Noah Smith – Why Paul Ehrlich – Population Bomb – Was Wrong

Noah Smith (see his Substack Noah Opinion & subscribe) an accomplished wordsmith, journalist, data analyst and thinker revisits Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, limits to growth and degrowth; still apparent in faux environmental narratives in mainstream media, but are coming from the fossil fuel nativist right.

Missed a few details including ZPG Zero Population Growth, Rockefeller Bros., Rockefeller Foundation, long standing donors like the Scaifes etc., whiff of anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Catholic and Asiaphobe sentiments that were channelled via deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton and his Social Contract Press; colleague of Ehrlich at ZPG.

Not to forget the roots of this movement including Malthus, Galton, Madison Grant, Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and post World War II the Rockefeller Commission, UN Population Division, green revolution, Club of Rome and tracking symptoms of previous high fertility i.e. ‘population growth’ but ignoring decline in fertility globally, to this day. 

‘Data Analysis – Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong

And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes

Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.

And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss:

When the news program was roundly ridiculed for giving Ehrlich air time, the 90-year-old scholar defended himself on Twitter by citing his academic credentials, and the fact that The Population Bomb had been peer-reviewed:

As many acidly pointed out, the fact that Ehrlich has impeccable credentials and was peer-reviewed is a reason to take a more skeptical eye toward academic credentials and peer review in general. Maybe we’ve gotten better at these things since the 60s, and maybe not. But being spectacularly wrong with the approval of a community of experts is much worse than being spectacularly wrong as a lone kook, because it means that the whole field of people we’ve entrusted to serve as experts on a topic somehow allowed itself to embrace total nonsense.

Anyway, it’s useful to review why Ehrlich got things so wrong, and why the people who make similar claims today — i.e., the “degrowth” movement — are also wrong. But it’s also important to realize that just because Ehrlich was wrong about overpopulation and some other stuff doesn’t mean that he, or the degrowth people, are wrong about the threat of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.

Why Ehrlich was so wrong in 1968

Ehrlich’s basic prediction in The Population Bomb was that overpopulation would soon cause massive famines. Matt Yglesias has a good Twitter thread with some screenshots:

Ehrlich also predicted that 65 million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s, that England would cease to exist by the year 2000, etc. etc.

Obviously, nothing like this ever happened. But why? In fact, there are a number of reasons. But the most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.

In the case of overpopulation and food supply, two big things happened to make Ehrlich wrong. The first is that a bunch of new agricultural technologies — collectively referred to as the Green Revolution — emerged that boosted crop production dramatically. For example, corn production has more than quadrupled since Ehrlich’s book came out:

The other thing that changed was the number of mouths that had to be fed. Population growth has not remained exponential; it has slowed all around the world, thanks to lower fertility rates. Ehrlich wrote right around the peak; since then, population growth has been more than cut in half.

These two factors, in combination, mean that human beings consume substantially more calories today, on average, than when Ehrlich made his sensational predictions

Nor is this just because a few rich-world people are hogging all the food. Global deaths from hunger and malnutrition have fallen steeply, to about 212,000 in 2019

So whether or not Ehrlich got his math right, the fact is that his assumptions were wrong. But why were they wrong? A bit of it was due to what I might call “quasi-natural” processes — economic growth led to urbanization, which drives down fertility rates. Increasing education, which also tends to accompany growth, reduced birth rates as well. But most of Ehrlich’s mistakes come from his failure to anticipate that human beings would act intentionally to avert most of the trends he was warning about.

Scientists of the 1960s, like Norman Borlaug, knew that feeding the world would be a problem as global population rose; they didn’t need Paul Ehrlich to tell them that. That’s why they dedicated their lives to working on improving crop varieties and fertilizers and irrigation. The inventors of birth control knew that for many families, having one more accidental child just meant one more mouth to feed, and they invented new forms of contraception specifically so that people could choose the family size they wanted. Human ingenuity — what Julian Simon, who famously beat Ehrlich in a bet about commodity prices, called “the ultimate resource” — was one of the stabilizing mechanisms that acted to damp out the runaway trends Ehrlich was predicting. (In fact, human ingenuity was also the reason Simon won the bet about commodities; people worked hard to develop new sources of supply and new ways of using resources more efficiently.)

Another stabilizing mechanism was government action. Concern about overpopulation was what prompted many countries to make new birth control technologies more available to their people, even when it violated their conservative values — for example, worry about food supply prompted Iran’s religious leaders to implement one of the world’s most effective (and totally voluntary) family planning programs in the 1990s.

What about coercive programs? Brutal, repressive policies like India’s mass sterilization program or China’s one-child policy were motivated in part by the overpopulation panic that originated in the West (though in China’s case the key book was The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth). Of course, China and India hardly needed some American intellectuals to tell them that they were poor countries who struggled to feed their gigantic populations. But these were definitely the kind of brutal totalitarian measures that Ehrlich was recommending.

And yet it’s not at all clear how much of an effect these repressive policies actually had. China’s fertility rate had already declined precipitously by the time they enacted the one-child policy, and further declines didn’t happen until a decade later.

Meanwhile, India’s mass sterilization campaign in 1975 produced no discernible change in the slow, steady downward fertility trend in that country.

In other words, the stabilization mechanisms that made Ehrlich so laughably wrong were generally not the massive coercive top-down government actions that he hoped for. Instead, stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.

There is a lesson here for the modern day.

Ehrlich’s modern-day heirs

In general, my advice to people who want to understand the late 2010s and 2020s is to read about the late 1960s and 1970s. The parallels aren’t perfect, of course, but the broad-based social and political unrest that emerged in the late 60s has an obvious parallel with the unrest of the late 2010s. My general thesis is that unrest is a “macro variable” that trickles down and basically infects everything in a society, including what scientists think about and write about.

For many, I think, unrest creates a sense of catastrophic runaway change, which results in a desire to “stop the bus” and slow change down. If you’re a biologist, then perhaps that fear of change manifests in catastrophic predictions about population and natural resources. Ehrlich has caught an especially large amount of flak, but he was hardly unique for his day; Mark Perry has a good roundup of apocalyptic predictions that environmentalists made around the same time, some of which are even more extreme than Ehrlich’s!

Nowadays, as in the 70s, many intellectuals on the left have become afraid of economic growth and resource limitations. This is why Ehrlich is back on TV — wildlife loss is one of the things people are scared of. But the biggest thing people worry about is climate change. And though some environmentalists have embraced the idea of green growth as the solution to climate change (which it is), there’s also a degrowth movement that’s especially popular in the UK and North Europe, and has gained a foothold in some intellectual circles in the U.S.

