WEBVTT - How Think Tanks Laid the Groundwork to Criminalize Protest 0:00:02.000 --> 0:00:05.040 Well, the raids started this morning at around seven am. 0:00:05.519 --> 0:00:09.720 Fifteen properties were searched this morning in seven of the 0:00:09.800 --> 0:00:12.600 German of the sixteen German states, so that is a 0:00:12.640 --> 0:00:16.200 pretty big operation where some one hundred and seventy offices 0:00:16.280 --> 0:00:17.680 were involved altogether. 0:00:18.239 --> 0:00:21.919 In May twenty twenty three, German police conducted a massive 0:00:22.000 --> 0:00:24.680 raid on the homes of leaders in the climate group 0:00:24.800 --> 0:00:25.800 Last Generation. 0:00:26.640 --> 0:00:29.440 Our website you might have been taken down as several 0:00:29.440 --> 0:00:32.640 technical devices have been confiscated and accounts are blocked. 0:00:32.880 --> 0:00:35.199 It doesn't mean that the resistance will stop. It was 0:00:35.240 --> 0:00:40.560 a pretty rapid escalation. Last Generation had only just started 0:00:40.600 --> 0:00:45.000 staging protests in January twenty twenty two. The group N 0:00:45.120 --> 0:00:47.879 is just seven young people in Germany who went on 0:00:47.920 --> 0:00:50.239 a hunger strike trying to get the front runners in 0:00:50.280 --> 0:00:53.720 the twenty twenty one national election to talk just talk 0:00:53.920 --> 0:00:58.200 about climate change. After three weeks and multiple hospital visits, 0:00:58.240 --> 0:01:01.120 only two of the activists remained on their hunger strike, 0:01:01.560 --> 0:01:03.880 and they managed to get the presumed winner of the election, 0:01:04.080 --> 0:01:08.279 Olaf Schultz, to agree to host a public discussion about 0:01:08.280 --> 0:01:13.000 the issue. Almost seventy percent of Germans believe they are 0:01:13.000 --> 0:01:16.160 more concerned than their government about climate change today and 0:01:16.240 --> 0:01:19.520 as a result have become pretty pessimistic about the government's 0:01:19.520 --> 0:01:23.840 ability to pull through on its climate commitments. So in 0:01:23.920 --> 0:01:28.280 late January twenty twenty two, activists with Last Generation began 0:01:28.520 --> 0:01:34.120 blocking roads. Within months, a prominent conservative politician, Frank Schaeffler, 0:01:34.480 --> 0:01:37.640 was sounding the alarm about them being extremists and terrorists, 0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:43.440 and multiple other politicians joined in. When Last Generation activists 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:47.960 painted the headquarters of his party, the FDP, Schaffler compared 0:01:48.000 --> 0:01:53.240 them to the RAF or Red Army Faction, also known 0:01:53.360 --> 0:01:56.200 as the bottommine Off Gang. The RAF was a far 0:01:56.360 --> 0:02:00.840 left terrorist group that routinely kidnapped, bombed, and n assassinated 0:02:00.880 --> 0:02:06.120 its targets beginning in the nineteen sixties. Because sure, throwing 0:02:06.200 --> 0:02:09.640 mashed potatoes at a painting is totally the same thing. 0:02:12.000 --> 0:02:16.279 Hold On bens Stamp. 0:02:19.200 --> 0:02:24.280 Told them, Alice, well, boy, yeah, I was tapped, did 0:02:24.360 --> 0:02:26.280 tip him. 0:02:26.280 --> 0:02:27.400 I'm commanded. 0:02:28.960 --> 0:02:32.280 That's the stunt that drew international attention to Last Generation 0:02:32.800 --> 0:02:37.200 throwing mashed potatoes at amne. The activist talking there says 0:02:37.240 --> 0:02:40.040 people are starving, people are freezing, people are dying, and 0:02:40.160 --> 0:02:43.280 you're worried about tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a 0:02:43.320 --> 0:02:50.519 painting Schaffler called the stunt terrorism. It'd be easy to 0:02:50.639 --> 0:02:54.359 laugh off if German media hadn't started repeating the RAF 0:02:54.520 --> 0:02:59.079 thing pretty quickly. Here's Spiegel TV covering the spray paint 0:02:59.160 --> 0:03:03.399 incident and saying some are concerned about Last Generation being 0:03:03.480 --> 0:03:04.279 a green. 