Decoding "centre right"

At the weekend's CPAC conference in Brisbane, speakers continually referred to themselves as "centre right". Don't accept the label for an authoritarian, and bloody, ideology.

It is a meme on the transnational Right to refer to themselves in public as “centre right”. The rhetorical flourish works to launder their radicalising Right politics and help keep an inattentive public calm while the affiliates work to strip us of rights and freedoms. They also strip us of our living standards.

It’s a label that can be found around the world in countries where the networked figures are active.

The mainstream media recycles that term, continuing to refer to the actors as “conservative”, even as their radical plans enact the oligarchs’ revolution in the American system. Meanwhile satellite operations around the globe try to replicate what their partners in the US are achieving.

Australia had a lucky break when Charlie Kirk’s murder kept Jack Posobiec from attending and “speaking live” at the Brisbane Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this last weekend. (He appears to be opportunistically trying to take on friend Kirk’s grift.) Posobiec, in the thick of this billionaire-suffused Trump regime, is currently portraying “conservatives” as suffering “asymmetric warfare” from an imagined huge and violent “left” against a plucky little Right.

Instead, he was interviewed for the Brisbane conference by Rita Panahi who joined him at the Charlie Kirk memorial in Arizona. Panahi there describes Kirk’s critics as behaving with “depravity”. She depicts parts of “the left” as “ugly and putrid”. The pair evoke the “left” as filled with “violent hate”. Posobiec declared that there can be no “unity” with a person “who rejects your right to exist” and “stands for your oppression, who stands with stripping you of your life”. Progressives are a “cancer” which must be “cured”.

Posobiec has been one of the loud voices lying about a “wave” of “trans shooters.” The vast majority of shooters continue to be cis white men from rightwing backgrounds, but the attempt to create the mood for trans extermination has escalated since Kirk’s shooting. In opposition to that rhetoric, trans people remain overwhelmingly the victims of violence. (CPAC 2023 in particular was a hotbed of anti-trans activity.)

We should all be beyond being shocked by the “accusations in a mirror” from the radical Right.

Such rhetoric is a key tool used by those fomenting genocides.

The master CPAC organisation was spawned by two American proto-Atlas Network partners in 1974.(1) Ronald Reagan gave the first keynote speech. In recent years, it has become a MAGA product fully in favour of the Trump movement and disdaining its earlier allies in mainstream Republican politics. It has also gone global with organisations in Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

This is how CPAC Australia describes that phenomenon: “CPAC Australia actively participates in CPAC International conferences to foster global collaboration among freedom-loving nations, emphasizing the importance of unity and shared values in protecting individual liberties”. Note that the only “liberties” for the masses in this project are the freedom to be loudly bigoted. All other freedoms are for the donors and enablers.

CPAC Australia is a product of official Atlas Network partner Libertyworks.

Without Posobiec, the biggest international attraction at the Brisbane event was limp lettuce Liz Truss (again). Truss is tightly integrated into Atlas Network activity in the UK (known as “Tufton Street” there). As investigative journalist Sam Bright said about her, “Tufton Street took 12 years to create Prime Minister Truss and six weeks to destroy her Government”.

Also speaking, Matt Schlapp and the co-founder of Moms for Liberty are two unwelcome American contributors to the Australian civic debate. Schlapp is the chairman of the main CPAC body and a global far Right networker. Moms for Liberty is a front group designated an extremist organisation that works to foster bigotry and undermine public education. It is a plutocrat-funded astroturf operation, meaning fake grassroots.

The fact that CPAC Australia had boasted about Posobiec’s appearance deserves some attention.

Posobiec is an American far right agitator. He has, as described by NPR, “a long history of promoting antisemitic and white supremacist content”.

He was the man who pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy about a child abuse circle centred around Hillary Clinton. That conspiracy ended up with a gun-toting sucker imprisoned for coming to “save” the non-existent children trapped in a non-existent cellar, endangering families out for a fun meal.

Posobiec was made a Lincoln Fellow at the previously august Claremont Institute, Atlas Network partner. Given that Atlas has made its partner list secret in recent years, it is hard to know if Claremont continues its association with Atlas. Either way it has radicalised beyond measure. A “racist fever swamp”, it fostered the legal dross used to justify Trump’s 2021 efforts to enact a coup, and is closely integrated with an “extremist fraternal order.”(2)

Another Atlas partner, the Cato Institute, evoked Posobiec thus: “The Claremont Institute, whose mission is to “restore the principles of the American Founding,” awarded a Lincoln Fellowship to Jack Posobiec, a blogger who has promoted the Pizzagate and Seth Rich conspiracy theories, tweeted about “white genocide,” and dropped racist and Nazi code words into numerous tweets.”