So far, degrowth’s popularity in the U.S. has been limited due to vigorous pushback from liberals and many leftists, who realize that its proposed solution of massive coordinated global anti-growth planning is A) unworkable, B) would stall the transition to renewable energy, and C) would require developing countries to make untenable sacrifices. But the idea still gets regular exposure in the American press, and sensible folks are forced to be constantly vigilant against the steady drumbeat of degrowtherism from across the Atlantic.

It worth mentioning, though, that degrowthers aren’t just calling for unworkable solutions; they’re also incredibly sloppy in their predictions. For example, degrowthers regularly base their assessments of unsustainable resource use on aggregate measures of material usage. 

The British intellectual Jason Hickel also uses aggregate measures of resource use by gross tonnage to support his own jeremiads against growth.

This is a terrible metric, for several reasons. First, it includes materials that are recycled or sustainable (e.g. commercial forests, or farming itself). If resources shift to a more sustainable form — for example, the massive switch from fishing to fish farming — that won’t be recorded in these numbers.

Second, it ignores one of the most important sources of sustainability: resource substitution. When humans figure out how to substitute a commonly available resource for a scarce one, sustainability increases even if the gross tonnage used also increases. For example, if we use widely available magnesium instead of scarce lithium for our batteries, that increases sustainability even if tonnage doesn’t change. Humans are always looking for ways to substitute plentiful resources for scarce ones, and we often find them.

But no matter what metric they use, degrowthers always make the same fundamental mistake, and it’s the same one Paul Ehrlich made: trend extrapolation. The tweet above is just classic “line go up” thinking. And degrowthers treat the past correlation of economic growth and resource use as if it’s a law of the Universe, when there’s no reason to believe that correlation will continue. For example, many countries have managed to decouple their carbon emissions from their GDP growth:

When confronted with this blunt fact, the degrowthers, who have long claimed that this sort of absolute decoupling is impossible, will respond that all that matters is global emissions (which is true), and that although global GDP has grown much faster than emissions since 1990, the fact that global emissions are still up slightly since that time means these have not yet decoupled in an absolute sense.

This is, of course, nonsense. Absolute decoupling in countries like Mexico, Singapore, Germany and the U.S. shows that absolute decoupling is possible in every country; most countries consume just about as much carbon as they produce, which is why outsourcing of emissions basically doesn’t happen. There’s no reason that China, India, and the rest of the world can’t decouple as well, and with them, the world. Of course, it will take several years — perhaps a decade — to demonstrate global absolute decoupling, by which time our age of unrest will likely be behind us and degrowth will have faded just as surely as the population panic of the 70s.

In the meantime, however, degrowth might push some countries’ policies in a decidedly foolish direction; I’m particularly worried about the UK. Just as India and China pursued self-destructive policies in response to the population panic, the UK may be tempted to make its grinding post-2008 stagnation even worse in the name of degrowth.

But enviro-catastrophists are not always wrong

Witnessing the follies of environmental catastrophists, from the 1970s to today, it’s tempting to conclude that people who make dire environmental predictions are simply kooks whom we should just never listen to. Indeed, many people do draw exactly that conclusion, especially on the political right. This is a bad response, for a number of reasons.

First, environmental catastrophes are a very real possibility. Climate change is the main example; if we don’t do something to limit emissions (and, probably, pull some carbon out of the air), we really do face a whole lot of extremely negative consequences. Sober scientists who believe strongly in the power of human ingenuity, technical solutions, and economic growth nevertheless recognize both the necessity and the magnitude of the task.

It would be very, very bad to ignore the people warning about climate change. If we do avert catastrophe, technology will be how we do it. But just as with Norman Borlaug, scientists have to be sufficiently worried about the problem in order to be motivated to devote their lives to this project. It’s easy to mock climate alarmism, but without some sort of alarm, people wouldn’t have spent the last 40 years figuring out how to make solar power and batteries cheap. Ingenuity is one of the great stabilizing forces of human society, but it doesn’t just happen automatically.

(So how do we tell the difference between the sober, realistic warnings and the overblown panics? There’s probably not a good general mechanism for doing this; we just have to use our intelligence to evaluate the claims various people are making. But one good rule of thumb is probably to be suspicious of people who package their warnings with pre-prepared solutions. In general, expertise in identifying a problem isn’t the same as expertise in solving it, so people who insist that mass sterilization is the only solution to overpopulation, or that degrowth is the only solution to climate change, often have a political axe to grind, or are just overconfident people to begin with.)

But there’s one other situation where prophets of enviro-doom might come in handy even when their warnings are overblown. Humans, who set all the policies and invent all the technologies, simply don’t care enough about nonhuman life. We may stop climate change and overpopulation and resource scarcity and air and water pollution out of self-interest, but it’s unlikely that pure self-interest will be enough to stop habitat destruction.

And we are destroying the animals — or at least, many of them. Wild mammals, for instance, have declined by 85% (in terms of biomass) since humans arrived on the scene. 

Statistics on biodiversity and habitat loss generally all point in the same direction.

I’ll write a lot more about why this is happening, and how bad it really is, and what we can do to prevent it, but for now I’d just like to note that it’s highly unlikely that human beings care as much as we should about the welfare of non-human living beings. Some people do care, a lot; but the fact that self-interest is rarely a major factor in our calculations about other animals means that we’ll always tend to care less about actions of ours that harm those voiceless, powerless creatures.

This lack of caring can often be utterly chilling. In an otherwise strong post criticizing Ehrlich’s recent 60 Minutes appearance, Cato senior fellow Marian L. Tupy ended with this disturbing assertion:

But let’s get real. The reason the planet matters is that we are here to perceive it and to enjoy it with our senses. (Animals don’t care about biodiversity per se. What they do care about is finding an organism to kill and eat or mate with.) Moreover, the planet is not a fragile damsel in distress…Rather, it is a ruthless killing zone in need of taming.

This depiction of animals as savage beings who care only about killing and sex is strongly at odds with the experience of anyone who has actually been around animals and seen them demonstrate love, playfulness, and kindness. It also happens to omit animals’ desire to live, to avoid starvation and pain — wildlife exists not just for humans’ benefit, but for its own. And the idea that the savage necessities of life in the wild provide moral justification for human destruction of wild habitats needs some stern reexamining.

Seeing the prevalence of attitudes like this, I wonder if alarmism like Ehrlich’s isn’t a useful counterweight to human callousness. In economics jargon, perhaps overestimating the probability of a sixth mass extinction is a way to better match the private utility functions of the humans who make global economic policy with the social welfare function that includes all living, feeling beings. At the very least, alarmism might help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.

So I’m not ready to throw the degrowth people and the doomers under the proverbial bus quite yet. I just want them to focus their efforts on wildlife, biodiversity, and habitat destruction, and leave climate change to more sober-minded folk.’