0:03:04.400 --> 0:03:11.560 RAF gets off by the FDP laws depolit four Denka 0:03:11.800 --> 0:03:16.919 in the klima short sneer fabul from Spinstan Grunen. If 0:03:17.360 --> 0:03:20.600 debtvik would have gone to write on TI media was 0:03:20.919 --> 0:03:22.080 optimal faviet pa. 0:03:23.720 --> 0:03:27.560 Pretty quickly, Schaffler started referring to Last Generation as a 0:03:27.680 --> 0:03:32.360 quote criminal organization and used his position in the German 0:03:32.440 --> 0:03:36.160 Parliament or Bundestag to call for the group to be investigated, 0:03:36.600 --> 0:03:41.760 particularly with respect to their donations. As media coverage continued 0:03:41.840 --> 0:03:43.920 and raids like the one you heard at the beginning 0:03:44.000 --> 0:03:47.480 of this episode started to happen, police were beginning to 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:49.960 sound an awful lot like Schaeffler. 0:03:50.520 --> 0:03:54.280 Seven suspects between the ages of twenty two and thirty 0:03:54.360 --> 0:03:58.200 eight are accused of forming or supporting a criminal organization, 0:03:58.360 --> 0:04:02.480 and of course that is quite a heavy accusation here 0:04:02.600 --> 0:04:05.080 that can also be charged with five years up to 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:08.120 five years in prison. Well, the main accusation is that 0:04:08.320 --> 0:04:12.280 those suspects that I've just mentioned have organized fundraising to 0:04:12.480 --> 0:04:15.520 finance further crimes for the last generation. 0:04:16.640 --> 0:04:21.800 Schaffler hasn't historically been a super powerful guy in German politics. 0:04:22.360 --> 0:04:24.760 He's best known for being the guy who didn't want 0:04:24.800 --> 0:04:27.840 to bail out Greece during the twenty eleven deck crisis, 0:04:28.279 --> 0:04:33.440 a move that saw him ousted from Parliament for four years. Today, 0:04:33.520 --> 0:04:36.719 in addition to stoking fear and anger towards last generation, 0:04:37.600 --> 0:04:40.560 he's been credited with blocking a climate bill that the 0:04:40.640 --> 0:04:45.480 government had unanimously passed. It would require that all newly 0:04:45.560 --> 0:04:48.880 installed heating systems are powered by at least sixty five 0:04:48.960 --> 0:04:54.240 percent renewable energies by next year, effectively banning oil and 0:04:54.320 --> 0:04:58.680 gas in new buildings. Schaffler has stalled its passage and 0:04:58.800 --> 0:05:01.359 the gas lobby has been spending a lot of money 0:05:01.440 --> 0:05:03.920 to fight it, so it was once a done deal 0:05:04.160 --> 0:05:09.240 is now uncertain. One possible reason for Shaffler's sudden turn 0:05:09.440 --> 0:05:12.680 as a big anti climate guy is what he did 0:05:12.880 --> 0:05:16.960 with his time off from parliamentary politics. He started a 0:05:17.080 --> 0:05:21.760 libertarian think tank, the Prometheus Institute, and he managed to 0:05:21.800 --> 0:05:24.640 get it into a powerful global network of like minded 0:05:24.680 --> 0:05:27.560 think tanks. The Atlas Network. 0:05:32.160 --> 0:05:35.120 Well, Atlas Network is, as a name suggests, a network, 0:05:35.279 --> 0:05:36.039 and it's global. 0:05:36.200 --> 0:05:37.520 We work all around the world. 0:05:37.600 --> 0:05:38.600 We're based in the US. 0:05:38.720 --> 0:05:41.840 We have about one hundred and fifty nine partners in 0:05:42.360 --> 0:05:44.920 the United States right now, and the bulk of our 0:05:44.960 --> 0:05:47.239 partners are outside Adlas Network. 0:05:47.440 --> 0:05:52.200 It connects people from all over the world defending the 0:05:52.400 --> 0:05:58.320 idea of human dignity, defending human rights and personal liberties. 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:02.120 This is a little intro video to the Atlas Network 0:06:02.279 --> 0:06:06.480 from the organization's YouTube channel in twenty twenty one. The 0:06:06.600 --> 0:06:10.360 network was formed in nineteen eighty one. But to understand 0:06:10.440 --> 0:06:13.320 what it is and why it's so powerful, we've got 0:06:13.360 --> 0:06:16.120 to go back in time a few decades to the fifties, 0:06:16.560 --> 0:06:19.440 to the first of these think tanks, the Institute for 0:06:19.600 --> 0:06:24.560 Economic Affairs, and the guy who started it, Anthony Fisher. 