Speaker 1: Well, the raids started this morning at around seven am.
Speaker 1: Fifteen properties were searched this morning in seven of the
Speaker 1: German of the sixteen German states, so that is a
Speaker 1: pretty big operation where some one hundred and seventy offices
Speaker 1: were involved altogether.
Speaker 2: In May twenty twenty three, German police conducted a massive
Speaker 2: raid on the homes of leaders in the climate group
Speaker 2: Last Generation.
Speaker 3: Our website you might have been taken down as several
Speaker 3: technical devices have been confiscated and accounts are blocked.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mean that the resistance will stop. It was
Speaker 2: a pretty rapid escalation. Last Generation had only just started
Speaker 2: staging protests in January twenty twenty two. The group N
Speaker 2: is just seven young people in Germany who went on
Speaker 2: a hunger strike trying to get the front runners in
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty one national election to talk just talk
Speaker 2: about climate change. After three weeks and multiple hospital visits,
Speaker 2: only two of the activists remained on their hunger strike,
Speaker 2: and they managed to get the presumed winner of the election,
Speaker 2: Olaf Schultz, to agree to host a public discussion about
Speaker 2: the issue. Almost seventy percent of Germans believe they are
Speaker 2: more concerned than their government about climate change today and
Speaker 2: as a result have become pretty pessimistic about the government's
Speaker 2: ability to pull through on its climate commitments. So in
Speaker 2: late January twenty twenty two, activists with Last Generation began
Speaker 2: blocking roads. Within months, a prominent conservative politician, Frank Schaeffler,
Speaker 2: was sounding the alarm about them being extremists and terrorists,
Speaker 2: and multiple other politicians joined in. When Last Generation activists
Speaker 2: painted the headquarters of his party, the FDP, Schaffler compared
Speaker 2: them to the RAF or Red Army Faction, also known
Speaker 2: as the bottommine Off Gang. The RAF was a far
Speaker 2: left terrorist group that routinely kidnapped, bombed, and n assassinated
Speaker 2: its targets beginning in the nineteen sixties. Because sure, throwing
Speaker 2: mashed potatoes at a painting is totally the same thing.
Speaker 3: Hold On bens Stamp.
Speaker 4: Told them, Alice, well, boy, yeah, I was tapped, did
Speaker 4: tip him.
Speaker 3: I'm commanded.
Speaker 2: That's the stunt that drew international attention to Last Generation
Speaker 2: throwing mashed potatoes at amne. The activist talking there says
Speaker 2: people are starving, people are freezing, people are dying, and
Speaker 2: you're worried about tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a
Speaker 2: painting Schaffler called the stunt terrorism. It'd be easy to
Speaker 2: laugh off if German media hadn't started repeating the RAF
Speaker 2: thing pretty quickly. Here's Spiegel TV covering the spray paint
Speaker 2: incident and saying some are concerned about Last Generation being
Speaker 2: a green.
Speaker 4: RAF gets off by the FDP laws depolit four Denka
Speaker 4: in the klima short sneer fabul from Spinstan Grunen. If
Speaker 4: debtvik would have gone to write on TI media was
Speaker 4: optimal faviet pa.
Speaker 2: Pretty quickly, Schaffler started referring to Last Generation as a
Speaker 2: quote criminal organization and used his position in the German
Speaker 2: Parliament or Bundestag to call for the group to be investigated,
Speaker 2: particularly with respect to their donations. As media coverage continued
Speaker 2: and raids like the one you heard at the beginning
Speaker 2: of this episode started to happen, police were beginning to
Speaker 2: sound an awful lot like Schaeffler.
Speaker 5: Seven suspects between the ages of twenty two and thirty
Speaker 5: eight are accused of forming or supporting a criminal organization,
Speaker 5: and of course that is quite a heavy accusation here
Speaker 5: that can also be charged with five years up to
Speaker 5: five years in prison. Well, the main accusation is that
Speaker 5: those suspects that I've just mentioned have organized fundraising to
Speaker 5: finance further crimes for the last generation.
Speaker 2: Schaffler hasn't historically been a super powerful guy in German politics.
Speaker 2: He's best known for being the guy who didn't want
Speaker 2: to bail out Greece during the twenty eleven deck crisis,
Speaker 2: a move that saw him ousted from Parliament for four years. Today,
Speaker 2: in addition to stoking fear and anger towards last generation,
Speaker 2: he's been credited with blocking a climate bill that the
Speaker 2: government had unanimously passed. It would require that all newly
Speaker 2: installed heating systems are powered by at least sixty five
Speaker 2: percent renewable energies by next year, effectively banning oil and
Speaker 2: gas in new buildings. Schaffler has stalled its passage and
Speaker 2: the gas lobby has been spending a lot of money
Speaker 2: to fight it, so it was once a done deal
Speaker 2: is now uncertain. One possible reason for Shaffler's sudden turn
Speaker 2: as a big anti climate guy is what he did
Speaker 2: with his time off from parliamentary politics. He started a
Speaker 2: libertarian think tank, the Prometheus Institute, and he managed to
Speaker 2: get it into a powerful global network of like minded
Speaker 2: think tanks. The Atlas Network.