After that era, Posobiec went on to publish in 2024 a book that became a New York Times bestseller. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). He was assisted by both Steve Bannon, who wrote the foreword, and JD Vance, who blurbed the book.

In it, Posobiec and his ghostwriter characterise everyone to the left of the far Right as “communists” who are “unhuman.” They declare: “As [progressives] are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman”. They say that monumental violence will accompany an unchecked “left.” Their heroes are Franco, Pinochet and Joseph McCarthy. The book is not only deeply anti-democratic but also deadly dangerous. We have all seen the bloodshed created out of the fear of violence from a demonised Other erupting in indoctrinated populations. Posobiec’s rhetoric around Kirk’s death is clearly linked to using that act of violence to justify a bloody crushing of his demonised depiction of progressives - or “communists”.

It is important in this context that Andrew Cooper described the tame Albanese Labor government as implementing “communism” at the Brisbane conference.

Cooper founded Atlas partner Libertyworks perhaps as a “special project” of the Atlas partner Australian Institute for Progress (AiP). (Cooper was Director of Special Projects at AiP from May 2015 until March 2022. He founded Libertyworks Inc in September 2015 according to his LinkedIn. Cooper’s previous work as a PR consultant must be useful in this activity. The AiP has been coal-funded. AiP is also interlinked with the radical Right National Conservatism Institute of Australia.)

Senator Jacinta Price Nampijinpa too used the boogieman “communist” in Brisbane on the weekend, in her case to refer to Net Zero. Marginally less hyperbolic, Senator Matt Canavan referred to Net Zero as “socialism.” South Australian Senator Antic blamed Net Zero for high energy prices, instead of the history of deals that gave immense profit to foreign power traders at Australians’ expense.

Tony Abbott there begged the MAGAus assembled to give the Liberal Party one more chance to be radical Right. His presence links CPAC to the illiberalism of Viktor Orbán. In fact, he is important in linking Australian rightwing politics and culture wars to the international networks of the movement. Abbott called for the Liberal Party to be “reformed” meaning it ought to take after Nigel Farage’s UK nativist Reform Party.

Praise for far right Kirk pervaded the conference. Canavan applauded Kirk displaying “his Christian faith without any apology”.

It ought to be clear from the plan to include Posobiec in the list of speakers alone that there is nothing “centre right” about CPAC, in Australia or abroad. It is part of the networking of illiberalism. Posobiec intends that illiberalism to be bloody, where “normal humans” crush the “unhumans”, inspired by his use of the “language of genocide”.

While CPAC is fringe in Australia, none of these actors see the project as short-term. We need to begin resisting by urging our media to reject the laundered ways the radicalised Right figures refer to themselves. Instead the commentariat must evoke clearly the danger of a political project that depicts timid centrist Albanese as enacting “communism.”

Note the description of this video from the Times of India. Hindutva nationalists are part of the global illiberal coalition.

(1) The Atlas Network is shorthand term for the global network of partners intimately connected to the Reagan/Thatcher revolution. In 1981, the unofficially networked front groups formed as an official network to streamline their cooperation and proliferation globally. In America, the product can be known as the “Kochtopus”. In the UK, it is nicknamed Tufton Street. In NZ/Ao a partner is one leg of the current coalition government. It is tightly integrated into the mission being executed by the posse around Trump, although it is uncertain to what degree the interlinked networks fostering MAGA politics (the Conservative Partnership Institute) and Christian Nationalist “libertarianism” (the Council for National Policy) continue to cooperate with Atlas partners and how much they are a breakaway movement. The networks share a loathing of anything that can be designated as “woke” with a primary goal of defeating woke climate action.

The two (eventual) Atlas partners that produced CPAC were the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom, which is now a “project” of the Young Americas Foundation.

(2) The link accompanying “radicalised” is to an article published on another Atlas partner site. The Ethics and Public Policy Center is one of the front groups that focuses on Judeo Christian ethics in the desired ultra free market. The link that accompanies “fostered” is to the Niskanen Center whose existence as a breakaway from a key Atlas partner I discussed recently.