You’re in a class war, whether you fight back or not

It didn’t take the titanic corruption and clown-car incompetence around Trump to tell young people that death-throes capitalism is a disaster, but it sure didn’t hurt. 

Trickle-down economics, where tax cuts for the rich supposedly make all of us better off, has shoved light-years between the mega-rich and the rest of us; that’s precisely why the tycoons forged a PR machine to make it happen decades ago. 

Now the young can’t find jobs and can’t afford homes. Dave Hughes is filming unhinged rants because his property portfolio got crimped, while the young would just like to move out from their cramped parents’ place.

In the US, whence this plutocrat policy was pushed, the system is designed to put young Black and Brown men in jail where the 13^th Amendment allows them to be used as slave labour still to this day. (The poor white youth are starving on naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz.) Trump’s people have declared massive tax cuts for the rich, again, by slashing healthcare for the poor. Trump’s posse is disassembling the scientific structure and the regulatory state. As a result, dozens of foods have been recalled as unsafe to eat and virtually eliminated diseases are running rampant.

This isn’t an accident: Trump’s second government is just the extreme end of the project that began with Ronald Reagan. We see the catastrophe, but politicians and media talking heads dedicated to the agenda continue to tell the populace to shut up and suffer. The popularity of Democratic Socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski has these boosters terrified, so the Red Scare is back. Apparently communism is looming, and we’ll all starve in the gutter. 

They tell us that would be worse than the trajectory the US is on now.

Given the crumbling colossus that is the USA, you’d think the Australian boosters of the Reagan-Trump project would be backing away. They’re not. Two Liberal Party politicians recently revealed the shape of the class war the rich are waging against the rest of us. 

When Andrew Bragg was asked whether he was saying “low-income earners” should accept “substandard housing,” he replied, “Yes, definitely.”

Bragg, Shadow Minister for the Environment, has announced the intention to cut the National Construction Code from nearly 2,000 pages to 80. Cutting “red tape” would speed up building, he says. The Code might indeed be able to take some trimming but make no mistake: this route will cost us far more in the end. That’s before we calculate the human suffering from faulty construction, excess heat and cold, mould and all the other ills that accompany shoddy construction. 

And Bragg can’t stop squealing that the communists are coming. May he be haunted by the 70 dead of London’s Grenfell Tower, barbequed as their flammable cladding incinerated their home.

Bragg’s colleague, Tim Wilson, Shadow Treasurer, suggested the excessive cold in ramshackle housing should be dealt with by putting on a jumper in winter.

Bragg and Wilson both attended (minor) private schools. Neither of these men, springing from relatively affluent backgrounds, know what it is to live unable to escape bone-grinding cold or suffocating heat. They cannot imagine living in a collapsing house, with the desperation of meeting additional repair and medical bills competing in urgency against the increasing daily costs of food. And they clearly don’t have any interest in trying to imagine it.

Both Bragg and Wilson are also part of the broad information architecture that has been trying to turn Australia into another neofeudal USA for decades. 

Bragg served on the Business Council of Australia as well as the Menzies Research Centre. Business and advertising councils were amongst the bodies which galvanised when Gough Whitlam was elected in 1974. They began a nationwide “economic education campaign” into the wonders of “free enterprise” to fend off Labor’s dreaded socialism. American operators taught them the strategies. The idea that we could have universal healthcare, good public schools, free tertiary education was poison. The notion that Australians, not (foreign) corporations, should be the prime beneficiary of the extraction of our mineral resources was their nightmare.

Bragg was also the head of the “Enterprise Policy Institute” at the Liberal Party’s Menzies Research Centre. The MRI junktank is interlinked with the official Atlas Network partners that have bedevilled Australian policy making since the 1970s.

Tim Wilson is an alumni of an official Atlas Network partner. The degree to which he has exited remains uncertain.

