Postscript: Toby Young interviewed at ARC by posh Aussie prat Will Kingston

It is important to recognise how deeply reliant the plutocrat- and industry-funded Atlas Network ops are on a range of enmeshed media voices to disseminate the messaging.

David Brock was part of the media apparatus that spread Atlas Network tosh intended to protect the rich and keep their political party in power through until 1997. It wasn’t just news cycle work: he wrote books dedicated to the goals, including one that was part of the right-wing network’s full-throated campaign to destroy Hillary Clinton’s reputation in 1996. On emerging from this ecosystem, disgusted by it as well as by his own contribution, he wrote several books exposing the tight loop of operations. He also set up Media Matters for America to continue highlighting the problems.

Brock had progressed from the Moonie-funded rag Washington Times to ‘a stint as a ‘research fellow’ at the Heritage Foundation (the Right’s premier think tank), to a position as an ‘investigative writer’ at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.” Brock includes publishers such as Harper Collins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, as available to this project.

I highly recommend his 2004 book The Republican Noise Machine: right wing media and how it corrupts democracy. Scan through the list of US Atlas Network partners before reading, and the circuit of platforms, pundits and “journalists” enmeshed with the “architecture of influence” becomes clear. Serving the generous plutocrats and CEOs can make the beach house affordable.

The media outlets or particular voices that serve the project don’t make it onto Atlas partner lists, but they are critical to the success of the propaganda.

Two current members of the media outreach for the disinformation space are Toby Young and Will Kingston. Their use of newer internet outlets illustrates the major change since Brock’s heyday.

Young is a British git who failed upwards until he found an audience pandering to radicalised Right messaging operations and was elevated to the House of Lords by Kemi Badenoch in disgraceful proof that the House of Lords system should be scrapped and replaced by an upper house based on merit if not electoral success. He has used The Daily Sceptic and The Spectator to pander to the donors’ interests. His own appalling social media use fomenting outrage for right-wing clout, and facing repercussions for it, made him an obvious choice to co-found the egregious Free Speech Union. That body went to court to prevent its hacked donor lists being published. [See also in this interview that Project 2025 authors have been travelling from the US to the UK to advise Reform.]

Will Kingston was a much more successful upper class Australian. He attended the Shore School in NSW, famous for inculcating the boys with the certainty that they are Australia’s elite, for rampant misogyny, for (punished) games that rewarded spitting on the homeless etc etc. He continued on to St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney which has faced similar scandals. (I make no allegation about Kingston’s own behaviour about which I have no knowledge.) Kingston, however, made the First Rugby XV and the First Debating team at both, which suggests he had much more going for him than Young who was apparently loathed at school and floundered.*

Kingston had a career at PWC and other consulting operations after college but decided to join the Atlas Network partner the Adam Smith Institute as a “partner.” This is one of the top British junktanks in the network. He simultaneously works for GBNews, the UK’s Fox News. It has been nicknamed “Reform TV” because it functions to boost that far right party. It was founded by the same right-wing Christian Evangelical fossil-fuel heavy hedge fund donor who was a co-founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) and is now owner of The Spectator. Marshall also owns the Unherd site. The other founder of ARC was an Atlas partner junktank.

At the ARC conference in London, Kingston appeared to have a booth set up where he could funnel speakers to the GB News audience. There he interviewed Young, where the pair could inflame the myth-based anger of that audience. Australia’s Fox, Sky News (now News 24), was streaming the conference. We need to be aware of the way the big money donors use these platforms to spread toxic messaging to low-information voters out of mainstream sight.

Most Atlas Network affiliates in Australia remove their (often elite) schooling from their LinkedIn bios. Kingston is one of the few who hasn’t; this column shows why the others tend to purge such affiliations from the public record. Riling up loathing for migrants and trans people as cover for their mega-rich benefactors isn’t pretty work. Climate disinformation and covid disinformation will kill the media outlets’ audience members, but the donors (like Toby Young too) incline towards eugenics which has been supported by the Atlas Network’s partners for decades. They - with media associates like Rupert Murdoch - work to encourage the belief that it is “good for the gene pool” to leave those endangered by ruthless neoliberalism to their Darwinian fate. The clear connections with the power elites’ schooling underscores the nature of the project.

This is class war.

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*Young, Toby (2001, October 21). Young, gifted and disliked. The Independent. London.

It is also noteworthy that Young’s Daily Sceptic began as Lockdown Sceptic. I make no claim about whether Young began this operation as any part of the Atlas Network partner operations that did so much to spread covid disinformation.