We don’t expect the free market’s ad men to understand their movement’s deep integration with eugenicist ideas. It is worth knowing that fact, however much they will deny the relevance of their origin stories.
Peter Kurti, of the Atlas Network’s Centre for Independent Studies, wrote an opinion piece for The Australian recently called “Citizenship based on rights can’t replace the glue of civil society.” There he posits “social cohesion” as more important than rights. He blames “multiculturalism” for the reluctance of Australians to volunteer. These are baseless tropes common to the Atlas Network, and also to Viktor Orbán’s junktank space where Kurti is a feature.
British investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed has just published a book tracking the tight integration of the same American eugenics movement that fed the Nazi death camps into the “science” of free market economics. The integration of “former” Nazis and fellow travellers into the movement around libertarianism is made quite clear in his account. The same donors that fund the Atlas Network also funded the “science” of class and racial difference.
It is not surprising that a movement designed to serve the rich should emerge out of racist beliefs. The upper classes of the early 20th century tended to be eugenicist and many supported the Nazis. The 19th century Social Darwinist idea that success, in society or business, reflected genetic fitness never went away.
The Mont Pelerin Society (that later birthed the Atlas Network to act as the self-replicating advertising agency for its oligarch donors’ policy goals) was established in 1947 to fight the threat of communism. Property had to be protected from the masses. Keynesian government involvement in the market and society was just another form of theft for these economist-servants of the upper echelons.
At the same time, Ahmed explains, the proto-CIA was integrating former Nazi spies into the Western intelligence gathering circuit where they fostered anti-Soviet hysteria for their own purposes. William Casey was one of the key OSS figures in that era and later director of the CIA under Reagan.
Casey also worked with the creator of the Atlas Network Sir Antony Fisher, co-founding together Fisher’s first American junktank, the Manhattan Institute.(1)
Race, empire and capitalism have deeply intertwined roots. Part of the monumental global violence of the Cold War involved empires and capitalist forces rejecting the colonised people’s demand for freedom. One of the Atlas Network’s roles has been to deploy disgruntled local elites to foster a more convenient definition of “freedom” that protects the local (lighter skinned) aristocracy’s property, alongside the (foreign) corporations’ investments and profits.
The Cold War struggle against redistribution came to demarcate the “communist” enemy in any group that wanted equal rights. Old racisms were recast as factual detection of communist subversion. The Civil Rights movement was depicted by the propagandists entrenching privilege as a communist threat.
Many amongst the moneyed class in America belonged to the notorious John Birch Society through the 1950s into the 70s. Charles Koch, one of the key Atlas Network donors and strategists later in the century bought a lifetime membership. His father had been a founding member. Birch was an hysterical conspiracist organisation that fought communism but was also explicitly racist.
So the fact that key Atlas donors like the Mellon-Scaifes, Bradleys and Olins were also funding research to establish that “science” could shore up the Evolutionary Ladder is not surprising. They wanted the proof that Black people were genetically inferior.
It had the adjunct benefit of establishing that the White working class was inferior also.
Atlas junktanks and Rupert Murdoch, who was a junktank director at Atlas’s Cato Institute in the 90s, fostered the career and disseminated the writing of figures like Charles Murray who gave them the (discredited) science to fight “welfare.” There was no value in helping the poor, of any skin colour, if they were genetically trapped in their suffering.
Many of the same donors funded the transition of the race biology industry into the Islamophobia industry after 9/11. They needed a new enemy, now that Russia was White and Christian again. Creating a sense that there was an integral “clash of civilisations” with the Islamic “world” was as useful as the certainty that the Soviets were an existential threat and that Black people were genetically inferior.
Many of same figures and families continue to work now in this movement that gradually flipped Western society from a Keynesian understanding of political economy to a neoliberal one.
In the wake of the shooting of a CEO in New York, there have been many musings on the “ruthless arithmetic” of neoliberal capitalism, the implicit knowledge that some lives have no value for the shareholder.
The same old idea of the fungibility of the lower orders underpins the Atlas Network’s Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) hosting Jay Bhattacharya in Australia during the pandemic to promote his easily debunked research fighting public health measures. The massive death toll amongst (darker skinned) “essential workers” in the USA was a small price to pay for quarterly profit protection.
