Atlas Network Shrugged – what is intellectually driving & influencing the NZ Right?
Influencers on the Right are numerous and are crawling all over this new hard right racist climate denying Government.
Taxpayers’ Union
Their unbelievable success at getting lobbyist policy injected into actual Government policy marks them out as the uber champion of influence. They have former Nazgul as Minister’s now, their power and control over the narrative and ability to spook Luxon into action mark them as one of the most important nerve endings between right wing free market ideology and policy implementation.
Watch their press release game, one of the best in NZ.
Free Speech Union
How the Left allowed the Right to become the new champions of free Speech was one of the great strategic failures of the woke middle class identity politics acolytes who gave the right all the political ammunition they fight culture wars we can’t win.
The Free Speech Unions Twitter game is like an incel watermelon vodka vape hotbox. Watch the hypocrisy as people criticise Israel.
The NZ Initiative
They have their free market tentacles everywhere so that free market capitalism is always the default mechanism. Stuff’s political editor Luke Malpass is a former NZ Initiate Policy Consultant and Deputy National Leader Nicola Willis is a former Board member. Watch for them to provide the intellectual weight to justify mass privatisation in Education and Health.
Groundswell
Without the Māori’s is stealing da water conspiracy, Groundswell have no more axe to grind against a Government that favours them already. Watch them disperse into the anti-Treaty redneckery as they can’t attack this Government.
Antivaxx Conspiracy Swamp
The Conspiracy Swamp Kingdom that NZ First is now reliant upon for its above 5% popularity has generated Qanon talking point policy that NZ First are ramming through as actual policy. The W.H.O. fiasco, the threat to remove public funding of any Sports team that has a trans player and an antiVaxx Grievance Carnival masquerading as a Royal Inquiry into the Covid response all add up to giving these feral lunatics more credibility. Rather than shunning the book burners, NZ First is encouraging them. The problem with these people however is that they are total conspiracy fruit loops and nothing short of Winston telling them that there really is a shadowy global Satanic child molesting cabal making Covid in a lab will sate their fringe beliefs.
Corporate Consultants
The privatisation agenda that is about to be launched on everything not nailed down will be a horror to behold. Look how easy the Tobacco industry has implemented their talking points as actual policy, the privatisers and crony capitalism of donors wanting less regulation to increase their profit margins are all coalescing around National, ACT and NZ First.
Especially NZ First.
National and NZ First will slash red tape and privatise for their donor mates, ACT will do it out of pure ideological arousal.
The difference between Labour’s use of consultants and National’s is Labour wanted guidance on how to implement their policy, National will simply want to implement whatever their donors want.
Alt Right media
The Platform and Reality Check Radio is where NZ First goes to reap their redneck audiences and they both have the power to spook Luxon into knee jerks like halting aid to the Palestinians. ZB Plus who first attacked Golriz is NZMEs attempt to harvest this reactionary audience. Once upon a time these were true blue Talkback listeners, but after the polarisation via social media hate algorithms, they’re all now mini Jordan Peterson’s crossed with Andrew Tate and Posie Parker level mouth foamers.
Big Data Social Investment
Oranga Tamariki is a Frankenstein monster, a neoliberal welfare experiment conjured up by Bill English and big data.
Luxon has already promised to revive the Social Investment model.
What is the ‘social investment’ model?
Look at Oranga Tamariki.
The argument is that children from backgrounds with specific features were the worst in terms of cost to the state, so if the State stepped in and removed the children quickly enough, that cost will fall. To do this they passed law reducing the legal rights of parents, streamlined their 0800 numbers and weaponised uplifts.
They also ensured that people with children taken from them are ineligible for legal aid so impacted parents couldn’t fight back legally.
Oranga Tamariki has always been about saving the State money and the welfare of the child is secondary to that!
This is what’s driving the desire to place Māori children with white families, it’s cheaper than researching whakaapa and finding a safe place for uplifted Māori children.
We will see more of this sold as a solution to dismantle universal welfare for worst case biggest cost intrusions.
These influences are obvious and apparent, the one that is not, yet is the most insidious influence of all, is the Atlas Network.
The crazy thing about conspiracy theories isn’t that they aren’t real, it’s that the most crazy and outlandish conspiracies like the anti-vaxxers, like the Qanonners, the Cookers and the Settler rednecks get all the attention when real and actual conspiracies are occurring right in front of our noses.
It’s always been the rich, the corporates, the Trans Nationals that have actively conspired to see their interests implemented while our emotions are manipulated.
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!