Speaker 6: Well, Atlas Network is, as a name suggests, a network,
Speaker 6: and it's global.
Speaker 7: We work all around the world.
Speaker 8: We're based in the US.
Speaker 7: We have about one hundred and fifty nine partners in
Speaker 7: the United States right now, and the bulk of our
Speaker 7: partners are outside Adlas Network.
Speaker 3: It connects people from all over the world defending the
Speaker 3: idea of human dignity, defending human rights and personal liberties.
Speaker 2: This is a little intro video to the Atlas Network
Speaker 2: from the organization's YouTube channel in twenty twenty one. The
Speaker 2: network was formed in nineteen eighty one. But to understand
Speaker 2: what it is and why it's so powerful, we've got
Speaker 2: to go back in time a few decades to the fifties,
Speaker 2: to the first of these think tanks, the Institute for
Speaker 2: Economic Affairs, and the guy who started it, Anthony Fisher.
Speaker 9: So Fisher was, like most of the major protagonists of
Speaker 9: the movement, was born to a quite wealthy family.
Speaker 2: This is Jeremy Walker, a senior lecturer at the University
Speaker 2: of Technology, Sydney who's written more about the Atlas Network
Speaker 2: than anyone.
Speaker 9: He went to Eton, the e Late School across the
Speaker 9: river from Windsor Palace, and I went to Cambridge. He
Speaker 9: was wealthy enough that he and his brother bought an
Speaker 9: airplane for the fun that he came from a family
Speaker 9: of mine owners.
Speaker 2: Fisher joined the Royal Air Force and was shocked that
Speaker 2: when Britain finally had an election at the end of
Speaker 2: World War II, the public voted for the more left
Speaker 2: leaning Labor Party. To Fisher, they represented exactly the sort
Speaker 2: of slippery slope to socialism he'd been fighting in Germany.
Speaker 2: He read the reader's digest version of a book called
Speaker 2: The Road to Serfdom by economist Frederick Hayek, who also
Speaker 2: blamed socialism for all of society's problems, and sought Hayek out.
Speaker 2: At the time, he was a professor at the London
Speaker 2: School of Economics. Fisher told Hayek he was considering getting
Speaker 2: into politics to do something about this situation, and Hayek
Speaker 2: advised him against it.
Speaker 9: Hiak said, there's no point going into politics. That we
Speaker 9: need to do is change what the intellectuals think, like
Speaker 9: the teachers, the journalists days of the paper who had
Speaker 9: piped away for public acceptance of Keynesianism and the idea
Speaker 9: of welfare state.
Speaker 2: Fisher would later go on to talk about this as
Speaker 2: waging the war of ideas. In nineteen fifty four, Hayak
Speaker 2: invited him to be part of a network of neoliberal
Speaker 2: thought leaders called the montpellerin Society.
Speaker 9: That's very interesting in that letter that he wrote says,
Speaker 9: we don't do propaganda. That's not what we do in
Speaker 9: the montpellerin Society. It's a kind of intellectual society where
Speaker 9: we debate economics and policy problems of the day to
Speaker 9: defend an advanced liberalism against this tide of socialism which
Speaker 9: is washing over the world.
Speaker 2: Fisher took Kyek's advice to heart, and instead of launching
Speaker 2: a political campaign, he started a research institution, the Institute
Speaker 2: of Economic Affairs in the UK in nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 2: It fashions itself as the UK's original free market think tank. Ironically,
Speaker 2: the money that paid for the IEA initially came from
Speaker 2: the fortune that Fischer had amassed by bringing the idea
Speaker 2: of key chicken farming from the US to Britain. Because
Speaker 2: nothing says freedom like cajuns and animals. The IA pottered
Speaker 2: along for a few years, putting out research papers, and
Speaker 2: then something happened to elevate its status in the world.
Speaker 9: The early sixties. Shell comes on board and starts to vacuum.
Speaker 9: They finance him as well as BP, and then things
Speaker 9: start to change. They start to, you know, begin to
Speaker 9: have some influence.
Speaker 2: I'm Ami Westervelt and this has drilled the real free
Speaker 2: speech threat. How big oil helped Fisher take over Britain
Speaker 2: and ultimately the world. What it all has to do
Speaker 2: with the crackdown on climate protests today after the break.
Speaker 9: So, the thing with the think tank method was it
Speaker 9: allowed corporations to say things that they couldn't say themselves
Speaker 9: without appearing to be merely speaking to their particular of
Speaker 9: a interesting profit.
Speaker 2: This is Jeremy Walker again. I think thanks are so
Speaker 2: ubiquitous today that sometimes it's easy to forget that they've
Speaker 2: actually had and continue to have a pretty major impact
Speaker 2: on society and public policy in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: That began with Fisher and the IEA.
Speaker 9: By the seventies, they're having a real impact, right, They're
Speaker 9: getting a lot of press. And the way that it
Speaker 9: would work was they would get these professors to write short,
Speaker 9: digestible articles whatever it would be about.
Speaker 3: You.
