Far-right watch: the neoliberal think tank director platforming ethnonationalists

Around the West, mainstream figures are normalising far-right actors and ideas. Some of them, for example the Australian judiciary, do so because they do not understand the deep dangers to societal wellbeing of, say, Neo Nazi ideologies. Maybe young white men in suits do not look so dangerous to these inattentive citizens. Others are actively laundering violent ideas, helping them seep into mainstream thinking. It is near impossible to know if the enablers are hapless accidental vehicles or are working with bad intent but, regardless, the outcomes are similar.

Dan Ryan is determined to bring together the “notoriously fractious Right” in Australia. His strategy of choice is a podcast. Hosted there are LNP politicians, “conservative” academics, and a colleague of self-declared Neo Nazis. We cannot know Ryan’s intent or awareness of the backgrounds of his guests: perhaps a survey of the worst could help him see the danger. 

Ryan looks like your average private school dad. He has worked as an in-house lawyer for most of his career, in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2012. He was a director of that state’s second most prominent free market think tank, the Lion Rock Institute, from 2008 to 2017. Hong Kong, of course, is the inspiration for the neofeudal dreams of “neoliberal” political economists. It is almost Friedman, Hayek and friends’ “anarcho-capitalist paradise”; these extreme free marketeers longed to replicate this barely regulated colonial outpost everywhere. Its dependence on a rightless, low-paid workforce in Shenzhen is part of the model. Lion Rock is a member of the Atlas Network, the globally connected array of ostensibly free market “think tanks.” For almost a dozen years, Ryan has also been a director of the Australian Atlas partner, the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP) in Brisbane. Delivering a speech there, his relaxed humour and confidence are apparent.

In a side-project, Ryan hosts a podcast with several questionable guests.

One is Hugo “Auspilled” Lennon, who organised the “March for Australia” rallies alongside overt and violent Neo Nazi Thomas Sewell. That group is in the process of creating the White Australia political party, with an agenda item to enable the “mass deportation of people of Jewish faith”. Lennon has embraced “white ethnonationalism” to the point it even disturbed far-right influencer Charlie Kirk. It was after that encounter with Kirk, covered in detail on the Australian Neo Nazi’s “news” platform”, that Dan Ryan hosted Lennon on his podcast. 

Another Ryan interviewee who has written for the Neo Nazi-affiliated news platform is former Liberal Party dirt unit figure and erstwhile Tasmanian political candidate John MacGowan. In that essay, he exhorts people to leave the Liberals as the only way to be on “our team” against immigration.

Ryan, furthermore, interviewed Stephen McInerney, recently exposed in the Sydney Morning Herald as promoting “white nationalism”, when he is not performing as a poetry lecturer at Catholic Campion College. McInerney’s biological determinist Twitter (sic) account features a stream of retweets of ethnonationalist material. He is determined we must live in a “Christian imperium” and describes pluralistic society as embracing “evil”. The rhetoric he posts and supports belongs to the “race suicide” conspiracy declaring that a Great Replacement will end “whiteness”. He recently posted and deleted that “people should become ‘political supporters’ of the White Australia Party” to “safeguard against White erasure.” “Other pro-White parties” he assures his followers will “follow in time” without the NSN connection.

Ryan interviewed Matthew Grant of the re-founded Australian Natives Association (ANA), which markets itself deploying militarised language. In 2015, Grant posted on the violent extremist Iron March chat forum that he was not a fascist because he was a supporter of laissez faire market economies. He expanded on his support for free enterprise with this caveat: “So long as you have a homogenous – hence why I’m a Nationalist – nation, the market can’t be usurped by Jew-like profiteers”. The ANA in NSW is a registered hunting organisation.

Ryan has also hosted Frank Salter, who founded the ethnonationalist Australian National Alliance party and more recently advised One Nation on opposing immigration.

He interviewed Bob Birrell who argues against immigration from an environmental perspective, depicting it as a “disaster” in this conversation.

Ryan is not only platforming anti-immigration and ethnostate activists from Australia. He has also hosted a representative of the UK’s Homeland Party and New Zealand’s Right Minds. He has guests to expand on and promote this politics from France, Ireland, Canada. He interviewed a female UK influencer who has been on British streets promoting Tommy Robinson and his white ethnostate rallies.

Amongst his more disturbing guests are Mark Krikorian and Jason Richwine. These two represent the Center for Immigration Studies. This American body has been labelled a hate group as a result of its platforming white supremacist and antisemitic writers. It is one of the main front groups associated with the Tanton Network, a collection of actors at the heart of US race and immigration disinformation. Bob Birrell has published, perhaps unwittingly, in Tanton’s Social Contract Press journal.