0:06:27.240 --> 0:06:30.880 So Fisher was, like most of the major protagonists of 0:06:30.960 --> 0:06:33.640 the movement, was born to a quite wealthy family. 0:06:34.360 --> 0:06:37.560 This is Jeremy Walker, a senior lecturer at the University 0:06:37.600 --> 0:06:40.840 of Technology, Sydney who's written more about the Atlas Network 0:06:40.960 --> 0:06:41.680 than anyone. 0:06:42.600 --> 0:06:46.480 He went to Eton, the e Late School across the 0:06:46.600 --> 0:06:50.240 river from Windsor Palace, and I went to Cambridge. He 0:06:50.360 --> 0:06:51.880 was wealthy enough that he and his brother bought an 0:06:51.920 --> 0:06:54.440 airplane for the fun that he came from a family 0:06:54.480 --> 0:06:55.200 of mine owners. 0:06:56.200 --> 0:06:59.000 Fisher joined the Royal Air Force and was shocked that 0:06:59.080 --> 0:07:01.560 when Britain finally had an election at the end of 0:07:01.640 --> 0:07:04.440 World War II, the public voted for the more left 0:07:04.600 --> 0:07:09.200 leaning Labor Party. To Fisher, they represented exactly the sort 0:07:09.279 --> 0:07:13.400 of slippery slope to socialism he'd been fighting in Germany. 0:07:14.280 --> 0:07:17.200 He read the reader's digest version of a book called 0:07:17.240 --> 0:07:21.240 The Road to Serfdom by economist Frederick Hayek, who also 0:07:21.280 --> 0:07:26.320 blamed socialism for all of society's problems, and sought Hayek out. 0:07:26.960 --> 0:07:28.920 At the time, he was a professor at the London 0:07:29.000 --> 0:07:33.280 School of Economics. Fisher told Hayek he was considering getting 0:07:33.280 --> 0:07:37.880 into politics to do something about this situation, and Hayek 0:07:38.040 --> 0:07:39.200 advised him against it. 0:07:40.000 --> 0:07:43.120 Hiak said, there's no point going into politics. That we 0:07:43.240 --> 0:07:46.680 need to do is change what the intellectuals think, like 0:07:46.960 --> 0:07:51.040 the teachers, the journalists days of the paper who had 0:07:51.120 --> 0:07:56.120 piped away for public acceptance of Keynesianism and the idea 0:07:56.160 --> 0:07:56.960 of welfare state. 0:07:57.720 --> 0:07:59.840 Fisher would later go on to talk about this as 0:08:00.120 --> 0:08:04.520 waging the war of ideas. In nineteen fifty four, Hayak 0:08:04.560 --> 0:08:07.480 invited him to be part of a network of neoliberal 0:08:07.560 --> 0:08:10.240 thought leaders called the montpellerin Society. 0:08:10.720 --> 0:08:14.400 That's very interesting in that letter that he wrote says, 0:08:14.840 --> 0:08:17.800 we don't do propaganda. That's not what we do in 0:08:17.920 --> 0:08:23.360 the montpellerin Society. It's a kind of intellectual society where 0:08:23.400 --> 0:08:26.120 we debate economics and policy problems of the day to 0:08:27.240 --> 0:08:30.880 defend an advanced liberalism against this tide of socialism which 0:08:30.960 --> 0:08:31.880 is washing over the world. 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:35.959 Fisher took Kyek's advice to heart, and instead of launching 0:08:36.040 --> 0:08:41.000 a political campaign, he started a research institution, the Institute 0:08:41.080 --> 0:08:45.240 of Economic Affairs in the UK in nineteen fifty five. 0:08:46.200 --> 0:08:53.240 It fashions itself as the UK's original free market think tank. Ironically, 0:08:53.280 --> 0:08:56.160 the money that paid for the IEA initially came from 0:08:56.200 --> 0:08:59.280 the fortune that Fischer had amassed by bringing the idea 0:08:59.400 --> 0:09:03.840 of key chicken farming from the US to Britain. Because 0:09:04.000 --> 0:09:08.920 nothing says freedom like cajuns and animals. The IA pottered 0:09:08.960 --> 0:09:12.079 along for a few years, putting out research papers, and 0:09:12.240 --> 0:09:16.000 then something happened to elevate its status in the world. 0:09:16.559 --> 0:09:19.920 The early sixties. Shell comes on board and starts to vacuum. 0:09:20.640 --> 0:09:24.000 They finance him as well as BP, and then things 0:09:24.000 --> 0:09:26.319 start to change. They start to, you know, begin to 0:09:26.360 --> 0:09:27.200 have some influence. 