Right Wing Anglosphere – White Nativist Demographic Talking Points – Population – Immigration – International Education

Disjointed analysis in Murdoch’s NewsCorp media across multiple (often seemingly unrelated) factors, bypassing data analysis principles according to Statistics 101 and ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics advice on using the NOM net overseas migration formula, that feeds into estimated resident population headline data; misdescribed as undefined ‘immigration’.

However… 2006, the NOM was inflated, follows the fossil fuel climate science denial techniques used to misrepresent and denigrate climate science research by misinterpreting data, claiming non existent correlations etc. and in the media shooting messengers or centrist government. 

Using a right wing ‘wedge’ and foil to the criticism directed at fossil fuels in Anglosphere, plus parts of Europe, informed by former ZPG Zero Population Growth white nativist Tanton Network. In the US it shares donors with Koch Network think tanks behind the GOP Republican Party and Trump, Bannon, Miller and FoxNews border obsessions including climate science denial; ditto the same networks in the U.K. Tories, UKIP/Reform, Farage, Anderson and GB News for Brexit.

Unvoiced or silent objective? Corrupt white nativist authoritarian autarky like 1930s Italy and Germany, or 19th century America of planters, master servant relationships and ‘segregation economics’, informed by the eugenics movement and the Mont Pelerin Society?

‘From NewsCom:

‘Simply too high’: Australia nearing crucial immigration ‘peak

Aussies have been warned that a current crisis plaguing the country could become “permanent”.

Leith van Onselen

‘ANALYSIS’

Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the official population statistics for the September quarter of 2023, which revealed that Australia’s population grew by an unprecedented 660,000 people over the year, driven by record net overseas migration (NOM) of 549,000.

In percentage terms, Australia’s population grew by 2.5 per cent, the nation’s fastest growth rate since 1952, during the post-war migration boom.

(No, this defies both direct ABS advice and Statistics 101, NOM definition changed in 2006, cannot compare before and after

Graph from MacroBusiness misrepresents data by ignoring the 2006 expansion and running NOM (red line) uninterrupted from 1900 through 2006 to focus on present and temporary ‘data noise’, described as ‘immigration’.

‘23 Estimates of NOM based on the previous methods and those based on the ‘12/16 month rule’ methodology are not comparable. The key change is the introduction of the ‘12/16 month rule’ for measuring a person’s residency in Australia, replacing the previous ‘12/12 month rule’.’ ABS Explanatory Notes.)

Meanwhile, Australia’s natural population increase was a historically low 111,000 in the year to September 2023, courtesy of a jump in deaths, most likely related to the Baby Boomers beginning to die off and the impacts of the pandemic.

As a result, NOM as a share of Australia’s population increase remained at a record high of 83 per cent in the September quarter of 2023.

Separate annual data released by the ABS for the 2022-23 financial year showed that Australia’s capital cities grew by an unprecedented 517,000 in the year to 30 June 2023.

Melbourne (167,500) led the nation’s population growth last year, followed by Sydney (146,700).

The ABS’ monthly permanent and long-term arrivals data provide a useful proxy for the official quarterly NOM.

Annual net permanent and long-term arrivals hit a record high in January, suggesting that Australia’s official NOM and population growth would have increased further in the December quarter of 2023.

In its December Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Update (MYEFO), the Albanese government forecast that Australia’s NOM would fall to 375,000 this financial year, which would represent the second-highest annual NOM in Australia’s history.

However, given the acceleration of NOM in the September quarter and the stronger-than-anticipated net permanent and long-term arrivals numbers to January, Australia should expect significantly higher NOM this financial year than the government’s forecast.

The good news is that visa data suggests that NOM is at or near its peak.

According to the ABS, there were 402,000 net visa arrivals (excluding visitors) in the year to February 2024, down from a recent peak of 503,000.

This decline in visa arrivals has been driven by foreign students, which fell to 221,000 in the year to February, down from a recent peak of 294,000.

Australian renters are being smashed (source or evidence?)

The migration surge’s impact on the nation’s rental market has been particularly severe since the population boom occurred alongside the collapse in dwelling construction to decade-lows.

According to the ABS, Australia added only 155,600 homes (net of demolitions) to the nation’s dwelling stock in the year to September 2023, against a population increase of 660,000.

Therefore, Australia added only one new home for every 4.24 new residents. This explains why the nation’s rental vacancy rate has collapsed to a record low of around one per cent.

(No evidence simply talking points while ignoring the more unique housing types and requirements of international students and diversity of supply versus first home buyer and families)

Reflecting this demand-supply imbalance, median asking rents across Australia have soared by 38 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic, according to PropTrack, with almost all of this growth occurring after the federal government opened the international border to migration in late 2021.

With Australia’s net overseas migration and population growth to remain historically high for the foreseeable future, and the rate of dwelling construction expected to continue falling, the housing situation will remain fraught.

As a result, Australian tenants should prepare for further tightening of the rental market and ongoing strong rental inflation.

Australia needs a smaller and better-targeted immigration system

Few people would disagree that Australia’s immigration numbers are too high.

While migrants undoubtedly fill important labour market gaps across the economy, the sheer volume of arrivals has placed chronic pressure on the housing market and the nation’s infrastructure.

(No evidence, infrastructure requires healthy budgets from taxes plus skilled personnel and especially skilled migrants; clear issue in regions with population ageing and decline)  

A report released this month by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) showed that “recent migrants earn significantly less than Australian-born workers” (because they are not ‘migrants’ but international student, on low income?) and that “migrants have become increasingly likely to work in lower productivity firms”, earning more than 10 per cent less than Australian-born workers on average.

The CEDA report also showed that the unemployment rates of recent skilled migrants are higher than Australian-born workers.

CEDA’s findings are supported by the latest Graduate Outcomes Survey, which shows that international graduate employment rates, participation rates, and median salaries are well below those of domestic graduates.

(What if the other way round, then there would be complaints that domestic graduates are being usurped by international students in graduate employment?)

Research released in November 2023 by independent economist Gerard Minack showed that Australia’s 8.2 million population increase this century has outpaced the provision of business investment, infrastructure and housing, resulting in what economists call “capital shallowing” and reduced productivity growth.

“Australia’s economic performance in the decade before the pandemic was, on many measures, the worst in 60 years”, Minack wrote in his November report.

“Per capita GDP growth was low, productivity growth tepid, real wages were stagnant, and housing increasingly unaffordable. There were many reasons for the mess, but the most important was a giant capital-to-labour switch: Australia relied on increasing labour supply, rather than increasing investment, to drive growth.

“Australia’s population-led growth model was a demonstrable failure in the 15 years prior to the pandemic. Remarkably, the country now seems to be doubling down on the same strategy. The result, unsurprisingly, is likely to be more of the same.”

(No, wrong as our population was inflated by the NOM expansion in 2006 sweeping up international students who study and work part time, i.e. low income, hence, averaging or per capita does not reflect this).

To add further insult to injury, data compiled by the Grattan Institute shows that a significantly smaller share of migrants work in the construction sector than their Australian-born counterparts.

“About 32 per cent of Australian workers were foreign born, but only about 24 per cent of workers in building and construction were born overseas”, the Grattan Institute wrote in January.

“And very few recent migrants work in construction. Migrants who arrived in Australia less than five years ago account for just 2.8 per cent of the construction workforce, but account for 4.4 per cent of all workers in Australia”.

Therefore, Australia’s immigration system is directly adding to Australia’s housing and productivity problems in two ways.

First, immigration volumes are simply too high, overwhelming the supply side of the economy. 

(No, there is no optimum number but demographic balance for a youngish population, while international students spike data via the NOM, but described as ‘immigrants’ vs. far larger ageing baby boomer bomb)

Second, the migration system is poorly targeted and does not provide the skills the economy needs.

(Evidence?)

The fact that the nation’s population has ballooned by 8.2 million people (44 per cent) this century alone, yet Australia’s skills shortages are worse than ever, is empirical evidence of these facts.

(No, it’s higher churn over as many of those originals were temporary, and are no longer resident in Australia; where is the evidence of skills shortages being worse due to immigrants?)

Australia, therefore, needs a migration system that is much smaller in size and better targeted towards the skills we need.

(Opinion or motherhood statement lacking specifics)

Australia’s migration system must be calibrated to a level below the nation’s ability to supply homes, infrastructure, and business investment while safeguarding the natural environment (including water supplies).

(Opinion or Motherhood statement lacking specifics) 

Otherwise, Australia’s housing shortage will become permanent, and productivity growth and living standards will flounder.

(No, if a shortage why have Sydney house values stagnated for past decade i.e. price only doubled?)’

Leith van Onselen is co-founder of MacroBusiness.com.au and Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.

For more blogs and articles on Australian Immigration News, Australian Politics, Demography, International Education, Media, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

Australian Bureau of Statistics – UNPD NOM Net Overseas Migration Formula – Inflating Immigration and Population Growth

Posted on March 25, 2024

One has written previously on the wilful confusion around immigration and population data used for demographic analysis in the Anglosphere, also to dog whistle refugees, immigrants and population growth.

However, requires the misrepresenting of data and research using climate science denial techniques used by entities linked to both Tanton Network and Koch Network, deflecting from carbon or fossil fuels and promoting eugenics; in Australia and US using proxies to replicate previous race based immigration restrictions.

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

Posted on March 11, 2024

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’.

Mainstreaming of the Far Right

Posted on January 2, 2024

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. 

Environment – Fossil Fuels – Climate Science Denial – Populationism – Anti-Immigration – Far Right – Tanton Network

Posted on November 30, 2023

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.

Australian Migration Review 2023 – For Immigrants and Nation or a Nativist Trap?

Posted on May 10, 2023

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.

Immigration to Australia – More Opportunities for Temporary Residents?

Posted on March 7, 202

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.?

Tanton Network Migration Watch UK criticised for misleading UK immigration reports.

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.

Global Population Decline and Rebalance

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.

There is an increasing body of research, knowledge and awareness of population and demography in nations and globally thanks to Jack Caldwell, Fred Pearce, Wolfgang Lutz, Hans Rosling, Sanjeev Sanyal, then recent years Bricker & Ibbitson (‘Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline’); outside of the UNPD, right wing and faux centrist media, think tanks, politics and influencers.

Following is the link to the online version, Beacon’s review and a Guardian review of the same.

Google Books: The Coming Population Crash and and Our Planet’s Surprising Future – Fred Pearce. Beacon Press 2010

Beacon Press

‘A leading environmental writer looks at the unexpected effects and possible benefits of a shrinking, graying population

Over the last century, the world’s population quadrupled and fears of overpopulation flared, with baby booms blamed for genocide and terrorism, and overpopulation singled out as the primary factor driving global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it appears that the population explosion is past its peak-by mid-century, the world’s population will be declining for the first time in over seven hundred years. In The Coming Population Crash, veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce reveals the dynamics behind this dramatic shift and describes the environmental, social, and economic effects of our surprising demographic future.’

Guardian Review

‘Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash by Fred Pearce

Alok Jha on why Malthus was wrong to fear a population explosion

Alok Jha – Sat 27 Mar 2010 

Thomas Malthus has a lot to answer for. As the young cleric performed birth and death rites at the end of the 18th century, he began to notice that there were far more christenings than funerals. The insight led him to write his “Essay on the Principles of Population”, a dark warning against the perils of unchecked human reproduction. Overpopulation was a looming threat because the masses were on a treadmill of sex and procreation, he argued. Eventually, the world would run out of food. People would die of starvation. It was nature’s way of keeping populations in check.

This “dark and terrible genius” may have been right to pinpoint the idea that population was a potent economic force, says Fred Pearce, but he was wrong about almost everything else. And yet Malthus’s ideas persisted among the elites for hundreds of years, spreading a fear of population time bombs and seeding ideas for eugenics programmes up to the last half of the 20th century.

By the 1950s, “population controllers” were everywhere, wringing their hands in NGOs and United Nations agencies, worrying about the coming Malthusian population catastrophe, looking to the poorest parts of the world to curb the population growth. Mass US-funded family planning programmes were targeted at a number of countries, with foreign aid and even trade sometimes dependent on meeting western targets. In India, the government put pressure on citizens to get sterilised, while China’s one-child policy led to brutal forced abortions.

But the population-controllers’ predictions of world famine in the 1940s and the 1980s never came true. Why? As the numbers grew, so agricultural technology improved. Norman Borlaug won a Nobel prize for developing high-yielding varieties of dwarf wheat in the late 1960s which, if fed with water and fertiliser, would grow large heads without falling over. By the mid-1970s, wheat and maize yields had doubled in places such as India. Some environmentalists have questioned whether this green revolution was such a good thing, tying so many of the world’s peasant farmers to mechanised, energy-guzzling farming practices, and Pearce sees their point. “But would they prefer billions starving?” he asks. Even today, whenever famines occur, the problem is rarely an absolute shortage of food but an inability to buy it.

Yet warnings about overpopulation and impending famine persist. Pearce doesn’t buy it. The global population replacement level, the number of births required to keep population stable, is 2.3 babies per couple. But thanks to increased access to contraception and improving education for women, actual birth rates have been dropping around the world. In the 1950s, it was between five and six; by 2008 it was 2.6. At the current rate, the world’s fertility rate will be below replacement level soon after 2020. “Future historians are likely to record two great social trends in the last half of the 20th century,” writes Pearce. “The dramatic decline in fertility and the transformation of the role of women in society. These two events are clearly linked.”

Pearce does not gloss over the potential environmental problems that could occur if the world were overpopulated. But, though an environmentalist to the core, he puts people before planet, pointing out that the poorest three billion, around 45% of the total, are currently responsible for 7% of carbon dioxide emissions, while the richest 7%, around half a billion, are responsible for 50% of emissions. “A rural woman in Ethiopia can have ten children and her family will still do less damage, and consume fewer resources, than the family of the average soccer mom in Minnesota or Manchester or Munich.”

Overpopulation is not the problem, he argues, but over-consumption: more specifically, over-consumption in the west. Ever the optimist, Pearce thinks we can solve this crisis if we recognise its seriousness. Today’s technology could enable us to reduce our carbon footprints by 80% by 2050 (as the British government has committed us to do).

There are a lot of statistics in this book, but Pearce’s narrative is rescued by his stories of people, whether groups of women in Bangladesh, families buying their first televisions in the slums of Mumbai, ghost towns in eastern Germany or an unexpected Somali community in Ohio. At one point he marvels at the crucibles of New York and London, these growing cosmopolitan hubs of the world, with people finding ways to live despite the obstacles thrown at them. If this is the future, says Pearce, bring it on.’

For more blogs and articles related to demography, immigration, political strategy, population growth, populist politics and Tanton Network click through:

Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome

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.

However, by 2012 Randers had revised own his global population peak estimate down to 8 billion or so which concurs with more recent research of Bricker & Ibbitson presented in ‘Empty Planet’ and The Lancet peer reviewed research paper by Stein Emil Vollset et al. titled ‘The Lancet: World population likely to shrink after mid-century, forecasting major shifts in global population and economic power’ which states that fertility rates have declined much faster than expected.

Hans Rosling – GapMinder – Factfulness – Human Development – Adult Education

Time to revisit the late but great Professor Hans Rosling of Gapminder Foundation on the need to for improved skills of analysis and critical thinking, as reflected in commentary round population linkages with environment, poverty and lack of education in the less developed world, amongst educated western elites who remain ignorant of both the outside world and the developing world.

Although Rosling did not then challenge the UNPD high end of century population forecasts, they have been revised downwards due to more demographic research on the ground in developing nations. 

Population Growth or Decline?

Much about population growth and fertility in the Anglo world has negative connotations or perceptions from the mainstream due to inflated (forecast fertility rates) data from the UNPD Population Division, ZPG/Club of Rome, Population Matters, Sustainable Population Australia, nativist conservatives, eco-fascists and white nationalists spruiking at best supposed environmental degradation, at worst the ‘great replacement theory’ or ‘tipping point’.

In fact during the past ten years credible demographic research and/or writing from Rosling, Lutz, Pearce, Bricker & Ibbitson et al. has debunked the idea of exponential growth in population as it is based upon inflated UNPD fertility rates, and we are headed for a peak mid century followed by a (potentially precipitous) decline.

Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links

Article titled ‘Green Anti-Immigration Arguments Are A Cover For Right Wing Populism’ summarises ZPG Zero Population Growth in Australia, US white nationalist links, citing Paul Ehrlich and John Tanton. A symptom of US based radical right libertarianism and eugenics, presented as liberal, environmental and science based, but in fact supported by oligarchs.

The clearest signals emerged in the US in the ’70s when simultaneously fossil fuel companies became aware of global warming due to carbon emissions (and threatened by Nixon’s EPA), ZPG was established with Ehrlich, Tanton et al., supported by Rockefeller Bros. (Standard Oil then Exxon), Ford and Carnegie Foundations (according to the Washington Post), Club of Rome promoting Limits to Growth PR construct (including carrying capacity, Herman Daly’s steady-state economy suggesting protectionism to preclude global competition etc.) hosted on Rockefeller estate, sponsored by VW and Fiat, while James Buchanan and later Koch’s et al. started promoting libertarian economics (also Friedman, Hayek, Rand and Chicago School), nativism and developing think tanks for influence in politics, academia and media (according to MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’ and Mayer’s ‘Dark Money’), including ALEC, Heritage Foundation etc..

Murdochs, FoxNews, Tucker Carlson, Anglo Conservatives and Hungary

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’?

‘Tucker Carlson’s ‘Unapproved’ Trip To Hungary Could Have Led To His Fox Firing

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.’

‘Why Australia’s conservatives are finding friends in Hungary

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.’

‘Greg Sheridan’s Grand European Tour

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.’

‘Greg Sheridan, Australian conservatives flirt with Orban’s fascistic politics

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 Director chairs the MCC’s Board of Trustees.’

Related articles and blogs on ageing democracy, Australian politics, conservative, demography, EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, immigration, Koch Network, media, populist politics, Russia and Tanton Network click through

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

Anglosphere News Media – Objectivity – Political Interference – Fair & Balanced

Nigel Farage – Julian Assange – Wikileaks – Trump Campaign – Russian Influence

Conservative CPAC Event – Hungary – Who Pays for Influence?

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

Historical Influence and Links Between Russia and the US Christian Right

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?

From Politico 2017:

‘How Russia Became the Leader of the Global Christian Right

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.”’

For related blogs & articles on Australian Politics, Conservative, Evangelical Christianity, Koch Network, Political Strategy, Russia & White Nationalism click through:

Anglosphere Conservatives Links – ADF Alliance Defending Freedom – Heritage Foundation

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

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship ARC and Anglo Right Wing Grifters

Abortion Reproductive Rights for Conservatives or GOP Evangelical Christian Support