Speaker 9: Often those things around currency conversion or of things that
Speaker 9: were fairly technical to the non economists. But then these
Speaker 9: wealthy donors to the IA would then buy like you
Speaker 9: copies and send them to all the schools and the universities.
Speaker 2: But to accomplish that whole corporation speaking without people knowing
Speaker 2: that it's them thing, the IEA kept those wealthy donors hidden.
Speaker 2: The research papers seem like just original research. They weren't
Speaker 2: coming out of a university, but they were on par
Speaker 2: with university research and often written by professors. Longtime listeners
Speaker 2: of this podcast might hear echoes in this strategy the
Speaker 2: approach that early pr pioneer Ivy Lee took when the
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania Railroad was trying to combat new regulations in the
Speaker 2: US at the turn of the century. Lee created the
Speaker 2: Bureau of Railway Economics. He staffed it with legit and
Speaker 2: credible economists and put out dry white papers on the
Speaker 2: broader economic impacts of things like safety requirements or increased
Speaker 2: wages for rail workers. The press, not knowing that the
Speaker 2: research was paid for by the rail company, quoted from
Speaker 2: it like it was entirely independent research. In Fisher's case,
Speaker 2: the work the IEA was doing wasn't just for the
Speaker 2: benefit of one particular industry or company. He wanted to
Speaker 2: change how a large segment of society viewed how the
Speaker 2: economy and the government should work period.
Speaker 9: Adept never disclosing the sources of their funding, the corporate
Speaker 9: backers and so on. That was key to the whole operation.
Speaker 2: For oil companies, the think tank approach was part of
Speaker 2: a broader propaganda strategy.
Speaker 9: The same time as Shell and BP were sponsoring the
Speaker 9: Institute of Economic Affairs to business propaganda to the British
Speaker 9: electorate against the post war welfare state, they were also
Speaker 9: financing the British Secret Intelligence Service overseas, the MI six,
Speaker 9: to do propaganda in all of the countries in the
Speaker 9: Middle East and Africa where they had operations. So in
Speaker 9: a sense, yeah, that work. Companies are sponsoring two kinds
Speaker 9: of propaganda, one.
Speaker 10: Which was civil and directed at the electorate in Britain
Speaker 10: and another one which was linked to the British Secret
Speaker 10: services policy to maintain friendly governments towards the British oil
Speaker 10: companies in.
Speaker 9: The Middle East.
Speaker 2: Fisher and his work at the IEA was key to
Speaker 2: those efforts.
Speaker 9: So around the early seventies, Fisher becomes very much in demand,
Speaker 9: and they can see that what he's doing is having
Speaker 9: a big impact.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, Fisher's farming business was not doing so well. Having
Speaker 2: sold the chicken farming business, Fisher invested in a new venture,
Speaker 2: turtle farming in the Cayman Islands. As he had done
Speaker 2: with chicken. Fisher thought he could use captive farming methods
Speaker 2: with turtles to create a cheap source of protein for
Speaker 2: people all over the world. But some pesky environmentalists got
Speaker 2: in the way and ruined it all. They got politicians
Speaker 2: across the world to ban turtle products and the venture
Speaker 2: went belly up. Fisher lost a lot of his farming fortune,
Speaker 2: all of which made the success of the IEA that
Speaker 2: much more important to him.
Speaker 9: He came to the United States in nine seventy and
Speaker 9: did it, speaking to her where he exhorted American business
Speaker 9: to fight back against this apocalyptic tide of regulation and
Speaker 9: social movements and stuff, you know, the environment movement, all
Speaker 9: the social movements of the sixties, and he had the
Speaker 9: method for how they could do that. He was invited
Speaker 9: out by the Institute of Humane Studies, which was founded
Speaker 9: by Baldy Harper, who was also a Montpella and Society member.
Speaker 2: Today, the group Uncoke My Campus, which advocates for getting
Speaker 2: dark money in general and Coke family money in particular
Speaker 2: out of universities, describes the Institute for Humane Studies as
Speaker 2: a recruitment arm for the Coke network. It's a campus
Speaker 2: program based at George Mason University that acts as a
Speaker 2: sort of talent pipeline for Coke think tanks, front groups,
Speaker 2: and advocacy projects. Back in nineteen seventy, though, it was
Speaker 2: still just getting started and looking for a way to
Speaker 2: further the conservative car in the US, which is what
Speaker 2: led them to invite Fisher over.
Speaker 9: And they invited him out, and then the main sponsor
Speaker 9: was Charles Coke, who also controlled the board, and Fisher
Speaker 9: did a tour in the States in nineteen seventy, including
Speaker 9: tobacco executives and so forth. So the IA starts this
Speaker 9: correspondence with the IHS, and so this disconnects Coke and
Speaker 9: his lieutenants to the IA. Around nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: The conversations between Fisher's IEA and Coke's IHS built the
Speaker 2: foundation for Fisher to go beyond Thatcherism and go international.
Speaker 2: A few years later, Fisher got invited to Canada, and
Speaker 2: it's there that he ended up starting his first think
Speaker 2: tank outside the UK.