0:09:28.520 --> 0:09:32.080 I'm Ami Westervelt and this has drilled the real free 0:09:32.120 --> 0:09:36.080 speech threat. How big oil helped Fisher take over Britain 0:09:36.200 --> 0:09:38.599 and ultimately the world. What it all has to do 0:09:38.720 --> 0:09:42.199 with the crackdown on climate protests today after the break. 0:09:48.440 --> 0:09:51.439 So, the thing with the think tank method was it 0:09:51.600 --> 0:09:55.560 allowed corporations to say things that they couldn't say themselves 0:09:55.679 --> 0:10:00.079 without appearing to be merely speaking to their particular of 0:10:00.080 --> 0:10:01.880 a interesting profit. 0:10:02.480 --> 0:10:05.280 This is Jeremy Walker again. I think thanks are so 0:10:05.480 --> 0:10:08.480 ubiquitous today that sometimes it's easy to forget that they've 0:10:08.559 --> 0:10:12.560 actually had and continue to have a pretty major impact 0:10:12.800 --> 0:10:16.480 on society and public policy in a lot of ways. 0:10:16.559 --> 0:10:18.640 That began with Fisher and the IEA. 0:10:19.640 --> 0:10:22.960 By the seventies, they're having a real impact, right, They're 0:10:22.960 --> 0:10:24.800 getting a lot of press. And the way that it 0:10:24.840 --> 0:10:28.679 would work was they would get these professors to write short, 0:10:29.040 --> 0:10:32.400 digestible articles whatever it would be about. 0:10:32.800 --> 0:10:32.839 You. 0:10:33.080 --> 0:10:36.480 Often those things around currency conversion or of things that 0:10:36.559 --> 0:10:39.240 were fairly technical to the non economists. But then these 0:10:39.280 --> 0:10:41.839 wealthy donors to the IA would then buy like you 0:10:41.920 --> 0:10:44.439 copies and send them to all the schools and the universities. 0:10:44.960 --> 0:10:48.840 But to accomplish that whole corporation speaking without people knowing 0:10:48.920 --> 0:10:53.520 that it's them thing, the IEA kept those wealthy donors hidden. 0:10:54.160 --> 0:10:57.320 The research papers seem like just original research. They weren't 0:10:57.360 --> 0:10:59.360 coming out of a university, but they were on par 0:11:00.040 --> 0:11:05.920 with university research and often written by professors. Longtime listeners 0:11:06.000 --> 0:11:09.959 of this podcast might hear echoes in this strategy the 0:11:10.040 --> 0:11:13.400 approach that early pr pioneer Ivy Lee took when the 0:11:13.400 --> 0:11:16.959 Pennsylvania Railroad was trying to combat new regulations in the 0:11:17.160 --> 0:11:21.000 US at the turn of the century. Lee created the 0:11:21.400 --> 0:11:25.160 Bureau of Railway Economics. He staffed it with legit and 0:11:25.280 --> 0:11:28.319 credible economists and put out dry white papers on the 0:11:28.400 --> 0:11:33.080 broader economic impacts of things like safety requirements or increased 0:11:33.160 --> 0:11:37.280 wages for rail workers. The press, not knowing that the 0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:40.760 research was paid for by the rail company, quoted from 0:11:40.800 --> 0:11:45.000 it like it was entirely independent research. In Fisher's case, 0:11:45.080 --> 0:11:47.800 the work the IEA was doing wasn't just for the 0:11:47.880 --> 0:11:52.120 benefit of one particular industry or company. He wanted to 0:11:52.280 --> 0:11:55.760 change how a large segment of society viewed how the 0:11:55.840 --> 0:11:59.120 economy and the government should work period. 0:12:00.040 --> 0:12:05.840 Adept never disclosing the sources of their funding, the corporate 0:12:05.920 --> 0:12:09.920 backers and so on. That was key to the whole operation. 0:12:10.760 --> 0:12:13.280 For oil companies, the think tank approach was part of 0:12:13.360 --> 0:12:15.320 a broader propaganda strategy. 