The Democracy Project’s NZ First apologist, Chris Trotter, has attacked Mihi Forbes and her expose on the influence of the Atlas Network again.
Let’s be very clear,
Joshua Drummond ain’t no chump.
He’s the researcher for Mihi Forbes and Mihi Forbes is one of the best political broadcasters in New Zealand.
Their combined focus on ACT and their connections to the Atlas Network is journalism The Daily Blog has followed closely and posted on numerously.
Joshua’s research is flawless and is based on open source media, but these far right think tanks don’t sit around plotting co-ordinated attacks on democracy, that is too cartoonish a villain, the Atlas Network is far more insidious than that and far more dangerous.
Sociopaths singing songs to far right market lunatics doesn’t a plot make, and David’s denial is that there was no clear order from the Atlas Network to implement the policy platforms he has, and in this he is of course 100% right.
Because there is such order, that would be stupid. The way this cancer grows and metastasizes is via osmosis.
Atlas (shrugged) Network is funded by petrol oligarchs and climate change polluters who find the social media pressure points the way the old Cambridge Analytics did. They can micro target and mine resentment better than anyone else in the game, and they pass those findings along allowing for local think tanks to plot legislative change welded to the culture war pressure points and allow hate algorithms to do the rest.
Joshua’s research follows the column George Monbiot first published in January linking the Atlas Network’s influence in British politics.
Look at this agenda:
A crash programme of massive cuts;
demolishing public services;
privatising public assets;
centralising political power;
sacking civil servants;
sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs;
destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world;
supporting landlords against tenants;
criminalising peaceful protest;
restricting the right to strike.
…this is the Atlas Agenda and this is the exact same bloody agenda being proposed here, in fact I can find an example of every single one of those implemented since this new hard right racist climate denying Government came in!
Why does all of this matter so much? Well look at who is funding the Atlas Network! It’s all the worst industries with the worst records and with the money to ensure laws are written for them and not against them, that’s extraordinarily dangerous!
Monbiot makes this point…
And who, in turn, are the junktanks? Many refuse to divulge who funds them, but as information has trickled out we have discovered that the Atlas Network itself and many of its members have taken money from funding networks set up by the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires, and from oil, coal and tobacco companies and other life-defying interests. The junktanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.
…Oil, coal, tobacco, right wing billionaires, the fucking Koch brothers, dark money influencing our political system so much so that we see the exact same agenda being rolled out here!
There is a fucking difference between a Left Wing Think Tank getting funding from Unions that wants to make workers rights stronger and Right Wing Think tanks funded by far right Billionaires, Tobacco, Oil and Coal using spite politics to ensure their interests and profit margins are expanded at the cost of the climate, the people and the entire fucking planet!
The Democracy Project’s total inability to see the difference between those two things is jaw dropping in its audacity!
How the fuck is this all presented as Leftwing critical analysis? This is only ‘leftwing’ if it was on The Platform!
The Democracy Project is endlessly critiquing the Professional Managerial Class’s corrupt influence in Left wing politics because The Democracy Project was hounded with culture war criticism from many of those very same Woke Wellington Professional Managerial Class, so it’s personal, which is fine and dandy because I can’t stand those Woke Wellington Professional Managerial Class types either, but sweet Zombie Jesus, in comparison to what Right wing lobbyists are cooking up under this new Government, from Tobacco, from Big Fishing, from the Real Estate Pimps – AND NOW – The Atlas Network, the Woke Wellington Professional Managerial Class look fucking childlike in juxtaposition.
The Atlas (shrugged) Network is funded by petrol oligarchs and climate change polluters who find the social media pressure points the way the old Cambridge Analytics did. They can micro target and mine resentment better than anyone else in the game, and they pass those findings along allowing for local think tanks to plot legislative change welded to the culture war pressure points and allow hate algorithms to do the rest.
This is happening right as Gerry Brownlee cloaks these lobbyists in secrecy, right when legislation allowing mining on conservation land is being cooked up alongside fast track powers to push them through alongside an attempt to dismantle the Treaty Principles so that Māori don’t need to be consutled when these Trans National’s start up.