Speaker 9: In nineteen seventy four, Fisher is invited to Canada to
Speaker 9: establish the Fraser Institute. It's very difficult to find anything
Speaker 9: much out about that, but the Fraser Institute certainly was
Speaker 9: connected very much to the question of the development of
Speaker 9: oil and gas in Canada.
Speaker 2: The world's major oil companies continued to back Fisher in
Speaker 2: all of his various endeavors as he started to branch.
Speaker 9: Out all of the major oil companies. Obviously there's Shell there,
Speaker 9: but there's also the American oil companies. At the same time,
Speaker 9: the North Sea oil is being opened up, and this
Speaker 9: is a big deal because this breaks the OPEC cartel.
Speaker 9: And so Fisher gets invited to Canada. They set up
Speaker 9: the Fraser Institute around the time that the Tasan oil
Speaker 9: is being developed. And again on the early boards, you've
Speaker 9: got people from Imperial Oil just Exon subsidiary in Canada.
Speaker 9: You've got the Royal Bank of Canada and the Corporate Board,
Speaker 9: which is the biggest investor in oil and gas in Canada.
Speaker 2: There was a lot going on for the oil industry
Speaker 2: at this moment in time. It's the mid seventies, so
Speaker 2: right around the time that people in other countries start
Speaker 2: inviting fisher to come and start think tanks. You've got
Speaker 2: multiple Middle East countries kicking US and European oil companies out. Suddenly,
Speaker 2: after profiting from the resources in those countries for decades,
Speaker 2: they had to start looking for new oil, and they
Speaker 2: were getting desperate to find some. Then you get the
Speaker 2: Arab oil embargo in nineteen seventy three as a response
Speaker 2: to the US providing military aid to Israel, and that
Speaker 2: kicks off an energy crisis. At the same time, oil
Speaker 2: company scientists are starting to put out papers about the
Speaker 2: greenhouse effect in this big potential looming problem for the industry,
Speaker 2: and you've got a bunch of new environmental regulations being
Speaker 2: passed both in the US and all over the world.
Speaker 2: So industry is really on its back foot. We've covered
Speaker 2: before how much they started to lean on pr during
Speaker 2: this period to deal with this whole situation. Walker has
Speaker 2: documented how they also started to lean on the think
Speaker 2: tank approach during this time.
Speaker 9: So with all of this new environmental regulation coming to
Speaker 9: oil companies, as well as public support for nationalization of
Speaker 9: domestic oil and gas. And there's also at the same
Speaker 9: time a huge kind of deep mistrust of transnational corporations,
Speaker 9: So the whole critique of transitional corporations in the developing
Speaker 9: world and in the West, you have this great attention
Speaker 9: to companies providing arms no more like Dow and so
Speaker 9: on that had also been highlighted by Retel Cousins book
Speaker 9: The Salt Springs. So they've got all of these threats
Speaker 9: coming toward them, and so they can't go out there
Speaker 9: and do what might have been done in the fifties
Speaker 9: and hire Ronald Reagan and have the General Electric Hour
Speaker 9: on a TV show. They can't do anything in their
Speaker 9: own names, right, And so this is where the Fisher
Speaker 9: method comes in.
Speaker 2: After Canada, Fisher got invited to Australia to set up
Speaker 2: a think tank there and then back to the US
Speaker 2: to set up two more.
Speaker 9: And Fisher quite literally describes what he does after from
Speaker 9: the mid seventies, Ons is establishing i EA clones, right,
Speaker 9: so just taking the method and then reproducing it. It's
Speaker 9: been getting invited by very wealthy businessman corporations to produce
Speaker 9: this new method of influencing public opinion and pushing back
Speaker 9: against these movements for public control of oil rents and
Speaker 9: public control pollution in Australia.
Speaker 2: Fisher helped to found that the Center for Independent Studies
Speaker 2: with the help of a wealthy businessman who is now
Speaker 2: a household name.
Speaker 9: He's invited by a man called John Beneathan, who ran
Speaker 9: one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers in Adelaide, which is where
Speaker 9: Rupert Murdoch's corporate empire begins. In South Australia.
Speaker 2: In the early nineteen seventies, Australians were calling for nationalizing oil,
Speaker 2: coil and gas, passing environmental regulation, and passing legislation that
Speaker 2: protected Aboriginal land rights for the first time. Murdoch used
Speaker 2: his media empire to campaign against all of it, and
Speaker 2: eventually that campaign was successful, triggering a constitutional crisis in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five that put conservatives in power. But businessmen
Speaker 2: and wealthy elites in the country were worried that public
Speaker 2: sentiment was not really on their side, and that is
Speaker 2: where Fisher came in.