0:12:16.200 --> 0:12:20.280 The same time as Shell and BP were sponsoring the 0:12:20.360 --> 0:12:24.240 Institute of Economic Affairs to business propaganda to the British 0:12:24.280 --> 0:12:29.240 electorate against the post war welfare state, they were also 0:12:29.520 --> 0:12:33.160 financing the British Secret Intelligence Service overseas, the MI six, 0:12:33.360 --> 0:12:37.400 to do propaganda in all of the countries in the 0:12:37.400 --> 0:12:41.040 Middle East and Africa where they had operations. So in 0:12:41.120 --> 0:12:43.200 a sense, yeah, that work. Companies are sponsoring two kinds 0:12:43.200 --> 0:12:44.040 of propaganda, one. 0:12:43.920 --> 0:12:47.360 Which was civil and directed at the electorate in Britain 0:12:47.400 --> 0:12:51.240 and another one which was linked to the British Secret 0:12:51.880 --> 0:12:55.440 services policy to maintain friendly governments towards the British oil 0:12:55.480 --> 0:12:55.960 companies in. 0:12:55.960 --> 0:12:56.520 The Middle East. 0:12:57.960 --> 0:13:00.920 Fisher and his work at the IEA was key to 0:13:01.120 --> 0:13:01.880 those efforts. 0:13:02.840 --> 0:13:07.040 So around the early seventies, Fisher becomes very much in demand, 0:13:07.160 --> 0:13:09.080 and they can see that what he's doing is having 0:13:09.080 --> 0:13:09.800 a big impact. 0:13:10.960 --> 0:13:16.240 Meanwhile, Fisher's farming business was not doing so well. Having 0:13:16.320 --> 0:13:19.920 sold the chicken farming business, Fisher invested in a new venture, 0:13:20.800 --> 0:13:25.400 turtle farming in the Cayman Islands. As he had done 0:13:25.440 --> 0:13:29.079 with chicken. Fisher thought he could use captive farming methods 0:13:29.200 --> 0:13:32.640 with turtles to create a cheap source of protein for 0:13:32.800 --> 0:13:36.800 people all over the world. But some pesky environmentalists got 0:13:36.840 --> 0:13:40.040 in the way and ruined it all. They got politicians 0:13:40.080 --> 0:13:43.880 across the world to ban turtle products and the venture 0:13:44.000 --> 0:13:48.920 went belly up. Fisher lost a lot of his farming fortune, 0:13:49.559 --> 0:13:52.599 all of which made the success of the IEA that 0:13:52.800 --> 0:13:54.319 much more important to him. 0:13:58.120 --> 0:14:01.800 He came to the United States in nine seventy and 0:14:02.679 --> 0:14:06.560 did it, speaking to her where he exhorted American business 0:14:06.840 --> 0:14:10.319 to fight back against this apocalyptic tide of regulation and 0:14:11.360 --> 0:14:13.920 social movements and stuff, you know, the environment movement, all 0:14:13.920 --> 0:14:16.719 the social movements of the sixties, and he had the 0:14:16.800 --> 0:14:20.160 method for how they could do that. He was invited 0:14:20.240 --> 0:14:25.280 out by the Institute of Humane Studies, which was founded 0:14:25.320 --> 0:14:28.880 by Baldy Harper, who was also a Montpella and Society member. 0:14:29.160 --> 0:14:32.480 Today, the group Uncoke My Campus, which advocates for getting 0:14:32.520 --> 0:14:35.640 dark money in general and Coke family money in particular 0:14:35.880 --> 0:14:41.040 out of universities, describes the Institute for Humane Studies as 0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:44.600 a recruitment arm for the Coke network. It's a campus 0:14:44.720 --> 0:14:48.160 program based at George Mason University that acts as a 0:14:48.240 --> 0:14:51.960 sort of talent pipeline for Coke think tanks, front groups, 0:14:52.040 --> 0:14:55.800 and advocacy projects. Back in nineteen seventy, though, it was 0:14:55.840 --> 0:14:58.320 still just getting started and looking for a way to 0:14:58.600 --> 0:15:01.960 further the conservative car in the US, which is what 0:15:02.120 --> 0:15:03.720 led them to invite Fisher over. 0:15:05.120 --> 0:15:07.160 And they invited him out, and then the main sponsor 0:15:07.320 --> 0:15:10.960 was Charles Coke, who also controlled the board, and Fisher 0:15:10.960 --> 0:15:13.960 did a tour in the States in nineteen seventy, including 0:15:14.040 --> 0:15:17.160 tobacco executives and so forth. So the IA starts this 0:15:17.280 --> 0:15:22.160 correspondence with the IHS, and so this disconnects Coke and 0:15:22.240 --> 0:15:26.160 his lieutenants to the IA. Around nineteen seventy. 0:15:26.760 --> 0:15:31.920 The conversations between Fisher's IEA and Coke's IHS built the 0:15:32.000 --> 0:15:36.520 foundation for Fisher to go beyond Thatcherism and go international. 