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;
We are seeing this now
demolishing public services;
National, ACT and NZ First all collectively campaigned on demolishing public services!
privatising public assets;
ACT Party fantasy.
centralising political power;
When it came to the Māori Health Authority they couldn’t nationalise fast enough!
sacking civil servants;
They all promised this.
sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs;
Watch their policy platform roll out that dismantles regulation, they are already lining up legislation to open mining up and give Shane Jones fast track powers.
destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world;
They attacked worker and renter rights in the first week of power.
supporting landlords against tenants;
Handed Landlords right to evict and tax loopholes.
criminalising peaceful protest;
Have started this aimed at da gangs, watch how quickly those powers get re-interpreted for environmental protests.
restricting the right to strike.
Attacked Fair Pay Agreements on day one.
…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 companiesand 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!
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!
Shouldn’t we be talking a lot more about the Atlas Network and their libertarian extremist pro climate change polluting sociopaths?
We can’t beat this hard right racist climate denying Government if we don’t know where their agenda is coming from!
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media.
I’m glad people are now talking about it again. The Atlas Network and the Mont Pèlerin Society were the most influential lobbying groups behind the Thatcher, Reagan, Lange, Bolger and Howard administrations. The Clintons, the Hawke-Keating government and the Blair-Brown administration did not escape their influence either.
Had the influence of these lobbyists and their Wall Street paymasters been defeated, the Australasian system of so-called “Fabian Socialism” would probably still exist — and a struggle for greater national sovereignty would likely have ensued.
The press gatekeepers and the party apparatchiks continue to run interference for the lobbyists associated with the two networks. Any discussion around why the social democrats were ejected from political life, and replaced by the highly unpopular ideology of Third Way Liberalism, is essentially forbidden in the Western corporate and state press.
All these Atlas connected and funded people need to be constantly outed because the effects on working class people are horrendous. For example, this filthy Govt. is going to fund the construction of union busting Charter Schools while winding back already planned renovation of a number of state schools.
If these rightwing dickheads want to do capitalists bidding and hasten Climate Disaster that is their choice–but the sneaking around and denial of their true agendas has to stop so that ordinary people know what they are dealing with and can get organised.
If David Seymour has ever had a root he did not pay for it would be surprising. Jordan Williams TU was quick off the rank to claim COVID wage subsidies! There are some unpleasant and nasty sellouts affiliated with Atlas Network and they need to slapped down sooner rather than later.
Careful @Tigger. There’ll be one of the well known contributors that come on here to tell you that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.
Problem being that in the era of the narcissist and populist politicians, kindness no longer works – often it just emboldens them and sure as shit they’ll be playing the victim card and branding you as a hater.
Pretty obvious Seymour needs a good rooting. Just as Upston looks as if she’s permanently sucking on a half ripe lemon.
They’re dangerous and they need to be constantly called to account. They’re not above ridicule.
But whoar! I wooden wanna be in your shoes
I am not given to crudities generally Tim, but this Seymour chap is taking the urine big time at the moment, and wanted to shake the tree…
Usually, me either. Times have changed as good or bad as that may be.
There are some serious, and dangerous muppets out there.
I think it is all just going to have to play out.
I’m hopeful. How about you?. Some of the muppets are so bad, a 3 year term will be a miracle (looking on the bright side of life), but stranger things have happened at sea
Who is Atlas funding in NZ?
instead of sea lioning, how about sharing your view on whether shadowy right wing millionaire funded outfits should be influencing NZ Elections? Good or bad?
Our new governments, new word for consultants is advisory group, bloody hypocrites they campaigned on getting rid of consultants and they said we don’t need any more advisory groups or reviews, we need action.
Many of our Councils that bitched and moaned about losing water assets now have no money to pay for the infrastructure and the councils bullshit behavior will hurt their rate payers who will have to pay for water infrastructure all because many NZers are too fucken dumb and lazy to look at the policies.
It’s interesting that the Education Minister said we need “data” to make decisions. Fair enough. When it comes to repealing the smoking legislation the rationale is fears of a black market. All the data we have other the last 10 years apparently gives no support to a growing illicit market. The black market theme seems to be a tobacco industry message, not a research based one.
Nah! Wheel, National use anecdotal information to justify policy change, not exactly best practice but then what do you expect, this is the government that brought us leaky homes and got rid of mining inspectors.
Plenty of leftists doing the governments bidding. They’re not lobbyists, their on the fuckin payroll.
Think NZ on air, Inside out, trade unions, Rainbow tick, Universities, MOE, Human rights commission, MSM ect
The FSU claims support across the political spectrum but won’t say a word on the biggest Free Speech case in the world The Trials Of Julian Assange. It would be good to know if the NZ FSU supports the Aussie Brother Assange or if its position is subservient to the view of Douglas Murray’s UK FSU?
Should left leaning supporters of Free Speech pull their support of the NZ FSU?
Does the NZ FSU support Assange? Johnathon Ayling please answer.