Speaker 9: This is what Fisher did was just basically target the
Speaker 9: people who were scared, who had the most to fear,
Speaker 9: who lay in bed awake, wearing going to be kidnapped
Speaker 9: by revolutionary Marxists or whatever they were worried about, and
Speaker 9: just play on these anxieties and then paint this apocalyptic
Speaker 9: scene for them, you know, of massive inflation and strikes,
Speaker 9: and you know government debt and taxation and punishment of
Speaker 9: rich people. And they would hand him some money and
Speaker 9: I'm here then ask them for more connections. It was
Speaker 9: Fisher that really did the work of galvanizing capitalists to
Speaker 9: the cause of the need to have a new institute
Speaker 9: in Australia like the IA, and it was called the
Speaker 9: Center of Independent Studies, and the founding brands for that
Speaker 9: came from the Murdoch Press, from Shell, DHP, Rio Tinto.
Speaker 2: In the US, Fisher helped to start two new institutes.
Speaker 2: There was the Pacific Research Institute in California, which was
Speaker 2: meant to deal with environmental regulation. In fact, its original
Speaker 2: name was the Center for Economic and Environmental Analysis, idea
Speaker 2: being to consistently remind people that compromises needed to be
Speaker 2: made on environmental issues in order to ensure that the
Speaker 2: economy would continue to grow. But the environmental movement wasn't
Speaker 2: the only social movement causing trouble in the US at
Speaker 2: the time. US business leaders wanted their own version of
Speaker 2: the Thatcher Revolution, something that would push back on all
Speaker 2: of the social movements of the sixties. So in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 9: Eight he established with William Caissey, who went on to
Speaker 9: run Reagan's election campaign and then was CII director. Under Reagan,
Speaker 9: they established the Manhattan Mistitute.
Speaker 2: It's pretty incredible how often Fisher turns up at all
Speaker 2: these key moments in history. But for our purposes, it's
Speaker 2: particularly interesting to note that environmentalists were a problem for
Speaker 2: him the whole way through, from his failed turtle farming
Speaker 2: venture in the Cayman Islands to the regulations that environmentalists
Speaker 2: were pushing in the early seventies, to the formation of
Speaker 2: an entire institute to deal with it, the Pacific Research Institute.
Speaker 2: Shortly after he started it, he began looking for funding
Speaker 2: and support to turn his little collection of IEA clones
Speaker 2: into a cohesive entity, a network of think tanks that
Speaker 2: could work together and inform each other, and also act
Speaker 2: as an incubator for more think tanks. The Atlas Network
Speaker 2: was founded in nineteen eighty one. Almost immediately, Fisher began
Speaker 2: turning his attention to Europe and Latin America, two areas
Speaker 2: where a tendency towards socialism had been concerning business interests
Speaker 2: for a long time.
Speaker 11: Fisher started the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to replicate this
Speaker 11: success of his first effort in this field, the Instead
Speaker 11: of Economic Affairs in the United Kingdom. He saw that
Speaker 11: how after decades of serious work, it influenced the country
Speaker 11: and the world, so he wanted to replicate success and
Speaker 11: also tried to win some policy battles.
Speaker 2: This is Alejandro Chaflin. He was eventually tapped to run
Speaker 2: the Atlas Network and he ran it from nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: one until twenty eighteen.
Speaker 11: He saw thought that many things tanks working on the
Speaker 11: same topic were more effective than a single voice of
Speaker 11: producing research that is rigorous enough as to be used
Speaker 11: at universities but also accessible to the educated lamb, and
Speaker 11: in that way helped change public opinion and finally change
Speaker 11: policy in different corners of the globe.
Speaker 2: Chaffwin started out as the Atlas Network's Latin America director.
Speaker 11: I had a vision to bring more think tanks from
Speaker 11: the Americas to the freedom movement, and when he met me,
Speaker 11: who came from Latin America, he again appointed me like
Speaker 11: director of Latin American affairs and let me go was
Speaker 11: very young. He sent me to Sea donors to raise
Speaker 11: funds to create a program, and that has led to
Speaker 11: Atlas becoming perhaps the leading supporter of think tanks in
Speaker 11: the America.
Speaker 2: At one point, Chafwin was asked to explain who the
Speaker 2: audience was for Atlas Network, and he boiled it down
Speaker 2: to one word. One of the very first think tanks
Speaker 2: created by this newly formed Atless network was the Institute
Speaker 2: for Liberty and Democracy in Peru. It was started the
Speaker 2: same year the Atlas Network started in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 2: and its founder was a well known economist, Hernando de Soto.
Speaker 2: De Soto came up with a theory that wound up
Speaker 2: reverberating throughout the Atlas Network universe. It's a really good
Speaker 2: example of just how much these think tanks talk to
Speaker 2: each other and how ideas spread.
Speaker 12: Reda dit Ceo gira la masonia nuisabata.
Speaker 2: Here he is giving a TED talk in twenty eleven
Speaker 2: explaining his strategy for dealing with indigenous environmental activism.
Speaker 12: Wequa internationalist I Coolo hi Is stays having los in
Speaker 12: diaz Nolezu.
