Putin’s Russian Led Corruption of Anglosphere and European Radical Right, Conservatives and Christians

Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.

These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values.  These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke,  anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs.

The latter includes Russian Orthodox Church, ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, WCC World Council of Churches, WCF World Congress of Families, Baptist Convention, CNP Council for National Policy, UK Tories, US GOP, Australian LNP, IDU International Democratic Union, Legatum, Tufton Street London, Heritage Foundation, Danube Institute, Conservatives for Russia, ARC Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Atlas or Koch Network, Tanton Network, CPAC, Breitbart, Fox News, GB News, Rebel News and a conga line of transnational grifters.

Foremost have been Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Steve Bannon, Marie Le Pen, Nigel Farage, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Alexander Downer, ‘Moscow Mike’ Flynn, Tucker Carlson, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News team, Sean Hannity, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu  et al. with related events including Brexit, Trump, Australia’s Voice Referendum and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

From ECFR European Council on Foreign Relations:

‘Conservatism by decree: Putin as a figurehead for the global far-right

Vladimir Putin is ramping up his radical-right credentials. This reinforces his grip on power in Russia, but it could also increase his influence worldwide

Ksenia Luchenko Visiting Fellow

1 March 2024

In his state of the nation address on 29 February, Vladimir Putin doubled down on a theme that has become familiar to Russians over the past few months: family, or more specifically, “traditional family values”. “Some countries,” he said, “deliberately destroy norms of morality, institutions of the family, push whole peoples towards extinction and degeneration.” Not so in Russia: “we choose life.” The ultraconservatism tied up in this discourse has been central to Putin’s campaign ahead of the Russian election this month – and will shape his fifth term as president that follows.

Putin has long promoted the narrative that “traditional values” are what differentiate Russia from the “satanic West”. But Putin’s brand of conservatism is in keeping with a wider political trend, rooted in the right-Christian agenda that formed during the US culture wars of the late 20th century. According to the political scientist Gionathan Lo Mascolo, the shift comprises “two major colliding phenomena: the politicization of religion, often driven by religious actors, leaders, and institutions; and the sacralization of politics, driven by far-right parties and actors”.

This “moralist international” is made up of far-right populists spanning the American and European continents (and their companions in assorted churches). Donald Trump and his acolytes, of course. But also, for example, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who combined idolisation of “the traditional Brazilian family” with religious and nationalistic sloganeering to help erode years of social progress in the country. Viktor Orban’s Hungary follows a similar pattern.

But Putin has power to implement his domestic agenda that his American and European counterparts can only dream of, unconstrained by law, opposition, or public opinion. Just as Bolshevism in the Soviet Union was a radical, fundamentalist interpretation of socialism, Russia now pushes moral traditionalism to the extreme. The president hands down one decree after another to regulate morality and ethics, and demonstrates his power over the private lives of his citizens. In doing so, he not only positions himself as a leader in an alternative (authoritarian) global order, but also stamps out liberal life in Russia and strengthens his autocracy.

Last year saw a spike in ideologically driven lawmaking in Russia, with women and the LGBT+ community, especially transgender people, emerging as key targets. Gender transition – both surgical procedures and hormonal therapy, along with changing one’s gender on official documents – was completely banned. Those who had already transitioned were forbidden from adopting children. On November 30, the Russian Supreme Court declared the non-existent “International LGBT Movement” an extremist organisation and prohibited its activities. Essentially, same-sex relationships are now illegal, as are any symbols associated with the ‘movement’, including rainbow earrings and My Little Pony.

Another key theme is pro-natalism. A bill prohibiting the promotion of childlessness is currently under consideration in the Duma, stating voluntary childlessness “goes against traditional family values and the state policy of the Russian Federation”. But on abortion, authorities have yet to arrive at a definitive stance. Some regions have instituted penalties for “encouraging abortion” and engaging in the “propagation of abortions”. This was followed by a Ministry of Health directive limiting access to emergency contraception. Then, in November 2023, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, petitioned Vyacheslav Volodin, Chair of the State Duma, seeking endorsement for the prohibition of abortions within private clinics.

However, during a press conference in December, Putin called for a circumspect approach to the abortion issue, asserting that the solution lies in a “return to traditional values … and in the sphere of material well-being.” Subsequently, the State Duma health committee rebuffed support for a federal ban on abortions within private clinics.

As with all potentially sensitive governance decisions that affect the populace (such as pandemic restrictions and mobilisation), Russia is experiencing what political analyst Ekaterina Shulman terms “paradoxical federalisation” – a devolution of responsibility from the federal centre to lower levels; regional authorities shoulder the burden of unpopular decisions, shielding the president from direct association.

