The centre fails us again

The reaction to Charlie Kirk's death is emblematic of a centre that will not stop its work ushering in theocratic authoritarianism. Ezra Klein's 'Abundance' is part of that problem.

Far right figures speaking in public often tailor their messages to allow themselves plausible deniability. Others are much more open in their dehumanising bigotry. The degree to which mainstream voices launder their real message - or treat them as clickbait - endangers us.

Don’t mistake me. The far-right figures who act as donors, strategists and foot soldiers to the movement are to blame for our drift towards Christian Nationalist regimes in the West. The people willing to become their bloc, because bigotry suits their grievances, are also to blame. The complexity of challenging their toxicity can mean civic debate ceases to confront them. The commentariat and politicians take the hate those forces build as a fact of life rather than their product. Instead we hold liable the centrist forces whose gormless complicity with big money’s goals builds the rage that fuels the radicalising Right.

It is critical to blame those two factions before returning to condemn the centrist voices for their routine blindness to the bad intentions and bad faith of those on the Right. And the intentions are indeed bad. Stephen Miller functions as Trump’s de facto prime minister, as well as shadow head of the departments of defence and homeland security. He has recently described in hysterical terms people “celebrating” Charlie Kirk’s murder as “domestic terrorists”. Marco Rubio has introduced a bill to revoke US citizen’s passports for “crimes” such as criticising Israel, “as terrorists and traffickers”.(1)

Will business and tech commentators continue to discuss Peter Thiel and Elon Musk as businessmen, when the former is about to give four lectures on the Antichrist and the latter just called for anti-immigrant violence on British streets?

South Korean engineers were persecuted, shackled, in part because centrist voices repackaged the wild platform Trump and the Project 2025 team were building as a “conservative” outlier rather than a “Christian” fascistic project. By normalising Trump’s campaign and his posse’s open planning for extreme steps, mainstream voices robbed lower engagement citizens of the ability to know why they should vote.

JD Vance just hosted a commemorate streaming of Kirk’s podcast from the White House. NPR titled its piece: “JD Vance hosts 'The Charlie Kirk Show,' paying tribute with top White House officials”. The account whitewashes (sic) Vance’s fascistic threats to go after the “raging left lunatics” in “the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence”. He also promised to target mainstream left publications.

He is not alone in these threats. In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, many prominent rightwing voices declared war on the “left”, which included calls for violence and arresting all Democrat politicians. Mainstream media, meanwhile, promoted the narrative that the shooter was antifascist or trans. We have endured too many edgelord mass shooter manifestos full of internet jokes for this negligence to be acceptable. The big organisations can easily commission a database of information for their staff explaining the murderers’ trolling memes playing out in that space.

Ezra Klein, the New York Times’s star of explanatory journalism, is failing both in his representation of a far right actors in American society as well as in his cooperation with Dark Money-funded think tank operations.

Ezra Klein’s response to Charlie Kirk’s murder is typical of the reactionary centre. The fact that Kirk used “debate” as a way to platform his bigotries is repackaged as an interest in dialogue. His murderous disdain for the lives and welfare of people who did not look like him is erased.(2)

Kirk was a canny young man who, at 18, managed to catch the eye of the right-wing donor class which was desperate to infiltrate student audiences to limit youth’s threat to profits. Greater acceptance of plurality was almost as worrisome as the younger generations’ commitment to climate action for these reactionary figures.

So Kirk was one of the young right-wingers granted a lucrative ticket on the right-wing gravy train. Relatively few in number, any personable “conservative” college student can sign on for mentoring, fellowships, career paths that promise a comfortable life, and attention if they can do it right. Kirk did it Right.

Kirk’s Turning Point USA was not listed as an Atlas Network think tank partner. (The Atlas Network is the name of the neoliberal “Kochtopus” tracked in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money). It did interact with the Koch architecture of influence and worked in cooperation with overt Koch front groups (3), receiving funds from the overlapping donors.

Kirk was, however, listed as a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP). This is the US Christian Nationalist project that developed in the 1970s, and was formalised as a coalition in 1981. Its goal was to make the USA a Christian authoritarian state. The list of Christofascist donors, strategists and media networks operating together makes for unnerving reading. Anne Nelson tracked the body in Shadow Network, but the story can be summarised through the Bad Faith documentary. (The degree to which the Atlas Network and CNP are overlapping networks is thought-provoking.)

Kirk described Turning Point USA not as a “think tank” but as a “battle tank” to fight culture wars. Kirk’s donors include Foster Friess, who had been president of the CNP. Kirk’s front group has also been funded by the Bradley family, noted donors to ethnostate and race science projects. The head of a Bradley family foundation is a CNP member. Donors from the “fossil fuel space” are argued to have caused TPUSA’s decision to fight against university climate divestment.(4)

Now Ezra Klein appears to be serving Koch and friends’ goals. “Abundance” emerged out of the reactionary centre and has proved attractive to the tech and libertarian Right as a way to rebrand neoliberalism for a sceptical age. By co-authoring and promoting the movement, keynote speaker Klein works to flog the growth agenda to progressives and the left. It’s hard to imagine that someone as smart as Klein can’t see the dangers of the money and actors he’s playing with on this new grift. Has he been Overton Window’d Right by his time at the NY Times or is the promise of luxury tempting enough for him to set aside his critical thinking?

The Manhattan Institute is one of the founding Atlas Network front groups.

