John O'Sullivan's long history of writing against immigration

John O'Sullivan is a Brit with influence on the Australian Right. We should not ignore his record.

Readers will have encountered John O’Sullivan at least here and here. He is potentially a significant British presence in the Australian reactionary Right marshalled around the Quadrant journal. His influence through that sphere and the Australian grandees he has introduced to Viktor Orbán’s English-language think tanks means that his history is important to Australians watching the Right.

He continues to act as (CIA-linked) Quadrant’s international editor now, and was its editor proper from February 2015 to January 2017, at the time the journal’s crowd imported the Orbán Islamophobia roadshow to the Melbourne Club. Meet him then at the IPA with Atlas partner representatives Art Laffer and John Roskam.

O’Sullivan in 2022 was one of the drafters of the Statement of Principles for the NatCon movement. (John Roskam promoted one of the post-democracy thinkers on the Statement drafter list in his newsletter.)

O’Sullivan was invited onto the “neoliberal thought collective” the Mont Pelerin Society in 1971. This is his bio for the Independent Institute, the Atlas Network partner where Peter Thiel later had one of his first post-college gigs.

These are two extracts of his bio at the National Review Institute, one of the Atlas Network partners he is connected to, and/or founded.

and:

From “Right-wing politics and the anti-immigration cause” by sociologist Sara Diamond.

This excerpt from historian Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards gives the framework:

This article from Atlas Network actor fellow traveller, Linda Chavez, repeatedly pairs Brimelow and Sullivan as sharing a worldview.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2008 Tanton Files Intelligence Report: “Courting Conservatives”. (Meet the Tanton Network, and from Pro Publica.)

From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2013 “Dangerous Liaisons” Report on LGBTQ Rights. Austin Ruse is an Opus Dei supernumerary. He is a man of “violent rhetoric”. The Faith and Reason Institute is an Atlas Network partner. On C-FAM.

From “The Intellectual Roots of Nativism” by Tucker Carlson when he was still trying to commit journalism.

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Footnote 1: This constitutes gossip rather than evidence, but accords with this account that John O’Sullivan’s stepping down from editing National Review was part of the fine line that William F Buckley walked, incorporating the nativist Right at times, and pushing it outside the “fusion” of conservative thought when expedient:

Footnote 2: O’Sullivan here as one of the Atlas Network actors including Maggie Thatcher (with Conrad Black) in 2000 setting up the "reactionary” Anglosphere to draw the UK away from the EU. Historian Robert Conquest is mentioned in the article as one of the originators of the concept without linking him to the Hudson Institute and Heritage Foundation, as well as being another Cold War Thatcher advisor. National Review Institute links and Jim Bennett discussed here in Sullivan’s account of starting the think tank. Is NatCon a continuation of that project?

Footnote 3: This tribute to a key Atlas Network figure suggests O’Sullivan was in reasonably close communication with the main religious Atlas partner the Acton Institute where he is listed as an author.