Speaker 2: He says one of the consequences of treating Indigenous people
Speaker 2: like they're straight out of the movie Avatar is that
Speaker 2: they don't have property rights, and that various international environmental
Speaker 2: organizations argue that indigenous people don't want property rights, that
Speaker 2: they prefer to wander through the forest, but that when
Speaker 2: he and his team went to see for themselves, what
Speaker 2: they found was extreme poverty in indigenous communities. For DeSoto,
Speaker 2: the solution is property titles, property rights, which would then
Speaker 2: let indigenous people make money off their land, and in particular,
Speaker 2: off of selling or extracting the resources from it. This
Speaker 2: is perhaps unsurprisingly something that a lot of Atlas Thing
Speaker 2: Tank members in the US have argued as well. Naomi
Speaker 2: Schaeffer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
Speaker 2: has argued that the reason Indigenous people in the US
Speaker 2: experience higher poverty rates is because they don't have property rights,
Speaker 2: and expressly not because of anything to do with colonialism.
Speaker 2: DeSoto came up with his version of this theory after
Speaker 2: a bloody standoff between indigenous environmental activists and police in
Speaker 2: Peru in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 13: Dozens of people are estimated to have been killed, and
Speaker 13: clashes between police and indigenous activists protesting oil and mining
Speaker 13: projects in the northern Peruvian Amazonian province of Bagua.
Speaker 2: Indigenous leaders were protesting the encroachment on their land by
Speaker 2: various interests, including timber mining and oil and gas.
Speaker 13: I Witness accounts indicate the police fired live ammunition and
Speaker 13: tear gas into the crowd.
Speaker 2: DeSoto argues that the solution to all of this is
Speaker 2: just to cut indigenous groups in on the profits. It's
Speaker 2: all very well, he says, not to drag indigenous people
Speaker 2: into globalization, not to pull them under the law, but
Speaker 2: the result is that their resources are going to be
Speaker 2: extracted and other people will get rich off of them
Speaker 2: instead of the indigenous people themselves. In other words, there
Speaker 2: is no world in which extraction is not the point.
Speaker 2: We're going to get into this mindset and more depth
Speaker 2: in an upcoming episode, but for now, it's important to
Speaker 2: understand that this is the sort of paradigm colonizers have
Speaker 2: been trying to impose on indigenous people for centuries, so
Speaker 2: not exactly a novel economic theory. This idea shows up
Speaker 2: in Canada a couple of years later, when conservatives put
Speaker 2: out a bunch of papers in the wake of indigenous
Speaker 2: led protests. The McDonald Laurier Institute, another Atlas Network think
Speaker 2: tank and a partner of the Freezer Institute, is the
Speaker 2: source we have.
Speaker 8: You go back over fifty sixty years in mining sector
Speaker 8: and indigenous communities did not always get along well. There
Speaker 8: were actually some serious problems that emerged sort of over time.
Speaker 8: We know now that indigenous communities must be key partners
Speaker 8: in the mining process.
Speaker 2: More recently, starting around twenty nineteen, mcgott Wade, the leader
Speaker 2: of Atlas's Center for African Prosperity, began repeating a lot
Speaker 2: of these same talking points in discussions about climate action
Speaker 2: and development in Africa.
Speaker 14: My first company, we had started a nonprofit because my
Speaker 14: goal was how can I help replicate whatever success I
Speaker 14: was able to have. How can I help many of
Speaker 14: the magots or my male counterparts from Africa do exactly
Speaker 14: what I did with whatever product they deemed to.
Speaker 3: Do it with.
Speaker 2: How could I help with that? And it is doing
Speaker 2: that journey.
Speaker 14: But I eventually even I learned about the work of
Speaker 14: Hernando de Soto, and when I heard about his work,
Speaker 14: he was right there telling me, Magatt, what you went
Speaker 14: through is not an anecdote. This is very very something
Speaker 14: very systemic about this, and it is called economic freedom.
Speaker 2: Atlas Network members are not just loosely affiliated organizations. They
Speaker 2: meet up frequently throughout the year in both regional and
Speaker 2: international events, liberty forums. They show up on each other's podcasts,
Speaker 2: They publish papers together. In the nineties, Chaffwin bragged about
Speaker 2: how the Atlas Network was an early adopter of the
Speaker 2: Internet in order to stay connected and share ideas more easily.
Speaker 2: There's also a ton of overlap between people who work
Speaker 2: for the mothership, the Atlas Network organization, and people who
Speaker 2: work for various member think tanks, with folks moving in
Speaker 2: and out of those orbits pretty frequently. Chaffwin himself, when
Speaker 2: he left the Atlas Network in twenty eighteen, went on
Speaker 2: to lead an Atlas Network member think tank called the
Speaker 2: Actin Institute. The Actin Institute is the home of another
Speaker 2: really good example of how ideas spread through the Atlas Network.
Speaker 2: It has pushed a sort of religious form of climate
Speaker 2: denial for a really long time. It has often talked
Speaker 2: about environmentalists and climate activists as being religiously driven a cult,
Speaker 2: that sort of thing. This is an idea that you
Speaker 2: start to see reverberate through the ATLAS network. In fact,
Speaker 2: we just heard Bella Debrera with the Institute for Public
Speaker 2: Affairs and ATLAS member think tank in Australia talking that
Speaker 2: way in last week's episode. The Heritage Foundation and the
Speaker 2: Cato Institute in the US talk this way too, and
Speaker 2: the Cornwall Alliance, a group of faith based think tanks
Speaker 2: incubated by the Actin Institute, put out a twelve part
Speaker 2: series of videos on this topic called Resisting the Green Dragon.