Like former NYT columnist Bari Weiss before him, Klein has adopted the path of the provocateur. Weiss is more overtly a gateway to the Right for centrists with her posse of “heterodox thinkers” who support power and punch down on the vulnerable while pretending merely to “ask questions”. Weiss’s The Free Press operation is funded by right-wing tech tycoons.

There is plenty of that same money funding the project that came to the fore with Klein’s co-authored book, Abundance. This report investigates the Atlas Network and tech Right connections that pervade the Abundance “ecosystem.” The idea that cutting down consumption is not the solution we need, but that we need to promote growth to solve our problems is one that repackages neoliberalism’s supply side economics for the age of climate permacrisis. The fact that the abundance plan is full of holes doesn’t matter to those who profit from boosting it, nor those who are using it to launder their neofeudal goals for a centrist or left audience.(5)

This essay unpicks some of the lazy thinking at work in the “Abundance” prescription. Core to the project for libertarians, of course, but also for Klein and co-author Thompson’s more progressive picture, is to blame government regulation for the lag in innovation. At best, the notion that money will “grow” a better society without being pressured to do so well is laughably naive.

The attraction of this message to the old neoliberal actors should be obvious. The possible limits to consumption posed by Covid health measures was enough to send Charles Koch and fellow donors into a frenzy. Their destruction of the apparatus of scientific research through Project 2025 and the Trump 2.0 government suggests that the pandemic science-based intervention was Dark Money’s last straw.(5) The threat posed by the climate catastrophe is much more extreme. While the plutocrats intend to profit from the disasters, and trust that their wealth will protect them from the suffering, any attempts to constrain the scale of the disaster will pose obstacles. Degrowth is a philosophy that will not be tolerated.

The Right is always canny in the way it markets its goals. To sell what amounts to neofeudalism as “freedom” takes some serious cheek. Particularly when they manage to have the new age of serfs take it up as a battle cry.

The tendency of the centre (and even the left) to fail to examine this transnational network of networks is criminally negligent. The architectures of influence are aiming to undermine our democratic projects and impose authoritarian constraints on our lives. At the same time they are determined to trash all protections for our living standards and future. Worse, perhaps, they aim to turn us against each other in bloodshed as identities strive to steal some privileges from the chaos the plutocrats are creating.

The cruelty being perpetrated on vulnerable groups is not an accident: it fuels the bloodlust of the debased MAGA crowd.

Intelligent people like Ezra Klein cannot be assumed to be acting in good faith when they take on the task of laundering the reputations of fascistic regime mouthpieces like Kirk, nor when they launder the plutocrat goals lightly concealed in Abundance.

Our reactionary centrists and liberals need to face their complicity in the authoritarian trajectory we are seeing gain strength. As long as they continue to function as gateways to ever further Right ideologies, we cannot build a coalition to stand firm for our rights and freedoms.

We must confront them with this complicity in the accelerating dystopia.

(1) Note that parents of raped teens needing an abortion, and of trans youth needing safety and support, have been labelled “traffickers” when they take their children interstate. Kirk said that he would force his daughter if raped at 10 to carry a baby to term, regardless of what that would do to her body.

(2) These discussions tackle the ways in which Kirk was egregious.

I don’t speak German

The Intercept

Amy Remeikis (now taken down by The Daily) I’m sorry Charlie Kirk is dead, but I cannot mourn him. This is why

David Corn No Charlie Kirk was not practicing politics the right way.

Moira Donegan Charlie Kirk’s killing was a tragedy. But we must not rewrite his life

And don’t forget TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit where Kirk, and high profile Fox women, told female students to get married and have babies instead of studying and having a career.

(3) Turning Point USA was a regular feature at CPAC. CPAC was a creation of the Atlas Network partner the American Conservative Union.

(4) Kirk himself can be seen as a gateway to further right ideas. White supremacist groups saw the benefit of his college campus branches and infiltrated these milder fellow travellers. Kirk only expressed mild antisemitism rather than the overt and bloody antisemitism of people like Nick Fuentes (who might have led to Kirk’s murder with his campaign against Kirk). Kirk appeared on the Thought Crime podcast with the more extreme Jack Posobiec. (Posobiec is an erstwhile Atlas partner fellow with white supremacist connections). There they fostered hate against Black people. Posobiec wrote a book, blurbed by JD Vance, Unhumans. In that, anyone not in the far right is characterised as a communist and an “Unhuman” threat. We all know the mass violence that this kind of thinking can foster.

Posobiec is soon to appear at the Australian CPAC event.

(5) It is important not to be befuddled by the impressive sounding names given to front groups, looking instead at their people, funding and goals. Matt Yglesias, whose writing is said to have provoked Thompson’s Abundance thesis, is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. That body was founded by a 20 year operative at the Cato Institute, core Atlas partner, who believed that libertarianism could address climate science more productively than its longstanding denial. While that’s an improvement, it is a concerning offshoot from a Network whose partners try to capture as many diverse audiences as the strategists linked to the process believe necessary.

The Progressive Policy Institute, which supports Abundance, is linked to the Democrat Party, but its Center for Civil Justice is run by a man with deep ties into fossil fuel and deployed to discredit climate litigation. The Institute for Progress is full of Atlas Network and Tech Right actors. That body co-hosted the original Abundance Conference.

(6) Science had fought from the 50s to establish that unrestricted industry was a threat to health: tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole and climate. Dark Money and its strategists has done untold damage to civic knowledge in response. Note also that Weiss’s The Free Press consistently platforms pandemic disinformation. Kirk’s TPUSA worked to spread Covid disinformation, picking up a surge in funding for that activity, despite the fact Kirk’s first tycoon funder and co-founder died of the disease.