As the push for more privatisation, steeper austerity and race baiting policy collides with extreme weather events, destabilising geopolitics and increasingly desperate first time home buyers bled out from rising mortgage rates and beneficiaries and state tenants kicked off welfare and out of homes, the only winner will be private prisons and the bloody Atlas Network!
To shrug it off as The Democracy Project does via Trotter’s latest fig leaf offering to NZ First limits the narrative to one where this hard right racist climate denying Government are sold to us as ‘moderate’ by The Democracy Project.
Trotter attacking a journalist of the mana of Mihi to defend rich racist American billionaires, Tobacco, Oil and Corporate interests influencing our domestic politics was not on anyones bingo card.
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I too, am taken aback by the recent writings of Chris Trotter.
Maybe he’s a late new-comer/convert to author Alice O’Connor’s (aka Ayn Rand) Atlas Shrugged?
He would do well to re-balance his thinking with some factual reading by authors like Peter Ward (Under a green sky), Peter Brannen (The ends of the world), or – closer to home – Vic Uni Prof, Michael Hannah (Extinction).
Economic and political theories will soon become totally irrelevant, CT, until and unless humanity has plans and policies to actually exist for anything but the very short term.
Ironically the only person who is doing this wholeheartedly is Elon Musk and the left want to shoot him down too.
Very well explained.
Their constant urge to expand, bigger and better, is utterly pointless. Their economic theories never take into account the realisation that constant growth is now, obviously, unsustainable.
Not obvious to some with short-sighted, short-term greedy tactics in mind.
Luxon lamented that his govt. had inherited a ‘country in decline’. What a joke the man is!
Every country is in decline. He will have to devise policy to cope with this inevitable decline because he does NOT have a magic wand that will stop that decline. Nothing and no-one does.
If he cannot understand that, he shouldn’t be prime minister.
I’ve always said Chris trotter is an undercover right-wing disguised as a lefty
You fail to see Trotter as a lefty because the modern left have disappeared over the horizon and up their own woke arseholes.
The old left, the working class left is on the socially conservative side but fiscally liberal.
Woke = someone said something I don’t like. Be good if you could define woke without resorting to cherry picking or nut picking.
I disagree with the tactics and stratagy. That men are this terrible issue. Infact men are terrified of woman. Not woman per se but the issues surrounding woman that terrify men. Men are losing everything in divorce there’s terrible results.
The “old left” now vote National/ACT/NZF having experienced 6 years of mayhem under a Labour Government.
The “young left” vote Labour/Green/TPM not yet realising its ideology only.
To tie this all into “materialism” is that woman want more security than men because they’re the more vulnerable sex.
Example is back in the day woman got attacked by wolves and died. In the 1600’s woman’s dresses caught on fire and died. Terrible. In today’s age those material things have largely been solved.
So when I ask woman who say that they feel unsafe. “Is the cause of those unsafe feelings due to safety concerns about men?” or is it the case that those concerns are due to material deprevation.
100% +
Indeed. It’s interesting and illustrative perhaps, that of all the left-wing bloggers that I follow, not a huge sample but enough maybe – Trotter is the only one that has not yet condemned the Israeli overreaction to the Hamas murders/kidnappings, and the deaths of thousands of innocent children.
The three A’s ,,, The Atlas shrugged) Ideology,,, The Atlas Network, a active networked group materialized from the ideology to influence and push their ideas (disguised of course) in society,,, as well as lobby and advise right wing govts for the implementation of their sociopath beliefs and voodoo economics ,,, summed up by Martyn as the Atlas Agenda
The Ideology and Agenda are far larger and extensive than the Network which has been somewhat exposed, it is just a node in a broad cult.
Strip it right down and it’s anti Govt social welfare, including pensions ,,, anti- Govt public health, anti Govt regulations,,,,
It so obviously harms the many to enrich the few that it has to be disguised and the implementation of the Agenda diverted away from.
That’s where the reactivation of NAct-firsts dirty politics has hit the ground running with Luxons bene bashing speech plus everything out of Seymors mouth being prime examples.