Speaker 2: Here's a snippet from the trailer.
Speaker 6: In what has become one of the greatest deceptions of
Speaker 6: our day, radical environmentalism is striving to put America and
Speaker 6: the world under its destructive control. This so called green
Speaker 6: Dragon is seducing your children in our classrooms and popular culture.
Speaker 6: It's less for political power now extends to the highest
Speaker 6: global levels, and its twisted view of the world elevates
Speaker 6: nature above the needs of people of even the poorest
Speaker 6: and the most helpless. With millions falling prey to its
Speaker 6: spiritual deception.
Speaker 2: The time is now to stand and resist.
Speaker 8: The religious and political environmental movement, what we call the
Speaker 8: Green Dragon, has become one of the greatest threats to society.
Speaker 2: And the Church in our day.
Speaker 15: Taking care of the earth sounds like a good idea
Speaker 15: because it is a good idea. What most Christians don't
Speaker 15: understand is that environmentalism is a whole worldview. It offers
Speaker 15: its own doctrines of God, of creation, of humanity, of sin,
Speaker 15: and of redemption.
Speaker 2: I think the fear mongering is and again a lot
Speaker 2: of this stuff ends up making its way into public
Speaker 2: policy discussions and legislation. In twenty nineteen, for example, an
Speaker 2: Atlas Network group called Policy Exchange in the UK put
Speaker 2: out a paper about extinction rebellion. It was called Extremism Rebellion,
Speaker 2: and it talked about how extinction rebellion were extremists and
Speaker 2: terrorists and potentially dangerous, and that something needed to be
Speaker 2: done about this new form of radical climate protest. Here's
Speaker 2: one of the authors of that paper, Richard Wolton, who
Speaker 2: was a senior fellow with Policy Exchange, advocating for a
Speaker 2: nationwide police response to extinction rebellion and for new legislation
Speaker 2: around protest.
Speaker 7: Engaged in organized criminality on the law scale, and their
Speaker 7: sort of tactics is one of civil resistance, a civil
Speaker 7: resistance model that is based on illegal action so I
Speaker 7: think what we saw of the weekend with the blockading
Speaker 7: of the various news print outlets was a form of anacheism. Effectively,
Speaker 7: it was rather typical. This is a group that rejects
Speaker 7: democracy and the liberal free market economy and explicitly sinks
Speaker 7: to overturn both.
Speaker 2: Just a couple of years later, the UK passed a
Speaker 2: new policing bill explicitly to deal with extinction rebellion style tactics,
Speaker 2: and in twenty twenty three, at a summer garden party
Speaker 2: for Policy Exchange, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak thanked them
Speaker 2: for helping to draft that bill. Similar things have happened
Speaker 2: in the US, where industry drafted legislation that was created
Speaker 2: in the week of the Standing Rock protests was spread
Speaker 2: to multiple states by another Atleas Network group, the American
Speaker 2: Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC. Sometimes it's less explicit than
Speaker 2: writing legislation. Here's Magot weigh again at an Atlas Network
Speaker 2: Liberty forum, talking about how she has managed to shift
Speaker 2: the conversation around climate action, particularly at the international level.
Speaker 14: It's not that we don't care about the climate change.
Speaker 14: I certainly care about Earth. I care about the environment.
Speaker 14: I am known for that, right, but on Earth we
Speaker 14: also have these people. So you cannot tell me, especially
Speaker 14: if you're telling me that you care about black lives,
Speaker 14: that black lives matter, Well, how about the fact that
Speaker 14: you're about to mess up the place where ninety percent
Speaker 14: of a representative of a black race lives, namely Africa.
Speaker 14: And so this led me to having my OpEd being
Speaker 14: published on the in the Water Journal. It's called the
Speaker 14: cup twenty six Plan to Keep Africa Poor. So I
Speaker 14: am saying this because this is a winnable part of
Speaker 14: your argument.
Speaker 2: This is really interesting because weeds talking points here don't
Speaker 2: just mirror how the fossil fuel industry talks about Africa,
Speaker 2: but have also started to show up all over the
Speaker 2: conservative universe. Here she is sharing her message on Jordan
Speaker 2: Peterson's podcast.
Speaker 14: Oh Gee, Climate Change. I'm not even gonna go and
Speaker 14: argue the scientific argument. I'm not. Your solution right now
Speaker 14: is to tell me we stop all carbon emission, we
Speaker 14: stop all fossil fuels right now, right now. But Jorda,
Speaker 14: what does that mean if we did that? What does
Speaker 14: that mean if we did that?
Speaker 10: Porn people will freeze in the dark and bake in
Speaker 10: the sun while they starve.
Speaker 14: Thank you, you just signed a death warrant for one
Speaker 14: point three billion people, of them one billion black people,
Speaker 14: and you just told me that that matter.