0:15:37.320 --> 0:15:39.960 A few years later, Fisher got invited to Canada, and 0:15:40.040 --> 0:15:42.520 it's there that he ended up starting his first think 0:15:42.560 --> 0:15:44.040 tank outside the UK. 0:15:45.600 --> 0:15:52.480 In nineteen seventy four, Fisher is invited to Canada to 0:15:52.760 --> 0:15:56.360 establish the Fraser Institute. It's very difficult to find anything 0:15:56.440 --> 0:16:02.560 much out about that, but the Fraser Institute certainly was 0:16:03.960 --> 0:16:06.320 connected very much to the question of the development of 0:16:07.120 --> 0:16:08.360 oil and gas in Canada. 0:16:09.720 --> 0:16:13.080 The world's major oil companies continued to back Fisher in 0:16:13.240 --> 0:16:16.480 all of his various endeavors as he started to branch. 0:16:16.240 --> 0:16:19.200 Out all of the major oil companies. Obviously there's Shell there, 0:16:19.240 --> 0:16:22.240 but there's also the American oil companies. At the same time, 0:16:23.760 --> 0:16:26.520 the North Sea oil is being opened up, and this 0:16:26.720 --> 0:16:30.360 is a big deal because this breaks the OPEC cartel. 0:16:30.600 --> 0:16:33.640 And so Fisher gets invited to Canada. They set up 0:16:33.720 --> 0:16:36.360 the Fraser Institute around the time that the Tasan oil 0:16:36.600 --> 0:16:39.480 is being developed. And again on the early boards, you've 0:16:39.520 --> 0:16:43.560 got people from Imperial Oil just Exon subsidiary in Canada. 0:16:43.640 --> 0:16:45.960 You've got the Royal Bank of Canada and the Corporate Board, 0:16:46.400 --> 0:16:49.400 which is the biggest investor in oil and gas in Canada. 0:16:50.000 --> 0:16:52.280 There was a lot going on for the oil industry 0:16:52.440 --> 0:16:55.480 at this moment in time. It's the mid seventies, so 0:16:55.800 --> 0:16:58.280 right around the time that people in other countries start 0:16:58.320 --> 0:17:01.400 inviting fisher to come and start think tanks. You've got 0:17:01.520 --> 0:17:07.800 multiple Middle East countries kicking US and European oil companies out. Suddenly, 0:17:07.960 --> 0:17:11.720 after profiting from the resources in those countries for decades, 0:17:12.280 --> 0:17:14.520 they had to start looking for new oil, and they 0:17:14.560 --> 0:17:19.800 were getting desperate to find some. Then you get the 0:17:19.840 --> 0:17:23.160 Arab oil embargo in nineteen seventy three as a response 0:17:23.280 --> 0:17:26.600 to the US providing military aid to Israel, and that 0:17:26.800 --> 0:17:30.120 kicks off an energy crisis. At the same time, oil 0:17:30.160 --> 0:17:32.879 company scientists are starting to put out papers about the 0:17:33.000 --> 0:17:37.520 greenhouse effect in this big potential looming problem for the industry, 0:17:38.480 --> 0:17:41.440 and you've got a bunch of new environmental regulations being 0:17:41.560 --> 0:17:43.760 passed both in the US and all over the world. 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:47.720 So industry is really on its back foot. We've covered 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:50.640 before how much they started to lean on pr during 0:17:50.720 --> 0:17:54.239 this period to deal with this whole situation. Walker has 0:17:54.359 --> 0:17:57.320 documented how they also started to lean on the think 0:17:57.400 --> 0:17:59.160 tank approach during this time. 0:18:00.119 --> 0:18:03.560 So with all of this new environmental regulation coming to 0:18:03.760 --> 0:18:08.320 oil companies, as well as public support for nationalization of 0:18:08.400 --> 0:18:11.080 domestic oil and gas. And there's also at the same 0:18:11.119 --> 0:18:16.719 time a huge kind of deep mistrust of transnational corporations, 0:18:16.800 --> 0:18:20.879 So the whole critique of transitional corporations in the developing 0:18:20.920 --> 0:18:24.800 world and in the West, you have this great attention 0:18:25.000 --> 0:18:30.440 to companies providing arms no more like Dow and so 0:18:30.600 --> 0:18:34.560 on that had also been highlighted by Retel Cousins book 0:18:34.560 --> 0:18:36.520 The Salt Springs. So they've got all of these threats 0:18:36.600 --> 0:18:38.719 coming toward them, and so they can't go out there 0:18:38.760 --> 0:18:40.840 and do what might