He feared the rise of monstrous forces as an immediate response to the collapse of the deregulatory, robber baron model of capitalism which characterised the first modern age of globalisation and which had a distinct American insignia. With the subsequent retreat of the world’s trading nations into a state of autarky, the onset of the Depression and mass unemployment especially in Germany, the effects of which were only ameliorated by the defence Keynesianism of rearmament programmes in the run up to World War II, the monsters of Gramsci’s imagination did indeed come to pass with the rise of Nazi Germany and all its attendant evils. The new order only came into being after the defeat of the Nazis and their allies in the cataclysm of the 20th century’s second global conflagration with the radical redistributionism of Britain’s first ever elected majority Labour government which oversaw the formation of the NHS, a comprehensive Welfare State and nationalisation of key parts of the commanding heights of the economy including coal, steel and rail transport. This social democratic or welfare capitalism consensus was to be hegemonic throughout the Western world until the economic shocks of the early 1970s.
Are we at a similar inflection point to that of almost a century ago? Another ideologically deregulatory or neo-liberal model of capitalism crashed and burned in the global financial collapse of 2007-08, although the political effects; Brexit, the election(s) of Donald Trump as US President and the rise of populist far right parties across Europe, have taken longer to percolate through the system. But the tariff regime that Trump has instituted in his second term has sounded the definitive death knell for this second era of globalisation and taken in tandem with his ill-disguised rupture with NATO allies over Ukraine, the entire edifice of post war international trading, security, and judicial order. Now, just as in the early 1930s (and with the Thatcherite/Reaganomics consensus of the 1980s), progressives be they liberals or socialists of whatever hue find themselves unable to launch effective counter-hegemonic strategies against the multipronged and networked populist or Alt-Right insurgency which the investigative journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed terms the “Alt-Reich.”
In their war to destroy the West from within, Dr Ahmed explains how over the last hundred years, a shadowy network of American, British, and European extremists inspired by Nazi eugenics has worked energetically to construct an insidious new fascism or conservative totalitarianism, masquerading under the moniker of ‘freedom.’ He reveals why this network emerged, who is behind it, its modus operandi, and their aims: to replace Western democracies with a global techno-authoritarian order that protects elite power in our age of multiple planetary crises.
With no little regret and no sign of hubris, Ahmed writes how predictions he made in 2010 are not only coming to fruition but at a critical pivot in the development of the West. He warned that the entire mainstream party-political system would become completely discredited because of its inability to deal with the structural causes of escalating economic crises while mainstream policy solutions in the main contribute to them rather than ameliorate them. He forecast that the collapse of mainstream centre-left and centre-right political parties across the liberal democratic ‘estate’ could open up space for the growing legitimisation and representation of the far right in the context of massive structurally generated resources scarcities.[1]
Like academic specialists in the area of democratic theory such as Anne Applebaum, Moses Naim, Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatts, Dr Ahmed expresses a serious prognosis for the survival of democracy in the West. He views the rise of the far right as a planetary crisis which threatens to undermine the very foundations of free societies across the world, from the US to the UK, Europe and beyond. Drawing on 15 years of investigative reporting he reveals how the far right has grown since the 1930s from a fringe pariah into a mainstream force operating in the heartlands of Western power, where it is poised to subvert liberal democracy from within. To make the West ‘great again,’ this movement looks back fondly on forms of authoritarian politics which the West was supposed to have defeated and transcended but which never actually went away. They regrouped and adapted; exploiting the defects in liberal democratic institutions such as the inadequacy of checks and balances, the unaccountability of elites and the intrusion of their interests into the organs of media domination and have latched onto the grievances felt by many by the symptoms of the crisis in the fossil fuel economy (the decline of energy return of energy invested – ERORI); persistent economic malaise, costs of living crises and the chaotic movement of people across borders.[2]
Emergence of the Alt-Right
Far-right groups have seized upon this growing agitation and have homed in on these major symptoms, diverting from any understanding and appreciation of the systemic causes and origins of these crises and instead scapegoating as many features of the existing post-war international architecture as they can: from migration to multiculturalism to ‘globalism’. With the growing pessimism felt by many as to the capacity of this international architecture to solve contemporary problems, the far right has tried to exploit this sentiment with a view to reversion to an era of imagined greatness, drawing inspiration from the history of failed experiments with authoritarianism, fascism, and colonialism. Since 2015, there has been a truly global mobilisation and solidification of ideologically disparate far right networks in tandem with the “shocks” experienced by the liberal democratic world such as Brexit, the election(s) of Donald Trump as President of the US and kindred figures such as Presidents Bolonisario of Brazil and Duterte in the Philippines and the substantial electoral pluralities for far right parties in Europe in response in part to migration crises and loss of belief in the functional efficacy and perceived remoteness of the EU. The mobilisation of the global far right under the banner of nationalist populism has linked Trumpism to the UK Conservative Party, Reform UK, and European far right parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Freedom Party of the Netherlands, and the Sweden Democrats. Ahmed terms this rapidly expanding network “The Alt Reich.”[3]
The different nodes in the Alt Reich have their own localised concerns, targets of opprobrium and political strategies but have their historical origins in the concatenation of ideas around Nazism in the 1930s. Since then, these ideas have mutated along a diversity of social and cultural trajectories into wildly differing permutations, many of which (especially Russophile groups and the anti-Islam English Defence League) stridently reject Nazism and fascism despite utilising, sharing, or sympathising their key precepts. The Alt-Right converges on a unitary plethora of tenets of two grand theories: the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘Cultural Marxism.’ The first is the belief that white or European people in the West are being replaced and dominated through mass foreign immigration and rising birth rates of ethnic minority communities, a process which will lead to a totalitarian Islamist takeover of Western political institutions. Some proponents of this conspiracy narrative invert in the most reprehensible manner possible the language of anti-racism by describing this mythical process as “white genocide” and that of anti-colonialism by talking about the “indigenous” population of Europe. The second is the belief that there is an ongoing academic, intellectual and cultural; assault on the Western ‘way of life’ driven by ‘the left’ over the past seventy years, aiming to replace traditional Christian and conservative values with liberal multiculturalism.[4] A common theme of both mythos is reference to the machinations and hidden agenda of cabals of transnational elites in seeking to effect such social engineering projects – a barely veiled reference to the shapeshifting and octagonal powers of Jews or Jewry.