Moreover, Putin has begun to break taboos on interference in the private, relational sphere. Until recently, Russian society had operated under an unspoken rule of family inviolability and non-publicity. The public should not intrude in the family life of the president and top officials, and they broadly returned the favour. That is, there was no physical belonging of citizens to the state. Even following Putin’s “gay propaganda” law in 2013, people were generally left alone to live their lives if they did so in private. But now the rules have changed.

Since the start of the war, officials have found a new way to express their loyalty to the president: the adoption of children abducted from the occupied territories of Ukraine. 

Reliable evidence exists for two such cases. Sergei Mironov, head of the Just Russia party and a member of the State Duma, and his wife took two children from the Kherson region and adopted them, changing their names. And Russian children’s rights ombudsman, Maria Lvova-Belova, who shares an International Court of Justice arrest warrant with Putin for illegal deportations of Ukrainian children, adopted a teenager from Mariupol. Lvova-Belova did so publicly, normalising her crime. Mironov hides the expansion of his family, but it follows the same trend: the intimate lives of people who pursue political careers is now subordinated to state interests.

And this change is not limited to political elites. Addressing municipal deputies in January, Putin alluded disparagingly to people who “jump around without pants at parties”, contrasting them with the supposed piety of the military. This intervention seemingly condemned Russian celebrities who participated in a private “almost naked” party in December, organised by popular blogger and influencer Anastasia Ivleeva. After semi-nude photos of the celebrities surfaced on social media, they faced a wave of criticism for immoral behavior and persecution by law enforcement. Similar cases have begun to occur in other cities, where attendees of private parties have been accused of “anti-Christian propaganda” and “gay propaganda”.

Private morality and ethics have thus become subjects of state interest – and the president himself has confirmed it. Given that liberals in Russia tend to be more pro-Western, it all contributes to his long campaign to obliterate any remaining pockets of dissent.

But by ramping up his far-right credentials in this way, Putin also aims to win (and win back) friends abroad, especially where Russia and Russian Orthodoxy have historically had a strong presence – for instance, in EU candidate countries Serbia, Georgia, and Moldova. There, pro-Russian political forces garner support in part through their hostility towards feminism, abortion, and the LGBT+ community. Georgia and Moldova will head to the polls this year – and Russian propaganda will use the full range of anti-Western rhetoric to increase its influence and weaken these countries’ support for Ukraine.

Indeed, Russian journalist Mikhael Zygar has argued that Putin’s far-right positioning is a form of statecraft, aimed mainly at this external audience. Putin thus builds Russian influence by adopting trends from the very West that he rails against. He seems to want to show his current and potential allies that an alternative to democracy exists, one that allows for the disregard of human rights and international law in pursuit of “traditional values”. In this way, he sets himself up as a figurehead for the informal international conservative alliance – a political and societal network that unites right-conservative forces worldwide.’

The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of their individual authors.

For more related blogs and article on topics including Conservative, Demography, EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, Koch Network, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Russia, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

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 (CEU Wien) in Russia’s War Against Modernity.

Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship ARC and Anglo Right Wing Grifters

Another nativist Christian front promoting a conference with a whiff of fossil fuels, climate science denial with Anglosphere right wing grifters and ‘freedom and liberty’ supported by Legatum, and no doubt indirectly linked to Koch Network, like Brexit and its deep pocketed foreign supporters.

Alexander Downer – Donald Trump aide George Papadopoulos – Russian Influence?

Alexander Downer, former Australian Foreign Minister in Conservative LNP coalition, Australia’s UK High Commissioner till 2018, visitor to Koch Network Heritage Foundation linked Hungarian Danube Institute (with former PM, now GWPF, UK Trade Advisor and Murdochs’ new Fox Board member Tony Abbott), and source for claims by Trump related people of DNC emails stolen by Russians i.e. George Papadopoulos.

‘Just a diplomat doing his job? A new book puts the spotlight back on Australia, Russia and interference in the US election.’

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?

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

In the Anglosphere there is still much confusion around Assange, Wikileaks, stolen DNC emails, Russian influence, Russia Report, Mueller Report, Trump campaign, Murdoch’s Fox News, Nigel Farage, Roger Stone, Cambridge Analytica, Tufton St. think tanks linked to Atlas or Koch Network, Steve Bannon  and right wing grifters, out to defeat Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Presidential Campaign in 2016.

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

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship ARC and Anglo Right Wing Grifters

Another nativist Christian front promoting a conference with a whiff of fossil fuels, climate science denial with Anglosphere right wing grifters and ‘freedom and liberty’ supported by Legatum, and no doubt indirectly linked to Koch Network, like Brexit and its deep pocketed foreign supporters.

