Abstract
Manufactured, divisive and destructive outrage over supposed ‘woke’ issues has long been building in the UK, fomented by think-tanks, media and politicians. To understand the relationship between culture wars in the US and the UK, the interests that lie behind them, and what can be learnt from US resistances to corporate donor influence, Liz Fekete interviews Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, authors of Free Speech and Koch Money: manufacturing a campus culture war (Pluto Press, 2021). Wilson and Kamola analyse the situation in terms of a plutocratic class’s counter-revolution against progressive gains in labour, civil rights and consumer and environmental protections. Though corporate leaders do not hesitate to make use of figures on the alt-Right and those who promote racial science, the authors argue that culture wars are ultimately related to the need to unchain wealth from any regulatory or other constraints.
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References
1.
Formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, it was set up in 1981 by Anthony Fisher, a devotee of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and founder of the Thatcherite free market British think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs.
2.
In 2021, Pluto Press published Free Speech and Koch Money: manufacturing a campus culture war by Ralph Wilson, founder of the Corporate Genome Project, and Isaac Kamola, Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, Hartford (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
3.
Following an investigation in 2018 by journalist George Monbiot in collaboration with the investigative group DeSmog UK into Charles Koch Foundation grants to Spiked US Inc, Monbiot criticised the lack of transparency around the funding, stating that he had been unable to find any public acknowledgement of it. George Monbiot, ‘How US billionaires are funding the hard Right cause in Britain’, The Guardian , 7 December 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-billionaires-hard-right-britain-spiked-magazine-charles-david-koch-foundation.
4.
See Nafeez Ahmed, ‘Peter Thiel’s free speech for race science crusade at Cambridge University revealed’, Byline Times , 10 December 2021, https://bylinetimes.com/2021/12/10/peter-thiels-free-speech-for-race-science-crusade-at-cambridge-university-revealed/.
5.
See Benjamin Wallace-Wells, ‘How a Conservative activist invented the conflict over critical race theory’, New Yorker , 18 June 2021; Sam Adler-Bell, ‘Behind the critical race theory crackdown: racial blamelessness and the politics of forgetting’, The Forum , 13 January 2022.
6.
A theorist of both ‘anarcho-capitalism’ and then ‘paleolibertarianism’ (the regrounding of libertarianism in traditional conservatism), Rothbard explicitly brought libertarianism together with racial science, openly promoting anti-black and neo-confederate causes. In 1997, he co-founded with Koch the Cato Institute, before falling out with him and going on to launch the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics in Alabama.
7.
Citizens United, a film production company funded by the hedge-fund billionaire (and financier of Donald Trump’s election campaign) Robert Mercer, had produced a documentary on Hillary Clinton which was broadcast at a time when the Federal Election Commission forbade advertising by non-campaign entities.
8.
In the Bell Curve: intelligence and class structure in America , co-authored with Richard Herrnstein and funded by the Pioneer Fund (New York: Free Press, 1994), Murray uses eugenicist claims to conclude that white men have higher average IQs than minorities and women. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Murray’s work ‘racist pseudoscience’.
9.
See Ellie Bothwell, ‘UCL launches investigation into secret eugenics conference’, Times Higher Education , 11 January 2018, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ucl-launches-investigation-secret-eugenics-conference. Previously, in 2015, Young wrote an article advocating ‘genetically engineered intelligence’ for parents on low incomes with below-average IQs, describing this as ‘progressive eugenics’, see ‘The fall of the meritocracy’, Quadrant Online , 7 September 2015. Retrieved 10 August 2022, https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/.
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See Ahmed, ‘Peter Thiel’s free speech . . .’.
11.
Ryan Mac and Matt Drange, ‘This Silicon Valley billionaire has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against Gawker’, Forbes , 24 May 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/05/24/this-silicon-valley-billionaire-has-been-secretly-funding-hulk-hogans-lawsuits-against-gawker/?sh=6430bd7c8d14. See also Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power (London: Penguin Press, 2021), pp. 227–35.
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Alan Finlayson, ‘Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web’, Theory, Culture & Society 38, no. 6 (2021), pp. 167–90.
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Chafkin, The Contrarian.
14.
See Chafkin, The Contrarian , pp. 243–46.
15.
Chris Havergal, ‘Kathleen Stock quits Sussex after transgender rights row’, Times Higher Education , 28 October 2021, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/kathleen-stock-quits-sussex-after-transgender-rights-row.
16.
The Office for Students (OfS) is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Education, acting as the regulator (Higher Education and Research Act 2017) and competition authority for the higher education sector in England.
17.
Liz Fekete and Liam Shrivastava, ‘The government is crying crocodile tears over free speech’, Byline Times , 11 August 2020, https://bylinetimes.com/2021/08/19/the-government-is-crying-crocodile-tears-over-free-speech-on-campuses/.
18.
See Ahmed, ‘Peter Thiel’s free speech. . .’; also ‘Significant progress made in securing free speech legislation on campus but many hurdles remain’, ADF UK, 17 September 2020, https://www.protectfreespeech.uk/significant-progress-made-in-securing-free-speech/.
19.
David Batty, ‘Office for Students Chair speaks at same event as denounced racist, The Guardian , 23 May 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/23/office-for-students-chair-james-wharton-same-event-as-denounced-racist-zsolt-bayer; Flora Garamvolgyi and Julian Borger, ‘Orbán and US right to bond at CPAC in Hungary over “great replacement” ideology’, The Guardian , 18 May 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/18/cpac-conference-budapest-hungary-viktor-orban-speaker?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.
20.
CPAC Australia’s 2022 conference to take place in Sydney in October, see https://www.cpac.network/. The organisers of the inaugural CPAC conference in Australia in 2019 were accused by the shadow Minister for Home Affairs, Kristina Keneally, of importing ‘alt-right white extremism’. Kaz Ross, ‘“Alt-right white extremism” or conservative mobilising: what are CPAC’s aims in Australia?’, The Conversation , 8 August 2019, https://theconversation.com/alt-right-white-extremism-or-conservative-mobilising-what-are-cpacs-aims-in-australia-121495.
21.
The Pizzagate conspiracy theory that went viral on social media during the 2016 US presidential election campaign connected several high-ranking Democratic party officials and US restaurants with human trafficking and a child-sex ring. It is seen as a precursor to the QAnon conspiracy theory that asserts that a cabal of Satanic sexual abusers of children conspired against Donald Trump during his time in office.