Degrowth Economics – Greenwashing Fossil Fuels and Nativism for Authoritarian Autarky?

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?

From The Conversation:

If you follow the degrowth agenda, it leads to an economy that looks a lot like the sickly UK

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.

From Grist:

How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t.

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.”

For more articles and blogs on Climate Change, Economics, Environment, Fossil Fuels, GDP Growth, Global Trade, Koch Network, Nationalism, Political Strategy and Tanton Network, click through: 

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

Posted on April 5, 2022

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.

Greenwashing – Club of Rome – Limits to Growth – Astroturfing Fossil Fuels – The Guardian

Posted on July 27, 2021

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.

Tactics Against Bipartisan Climate Change Policy in Australia – Limits to Growth?

Posted on November 30, 2019

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.

Degrowth and Steady State Economy or Eugenics for the Environment Debunked

Posted on June 30, 2022

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.

Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians

Posted on August 4, 2021

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.

Anglosphere Antipathy To Refugees, Immigrants and Sovereign Nations – White Nativism, Autocracy and Eugenics

Late news is that the former Labour MP, then Conservative MP and now Reform, Lee Anderson, has quite xenophobic views on both foreigners and fellow citizens, the new normal that is being actively promoted?

Repost from ByLine Times of AC Grayling article on Anglo, western and other nations negative attitudes that lack empathy, shared experience or understanding of refugees, asylum seekers and immigration history.

Nowadays with above median age voter dominated by less educated, less diverse, low info and more often regional voter, they are targeted by right wing nativist or white nationalist talking points for suboptimal outcomes e.g. Brexit, Trump, The Voice and those demanding no support for Ukraine vs. Russia’s invasion or ‘special operation’.

‘In Fighting for the Cause of Refugees and Migrants, We Fight For Ourselves’

AC Grayling reflects on what immigration really means, how right-wing politicians are twisting that meaning to exploit xenophobia, and what can be done to counteract their rhetoric

AC Grayling 12 December 2023

If Trump wins next year’s US Presidential Election, as Robert Kagan in The Washington Post both terrifiedly and terrifyingly says is now inevitable, will there be a flow of intellectuals and scientists out of the United States in a reverse of the flow of intellectuals and scientists from Europe into the US in the 1930s?

A flow of US refugees – genuine refugees, fleeing the collapse of their country into an illiberal, mean-spirited, even perhaps dangerous place for anyone not of the MAGA persuasion – is not inconceivable. Who with a sense of decency could stomach a situation of Donald Trump’s making?

The triumph of the US began in economic power before the Second World War and was sustained and enhanced after it by those refugees from European fascism. What will the world be like with wealth-powerful bullying states overshadowing it and bridling against each other – a Trumpian US; an irredentist, expansionist China; a world dominated by dictators?

This speculation invites analysis, given that the likelihood is that this is our future. But for present purposes let us focus on the word ‘refugees’ just used in this unexpected connection: ‘refugees from the US’. And let us consider that the refugee crises of recent years are as nothing – are as mere Sunday picnics – in comparison to the vast displacements of populations soon to be precipitated by climate change: a catastrophe of hundreds of millions of refugees, not mere millions, into regions unprepared and unwilling.

We have grown used to refugees from the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, but the future’s refugees will be different, from different places, and far more numerous, than those we see today.

In the far-right rhetoric of Victor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Suella Braverman, ‘immigrants’ are lumped together – whether they are refugees or migrants – in one unwelcome mass of moving populations seeking (in the case of refugees) safety or (in the case of migrants) opportunity. But as this distinction illustrates, refugees and migrants are not the same.

Many refugees are anxious to return home when peace is restored; migrants are in quest of a new home. Does this distinction show up in the numbers on ‘immigration’, in the provisions made for them, in the way they are dealt with? No. They are all lumped into the category ‘immigration’ because would-be immigrants, when their numbers reach a critical mass, trouble native populations, which – everywhere in the world, when left to unreflective tribalist instincts – are naturally xenophobic if not downright racist.

The resurgence in recent years of far-right politics in Europe and the US is based on the exploitation of xenophobia as the tool of choice for gaining power. Once got, that power is used to roll-back democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, aimed at reducing the state from a structure of governance on behalf of the people to a structure for wielding coercive power over the people. It is a familiar story to anyone who bothers to read history.

In the UK today, a desperate Conservative Party is flogging the immigration horse as hard as it can to try to save its skin – because it sees how the right elsewhere is gaining ground by means of the anti-immigration agenda. It has not yet finished delivering the state into private pockets and completing its agenda of creating a subject population unable to protest, strike, or expect decent public services. It wants to finish the job of asset-stripping the country for themselves and the masters behind them in the media and tax-havens and board rooms.

That the citizenry of the UK is not pouring onto the streets in protest at the screaming hypocrisy of a UK government stuffed out with the offspring of immigrants is testament to the dazement induced by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of these immigrant children. But what is worse is that the rhetoric is so effective in switching off thought on the part of so many.