One of the reasons such tools argued that schools must remain open (despite the unwillingness to allow investment in the improvements that would make schools safer during a pandemic) is because the CEOs needed them as childminding.
Atlas Network junktanks fight any regulation that translates into making workplaces and products safer. Their workers, neighbours and customers can die if the shareholder is happy.
The demonisation of “welfare” by Atlas Network junktanks over the decades created the space for Alan Tudge’s threats towards the battlers in the rhetoric around Robodebt. It provides the context for the individual cases that Tudge had extracted and provided to “friendly” media to ruin the reputation of people complaining about the illegal program.
The rich are on tax strike, one of the Atlas Network’s key goals. Much of the common wealth that is collected is funnelled up to the investors in industries such as the weapons sector, or just gifted as Jobkeeper overpayments were. This limits the money available for social goods.
That means that Kurti’s emphasis on volunteering becomes even more important. If the oligarchs have ensured that there is very little money available for the community, we need volunteers to compensate. The neoliberal project also partly works to fan up “family values” because they need women to provide the care for the family unit that they have prevented society making available.
And the enemy must be depicted as the Other. Whether it is the Black rights activist who must be portrayed as “communist” or the multicultural society that Kurti singles out as undermining “social cohesion,” the enemy cannot be the oligarch whose propaganda has enabled making our lives more precarious. Viktor Orbán is the guiding light of those who want ethnostates, the only way they can imagine cohesion.
The alleged socialism of anyone who wants their rights protected continues in random allegations of “socialism” by Atlas Network operatives. They rant against the trope of “woke” which they claim is the product of “cultural marxism,” a fevered furphy that is both an allegation of socialism and an antisemitic slur.(2)
The roots of the racism and desired inequality that underpinned the creation of the Atlas Network continue in its talking points now. We need to help those around us see those ghostly echoes for the dangerous entrenchment of privilege that they are.
- Atlas’s Manhattan Institute now has Christopher Rufo as a Senior Fellow. This is the man who took the academic legal study of residual racist laws from past eras – Critical Race Theory – and turned it into a frenzied effort by the MAGA base to prevent the teaching of accurate history in schools. His work to return American education to a White mythologised version of the nation’s history has been very effective at mobilising – and distracting – the radicalised base. Rufo followed up that work with a second toxic campaign to erase the existence of LGBTQIA+ people from education. Rufo is one of the connections between the acknowledged Atlas junktanks and Viktor Orbán’s junktank sphere.
- Jack Posobiec was a 2019 Fellow at Atlas’s Claremont Institute. Claremont was a more reputable right-wing junktank but has become radicalised. It has many personnel connections with an “extremist fraternal order” with Christofascist goals. It hosted senior personnel connected to the plot behind Donald Trump’s insurrection attempt in 2021. It appeared to be promoting a new civil war. Jack Posobiec has written a book that labels anyone not belonging to the radicalised Right a “socialist” threat and an Unhuman. The violence likely to follow thathas clear historical precedents.
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The article contains much useful material, including this gem -- “And the enemy must be depicted as the Other. Whether it is the Black rights activist who must be portrayed as “communist” or the multicultural society that Kurti singles out as undermining “social cohesion,” the enemy cannot be the oligarch whose propaganda has enabled making our lives more precarious.”
Yet still Lucy refuses to acknowledge the origins of the power that oligarchs wield.
Still she asserts that the philosophy behind the alliance between the wealthy and the far Right began with or about the establishment of the Mont Pelerin Society. Even though I alerted her to its far earlier origins at her Corporatocracy article.
The neo-liberal policy of granting more and more power to elites began with the Magna Carta. This was never challenged by the liberal movement when it developed to justify the inequities that were ever-present, but which accelerated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
It became central to liberal policy and has remained so with the progression to neo-liberalism.
The early liberal economists, Smith, Mill, Ricardo etc were aware of the danger, but their class loyalty prevented them from taking effective steps to eliminate the inequities. Class loyalty even influenced J M Keynes.