It is not surprising that Ryan hosts so many guests on the topic of immigration. The podcast in question is titled the National Conservativism Institute of Australia Podcast. NatCon, as it is known in the Global North, is a nationalist ideology that substitutes faith for race. Unsurprisingly, Ryan also interviews several very conservative Christians. NatCon ideology tends to position itself against anything that can be labelled “woke” which includes existing in public as anything other than a very conservative cishet man. In accordance, Ryan hosts terfs, pronatalists and traditional family promotion.

The most extreme of that category might be an interview with a female Australian lecturer who depicts declining birthrates to be something like the fault of dark triad feminism which leads to “manipulative reproductive suppression.”

The grandly named National Conservativism Institute of Australia is a three-man operation. The youngest partner is Jordan Knight, who appears semi-regularly with Ryan on the podcast. Knight is a former One Nation advisor and suffered humiliation in a Media Watch exposé of his Migration Watch Australia as a solo influencer operation.

The third and mostly silent partner is Antony Capello who emerges from Bob Santamaria’s Catholic publishing house. He now runs Connor Court which publishes Catholic works and Australian “think tank” books. Many of those confuse climate science and oppose climate action, unsurprisingly, because the think tanks are partners of the Atlas Network that has long operated as part of fossil fuel’s disinformation activity. The Atlas Network itself has ceased taking fossil fuel money. 

The Queensland “think tank” of which Ryan is a director, the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP), is a busy one. The AiP is one of the Atlas partners that continues to take fossil fuel money and, like its parent body, has been part of the tobacco disinformation project. The AiP appears to have spawned fellow Atlas partner Libertyworks while its founder Andrew Cooper was Director of Special Projects at AiP between 2015-2022. Libertyworks is the entity that stages the MAGAus CPAC Australia conferences.

It is impossible to know if NatConOz is another “special project.” It might be carried out without the approval of Ryan’s colleagues at AiP. That said, several Atlas Network partner affiliates have agreed to appear on his program. These include John Roskam and Dan Wild (Institute of Public Affairs IPA), Rebecca Weisser (Centre for Independent Studies CIS), Tim Andrews (Australian Taxpayers Alliance ATA, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform). 

Nick Cater also numbers amongst the guests. His Menzies Research Centre (MRC) co-brands events with the Atlas partners. The podcast has also hosted several people from its offshoot the Robert Menzies Institute. Married Weisser and Cater also have connections to Viktor Orbán’s think tank offshoots in Budapest.

Ryan has also featured several figures from the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) which is both an Atlas Network partner and functionally its steering committee. One of those is Samuel Gregg who has worked for the CIS, Acton Institute (Atlas’s prime Christian/free enterprise tank) and the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). That last was the base of the Charles Koch-derived “hijacking” of Covid health measures producing the Great Barrington Declaration (before Gregg’s tenure). Commentary in the British Medical Journal observed: “As we said previously, scientists should understand that, when it comes to AIER, we are dealing with ‘a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.’ For all that, Ryan and Gregg’s conversation is a very measured discussion of economics, but it also reveals the think tank-related networking that connects them. Guests Alan Moran, Tanveer Ahmed, John Lee and Jim Allan are all on the last leaked MPS list.

Other guests have emerged from interrelated international think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation whose president recently supported Tucker Carlson interviewing white supremacist antisemite Nick Fuentes.

Ryan also boasts many on Auspol’s right amongst his guests: Hastie, Canavan, Taylor, McKenzie are amongst the LNP representatives. Pauline Hanson figures. So too does conspiracist Gerard Rennick. John Ruddick represents the Libertarian Party. (That, like its forebear the Liberal Democrats and Australia’s main Atlas event the Friedman Conference, is a product of Atlas partner the ATA’s John Humphreys. He was also on that leaked MPS list.)

If NatConOz is not connected to Australia’s Atlas Network partners, many in the crew seem to support Ryan’s endeavour.

Victoria’s anti-trans MP Moira Deeming has been a guest. So too has George Christensen, who is no longer in politics but now registered by the Attorney General’s department as a foreign influence operation with Fundación CitizenGo, an extremist Spanish Catholic organisation.

It is disturbing to find Bob Carr, Judith Brett, ASPI’s Elizabeth Buchanan or The Australian’s Matt Cranston in such company. Alongside political figures, their presence serves to normalise Ryan’s enterprise and attract a more traditional conservative audience.

When Dan Ryan speaks to an AiP event about drawing corporate chaps into breakout events at the Christian Nationalist Alliance for Responsible Citizenship to help make this movement “the commanding heights” of the economy and culture, he seems only mildly unnerving. 

His guest list at NatConOz is much more troubling. 

In a political moment when One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts is mainstreaming the international extremists’ term “remigration” signifying massed forced deportation, Australians need to watch who is prepared to platform the influencers deploying such extremist, supremacist rhetoric.