Speaker 2: And now, leading up to this year's Conference of the Parties,
Speaker 2: the annual UN Climate Conference, the fossil fuel industry's main
Speaker 2: message is essentially what Wade is saying, we can't deny
Speaker 2: africa fossil fuel development, that moving off fossil fuels too
Speaker 2: quickly will condemn Africa to poverty. We've debunked this idea
Speaker 2: many times in this podcast. What they're doing here is
Speaker 2: cherry picking certain things and cramming them together into a
Speaker 2: simple message that resonates. But there are a lot of
Speaker 2: holes in this argument. For a start, if fossil fuel
Speaker 2: development were the fix for energy poverty or any other
Speaker 2: kind of poverty, than Nigeria, which has been in the
Speaker 2: oil business for longer than any other African country and
Speaker 2: is today the continent's largest producer, would not still be
Speaker 2: last in the world on energy access. The fact is
Speaker 2: a ussing both poverty and climate change is complicated, and
Speaker 2: no one is really doing a great job of it
Speaker 2: so far. That leaves space for a simple message like
Speaker 2: wades climate advocates just don't care about poor people to resonate,
Speaker 2: especially when it's then repeated over and over again by
Speaker 2: a whole ecosystem of talking heads. It's a perfect illustration
Speaker 2: of how Fisher always talked about the think tank strategy,
Speaker 2: that it was about getting certain ideas into the public
Speaker 2: discourse and then leaning on influential people to repeat those
Speaker 2: ideas and push them forward until they eventually became policy
Speaker 2: or international diplomacy. The way many of the Atlas network
Speaker 2: think tanks talked about youth climate protests in twenty nineteen
Speaker 2: is another great example. It turned up in a lot
Speaker 2: of countries, especially Australia, Canada and Sweden. Here's Joanne Tran,
Speaker 2: a young and that the Australian Taxpayers Alliance sent to
Speaker 2: Sky News to talk about how dumb it is to
Speaker 2: miss school.
Speaker 8: Just can you tell us basically, why did you decide
Speaker 8: you wanted to stay in school on Friday.
Speaker 16: One of the main reasons why I didn't go to
Speaker 16: the strike on Friday was because I fundamentally disagree with
Speaker 16: what the organization that was organizing the strike were advocating for. So,
Speaker 16: for example, one of their policies was one hundred percent
Speaker 16: renewables and just economically like unviable projects like that. And secondly,
Speaker 16: I just think that we need to have a much
Speaker 16: more informed debate about this issue. And I just don't
Speaker 16: think a bunch of kids who don't understand the impacts
Speaker 16: of what they're advocating for, waving around posters telling the
Speaker 16: Prime Minister to go f himself is the most is
Speaker 16: the best? Is the informed debate that we need in
Speaker 16: this country. And frankly, you know, just them skipping school
Speaker 16: says a lot.
Speaker 2: In this way. Even when Atlas Network think tanks aren't
Speaker 2: rating legislation that criminalizes protest, they really helped to create
Speaker 2: the conditions for legislation like that to pass. The example
Speaker 2: we started with in Germany is a good one. You
Speaker 2: also see this happening in Australia, and rapid crackdown on
Speaker 2: climate protests has gone almost unnoticed even by politicians that
Speaker 2: supposedly support climate action, because so much has happened in
Speaker 2: the media, because there's been so much public discussion about
Speaker 2: how radical these activists are, or how annoying, or how
Speaker 2: these kids should just be in school when legislation passes
Speaker 2: that criminalizes their activism. A lot more people in the
Speaker 2: public are willing to just sort of shrug and accept it.
Speaker 2: Here's Jeremy Walker again.
Speaker 9: I'll throw something out into the public sphere which you'll
Speaker 9: get a little bit depressed, and then before you know it,
Speaker 9: a law has been.
Speaker 2: Written.
Speaker 9: By now you have the criminalization of what was previously
Speaker 9: seen as legitimate civil protest.
Speaker 2: That's it for this time. If you missed last week's
Speaker 2: episode on Australia, go back and listen. It's very much
Speaker 2: tight into everything we were talking about today. You will
Speaker 2: hear lots of other examples in countries where the Alice
Speaker 2: Network is very active throughout this season as well, so
Speaker 2: come back for that, and of course we'll be covering
Speaker 2: lots of other topics throughout this season too. The Real
Speaker 2: Free Speech Threat is a cross border reporting project from
Speaker 2: our newly expanded Drilled Global team. Our senior editor for
Speaker 2: the series is Alan Brown.
Speaker 17: Sarah Ventry and Martin Seltz Austweak as senior producers. Sound
Speaker 17: design and scoring also by Martin Saltz Austweek, who composed
Speaker 17: much of the music in news episode.
Speaker 2: Peter Duff is our audio engineer. Additional reporting for this
Speaker 2: episode was contributed by Jeff Demi Key, Juliana Marulo, Lindall Rollins,
Speaker 2: and Marlow Starling.
Speaker 17: Fact checking by woudn Jan, Legal review by James Wheeton.
Speaker 17: Our artwork is by Matt Fleming. Our theme song is
Speaker 17: but in the Hand by four Known. The show was
Speaker 17: created by Amy Westervelt.
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