Because liberalism itself is built on class distinction.
Which brings us to the eugenics matter.
What is eugenics but the end-point, the final phase, of class discrimination?
This is because a eugenics philosophy requires of its adherents an innate sense of superiority that gives them knowledge of what constitutes the best interests of others and of society without the need for the consent of, or consultation with, its subjects/victims.
And the concept itself was present and active well before the rise of Mont Pelerin or Atlas as the article itself makes clear -- “The upper classes of the early 20th century tended to be eugenicist and many supported the Nazis. The 19th century Social Darwinist idea that success, in society or business, reflected genetic fitness never went away.”
But the article does not explain why it never went away.
Did it just bubble away in some dark corner of society, to re-emerge with the rise of neo-liberalism?
Not at all.
It was misleading to say “The same donors that fund the Atlas Network also funded the “science” of class and racial difference.” It was ever-present and influential across society and had been since the time of Francis Galton. It influenced public policy, as in the sterilsation of Afro-Americans in the 1950s. Even well known figures of the Left such as G B Shaw were taken in by the false science behind it.
Interestingly, it persists today in the gene-centric view of evolution.
So eugenics did not die, and it is not just a feature of the far Right and their wealthy allies. It persisted across the liberal democracies because class distinction is the beating heart of liberalism.
If the far Right and its allies have embraced eugenics, we have liberals to thank for that.
We could wipe out the Atlas Network and every right-wing think tank tomorrow and we would still have class discrimination and eugenics.
Ahh Steve. The man whose single-minded mission is almost single-handedly sending me to a fraction of the readership on Substack.
You straw man me. You reduce and remove nuance. You want me to have your research project, not mine. If you don't find me engaging with your points, that's why.
Lucy, please explain your strawman comment.
When I make a comment about an article I give evidence for it.
Please do the same for me.
You said "You want me to have your research project, not mine."
Or an alternative view could be that I'm adding to yours.
We could be collaborators! :-)
Fucking. Hell. Steve.
It doesn't matter. It really does not matter if, or how much, your interpretation of liberalism fed into the current state of the world. What matters is exactly what that state is and how we fix it.
Substack has to be better than constantly enduring this person's obsession with semantics, Lucy.
"What matters is exactly what that state is and how we fix it."
So how do we fix it leefe?
Lucy, on re-reading I did find something of a strawman in my comment, in that I focused on neo-liberalism while the heading related to Atlas. But in my defense a strawman is deliberate, while my focus was not a deliberate diversion, because further to my defense you did link Peter Kurti with “the neoliberal project”.
You said “It is not surprising that a movement designed to serve the rich should emerge out of racist beliefs.” If by that you meant neo-liberalism then that is not the case, as I explained earlier. If you meant Atlas then that is also not the case.
These projects that protect elite interests, no matter the name they go under, all developed from the liberalism historical thread that I have outlined. They might use racism as a tool, but that is not their reason for being.
They could even deride liberalism, but they all share crucial elements with liberalism because they exploit the groundwork that was established by liberalism.
Among other things, they exploit the undermining of working class consciousness and solidarity that has been part of the liberal project from the beginning, and has been so successful.
How do we fix it?
That has been the question for a long long time.
Always the ruling elite have demonstrated their belief that they are better, better bred, better blood lines, better what evers.
That they may have clawed to their position of privilege over the backs ... or should that be dead bodies of those lesser beings they enslaved in one way or another. The fact is they think their shit does not stink and wander around with clothes pegs on their noses in order to not be 'corrupted' by the stench of the great unwashed.
How do we fix it?
In the current world of X and Trumpisms, ignore those bastards, ignore Elon Musk who if we let him will become the unelected leader of the world, destroying the gains we have made in being heard, where people earn a living wage for their endeavours, where women are respected as, dare I say it, people too. where poverty is not criminalised, where people are respected no mater their birth, the colour of their skin, their accents or the language they use or which ever way people can be discriminated against.
And that, unfortunately or fortunately, starts with the you and me's of the world, demonstrating respect and empathy for those we meet.