‘Tony Abbott and John Howard join Jordan Peterson-led group looking at ‘meaning of life’

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship includes prominent Brexit voices and Bjørn Lomborg, who has questioned the urgency of the climate crisis

The former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard are among six Australians who have joined a global group fronted by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and backed by a pro-Brexit hedge fund billionaire and a Dubai-based investment group.

The group – The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) – has been gathering high-profile figures from politics, industry, academia and think tanks for an inaugural three-day conference in London in late October.

Peterson has said the conference would look at “issues metaphysical, cultural and practical” and “issues pertaining to the meaning of life” but also to “become practical with regard to the realisation of policy”.

The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg and the American commentator Michael Shellenberger, who have both questioned the urgency of the climate crisis compared with other global problems, are on the group’s advisory committee.

Also on the committee are Australia’s shadow defence minister, Andrew Hastie, and a former deputy prime minister, John Anderson.

Company records in the UK show Arc has two shareholders – the Dubai-based investment management group Legatum Ventures and the British investor and Brexiter Sir Paul Marshall.

According to The Times Rich List, in 2020 Marshall was worth about $1.1bn and is co-founder of Marshall Wace, reported to be one of the world’s biggest hedge funds.

Legatum and Marshall are major investors in GB News, the rightwing and partisan alternative news outlet launched in 2021.

One of Legatum’s four founders, the billionaire Christopher Chandler, told the Guardian in 2018 he made “hundreds of millions” from investments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and at one point owned 4% of the gas giant Gazprom with his brother Richard Chandler. The businessman was already rich when he invested in Russia soon after the end of the USSR…

Related blog and articles click through:

Howard and Abbott seek the meaning of life. What if our true purpose is … saving the planet

Why Australia’s conservatives are finding friends in Hungary

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

Anglosphere Nativism and Eugenics in Political  Media – Language and Social Discourse

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

IDU Global Networking of Conservatives, Nativists, Libertarians and Christian Leaders

IDU Global Networking of Conservatives, Nativists, Libertarians and Christian Leaders

Repost of article by Lucy Hamilton about the IDU International Democratic Union, Australian conservatives and their global counterparts who liaise round think tanks and conferences including Danubius Institute in Budapest, Tufton Street London (Koch & Tanton), CPAC, Fox, GB News etc., all underpinned by sharing ideas and tactics based on radical right libertarian socio-economic ideology of Koch Network, the nativism of Tanton Network informing ‘the great replacement’, ‘western civilisation’, ‘Soros conspiracy’ and Evangelical Christians.

From Pearls & Irritations:

Morrison joins hard right IDU’s embrace of Viktor Orban

By Lucy Hamilton Sep 23, 2022

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has joined the advisory board of the International Democrat Union. It is an organisation that is much more radical than its self-declared defence of the “centre right” spin suggests.

The alliance that marked the transition to the hard right is the IDU’s embrace of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader now standing for “illiberal democracy” around the west.

This echoes Tony Abbott’s post-leadership embrace of the Orban right. In 2015, he was appointed director of the Ramsay Institute for Western Civilisation, a body that created years of controversy.

“Defending western civilisation” is Orban’s code for Great Replacement theory terrors: the ugliest version says that Jewish elites are importing immigrants to replace the white, Christian population; the polite version asserts that the “woke” left undervalues the western tradition and in its carelessness (or malignancy) is inviting in hordes of non-western immigrants to overwhelm their western superiors. Abbott too is on the IDU’s honorary advisory board alongside John Howard and Morrison.

Abbott is not the only Australian to join in with Orban’s fear mongering about immigration and “family values” (code for intolerance of anything not strictly enforcing marriage between man and woman). There is a posse, including Alexander Downer and Kevin Andrews, that joins the talking circuit spreading Orbanist intolerance.

The ugliness of adopting the Orban worldview is perhaps encapsulated in his most assiduous acolyte – Florida’s Governor. Ron DeSantis is described as inventing American Orbanism. DeSantis’s most recent stunt was to fly plane loads of immigrants to affluent and liberal Martha’s Vineyard where he abandoned them. Sky News’s James Morrow has described the dehumanising gambit as a “genius”move that “beat the left.” The fact that Martha’s Vineyard residents poured out to aid the victims of the gimmick is not mentioned in propagandist coverage.