have been done in the fifties 0:18:40.920 --> 0:18:44.040 and hire Ronald Reagan and have the General Electric Hour 0:18:44.119 --> 0:18:47.280 on a TV show. They can't do anything in their 0:18:47.320 --> 0:18:50.280 own names, right, And so this is where the Fisher 0:18:50.320 --> 0:18:51.040 method comes in. 0:18:52.080 --> 0:18:55.280 After Canada, Fisher got invited to Australia to set up 0:18:55.320 --> 0:18:57.680 a think tank there and then back to the US 0:18:57.880 --> 0:18:58.920 to set up two more. 0:19:00.480 --> 0:19:04.640 And Fisher quite literally describes what he does after from 0:19:04.680 --> 0:19:08.600 the mid seventies, Ons is establishing i EA clones, right, 0:19:09.200 --> 0:19:14.480 so just taking the method and then reproducing it. It's 0:19:14.520 --> 0:19:20.240 been getting invited by very wealthy businessman corporations to produce 0:19:20.359 --> 0:19:23.400 this new method of influencing public opinion and pushing back 0:19:23.480 --> 0:19:28.320 against these movements for public control of oil rents and 0:19:28.400 --> 0:19:32.200 public control pollution in Australia. 0:19:32.400 --> 0:19:35.440 Fisher helped to found that the Center for Independent Studies 0:19:35.960 --> 0:19:38.840 with the help of a wealthy businessman who is now 0:19:38.920 --> 0:19:39.840 a household name. 0:19:40.520 --> 0:19:44.280 He's invited by a man called John Beneathan, who ran 0:19:44.520 --> 0:19:48.840 one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers in Adelaide, which is where 0:19:49.880 --> 0:19:53.879 Rupert Murdoch's corporate empire begins. In South Australia. 0:19:55.080 --> 0:19:59.000 In the early nineteen seventies, Australians were calling for nationalizing oil, 0:19:59.080 --> 0:20:03.680 coil and gas, passing environmental regulation, and passing legislation that 0:20:03.840 --> 0:20:08.320 protected Aboriginal land rights for the first time. Murdoch used 0:20:08.320 --> 0:20:11.320 his media empire to campaign against all of it, and 0:20:11.440 --> 0:20:15.720 eventually that campaign was successful, triggering a constitutional crisis in 0:20:15.840 --> 0:20:20.520 nineteen seventy five that put conservatives in power. But businessmen 0:20:20.720 --> 0:20:23.879 and wealthy elites in the country were worried that public 0:20:24.000 --> 0:20:26.960 sentiment was not really on their side, and that is 0:20:27.040 --> 0:20:28.040 where Fisher came in. 0:20:29.000 --> 0:20:31.440 This is what Fisher did was just basically target the 0:20:31.520 --> 0:20:33.520 people who were scared, who had the most to fear, 0:20:33.640 --> 0:20:37.000 who lay in bed awake, wearing going to be kidnapped 0:20:37.040 --> 0:20:41.320 by revolutionary Marxists or whatever they were worried about, and 0:20:41.560 --> 0:20:45.560 just play on these anxieties and then paint this apocalyptic 0:20:45.680 --> 0:20:50.200 scene for them, you know, of massive inflation and strikes, 0:20:50.280 --> 0:20:55.879 and you know government debt and taxation and punishment of 0:20:56.520 --> 0:21:00.080 rich people. And they would hand him some money and 0:21:00.200 --> 0:21:03.159 I'm here then ask them for more connections. It was 0:21:04.000 --> 0:21:08.240 Fisher that really did the work of galvanizing capitalists to 0:21:08.320 --> 0:21:12.600 the cause of the need to have a new institute 0:21:12.640 --> 0:21:15.119 in Australia like the IA, and it was called the 0:21:15.160 --> 0:21:18.080 Center of Independent Studies, and the founding brands for that 0:21:18.280 --> 0:21:24.080 came from the Murdoch Press, from Shell, DHP, Rio Tinto. 0:21:26.680 --> 0:21:29.399 In the US, Fisher helped to start two new institutes. 0:21:29.520 --> 0:21:32.879 There was the Pacific Research Institute in California, which was 0:21:32.920 --> 0:21:36.840 meant to deal with environmental regulation. In fact, its original 0:21:36.920 --> 0:21:41.080 name was the Center for Economic and Environmental Analysis, idea 0:21:41.200 --> 0:21:44.560 being to consistently remind people that compromises needed to be 0:21:44.680 --> 0:21:47.920 made on environmental issues in order to ensure that the 0:21:48.080 --> 0:21:52.480 economy would continue to grow. But the environmental movement wasn't 0:21:52.520 --> 0:21:55.920 the only social movement causing trouble in the US at 0:21:55.960 --> 0:21:59.399 the time. US business leaders wanted their own version of 0:21:59.480 --> 0:22:02.680 the Thatcher Revolution, something that would push back on all 0:22:02.840 --> 0:22:07.040 of the social movements of the sixties. So in nineteen seventy. 