Don’t imagine the reference to Gough Whitlam (or Reagan) is harking back to the prehistoric and irrelevant past. Maurice Newman was one of the junktank operatives of that era. He emerged from mining’s beloved Deutsche Bank. He was entrenched with mining and tobacco’s Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) from its founding. That is Australia’s prestige Atlas partner. A stint as Chair of the ABC under the junktanks’ hero John Howard allowed him to fight climate coverage. He was Tony Abbott’s business advisor. More recently, he helped found Advance.

Two of the thinkers imported from the US over the decades through this conduit are Charles Murray and George Gilder. IPA donor Rupert Murdoch used his media platforms to aid that promotion. In the 1990s, Murray used the Nazi-linked Pioneer Fund’s shonky “research” to argue that the poor of any skin colour were genetically inferior. Welfare would only promote “dysgenic” breeding.

George Gilder’s work is just as shoddy as Murray’s but less overtly eugenicist. While his peak impact was in 1981, he too remains topical. His first book about enforcing the natural difference between feminine women and masculine men has shaped two misogynist Heritage Foundation papers in 2026.

Gilder himself has spent decades in Atlas Network partners. His own Discovery Institute that promotes Intelligent Design – a fancy form of anti-evolution argument – is one such organisation. He was at the Manhattan Institute and remains on the Board of Advisors at the Independent Institute (where Peter Thiel was first active after college). He continues at the American Institute for Economic Research (AEIR) where he is a “Senior Resident Fellow.” The AEIR was the hub that Atlas Network donors used to fund Covid disinformation and fight health measures.

Dismissing Covid’s significance, and the public health measures required to keep hospitals functioning for anyone who needed emergency care, was easy for the US Atlas Network partners and their donors. They knew they’d be comfortable in their large houses, taking zoom meetings in a luxurious office chair, with necessities and indulgences dropped at the gate. For those whose work was deemed “essential,” whose houses were full of many generations, denied most healthcare by the neoliberal project over decades, the death toll was catastrophic. The wealthy could isolate in luxury while the “essential workers” died in catastrophic numbers.

The affluent did not see Covid’s oppressive rules as a temporary measure to protect hospitals and the community until the vaccine could be speed-run by the concerted work of the world’s specialists. Instead, they understood it as the arrival of the totalitarian communism they’d long dreaded. Government apparatchiks were impeding the affluent’s freedoms to continue business as usual, as their workers dropped like flies in the US. 

Scientists had interfered in industry’s operations one too many times. Tobacco, acid rain, ozone hole, thalidomide, climate: damned scientists just kept getting in the way of profits merely to protect worthless lives. The Atlas-partner through-line is documented in  Merchants of Doubt: “Hell, if most of the world’s population died of industrial by-products tomorrow, the climate crisis would be solved.”

That’s not how George Gilder saw tycoons. The book that made him a hero of the Reagan administration, and to neoliberal thinkers over the sea, was Wealth and Poverty published in 1981 (and republished during the Occupy Movement that followed the bankers’ crashing the world’s economy in 2008). Entrepreneurs are his heroes: “Capitalism begins with giving. Not from greed, avarice, or even self-love can one expect the rewards of commerce, but from a spirit closely akin to altruism, a regard for the needs of others, a benevolent, outgoing, and courageous temper of mind.” Sure, pal. 

And poverty was an inevitability.

Gilder still loves Trickle Down. All the evidence in the world couldn’t convince these zealots that their religious devotion to a debunked political economy is a dead end.

The neoliberals’ representatives have nothing but fear and hatred to sell us now. Fear of feminists, fear of trans people, fear of Muslims, fear of The Left, fear of socialists and communists. In America, at least 22 Black people have been lynched, hanging from trees in the last year. This fear is deadly.

The only way we can inoculate our societies against the fearmongering is to warn our compatriots about the ludicrous zombies still shambling through our media studios moaning “communists” while they strip our living standards to benefit the donors. Their chorus gives them power; we must shove this ideology into a tomb and forge a new social contract.