For if they did pause to consider, just for a moment, what the individual units of ‘immigration’ actually are – ie: human beings; men, women, fathers, mothers, children – how could they persist in accepting the bemusement of their faculties? Readers of these words won’t need reminding, but here is the distinction between a refugee and a migrant, and what each is.

‘Asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’. What is such a person? A human being fleeing persecution, danger, death, struggle, terror, horror. A human being fleeing guns and bombs, prisons, torture, cruelty, murder. A human being traumatised, shaking with fear, desperate. A human being who has heard, who has emitted, screams and cries of pain and grief, who has run away from a nightmare. A human being in dire need of safety.

‘Migrant’ What is such a person? A human being quitting places of hunger, futurelessness, who wants a chance to make a life, for himself or herself and his and her children, who wants stability, opportunity, who wants a new life, who wants a job, a home, security, a chance to grow into something they feel they can be.

People leave places because they are pushed and because they are pulled. The refugees are pushed by danger, the migrant by sterility of opportunity. Both are pulled by places that are better, safer, far more promising. Their situation in either case is so bad where they are that they risk much, often everything, to reach better places. However unfamiliar the new place, the strange language, the uncertainty of their reception, it is better by far than the place they leave.

Their action takes immense courage, resolve and effort. They do what human beings have always done, from the moment that homo sapiens trekked out of Africa 60,000 years ago – indeed, from the moment that homo erectus trekked out of Africa two million years ago – to find better places to be.

And here is the clincher: immigrants add, they do not take away. Look at the US in the years 1880-1939 and ask whether the huge waves of immigration in those decades was a bad thing for it. Well, was it?

In today’s UK there are 165,000 vacancies in the care industry – yet the politicians, to pander to ignorance and prejudice, bring down the shutters. Our NHS, our universities, our small business sector (99% of British businesses are small to medium-sized enterprises or SMEs), profit hugely from ‘incomers’. Germany and Australia need net immigration lest their economies stall; whereas the saner political parties in the former understand the problem, politicians in the latter play the same tattered card on both sides of the aisle. It is madness.

Among the solutions to the ‘problem’ of immigration are these: (a) educate the home population on the facts: immigrants add value; (b) invest in the countries that drive migrants outward because of the economic insufficiencies there, so that talent remains there and the impulse to leave is lessened.

And as to refugees and asylum seekers: chief among the solutions to this different problem are: (c) work to bring peace and stability to the regions that drive their terrified populations out; (d) be humane, be kind, welcome them when they stagger onto our shores, succour them.

Note always: migrants are those who explicitly seek to be immigrants. Not all refugees, indeed, perhaps not many of them, wish to be immigrants. Do not discriminate against either of them; discriminate between them and treat them accordingly – which with regard to both means decently.

It is essential to recognise, and not be fooled by, the use of the ‘immigration’ canard to blind us to the real agenda of the far-right. The far-right stir up hostility to an easily demonised ‘other’ as a mask for the rest of their wider and equally bad agenda. They are at present winning this nasty game. We must not let them. In fighting for the cause of refugees and migrants, we fight for ourselves.

AC Grayling is a philosopher, Master of the New College of the Humanities, and Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College at Oxford University’

For more related blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Australian Immigration News, Conservative, Demography, Eugenics, Immigration, Media, Nativism, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Radical Right Libertarian, Tanton Network & White Nationalism click through

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch – Fox News and Ultra Conservative Grifters – Putin, Brexit, Trump, GOP and Orban

Posted on March 7, 2024

Repost of article about Rupert Murdoch in Australia by Sean Kelly in Mother Jones January 2024.

‘AUSTRALIA VS. RUPERT MURDOCH 

WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF THE AGING MOGUL’S GLOBAL EMPIRE? LOOK TO THE PLACE WHERE IT ALL BEGAN.

Radical Right in the West – Fossil Fuel Atlas Koch Network – Nativist Tanton Network – Murdoch Media – Putin’s Russia – Brexit – Trump

Posted on March 6, 2024

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.

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Posted on September 1, 2022

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

Smoking Gun Memo – Warning to US GOP Republicans on Eugenics Masquerading as Conservative Immigration and Environmental Policies

Posted on January 31, 2023

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.

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

Posted on June 9, 2022

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.

Trump January 6 Insurrection, Conspiracy and Project 25 for Autocracy

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.

Then, as disturbing, but maybe not unrelated, is another push from Koch’s Heritage Foundation for GOP permanence in Project 2025 – Koch Heritage Foundation Plan – Trump GOP – Permanent Republican Government.

‘Opinion | What if Trump’s conspiracy was way bigger than we know?

Thom Hartmann 11 Sep ‘23

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.

For other related blog and articles on EU European Union, Media, Koch Network, Political Strategy, Populist Politics and Russia click through:

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Assange – Useful Idiot or Willing Dupe of the US Right and Putin’s Russia?