0:22:06.720 --> 0:22:10.840 Eight he established with William Caissey, who went on to 0:22:10.960 --> 0:22:16.840 run Reagan's election campaign and then was CII director. Under Reagan, 0:22:17.280 --> 0:22:19.080 they established the Manhattan Mistitute. 0:22:19.920 --> 0:22:22.840 It's pretty incredible how often Fisher turns up at all 0:22:22.880 --> 0:22:26.520 these key moments in history. But for our purposes, it's 0:22:26.640 --> 0:22:30.440 particularly interesting to note that environmentalists were a problem for 0:22:30.600 --> 0:22:34.919 him the whole way through, from his failed turtle farming 0:22:35.040 --> 0:22:38.720 venture in the Cayman Islands to the regulations that environmentalists 0:22:38.760 --> 0:22:41.639 were pushing in the early seventies, to the formation of 0:22:41.680 --> 0:22:45.560 an entire institute to deal with it, the Pacific Research Institute. 0:22:46.480 --> 0:22:49.119 Shortly after he started it, he began looking for funding 0:22:49.280 --> 0:22:53.040 and support to turn his little collection of IEA clones 0:22:53.359 --> 0:22:56.800 into a cohesive entity, a network of think tanks that 0:22:56.880 --> 0:22:59.920 could work together and inform each other, and also act 0:23:00.160 --> 0:23:04.000 as an incubator for more think tanks. The Atlas Network 0:23:04.080 --> 0:23:08.000 was founded in nineteen eighty one. Almost immediately, Fisher began 0:23:08.200 --> 0:23:12.200 turning his attention to Europe and Latin America, two areas 0:23:12.520 --> 0:23:16.440 where a tendency towards socialism had been concerning business interests 0:23:16.680 --> 0:23:17.920 for a long time. 0:23:19.520 --> 0:23:24.000 Fisher started the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to replicate this 0:23:24.240 --> 0:23:28.639 success of his first effort in this field, the Instead 0:23:28.680 --> 0:23:32.440 of Economic Affairs in the United Kingdom. He saw that 0:23:32.880 --> 0:23:36.960 how after decades of serious work, it influenced the country 0:23:37.840 --> 0:23:41.560 and the world, so he wanted to replicate success and 0:23:41.720 --> 0:23:44.520 also tried to win some policy battles. 0:23:45.440 --> 0:23:48.960 This is Alejandro Chaflin. He was eventually tapped to run 0:23:49.040 --> 0:23:51.480 the Atlas Network and he ran it from nineteen ninety 0:23:51.560 --> 0:23:53.560 one until twenty eighteen. 0:23:53.840 --> 0:23:56.080 He saw thought that many things tanks working on the 0:23:56.160 --> 0:24:00.080 same topic were more effective than a single voice of 0:24:00.200 --> 0:24:04.360 producing research that is rigorous enough as to be used 0:24:04.359 --> 0:24:08.600 at universities but also accessible to the educated lamb, and 0:24:08.680 --> 0:24:12.840 in that way helped change public opinion and finally change 0:24:12.920 --> 0:24:15.040 policy in different corners of the globe. 0:24:15.440 --> 0:24:19.440 Chaffwin started out as the Atlas Network's Latin America director. 0:24:20.520 --> 0:24:23.640 I had a vision to bring more think tanks from 0:24:23.680 --> 0:24:27.800 the Americas to the freedom movement, and when he met me, 0:24:28.320 --> 0:24:32.119 who came from Latin America, he again appointed me like 0:24:32.240 --> 0:24:36.040 director of Latin American affairs and let me go was 0:24:36.200 --> 0:24:38.960 very young. He sent me to Sea donors to raise 0:24:39.040 --> 0:24:42.399 funds to create a program, and that has led to 0:24:43.000 --> 0:24:48.879 Atlas becoming perhaps the leading supporter of think tanks in 0:24:49.000 --> 0:24:49.639 the America. 0:24:50.920 --> 0:24:54.200 At one point, Chafwin was asked to explain who the 0:24:54.359 --> 0:24:57.880 audience was for Atlas Network, and he boiled it down 0:24:57.960 --> 0:25:04.760