For more blogs and articles on Demography, Environment, Eugenics, Limits to Growth, Political Strategy, Statistical Analysis, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

Posted on February 16, 2021

Malthus on Population Growth, Economy, Environment, White Nationalism and Eugenics

In recent years we have observed the reemergence of the British nineteenth century preacher Malthus and his ideas on population, via groups like Population Matters in the United Kingdom, with a focus upon negatives round the supposed direct relationship between increasing population (growth), economic growth or impairment, and environmental degradation.

However, Malthusian population principles have less relevance in the 21st century, especially when presented via scientifically untested ideas or philosophy versus the now available grounded science research and data analysis. Further, there is very limited and sub-optimal data to support Malthusian claims which have returned to become a weapon or political tactic. This leveraging of Malthus includes white nationalism, fossil fuels and environmental degradation, apportioning blame for related issue on undefined population growth, as opposed to the lack of good policy development, on actual causes i.e. fossil fuel pollution, global warming through emissions; used to deflect from inertia of governments and create antipathy towards existing and future ‘immigrants’ including babies, from the non European world.

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

Posted on November 25, 2021

We have already looked at some other key players of the past related to eugenics, population via Malthus and liberal economics of Adam Smith, now we look at Galton, if not in detail, a broad sketch of his life and later impact on society, especially in the Anglosphere.

This has been exemplified by how eugenics theory never went away, even after the Nazis post WWII, but reemerged via the US using an environmental and climate prism, with a focus upon Malthusian population obsessions; supported by ZPG, UNPD data, Anglosphere media and think tanks to avoid regulation and business constraints, while encouraging xenophobia.

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

Posted on May 3, 2022

In recent years we have observed the rise of white nationalism, alt &/or far right, nativism, eugenics, neo-Nazis etc. in the Anglosphere and Europe, often underpinned by divisive dog whistle politics through legacy media. For one to understand modern Anglo &/or European nativism, the past of eugenics and conservation in the US especially, the history of Madison Grant starting over a century ago, needs to be scrutinised. Following is a brief but incomplete overview from relevant literature, including Grant’s own writings.

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

Posted on September 30, 2020

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

Posted on April 10, 2020

The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.

Monbiot – Radical Right Libertarians – Fossil Fuel Think Tanks – Koch & Tanton Networks

Posted on January 14, 2024

Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.

The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.

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.

Global Population Decline and Rebalance

Posted on January 17, 2024

The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.

However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.

Population Growth or Decline?

Posted on October 20, 2019

Since the 1970s, and earlier with Malthus and eugenics movement, we have been presented with the threat of catastrophic population growth due to fertility rates in the less developed world, then due to ‘immigration‘ from the less developed world when in fact we are facing population decline from mid century; contrary to UN Population Division data which inflates future headline growth?

This ‘misunderstanding’ has been highlighted by science journalist Fred Pearce in ‘The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future’; Hans Rosling in ‘Don’t panic the truth about population’; Prof. Wolfgang Lutz of Vienna’s IIASA and Sanjeev Sanyal demographer at Deutsche Bank.

How Conservatives Admire Corrupt Dictators and Authoritarians – Trump and Putin

Article from Michel in TNR The New Republic on the right’s obsession with, respect and desire for authoritarians and dictators, even if corrupt and nativist including Trump and Putin.

While ‘free market’ think tanks, especially US fossil fuel Atlas or Koch Network promote right wing policies for the 1%, and related white nativist Tanton Network entities promote eugenics and the great replacement.

Further, two other central elements include media and ageing citizens; hollowed out legacy media including ‘news deserts’ and now social media being colonised or flooded with far right nativist agitprop to increasing numbers of ageing and/or disadvantaged voters who are less urban, less diverse, less educated and less informed.

Right wing parties, nativists and populists are being used to support both eugenics and corporate friendly policies for the 1% versus 99%, even if against the latter’s interests; see Brexit, Trump and Putin.

From TNR The New Republic:

How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again Trump and Putin are nothing new.

By Casey Michel

For years, an imperialistic, hard-right European dictator unleashing bloodshed across the Continent cultivated supporters across the U.S. This despot claimed he was leading a “unique, anti-Western culture,” and, in so doing, cultivated allies and fellow travelers among conservatives across America, all of whom were disgusted by “corrupt Western liberal values” and who “scorned Western liberalism as a bankrupt ideology.” Nor was this appeal just rhetorical; as investigators later discovered, this right-wing revanchist bankrolled both propaganda efforts and agents on the ground, successfully turning Americans, especially on the right, to his cause.

To modern readers, the story is a familiar one — not least as it pertains to Donald Trump’s affections for Vladimir Putin, to say nothing of how Russian forces have cultivated conservative Americans from Tucker Carlson to the National Rifle Association and beyond. But the aforementioned case has nothing to do with Putin or with Trump. Instead, it took place a century ago, when conservatives across the U.S. flocked to the cause of Germany’s militarist tyrant, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In so doing, as Jacob Heilbrunn successfully argues in his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators, they created a blueprint for how foreign dictators even decades later could cultivate conservative communities to their cause — and could, by the early 21st century, help propel one as far as the presidency. The story of the Americans who worshipped Wilhelm is just one of a range of pro-dictatorship efforts that Heilbrunn excavates, threading a century-long conservative infatuation with right-wing dictators. It’s not only a corrective to the voluminous (if also accurate) investigations on how communist tyrannies fostered leftist supporters in the U.S., but also an able — and wildly timely — effort to stitch together nominally disparate views, from different epochs and eras. 

It all adds up to a convincing conclusion: that Trump, in “lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators … wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics,” Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a previously acclaimed book on the history of neoconservatives, writes. “Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”

It’s a tradition that has seen surprisingly little scrutiny, allowing Trump’s treacly fealty to Putin to seem like an aberration. To be sure, there are elements unique to Trump’s personal predilections — not least his history as a luxury real-estate developer, an industry that profited arguably more than any other from the illicit, kleptocratic flows linked to foreign dictators, laundering untold millions of dollars (and potentially more) in the process. Never before could foreign despots so easily, and so effectively, patronize the company of a sitting American president.