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

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.

Who is manipulating whom?

From Inside Story:

‘Russia’s war with the future

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.” 

Russia Against Modernity

By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press’

For more related articles and blogs on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Koch Network, Nationalism, Political Strategy, Russia, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

The Tory donor, Soviet-born Billionaire and Fossil Fuel Interests Bankrolling British Politics – ByLine Times 

Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Chomsky, US, Russian Propaganda and Faux Anti-Imperialist Narratives

Fake Anti-Imperialists of the Anglo Left and Right on Ukraine and Russia

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

Neo Conservative Rasputins? Putin and Dugin – Trump and Bannon – Johnson, Brexit and Cummings

Recent events in Ukraine have increased scrutiny and highlighted influences upon President Putin in an autocratic regime, following on from the Czars with Orthodoxy, Nationalism and Rasputin, the Soviets could always claim Marx, Engels, Lenin, The Party et al., but for present day Russia, and Putin, Alexander Dugin is cited as a key influencer (who is manipulating whom?).

Further is there evidence of any relationship with the key influencers round Brexit UK or Trump’s America or Europe?

According to Dunlop (2004) via Stanford’s The Europe Center in ‘Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics’, claimed that Dugin, a ‘a neo-fascist ideologue’ with other intellectuals is ‘interested in mysticism, paganism, and fascism’, ‘conservative revolution’, National Bolshevik Party, his theories partly adopted by the military, Russia as Eurasian, and backed up with some hierarchical views: ‘“Russians should realize that they are Orthodox in the first place; [ethnic] Russians in the second place; and only in the third place, people”. 

Further Dugin on America, echoes of Capitol Hill: ‘”It is especially important,” Dugin adds, “to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements– extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics“.

Martin Lee’s excellent (1997) ‘The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups & Right-wing Extremists‘ was prescient in highlighting movement of far right ideology post WWII including former Soviet Union, cited Dugin and also that a Putin like figure would emerge to take advantage of new expanded Presidential powers (plus e.g. funding far right in both Europe and US).

The Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin highlighted by Teitelbaum in New Statesman (8 Oct ’20) ‘The rise of the traditionalists: how a mystical doctrine is reshaping the right Steve Bannon, Russia’s Alexander Dugin and Brazil’s Olavo de Carvalho are united by their affinity with a spiritual movement that fundamentally rejects modernity…

…Repudiating the Enlightenment, traditionalists instead celebrate what they regard as timeless values. They honour precedence rather than progress, emphasise the spiritual over the material, and advocate surrender to the fundamental disparities – as opposed to equality – between humans and human destinies‘

In addition to Putin’s ‘project’, related is the UK oligarchs and (not limited to) Tory scandals, the US fossil fueled nativist libertarian ‘project’ which is being challenged; especially with the benefit of hindsight and scrutiny of Brexit and Trump.

Central in these nativist and/or conservative libertarian ‘projects’ were European and Anglo seers, with the former including far right politicians in Europe, funded by Putin including Le Pen or strongly influenced e.g. Hungary’s PM Orban.

However, in the Anglosphere of UK, US and Australia, eccentric figures have been promoted by the right also, often in the late John Tanton’s nativist Tanton Network, who had been an ideological muse of Steve Bannon, while in the UK central round Brexit and subsequent PM Johnson, was Dominic Cummings. 

While Bannon can be easily linked to the influence of Dugin in his ramblings masquerading as analysis and philosophy as New Statesman has done, Cummings can too,  This is reflected in his Russian connections, his writings and Brexit campaign; Gordon of the North East Bylines UK has stated as much in (3 August 2020)  ‘Cummings, Brexit and Russia: Part 1‘ highlighting Cumming’s attitude towards immigration and the EU, in attempts by Cummings to justify his antipathy.

Finally China and Russia, and although there is an agreement for cooperation on the old ‘Silk Road’ or the Belt & Road Initiative with China, one assumes the Chinese security services and academia have studied Dugun closely; if not they should, why?

Not only did he state that Ukraine needed to be part of Russia, and assumed unity in the Orthdox Church in regional states (absolutely untrue as ‘2021 schism between Greek and Russian Churches showed) he stated:

‘China, which represents a danger to Russia, “must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled”. Dugin suggests that Russia start by taking Tibet–Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia–Manchuria as a security belt.  Russia should offer China help “in a southern direction – Indochina (except Vietnam), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia” as geopolitical compensation.’ (Johnson, 2004).

What do President Xi and The Party think of that?

For more related blogs and articles click through below: 

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

The Beast Reawakens 1997 – Review – Radical Right Populism in Europe and the Anglosphere

Anglosphere Libertarianism in US, Australia and UK Tories with Dominic Cummings

Anglosphere Legacy Media: White Nativist and Libertarian Propaganda for Ageing Conservative Voters – Australia, Brexit & Trump

Ecosystem of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere