Powerful right-wing regressive weirdos gather to plot at Atlas-linked conference in Australia

In The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald was scathing about the dismal faux-intellectual posturing of the very rich around the “decline of the West”. He poked fun at their imperative to protect the “Nordic race” against the immigration that would debase it. These fever dreams of civilisational destruction, fostered by historian Edward Gibbon and fascist philosopher Oswald Spengler, linger on. The right-wing rich still fear our failure to breed and the “race suicide” that immigration hastens.

Spengler’s hysteria was back on the menu at the Advance Australia conference last weekend, held at an undisclosed hotel in Sydney’s Darling Harbour. The tycoon’s plaything, this fake grass roots operation, put immigration in the crosshairs at its behind-the-scenes strategy and agenda-setting meeting.

One panel, run by the private school alumni manning junktank operations, claimed victory for themselves in Advance’s victories. Both that panel and Tony Abbott’s speech used protests against Australia’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal violence as evidence of the wrong kind of immigration; a speaker described the rallies as proof that “a lot of them are undesirable”.

More disturbing still were two international speakers. One of them, Bradley Thayer, was introduced to the audience as representing the American Freedom Alliance (AFA). That body is a Southern Poverty Law Center-listed Islamophobic hate group. It has decades of involvement in the network of operations fostering the demonisation of Muslims and Islam. The Fairbrook Foundation behind it was named as one of the top funders of Islamophobic activity twice in the Center for American Progress’s 2009 and 2015 Fear inc. reports. The network is no joke: the white supremacist functioning as Trump’s Prime Minister to fill pop-up concentration camps learnt his trade in one of its junktanks.

One 2016 AFA conference hosted “a veritable all-star cast of anti-Muslim speakers and activists”. In the same year in Australia, a fearmongering “Conversazione” took place amongst our power elites. It became clear that the international guests at that event, staged at the Melbourne Club, had come wholesale from the English-language think tanks and events that were being formed around Viktor Orbán. The tenor of the event was very much 1930s Berlin.

Present was the British editor of Australia’s Quadrant, Thatcher speechwriter and think tank-devotee John O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan was the founder of Orbán’s Danube Institute, where can be discovered several Australian grandees, including Tony Abbott. O’Sullivan has been fearmongering about Muslim immigration since 2001. 

Australians cannot begin to understand the Right’s collective shrug at the horrific toll of Israel’s violence without understanding that there is a transnational Islamophobia Industry of massive family foundations and “think tank” operations that have been generating fear and loathing of Muslims since the 1990s. There is no genocide if Muslims are not understood as fully human. 

The neocons that drove the invasion of Iraq were central to that ideology emerging. Then 9/11 burnt into the souls of a generation of “conservatives” the determination that “Islam” exists as a “civilisation” utterly incompatible with “the West”.

At the Advance conference, Thayer did not dwell on his “terrorism” specialty, instead hyperventilating about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) driving a cohort of “Leninists” who want to “destroy Western Civilisation” led by people like George Soros. The “hyper aggressive” CCP has apparently led communists, Greens, the Voice to Parliament, Antifa and the Red Army as the “muscle” to bring about change.

The method of undermining the West defined by Thayer was accommodationist leaders like Anthony Albanese cooperating with the CCP by speeding the destruction of Australia’s “unique identity” as a Western nation. Substantial and rapid immigration was part of the Leninists’ struggle against those who have the right to rule: “the established order”. All “communist” parties are “illegitimate”. Know your place, prole.

This immigration is part of the “war” that our leaders are “waging” against “our own people”. The answer, Thayer commanded, was “remigration”. This is the white supremacist term for mass deportation.

Thayer flagged the immigrant enemies in code: he spoke of his delight in visiting the Anzac memorial. He described the soldiers (who fought the unmentioned enemy, the Muslim Turks) as contributing to “a larger struggle”. He intuited that these past heroes would view us with “contempt” for “surrendering” our “Western Civilisation” to “the forces of barbarism, unleashed by Leninism”. While he did not define those as Muslim, “barbarians at (or inside) the gate” is often used in these spheres to refer to Muslims.

The AFA last month co-hosted an event with Steve Bannon’s War Room that platformed the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders (again). Slogans from the event on Instagram include, “Islam is a demographic and immigration time bomb.” Wilders stated there: “The United States are next on the menu of the crocodile. Islam has already arrived on your shores.”

The other noteworthy international speaker at the Advance conference was Steve Bannon’s international editor. Benjamin Harnwell is a simpering Brit who believes Nigel “Fawaj” (as the AI transcription would have it) is continuing Maggie Thatcher’s glorious legacy. Bannon had Harnwell set to run his “gladiator school” in a monastery outside Rome, training “nationalist” far right politicians and influencers to take the West back from the immigrants he characterises as “invaders”.

He labels our mainstream parties as “sociopathic overlords” flooding our countries with invaders, showing “zero compassion” for the workers robbed of conditions. Of course, he’d already highlighted his Thatcher-born loathing of taxation (and implicitly the services it subsidises) so his own compassion for the masses is, at best, suspect.

Harnwell contrasts “the actual, real people” who share our countries with the “abstract entity” of millions of foreigners. Who apparently are neither actual nor real. Nor maybe also people. By contrast, he sees our leaders showing “zero compassion” to the people who belong. The audience’s forbears immigrated to contribute; the “invaders” come to “conquer”. Adding insult to invasion, they do so while living off our begrudged tax in Harnwell’s bizarro-world fantasy.

Islam he depicts as “oil and water” to Western values. 

He deploys a single sexual assault event as epitomising “everything that is wrong with the people who are choosing for themselves to come into the West”.  The crime, he asserted, was “routine” and “happening every day”.

Home Affairs refused to comment on “individual cases” of visas issued. The office also refused to comment on whether representatives of antisemitic hate groups would be granted a visa to speak in Australia.

If you’re wondering how David Adler fits into all this, he is named as one of the founders of Advance and also the founder of the Australian Jewish Association, a body so radical that the other mainstream Jewish peak bodies reject it. “Christian” Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists perhaps 30 to 1. Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, for example, has published opinions by one of the leading American figures of the Islamophobia networks around 153 times since 2001. Any part of Advance’s coalition could be responsible for their presence.

In the 1970s and 80s, Australian sociologist Alex Carey documented the long history of success of such propaganda operations in changing public opinion in the US. He warned Australia that such propaganda operations would endanger our democracy if we let them. We did not listen.

We have another warning now: these right-wing operations frothing over a “threat” to “Western Civilisation” are platforming hate speech. At the very least, we must demand the government addresses Islamophobia with the same zeal dedicated to antisemitism. Wannabe aristos are setting us up to fight like dogs in a pit for their entertainment. We must not allow ourselves to comply.