It may mean that instead of looking down the nose at the young mum at the check out who has to put stuff back because she cannot afford to feed her family, that we swipe our card through the register, that when we see a homeless person, we can offer them a bed in the spare room and feed them, see them through another day.
That is how 'we' can fix it.
Become the humanitarians we want the world to be.
It really does come down to the 'us'.
Exactly Bert, I could not have put it better.
And we can and do go further than that, by using a forum such as this to strengthen the solidarity of decent people that the system works relentlessly to undermine.
Some might say we're just singing to the choir, or preaching to the converted, but even the converted need some assurance now and again.
Repost long comment.... one made on Lucy's SubStack:
Good overview, much complexity to unpack and can add some tit bits, to this wicked web and as described by Nancy MacLean in ‘Democracy in Chains’ a long game…..
One wouldn't ascribe that much influence to Orbán when he has had media and expertise in support of his electoral opportunism, ie. following existing culture and demographics in Hungary; many old people and Roma.
Exemplified by his Fidesz party's ‘gypsy crime’ platform which then later via Netanyahu, segued into the imported ‘Soros conspiracy’; Orban's own grandmother was gypsy Heritage and when asked he said ‘you need different coloured balls to play pool’, suggesting strength in diversity? (Things are not going well for Orbán, a chief aide in Rogán has just been sanctioned by the US for corruption, ouch)
Mont Pelerin includes the Koch's muse ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan, a good old boy. For examples of John Birch tactics see Kochonomics Tea Party astroturf grass roots movement and the present targeting of school committees, curricula and syllabi; in Congress it’s the ‘Freedom Caucus’.
On Charles Murray and the ‘bell curve’, it crosses over to the white nationalist Tanton Network and the ‘intellectual dark web’ that denigrates woke, universities, women etc. to publicly attract younger males, but in fact eugenics or social-Darwinism for an audience of middle aged and older white males (like the ‘silent majority’).
Meanwhile, according to Media Matters US 2022, Fox News had employed friend of the late John Tanton (admired white Australia policy), ie. Brit born Peter Brimelow, friend and former colleague of Abbott's Danube Inst. boss and Quadrant correspondent John O'Sullivan, and reported directly to Murdoch (but stood down same time as Tucker Carlson).
Koch anti-Covid measures Jay Bhattacharya, while RFK gets the attention, former has already been appointed director of NIH National Institutes of Health…….
On taxes, this is where the anti-immigrant Tanton Network come in sharing social-Darwinism with Koch Network, as one has been targeted by a local Australian Tanton outlet in a particular media comment section. On anything immigrant and population, or supposed linked negative issues, using techniques of climate science deniers (avoid future trends, focus on single factor etc.), aggro of FoxNews, Scientology special ops and Roy Cohn (assisted McCarthy, Trump & Murdoch).
They practise Orwellian denial vs fact that Australia is ageing and needs immigration, both modest permanent and especially high temporary churn over of international students etc. as ‘net financial contributors’ to keep budgets healthy with tax revenue to support more retirees.
In response there is open misrepresentation of data, dog whistling, trashing universities with science, woke etc. and using high profile economists to present tricky analysis, promoted further by data, science, research process, finance and economics illiterate media……
Opens the door for old eugenics tropes around fossil fueled ‘limits to growth’ eg. degrowth, carrying capacity, sustainability etc. and even the untested MMT Modern Monetary Theory.
A sophisticated long game to avoid taxes by <1% and eventually pare down the state and public services, even if it means potentially crashing an economy and/or government (See Liz Truss & Kochonomics).
I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm just being paranoid. BUT - I reckon that the Atlas Network is once again going to swing into action in Australia, as it did in 2023, molding public opinion against the referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament . That was just a dress rehearsal for 2025. The public won't know what's hitting them, as the pro-Dutton tsunami swamps Australia. Lucy Hamilton is so right, that it is frightening. Gone will be factual information, as we'll see and hear repeated memes tropes, whatever you call them - meaningless statements from "influencers" etc - ingeniously overtaking news and commentary. Dutton and his nuclear unicorn will be the media glory for Atlas in Australia in 2025, and a Dutton -plus-nuclear win here will reverberate around the world - to everybody's detriment.