significant numbers of British subjects) who were already in country 2006 when line was drawn in the sand on population; many have neither departed nor returned to Australia long term and have two impacts upon the data (and census). First is longevity due to better health hence staying in the data longer (though invisible) being attributed to ‘immigration’. However, this will change when the baby boomer demographic starts departing this earth in the medium long term in about five years onwards i.e. deaths will outnumber births for long term thus impacting the estimated resident population significantly. This is also set against already declining fertility rates and global population ex. Sub Saharan Africa, expected to peak by mid-century as explained by development, medical and statistics expert Professor Hans Rosling (Gapminder, 2013).
A significant financial reason for encouraging temporary residents with no likelihood of permanent residency outcomes, whether students, backpackers etc., is as net financial contributors paying taxes without future access to state services. In other words, they support or subsidise increasing numbers of retirees needing pensions, health care etc. dependent upon healthy state budgets (with decreasing dependency ratio of workforce tax payer numbers to retirees).
Further, statistical analysis has found that not only is the NOM very confusing, it may over estimate Australia’s population significantly, through double counting those not in country but not outside for more than 12/16+ months:
‘Except on migration. On this single metric, it’s as if the entire world converges into a deafeningly silent consensus. Population! At last a hard number. Something tangible, physical, consistent. The cacophony of economic debate subsides as everyone gather’s around to pay homage at the altar of the purest, simplest driver of demand, production, and everything else. The one undisputed back-stop to debate…Trying to find a simple and defensible explanation of a complex issue isn’t easy. But for migration, I think there is one. I’ll describe it here in prose, and in a later post gather some of the graphs and data that support it. There has been a level shift. But it hasn’t been in ‘migration’, as everyone actually intends and understands the word. The shift that we should be talking about has been in mobility.’ (Quixotic Quant, 2017a).
‘The alternative story is that sometime in the mid-2000s the Australian Bureau of Statistics changed the definition of an official statistic called “Net Overseas Migration”. The arbitrary definition they had at the time was malfunctioning, and the next arbitrary one they changed to has been malfunctioning even worse. A blithely ignorant press didn’t even notice the change, let alone query the disfunction that inspired it, so the entire country has been putting their faith soaring population figure that has the integrity of custard. The harder alternative figure shows that our migration rate is actually flat’ (Quixotic Quant, 2017b).
By using ‘Migration’ in NOM to describe the definition may simply be a linguistic coincidence, however, it is highly suggestive of a direct correlation with permanent immigration and long-term population growth, which does not exist (except by some indirect correlation set amongst other factors).
The local and global NGOs, think tanks, institutes, commentators, ‘ecologists’, media and politicians who constantly highlight supposed negative aspects of immigration and ‘sustainable’ population growth have been influenced or manipulated by the US white nativist movement, with the latter being influential amongst Republican Party and Trump (SPLC, 2001) in turn influenced by Darwin’s cousin Galton’s ‘science of eugenics and racial hygiene’ (Das, 2015).
Post WWII prior to the formation of the UN Population Council the Rockefeller Foundation (Standard Oil/Exxon Mobil) co-opted the American Eugenics Society (AES) which had become discredited by the Nazis and their ‘research’ at The Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Germany, to then form the UN Population Council (Kurbegovic, 2005 & Novielli, 2017).
Also, to emerge with support of same and similar oligarchs’ (fossil fuels and auto) foundations were Zero Population Growth (ZPG) (Bentley Historical Library – University of Michigan, 2018), Zero Economic Growth (ZEG) (Daly, 1980) and the Club of Rome ‘limits to growth’, etc. constructs (Green Agenda, 2018) to popularise negative perceptions of population growth and immigration as ‘liberal and environmental’ concerns (Stern, 2005).
Demographically it is now coming to a head for many whether middle Europe or the ‘Anglosphere’ with the refrain, ‘brown people, Moslems etc. are going to outnumber white people or WASPs leading to demographic suicide….’.
Education Training Society 