But in other far more conspicuous ways, Trump is simply building on a legacy long predating his rise. There were, for instance, the early devotions to the Ur-Fascist himself, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce presented himself not only as a guarantor of order and stability — and a bastion against left-wing forces in Italy and beyond — but as someone who posed “as a defender of whites,” Heilbrunn notes, who prioritized “family values” and who, “in stark contrast to hedonistic America, cherished manliness.” (He also cherished Wall Street with JP Morgan organizing a loan for the Fascist government worth nearly $2 billion in modern currency.) Conservatives in America lapped it up, fêting not only Mussolini but salivating for a similar leader in the U.S. One conservative writer, Irving Babbitt, bleated that circumstances “may arrive when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”

So, too, did plenty of conservative Americans view the rise of Mussolini’s younger brother, ideologically, in Berlin. While the organization of pro-Nazi sympathizers in America has seen more detailed treatments elsewhere, Heilbrunn ropes in other conservatives who freely platformed Adolf Hitler. Germany’s dictator was freely supported by conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst, who “not only admired the Fuhrer, but commissioned him and Mussolini to write for his newspapers for handsome fees.” Later investigations revealed that Hitler’s regime picked up on the kaiser’s previous model, not only covertly funding agents in the U.S. but even slipping pro-Nazi propaganda into official congressional mailings, recruiting some of the U.S.’s most conservative representatives of the time.

The postwar smothering of fascism didn’t seem to slow conservatives’ lust for right-wing strongmen. By the 1960s, the primary home for such reverence was found not necessarily in Washington but in the pages of National Review, where founder William F. Buckley and his claque of writers apparently never found a hard-right despot they couldn’t support. There was Spain’s Francisco Franco, whom Buckley dubbed an “authentic national hero,” Heilbrunn writes. There was Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who wrote in the magazine that he was “fighting for Western civilization and Christian values.” There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whom Buckley viewed as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” (After Pinochet used a car bomb to assassinate a political opponent in Washington, D.C., Chilean officials turned directly to Buckley for advice on how to “sanitize Pinochet’s reputation,” for which Buckley happily obliged.)

Soon, though, such sentiments swelled back into the White House. By the Reagan era, American affections for right-wing despots during the late Cold War blossomed into official policy. The architect for such fondness was Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as an “unabashed defender” of right-wing regimes throughout her tenure. Nor was she picky about the form. Militarists in Argentina, those running death squads in El Salvador, the authors of apartheid in South Africa: Kirkpatrick, with Reagan in tow, succored them all.

But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later, the Soviet Union shattered. America — and liberalism — stood triumphant. Supporting such regimes was suddenly gauche, out of step with this American moment. And the patterns and preferences that propped up American backing of right-wing dictators slunk back into the shadows.

But it never disappeared entirely. As with so much of the paleoconservative architecture of Trumpism — the nativism and the racism, the suspicion of the federal government and the amorality undergirding it all — Heilbrunn identified Pat Buchanan as the figure who kept the flames of such fawning for right-wing dictators alive. Not only did Buchanan refer to leaders like Hitler as “an individual of great courage,” but Buchanan whipped up opposition to American intervention in the Balkans, calling time and again to let Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic have his way and commit genocide.

As Heilbrunn writes, Buchanan — who would later turn his affections toward figures like Putin, even before Trump entered the White House — “longed for a kind of internationalism rooted in those small towns and conservative values and in whiteness, whether in the U.S. or in Serbia or Russia or South Africa or elsewhere.” For years, Buchanan “seemed like a Cassandra,” but as Heilbrunn added, “One prospective candidate for the presidency who picked up on … Buchanan’s unusual history lessons was a loudmouthed Manhattan real estate mogul” — a figure who gave Buchanan’s views the biggest platform yet, carving an entire political movement out of a conservative tradition few Americans had any idea existed.

Thanks to Heilbrunn’s book, however, that confusion is no more. And while the book’s actual writing verges on the overwrought — words like oneiric and pursuivant belong in spelling bees, not mainstream political analysis — Heilbrunn correctly identifies the core of this conservative strain. Trumpists, and those who came before, “are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.” Just as the white supremacist Redeemers before them claimed they were simply advocating a restoration of democracy, so, too, do the Herrenvolk reactionaries of the MAGA world claim they’re simply restoring supposed American greatness — and that right-wing despots abroad should be allies in the fight.

If there’s a fault in Heilbrunn’s writing, it’s that there might be too much emphasis on such ideological affinity. After all, dictatorships’ abilities to inflame and inflate American conservative support can’t operate without a latticework of supporters. And as we’ve learned in recent years, those operatives — the lobbyists and the PR specialists, the law firms and the consultancies, the former congressional officials who leave office and immediately transform into mouthpieces for foreign regimes — don’t require any ideological overlap with their despotic clients. All they need is to get paid, and they’ll be happy to transform into foot-soldiers for tyranny.

Just look, for instance, at the network that serviced Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian thug who ruled Ukraine until Kyiv’s democratic revolution a decade ago. There was Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. But there was also Tony Podesta, who until the mid-2010s oversaw arguably the leading Democratic lobbying shop in Washington. There was even Tad Devine, who helped Yanukovych grab power in 2010 — and who then steered Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was an ideological potpourri, all working at the behest of an autocrat who tried to cement pro-Russian rule in Kyiv — and whose ouster lit a fuse that detonated stability in Europe and that now risks far more devastation.

But that’s all the subject for another book (mine, called Foreign Agents, will be hitting bookshelves in August). In the meantime, Heilbrunn’s analysis of this glorification of right-wing dictatorships is a warning — as if more were needed — of what a potential Trump second term could look like. Whether it’s Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, or even the echoes of Wilhelmine Germany, the conclusion is clear: “Aggrieved … by what they perceived as their own society’s failings — its liberalism, its tolerance, its increasing secularism — conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model of home.” The kaiser would be proud.

For more articles and blogs on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, Demography, Eugenics, Evangelical Christianity, Media, Political Strategy, Radical Right Libertarian, Russia and Younger Generations click through:

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

Posted on November 5, 2021

Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded.  This is not organic.

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

Posted on April 13, 2022

We have observed the rise of neo authoritarian conservative leaders using nativism and sociocultural issues with media PR support to inform the public, especially voters, suboptimally, including east and west.

However, there are pitfalls for democracy in manipulating access to information by the public or electorate, not just feeding the needs of narcissistic leaders (see article ‘Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons’), but developing societal collective narcissism for populism and electoral advantage aka Brexit, also observed in Hungary, Turkey and Russia.

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

Posted on May 31, 2021

Interesting article from CARR reflecting conservative parties across the world dealing with demographic change, and especially the Anglosphere of the UK, US and Australia where they have been beholden to corporate supporters from the old economy i.e. fossil fuels, agriculture and industry including assembly lines and construction.  Nowadays the new economy of Big Tech, innovation, services and government with more educated and empowered citizens is problematic for the Kochs, Murdochs, DeVos, Scaife et al.

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism

Posted on January 18, 2019

Liberal democracies in western world need to make sure they do not become populist gerontocracies with changing demographics creating elderly ‘Gerrymandering’ where influence and numbers of older voters (with short term horizons) increasing proportionally over younger generations with longer term interests but less voice and influence.

AC Grayling on the Need for more Educated and Informed Citizens

Posted on September 1, 2023

When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?

Across the Anglosphere and Europe many mostly ageing dominant voters, politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.

British Young People Thrown Under a Bus for Votes in Ageing Demographics

Posted on September 21, 2023

Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.

Radical Right Takeover of Conservatives

Good article on Conservative far right by Claire Jones in the West England ByLine Times; ByLine Times is worth subscribing to.

The ‘new Conservative far right’ may not be ‘new’ when one recognises the themes, talking points, media dynamics and ideology hiding behind; nor is it unique to the U.K., but transnational, even if the roots were centuries ago in the U.K..

Underpinning the right’s strategy and tactics are ageing demographics whereby above median age vote, more likely to be conservative, especially in regions, and dominates the above median age, but often low info or not educated, angry or narcissistic, and less diverse than urban centres as demographic change rolls on. 

Firstly several US fossil fueled Atlas Koch Network think tanks or outlets at Tufton Street, behind media and Tory used in lobbying and PR on preferred policies, are cited especially ‘climate science denial’, low taxes and small government; also behind Brexit and in the US the GOP, FoxNews etc., Donald Trump, and also Argentina, Australia, New Zealand etc..

Further, U.K. media landscape, has been complicated like elsewhere by digital and social media, which was preceded by hollowing out and dilution of regulatory constraints by Murdoch led media, leading to now pro-Brexit and pro-Putin Legatum’s GB News adding to curation of content and promotion of talking points for a more substantive or dominant right wing media landscape.

Many of the nativist, Brexit and anti-immigrant talking points are also imported, though originated with Malthus and Galton, from the network of dec. white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton of ZPG Zero Population Growth and groups lobbying previous GOP leaders, up to advising on Donald Trump’s immigration and border policies.

Although Tanton’s network flies under the radar, their talking points do not, and are personified by Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, UKIP now Reform, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Marie Le Pen, Hungarian PM Orban, UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott, Migration Watch etc.

From West England ByLine Times:

Mad, bad and dangerous – the new Conservative far-right

A post-election far-right power grab is looming. In 2024 we have a unique, possibly last, opportunity to prevent it

By Claire Jones 28 February 2024

With a Labour win now allegedly ‘baked in’, it’s fashionable to mock the Conservative Right (or ‘far-right’). But should we?  

The Conservative Right is a loose alliance that includes the Institute for Economic Affairs, (IEA) European Research Group ,  Popular Conservativism, (PopCon), The New Conservatives, The Common Sense Group and National Conservativism.

Notable members are Liz Truss, Jacob Rees Mogg, Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson, Andrea Jenkyns, Miriam Cates and Robert Jenrick. Common alliance themes are euroscepticism, climate scepticism, cultural conservativism, anti-immigration and economic neo-liberalism.

Some use these themes selectively, strategically even, to woo voters. But many, like Jenrick, eraser of children’s murals, are ‘full believers’, wholeheartedly committed to the entire box of ideological tricks.

‘Putting nanny to bed’

Two broad principles underpinning the alliance are libertarianism and  suppression. High on the ideological bucket list for the IEA and PopCon is economic libertarianism: financial deregulation and low taxation in free markets operating unfettered by the ‘nanny state’. 

Undeterred by her cataclysmic experiment with this idea during her brief tenure as PM, Truss recently returned, without shame, to re-present it at PopCon’s inaugural conference.

PopCon and other groups extend libertarianism to individual freedoms. We must be free to make our own choices, unconstrained by the state, they say. Measures to reduce air pollution and increase road safety are deemed an affront to driver freedom. Paying green levies, driving petrol cars, vaping, and overdosing on sugar, etc should all be matters of individual choice. Some regard the Covid lockdowns as a particularly invidious example of state control. Freedom from the nanny state apparently equates with freedom to kill oneself, others and the planet. But libertarians are seemingly untroubled by the ‘death wis’

 accompanying their vision.

Jiggery wokery

While individual liberty is celebrated, wokery requires suppression. ‘Woke’ is an elastic term applied to a diversity of groups:  “left-wing extremists”, “environmentalists”, lawyers (for criticising the Rwanda scheme), civil servants (for ignoring “the peoples’ bidding”), the RNLI (for providing ‘migrant taxis’), the Premier League (for ‘taking a knee’), and the National Trust (for giving imperialism a bad name by providing honest histories of their artefacts). In line with Georgia Meloni, Truss and others also include “supporters of LGBT people”.

But there’s a tension here between libertarianism and repression. Isn’t there a flagrant double-standard in saying we should be free to e.g. pollute the environment, but not to protest about it? That we should unshackle ourselves from the European Court of Human Rights, but tighten government control over our own supreme court?

Truss ‘fixes’ this conundrum by explaining that citizens are made to feel prohibited from speaking out. Militant, purist wokerati are trying to “drown us out” and must therefore be silenced. This ‘solution’ is buttressed by appeal to ‘the will of the people’, a fantasy consensus, concocted to justify populist policies (such as the Rwanda plan). Wokery must be suppressed because it obstructs the freedoms of ‘the majority’.

Getting bolder

The UK Conservative Right echoes the far-right thinking stealing across Europe (the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Greece, Sweden and elsewhere). Opposition to immigration is a shared theme and was the hand, dressed in racist rhetoric, that guided Brexit.

Our mainstream press is traditionally coy about describing Conservative factions as ‘far-right’. But last week, Lee Anderson claimed that “Islamists have got control of Kahn and London”. Oliver Dowden, deputy prime minister, failed to condemn this bald-faced Islamophobia. Instead, he insisted an apology would be sufficient to avoid a penalty, thus neatly priming the political airspace for further racism. Here Anderson and Dowden displayed a striking new boldness that crashed straight past our media barriers, laying bare the Right’s true colours.

With equal verve, Truss, the US far-right’s latest useful idiot, gave a presentation last week at CPAC in which the mask of Conservative moderation vapourised in the heat of MAGA enthusiasm. With cult-grade paranoia, she railed against “agents of the left”, including trans activists, whom she accused of infiltrating the civil service. On she ploughed, attacking the deep state “wokeonomics” that had thwarted her premiership, and calling for anti-woke Conservatives to unite globally.

And this is happening. The UK Conservative Right is strengthening its links with global far-right networks via mediators such as Truss, Farage and Steve Bannon, via the party’s numerous other Trump apologists, who deploy tactics straight from the Trump playbook, and via an increase in new far-right press and media channels. GB news founder, Sir Paul Marshall, a ‘liker’ of tweets supporting the ‘great replacement theory’ and expulsions of “fake refugee invaders”, is now a prospective purchaser of the Daily Telegraph. Our centre-ground commentariat expresses its revulsion but the network-building continues.

Mad as a box of frogs?

The Conservative Party is in for a hammering at the next election, with many of its right-wing MPs poised to lose their seats. So, why worry? Can’t we just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of a bunch of crackpot cultists shouting into the wind? Labour is coming, so ‘what’s to fear’?

But the question is: how good would we actually be at defending ourselves from the extremist ideologies menacing Europe?

The Conservative centre-ground is losing influence just as the party is trying to re-absorb ReformUK interest. So, in line with Europe, as the party re-assembles during Labour’s difficult first term, it is likely to morph rightwards on immigration, anti-woke cultural conservativism, the suppression of judicial independence, and our right to protest. If Trump is re-elected this will give further succour to fledgling UK ideological variants. And if these new iterations decide that it’s expedient to pose as ‘centre-ground’, voters (and Ofcom) may be slow to notice.

Labour travail

The good news is that the UK has a progressive majority, concealed by first-past-the-post (FPTP), but clearly there in attitude surveys. Our progressive values ought to protect us from a far-right incursion.

The less good news is that we thought the same, until recently, of parts of Europe. Wilders’ Freedom Party seeded in a famously egalitarian, socially innovative, ‘high trust’ society with “low corruption, press freedom and moderation”. But he ramped up anti-immigration rhetoric whilst tapping into feelings of economic and cultural neglect and, like Meloni, attracted strong youth support.

In broken Britain, we share many ailments that have driven European countries into the arms of the far-right. Every aspect of our well-being has been ravaged by 14 years of Conservative decimation: our physical environment, economic prospects, health and social services, trading relationships, and cultural life. The Office For Budget Responsibility forecasts that continuing falls in average household disposable incomes will profoundly impact living standards for many years.

Truly, Labour will inherit a ‘very sick patient’. The challenge posed by the Conservative legacy is so huge and Labour’s approach so timid and so hard to distinguish from its predecessors, that it’s difficult to avoid the prospect of voters falling out of love with Labour fast.

Here’s a realistic scenario: at the next general election, the country makes a final leap of faith to Labour, only to find that (through inexperience, narrowness of vision, impossible fiscal constraints, or global events) Labour cannot repair Blighty sufficiently (or fast enough) to retain support.

The message will, at this point, be the same as elsewhere, that centre ground politics (right and left) has failed. And it’s in such desperate times that countries lean towards extreme solutions. The toxic cocktail of poor living standards, widening inequality and political cynicism creates a vacuum where extremism steps in.

Other drivers

In the UK, currently just one in five under 40s trust their MPs. Also, despite our prized progressive majority, we are increasingly polarised. Note to the complacent: polarising anti-immigration rhetoric worked its magic sufficiently to land us with Brexit.

Other potential drivers are global events: climate change will keep migration, and hence anti-immigration anxiety, alive. The Ukraine war is driving voter disenchantment with progressive government and high energy prices which hinder prosperity. If destabilising wars in the Middle East and Ukraine escalate, the UK could retreat to a Blitz mindset that’s super-receptive to the Churchillian call for strong, authoritarian leadership. Another Trump apologist, Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, reassures us that Trump is “able to project strength and be prepared to wield it if necessary in a perilous world”.

Lastly, FPTP traps UK politics in a duopolistic cycle of power, endlessly relayed between the two main parties and in which the Conservative Right:

 “…will be incentivised to take back the keys fast from a disorientated Labour party … Left and Right parties conduct a dance of disappointment as, in turn, one fails to meet the challenges of a poly-crisis world, leaving the other to fill the void. But the direction of travel points to the populist Right and the triumph of strong leaders over weakening democracies.”

Lawson on Radical Pragmatism

A precious moment

Let’s hope Labour can overcome these vulnerabilities. But rather than waiting with fingers crossed, isn’t it wiser to act now to head off a future far-right power-grab?

Regardless of the size of Labour’s win, the immediate imperative is to maximize a Conservative defeat at the general election by voting tactically. Tactical voting is a crucial insurance policy. We insure things we value by rating, not just the statistical likelihood, but also the seriousness, of potential damage. We need tactical voting to cut the Conservative Right’s blood supply now because their future return could be catastrophic.  This year we have a unique (possibly last) opportunity to step in, use our progressive muscle, and seize the narrative.’

For more blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Climate Change, EU European Union, Koch Network, Nativism, Political Strategy, Populist Policies and Tanton Network, click through:

British Young People Thrown Under a Bus for Votes in Ageing Demographics

Posted on September 21, 2023

Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.

Climate Change Science Attitudes Australia and Koch in USA

Posted on July 7, 2020

Climate science or climate change denialism have been apparent for some decades since the 1970s with Koch Industries being central along with ‘big oil’ of Exxon Mobil etc. in funding through ‘Dark Money’ academia, research, think tanks, media, politicians and PR techniques to influence society.  Now we see the results including wide-spread climate denialism, avoidance of environmental protections and negative media PR campaigns; meanwhile the roots of this strategy have become more transparent with legal action following.

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.

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

CPAC Conservative Political Action Conference and the John Birch Society

Posted on March 14, 2024

CPAC US has been in the news for falling audiences and fallings out between different groups and players, while CPAC Hungary will be held 25-26th April in Budapest.  

Recently both The Atlantic and SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center have highlighted the links between CPAC and the anti-communist John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, with assistance from others including Fred Koch.

Fred Koch was the father of Charles Koch who in turn helped create the Atlas – Koch Network of global think tanks, along with Tanton Network nativism or eugenics from the old Rockefeller supported ZPG Zero Population Growth; underpins the threat of the ‘great replacement’ of the WASP 1% by lower orders and ‘other types’.

Heritage Foundation – Danube Institute – Trump – Hungarian PM Orban – Atlas – Koch Network – Conservatives

Posted on March 18, 2024

The Heritage Foundation has attracted attention of writer Michel in a The New Republic article below for Trump’s admiration of Hungarian PM Orban and how it has become more far right and extreme e.g. anti-Ukraine sentiments.

Additionally, the linked Danube Institute in Hungary is led by former Thatcher aide John O’Sullivan and European contributor for Australian conservative journal Quadrant. 

Brexit and UK Political Interference by Putin, Russia and Anglo Conservative Allies

Posted on March 12, 2024

Still, there is discussion and analysis of Brexit versus the EU and Trump versus Biden’s Democrat administration, with accusations and allegations being made against Conservative MPs, Ministers, some Labour, media, Anglo right wing grifters, US fossil fueled Atlas – Koch Network think tanks at Tufton, related nativist Tanton Network and Russians, including FSB, diplomats, media and oligarch types.

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.

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.

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

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.

SEAN KELLY

JANUARY 29, 2024

When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here.

Six years ago, Australia held a nationwide vote on gay marriage. During the brutal campaign, Sydney-based author Benjamin Law published a long essay accusing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of stoking a “moral panic” over a program safeguarding queer kids from bullying. Then he waited for the blowback. He knew it was not a question of whether the operation would retaliate but how. Soon after, he got an email from a journalist at one of Murdoch’s papers, asking for his reaction to a story they were writing about him. He felt dread. “You know that things are going to get really hairy.”

Around the world, Murdoch’s publications are known for maliciously pursuing their enemies. The technique is known as “monstering,” and the British journalist Nick Davies has likened it to the way “muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp.” Sometimes, these targets have earned attention by doing something egregious. Just as often they have simply picked the wrong side of a culture war. The simplest, most reliable way to signal you have made this regrettable mistake is by publicly criticizing Murdoch or his outlets….

…..This is a time of transition for Rupert Murdoch. In September, the 92-year-old announced that he was standing down as chair of both Fox and News Corp. His eldest son, Lachlan, will take over. Within the Australian wing of the organization, this is viewed as formalizing arrangements that have been in place for several years; it is nonetheless an historic moment. The assets Rupert is handing to Lachlan are spread across the large English-speaking nations: His companies own TV stations, a book publisher, and some of the most famous newspapers in the world, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and British papers The Sun and The Times. For a half-century, Murdoch’s influence has been most obvious in Australia, where News Corp controls more than 100 newspapers—including The Australian and several tabloids—that command more than half of the country’s readership, and a cable TV station called Sky News, modeled on Fox News.

Over the past 13 years, that influence has become steadily more controversial. In that time, Australia has endured political turmoil. Six people have led the country, one of them twice. 

Among the causes of this melodrama you might list ambition, cowardice, revenge—and the Murdoch press, which has been a constant force. As with the rise of Trump and the events of January 6, much of this mess seems unthinkable, almost inexplicable, until you remember: Murdoch’s operation was involved. Public frustration with the outlets has grown. They are criticized in other parts of the press and vilified on social media. Stickers telling people not to read Murdoch tabloids can be seen stuck to utility poles across the country……

……“For most of my life,” veteran journalist Margaret Simons tells me, “it’s been assumed that you couldn’t win government in Australia without the backing or at least the consent of Murdoch.” Now, she says, this is changing. In 2022, after nine years out of power, Labor won the national election without the backing of the Murdoch outlets. Labor holds power, too, in all but one of the country’s eight states and territories. The era of News Corp seeming to select prime ministers may be finished.

Suggestions that the Murdoch empire is declining in the place that Rupert first built it are tantalizing to his critics. That this alleged decline coincides with such a delicate handover—from all-powerful father to relatively untested son—may raise these hopes still higher: Perhaps this is the moment those terrified of Murdoch have been waiting for all these years. After all, if it can happen there, surely it could happen anywhere—perhaps even everywhere.

“This is a thing a lot of people don’t understand about power,” a former prime minister of Australia, the Liberal Party’s Malcolm Turnbull, tells me. “For me, power without purpose is pointless, right? But for a lot of people, and Rupert’s one of them, power is a goal in itself. If you said to him, ‘why do you like power?’ it would be like saying to someone ‘why do you like sex? Or chocolate?’ The answer is, ‘I don’t know why I like it but it’s great.’”…

…..The most common reason offered for the decline in Murdoch’s power over elections is that newspapers are dying. Margaret Simons—who has both worked for The Australian and been monstered by it—believes all media has lost influence, but says Murdoch’s papers have lost more influence than others. Other competitors have come along, too. Simons sits on the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian, which just celebrated its 10th birthday in Australia. The facts are far from clear. Media analyst Denis Muller reminds me the Murdoch papers are still among the most read in Australia. Because the shift to digital has made figures hard to track, he is not even willing to say readership has fallen. In late 2022, News Corp Australia announced that for the first time it had 1 million digital subscribers.

Simons told me that, during her own monstering, she felt “besieged” and was unable to sleep. Another victim told a journalist for the Australian news site Crikey, “I could spend half a weekend in agony.” When the Australian writer Robert Manne asked an Indigenous Australian woman about the impact a Murdoch campaign had had on her life, “She could not speak.” The power of the Murdoch outlets in Australia has never rested only with elections. The other element is primal: fear of what they can do to you….

…..What had happened in those 12 months was dramatic: Murdoch and his newspapers were rocked by revelations of illegal phone-hacking conducted by journalists at News of the World, one of Murdoch’s British papers. The public was particularly outraged to discover that in 2002 a phone belonging to Milly Dowler—a 13-year-old who had disappeared and was later found murdered—had been hacked. Massive scandal followed. Murdoch shuttered the 150-year-old paper. Rupert and his son James were called to answer questions before a parliamentary committee. Manne would later write that the “struggle to expose the criminal behaviour of News International was successful” because a “handful of individuals…behaved as if they were not frightened.” Lawyers and journalists—as well as politicians and celebrities victimized by Murdoch’s tabloids—had refused to “capitulate.” Of all the political virtues, he wrote, “courage” was the most consequential. It seems this was on Manne’s mind as he penned the conclusion to his essay, where he wrote that he could see only one solution to The Australian’s pernicious influence: “courageous external and internal criticism.” Other news organizations had largely avoided focusing on Murdoch, preferring not to risk battle with the ferocious billionaire. Meanwhile, journalists inside The Australian stayed mutely acquiescent, despite concern at what Manne called the paper’s “frequent irrationalism.” If those both outside and inside the empire began to speak up, perhaps there was hope….

….Five years later, it was Malcolm Turnbull, from the conservative Liberal Party, who got a kicking. This time, Rupert himself flew to Australia. This was an annual trip to oversee his companies—but as one of Turnbull’s staff later told The Guardian, “There was no doubt there was a marked shift in the tone and content of the News Corp publications once Rupert arrived.” Within two weeks, Turnbull, who had been pushing for more action on climate change, was replaced as prime minister by a more right-wing colleague who had once brought a black lump of coal into the parliament, bellowing, “This is coal! Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you!” Stories about Rupert Murdoch in pitched battle with a prime minister were too juicy to ignore, even for a risk-averse press. Two apparent interventions in five years? Undeniably sensational. The issue of Murdoch’s influence was finally getting the debate it deserved…..

…..Then, in August 2022, Lachlan Murdoch threatened to sue Crikey, a small Australian news website, after it published an article calling the Murdoch family an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Rather than backing down, Crikey took out an ad in the New York Times, effectively daring Lachlan to sue. The next day, he did—but eight months later, after Fox reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion, he backed down.