Back when the IDU was founded in 1983, it declared as a founding principle that it was “committed to advancing the social and political values on which democratic societies are founded, including the basic personal freedoms and human rights, as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; in particular, the right of free speech, organisation, assembly and non-violent dissent; the right to free elections and the freedom to organise effective parliamentary opposition to government; the right to a free and independent media; the right to religious belief; equality before the law; and individual opportunity and prosperity…”

Like so many figures and organisations on the ever more radicalised right, this is no longer the case. The decay of former conservatives’ belief in freedom (at least for the affluent) has become a solidifying certainty that societies must have “conservative” values enforced upon them.

Based in Munich, the IDU is currently helmed by former Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. In 2018 Harper tweeted the IDU’s support of Orban and in 2019, Harper showed how far his politics had hardened by spending Hungary’s national day celebrating with Orban and other IDU leaders. Harper intervened in Canadian politics this year to reassure his older centre right voters that the conspiracy-friendly leadership contender for the Conservative party was a safe bet. Pierre Poilievre is now “toying with paranoid populism.”

The IDU’s Deputy Chairman is Brian Loughnane, husband of News Corp voice, Peta Credlin. Loughnane has been also on the international advisory board of Orban’s primary “think tank” aiming to funnel his ideas to the west, the Danube Institute. He remains listed as an “Expert” to the affiliated Hudson Institute.

The IDU’s Honorary Chairman Michael (Lord) Ashcroft is a figure in several Tory controversies over the decades. He reportedly paid half a million pounds to have Isabel Oakeshott co-write an unauthorised biography about David Cameron airing lascivious gossip, to help undermine the faction of the party that would negotiate solutions. It is not only his impact on the media that has damaged the Tories. His large donations, made possible by his offshore domicile in Belize that enabled him to avoid taxes in Britain, are counted as a factor in driving Britain’s Conservative party further right. It now resembles a toxic clown car of figures that ought to be unelectable in any functioning democracy.

The Republican Party representative on the large leadership group is Mike Roman. He is notable as the man Trump employed to manage “election protection” in his 2016 campaign. Roman’s main role in American politics has been to foment propaganda to discredit the fairness of American elections, a key ploy in its democratic decay.

Ever more overtly, right wing organisations that embrace Orbanism while still spruiking freedom promote a particularly Christian Libertarian form of freedom. There should be freedom from taxation and regulation for the people considered entrepreneurial. Any tax burden to fund unavoidable infrastructure must fall upon the working and middle classes. There should be no freedom to protest. There should be no freedom to be feminist or LGBTQI or to promote multiculturalism.

Anne Applebaum wrote of the conservatives with whom she spent the New Year’s Eve that marked the transition into the new millennium in her work, Twilight of Democracy. In her account of what has since changed in her friends of that moment she sees two trends. One is a cynicism that capitalises on the riches available to the talking heads of the radical right. 

The other is a nihilism that despairs of the liberal democracy like America as a “dark nightmarish place, where God only speaks to a tiny number of people; where idealism is dead; where civil war and violence are approaching; where the ‘elite’ is wallowing in decadence, disarray, death.” This right dreads the colourful chaos of modern democracy, so unlike the version these former conservatives imagined themselves to support during the Cold War. Some desire to break it all; others want, somehow, to reverse change.

Turning to the authoritarian Orban signifies the despair of a former conservative. All the diversity of the modern world must be tidied away and the new voices silenced once again. Media polyphony is intolerable. If the uppity beneficiaries of the Civil Rights era won’t be humble, they must be forced back into their subordinate invisibility. There is no scope for human rights in this frightening world.

History too must be tamed to define the “conservative” present. Thus the Ramsay Centre disdains a lecturer “who is coming in with a long liturgy [did he mean litany] of what terrible damage Western civ had done to the world.” (Nick Riemer’s question about the verb used is illustrative.) Throughout the anglophone right, there is a violent antagonism towards the fact that history has warp and weft. No single story carries the truth, whatever the “history wars,” “war on woke” and Critical Race Theory campaigns would assert.

Christianity joins conservatism at the heart of the IDU’s mission, strongly allied to the Christian Democrat tradition. In the Orban model that not only excludes other faiths, including Judaism (despite disingenuous Budapest denials). It also excludes “non-traditional” ways of life.

The New Daily’s coverage of the radicalisation of the IDU, and Scott Morrison’s membership of its board, did Australians a service. It is important that we recognise what our “conservative” politicians represent and be wary.’

For related articles & blogs on Ageing Democracy, Australian Politics, Conservatives, Evangelical Christianity, Libertarian Economics, Political Strategy and White Nationalism click through and below:

Scott Morrison signs on with global political network home to ‘intolerant far right’.

Why Australia’s conservatives are finding friends in Hungary.

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy.

Narcissistic Political Leaders – NPD Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Collective Narcissism – Cognitive Dissonance – Conspiracy Theories – Populism.

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes.

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism