Covid and the Atlas Network: End Times in plague and storm

The Atlas Network's free marketers are working with people who believe End Times and Christ's Kingdom are within reach. Together they are dismantling the structures that would prevent mass deaths.

This is a fascinating podcast episode from the team at Conspirituality. Their work is highly recommended, and this topic is important. Someone should let them know that they’re talking about Atlas Network-interlinked activity when they speculate on connections between other “thinktanks” and Heritage’s Project 2025.

In this episode, “Karma and Christ at the NIH”, they discuss an interview between Jay Bhattacharya and Bari Weiss. (Important background information is available in their “Stanford has Fallen” episode.)

Their back catalogue also informs about the so-called “heterodox” thinkers, like Weiss. The point in brief is that these “intellectual dark web” adjacent-thinkers pretend to be provocative and resistant to mainstream thinking, but they end up supporting rightwing trajectories. It is not an accident that they are funded by the Right’s money men, functioning as a gateway to the rightwing thought space. Charles Koch’s money is important in the performative “free speech” space.

Weiss’s Free Press is funded by Peter Thiel, NatCon signatory* and leading figure in the authoritarian-trending tech sphere.

Bhattacharya is discussing his (then) imminent appointment to head up the National Institute of Health. As with all the Trump teams’ health appointments, this is very bad news indeed for American health. The collected impacts of the appointments are also very bad news for global health.

I’ll let you listen to the podcast to hear the detail of what Bhattacharya claims to believe, with vaccine conspiracies included in the mix. The fact that he positions himself as a Christian fits well with the NatCon trajectory.

Bhattacharya is also part of the medical crew that was used by big money donors affiliated with the Atlas Network to spread covid disinformation to foster distrust in the public health measures that raced to adapt to growing understandings of a new virus.

Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch have investigated the dark money poured into the disinformation about health measures. In brief, public health measures were impeding fossil fuel consumption and spending. The money hated them.

After 20 million deaths globally so far, we are stuck with a different world. David Wallace-Wells explored the effect in this New York Times essay. What he does not tackle in the essay or in this outstanding discussion with two of the best commentators on the intellectual Right at Know Your Enemy, is to what degree the changes to our psyche were promoted by the dark money’s propaganda and how much was an intrinsic impact of the trauma.

Between the two forces we are much worse prepared for any new pandemic, made more likely by climate change. The Atlas Network-interlinked thinkers’ disgust for the pandemic’s impact on the economy shows they perceive the downturn as only resulting from public health measures. They disregard people’s intrinsic reaction to a new threat that had the streets of Brooklyn marked by morgue vans to handle the catastrophic number dying.

The public health measures (much less stringent in America than people believe in retrospect, as Wallace-Wells illustrates) also triggered the Atlas Network partners’ longterm Cold War nightmares about the danger of government overreach. (The pandemic era combined with Black Lives Matter protests, reigniting their formative fears that the Civil Rights movement was socialism and a threat to their old (white) order. It was also concurrent with a moment where the Biden government was treating unions with more respect than had been seen since the Atlas Network’s first era of union crushing with Thatcher and Reagan, both Atlas Network-interlinked). Business’s propaganda operations have always surged when the coalition believed its preeminence and freedom were threatened.

The Atlas Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 set out the dismantling of all the health systems that could get in the donors’ way, regardless of the fact that the climate crisis is escalating disease threats. They’ve also dismantled the crucial research that allowed vaccines to produce enough resistance to covid to make the risk of opening up tolerable to the majority. Without the rapid (but safe) production and distribution of vaccines, many millions more would have died.

Both Bragman’s investigation and the Conspirituality podcast discuss how the American Institute for Economic Research (AEIR) was behind the marshalling of forces that appeared as the Great Barrington Declaration. That was the advice of… “heterodox” professionals that leant towards allowing herd immunity to handle the pandemic. We now know that the covid virus’s ability to mutate makes that unworkable.

The AEIR is Atlas Network. It is based in Great Barrington.

The Merchants of Doubt explored how, since the 1950s, a small percentage of scientists have worked at the behest of big money donors to give a veil of “research” to opinions and policy that suit the donors’ profit margins and goals. While some of the Great Barrington Declaration’s more reputable signatories likely moved with the scientific consensus to reject that herd immunity is a solution to covid, others, like the team around Bhattacharya continue to assert that they were correct and martyred.

The erasure of the development of understanding of covid over the months of its spread is critical to the rewriting in the rightwing narrative about the experience. Hindsight is the luxury we earn by enduring.

A footnote for Australians is that the AEIR is now headed up by President Australian Samuel Gregg.

Gregg worked for two years at the Australian Atlas partner the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) after his postgraduate degree. He then served as research director for the peak Atlas religious thinktank for two decades. He came to AEIR from the Acton Institute for Religion and Liberty in 2022.

Gregg spoke with Dan Ryan on his NatCon Australia podcast last year. Ryan is also a director of the Queensland Atlas partner, the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP). (The AiP was noted as spending much more on social media advertising than political parties to influence the last Queensland election, as part of its campaign against renewables.) As the executive director of the National Conservative Institute of Australia, Ryan runs a podcast where he interviews rightwing thinkers, activists and Murdoch journalists. Amongst them are some very bad actors. The interview with Gregg was a very normal “free market” discussion by comparison, but the men’s comments about knowing each other of old from the thinktank sphere is telling about the way Atlas-interlinked activity functions.

In 2022, the CIS’s fellow Australian Atlas thinktank the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) hosted Bhattacharya in Australia.

The religious aspect of the Conspirituality discussion is well worth your attention. Most of the “free market” Atlas actors are likely reckless about lives lost (and the network’s early support for eugenics research - fostering the argument that welfare only helps the poor breed when they ought to be left to die out as unworthy stock -illustrates that recklessness). Others, though, and especially in the Atlas Network’s interaction with the Christian Nationalist Council for National Policy, are extremist Christians who believe that End Times are upon us. To bring about Christ’s kingdom on earth, the purifying of the population is essential. Storms and plagues are signs that Christ is returning, not something we can prevent or address. The combined work of these ideologies heralds a grim future.

*National Conservatism is the ideology around the Trump administration and pervasive in the transnational right which argues that nationalism is crucial and that the nation’s people should be defined by adherence to a religion rather than a “race.” (Although the “race” element is clearly there too.) Christian Nationalists are working with Israeli Jewish Nationalists and Hindu Nationalists. The ideology claims to support the nation’s workers but much of their activity ends up supporting the same dark money donors and goals as the neoliberal project proper. There is considerable personnel and donor overlap with the Atlas Network in NatCon activity. The Christian Nationalist Council for National Policy network overlaps with Atlas activity here and in Project 2025.