The line between perceived power and actual power can be thin. People believe you have influence—to win elections, to destroy lives—and so you do. Your authority becomes a perpetual motion machine of dominance. “Murdoch works by frightening,” David Marr says. If Murdoch’s power was not working in quite the way it used to, it was because too many people had refused to be frightened.

The machinery was breaking down.

Some Americans may want to take comfort from the idea they are heading in Australia’s direction, toward a time when the Murdochs are less relevant. But what if it’s the other way around, and Australia is on its way to becoming America? “For those concerned about the cumulative impact of Fox News in America on the radicalization of US politics,” Kevin Rudd advised the Australian Senate in 2021, “the same template is being followed with Sky News in Australia. We will see its full impact in a decade’s time.”….

….Ferocity has long been at the heart of Murdoch’s power in both countries. The experience in Australia—so far at least—suggests the effectiveness of ferocity may have a limit: At some point, people might stop taking you seriously. David Marr insists The Australian remains in many respects an excellent paper with excellent journalists, but says other outlets now ignore even its best stories. He mentions one recent scandal: “It’s a big, big story, but in the rest of the press there’s a deep reluctance to follow it because it’s from The Australian.”

A similar limit may exist for major political parties. Turnbull, who “really admired” Murdoch when they first met almost 50 years ago, does not underestimate the older man’s influence to date: “It’s hard to think of one person that has made a bigger contribution to delaying action on climate in the world…And, of course, Trump and January 6: wow. There isn’t a person alive today who has done more damage to the United States.” At what point, though, do the parties backed by the Murdoch media become so extreme—so fanatically obsessed with fringe issues—that they stop attracting mainstream support?…

.

…..Unless detachment from reality is the point. In Australia, Sky is often dismissed for its relatively small TV audience. In recent years, though, it has turned increasingly to the production of short videos designed for distribution on social media, feeding off right-wing talking points and conspiracy theories. The success of these videos has been staggering—on YouTube, they have received over 3 billion views. Nor is their success only in Australia—in fact, it is possible Australians are not the target market, with one recent report finding Sky News’ digital audience across platforms was 38 percent American and only 26 percent Australian. A striking number of the comments on the YouTube videos seem to come from Americans (“Thank you Sky News for reporting the truth about what really goes on here in America,” reads one, fairly typical). The “QAnon Shaman”—the January 6 rioter wearing a fur hat, face paint, and horns—had posted links to Sky videos. Australians host many of the clips, but Megyn Kelly—previously of Fox News—stars in several of the most recent.

Sky must have published hundreds of videos about Joe Biden and cognitive decline, says Cameron Wilson—one of the journalists who first noticed Sky’s strategy—because the topic “always does incredibly well.” He says the site makes little sense if you think of it as playing to an Australian audience. “It makes much more sense when you realize they’re trying to go viral online.” Stories about China covering up the origins of coronavirus are popular. Viewers have been warned about the “Great Reset” conspiracy (“You will own nothing, and you will be happy”) and reassured by the global cooling soon to set in. There is a mildly aggressive tone—videos where someone is “mocked” or “slammed” do well. New revenue deals with tech giants like Google and Facebook mean the content receives prominent online billing, as though it is mainstream news……

…..This does not mean Murdoch’s influence is declining. Rather, it has shape-shifted, becoming something at once more pervasive and better hidden—which also makes it near-impossible to fight. The challenges to Murdoch in Australia have so far taken different forms: the teasing humor of Benjamin Law; the courage of Rashna Farrukh; the brazen public campaign of Rudd and Turnbull. In each case, it was clear who and what they were standing up to. So long as the tabloid formula was contained in a TV broadcast, or the pages of a newspaper, it was possible to recognize it, name it, and refuse it…..

….To believe that News Corp’s influence is fading based on old, increasingly outdated metrics may be a catastrophic misreading of the ways in which power is developing in our century.  This could mean that Lachlan is taking over at exactly the right time. So long as the success and influence of the Murdoch empire was tied to fear of his father, there remained a question: Lachlan could inherit the assets, but what about the terrifying myth? This turns out not to matter as much as it once did. Rupert has already stepped back, and one day he will be gone—but the machine he began building so many years ago will continue to do its work.’

For more blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Australian Politics, Conservative, COVID-19, Demography, Eugenics, Evangelical Christianity, Immigration, Media, Populist Politics, Russia and White Nationalism click through:

The Secret Jewish History Of The Greatest General You’ve Never Heard Of

This anti-Semitic backlash versus General Sir John Monash was spearheaded by Charles Bean and Keith Murdoch, who conspired amongst themselves to see to the dismissal of Monash. Bean was the official Australian war historian at the time. Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s father, was a journalist. The two of them began a campaign to try and convince the upper echelons of Australia’s military that Monash was at best incompetent; at worst, a German spy.

Bean wrote, of Monash, “We do not want Australia represented by men mainly because of the ability, natural and inborn in Jews, to push themselves forward.” Eventually, their hate-filled lies reached the ears of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who became convinced that Monash should be relieved of command. Hughes personally traveled to Monash’s camp before the Battle of Hamel, to relieve him of duty. Upon arriving at the camp, and speaking directly with the officers, he realized that Monash was not at fault, and changed his mind. By then, the damage had already been done. The slander thrown out by Murdoch and Bean is largely credited with why Monash never attained the rank of Field Marshal during the war, despite his many accolades and accomplishments during and after it.

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

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.

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?

Australia – Indigenous Voice Referendum – Atlas – Koch Network – CIS – IPA – Murdoch

Australia has had its Brexit or Trump moment on the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, being usurped by a proxy election campaign, with outcomes being divided society, communities and no real solutions.

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

Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.  

Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.

Trump January 6 Insurrection, Conspiracy and Project 25 for Autocracy

Thom Hartmann in Alternet has written a prescient article, ‘What if Trump’s conspiracy was way bigger than we know?’ that both infers from the noise around Trump and also asks, is there something deeper occurring around the GOP, US and transnational politics?

Interesting overview and thesis, withstanding Hartmann has not included related machinations in the Anglosphere, especially U.K., Australia, Russia, Central Eastern Europe and Hungary whether Brexit or Russian influence.

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

Return to questions over the U.K. Russia Report, former PM Johnson, Brexit, Conservative government, Russian oligarchs and influence on elections including the EU referendum..

Written by Peter Jukes and originally published January 2023 by ByLine Times, asking questions that are not only unresolved, but actively avoided by the Tories, media and supporters for the advantage of Putin’s Russia and oligarchs, both east and west?