Refashioning the fascist ideologies of the 1930s in a ‘post-modern context’, Dr Ahmed has traced out how these differing groups and networks across the US, UK and Europe are being turbocharged through the dark web and social media via toxic masculinist celebrities like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and then given the seal of legitimacy by respected academic institutions and opaque think tanks. A global network of lobby groups - invariably funded by elites who have accumulated their wealth from extractive industries, finance, and technology, have channelled this wealth to a core transatlantic network of movers and shakers who, by weaponising data and information, have created the Alt-Reich. In the context of a global polycrisis encompassing the economic, energy and ecological spheres, this movement has driven a global radicalization process in which fringe extremist ideologies have been mainstreamed in many Western capitals and whose endpoint is the abolition of the checks and balances and autonomous institutions of liberal democracies. In this context, racism, xenophobia and populist ethnonationalism are tools used by these secretive networks to divide and weaken the public to make way for new forms of deregulated capital controlled by competing trans-national elites.[5] So far from ‘draining the swamp’, as Trumpites are so fond of calling for, these networks to swamp the terrain of democracy. The second Trump presidency looks to be a laboratory for this transformative agenda.
Our starting point is the appointment of the notorious vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr as Health Secretary in Donald Trump’s second administration. This appointment is the anti-vaxxer movement’s Roe v Wade reversal moment; the culmination of the efforts a fringe but vocal fundamentalist lobby, versed like the pro-life or anti-abortion rights movement in the arts of pseudoscientific misinformation, and whose victory, like their pro-life cognates, will have untold public health impacts. Although since coming to office, Kennedy has rowed back from anti-vax fundamentalism, his past pronouncements do not inspire confidence for public health advocates. These include claims that Covid itself ‘ethnically targeted' White and Black people and spared Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese people. He also claimed that Covid vaccines, in turn, were weaponised against Black communities.[6] Playing upon the fears and ancestral memories of African-American and other minority communities of racist public health measures like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment is an egregiously cynical tactic of anti-vaxxers bearing in mind the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on ethnic minority and working class demographics.
At “Defeat the Mandates” rallies, RFK Jr warned in relation to Covid 19 vaccines that “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attack like Anne Frank.” Always judge a scoundrel by the degrees of obscenity of their Nazi or Holocaust comparisons. On a marginally less offensive level, speaking against vaccine mandates, he warned “if you give a government the right to silence their opponents, they now have a licence for any atrocity.”[7]
RFK Jr has also repeated the totally debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. On the polio vaccine, in 2022 a lawyer associated with Kennedy submitted a petition to the US Food and Drug Administration arguing for revocation of its approval claiming that the agency had not conducted adequate safety studies.[8]
Of course, disinformation tales were legion in the pandemic era. The American filmmaker Steve Peters, who directed the conspiracy film Died Suddenly which when first broadcast in 2022 was viewed 20 million times in the first few months and was featured prominently on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show and continues to be popular, persistently argues that Covid-19 vaccines cause blood clots and lead to sudden deaths, part of a depopulation plan on the part of the government. This claim rests on a video from embalmers saying that they were seeing a large number of blood clots in the bodies that they were preparing and that this was due to the Covid vaccine. Independent analysts found that several deaths reported in the video came not for people affected by Covid but from other maladies ranging from epilepsy to road traffic accidents. Data from the Centres for Disease Control showed only four cases of blood clots per million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. An unaffiliated embalmer debunked the clot claims by pointing out clots were a common phenomenon with the dead due to embalming fluids, low temperatures in morgue refrigerators, and dehydration in the dying patient. Yet depressingly, people still believed the clot-causing narrative.[9]
The Eugenicist Lineage of Wellness/Anti-Vaxxer Movements.
In her deconstruction of the ideologies of the alternative health and wellness movements which has spawned contemporary anti-vaccination agitation notes the following amalgam: a poisonous compound enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity and divinity and their polar opposites: unnaturalness, bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, and damnation.[10]
Fitness and alternative health subcultures have long mixed with fascist and supremacist movements. In the United States, early fitness and bodybuilding enthusiasts were also enthusiastic about eugenics, and the prospect of breeding for what they saw as a superior human form. Nazism was suffused with health fads and extreme occult beliefs, which were all suborned in the project of building an Aryan super race of godlike men.[11] The modern yoga movement – which arguably is the glue that holds the entire network of New Age and wellness precepts together, was a bizarre colonial collision between European racial anxieties and Indian cultural modernisation imperatives. Europeans, afraid of racial decline as the borders of empire became porous through global trade and increased long-haul travel, concocted an exercise ideology to inoculate the once-proud national body against corruption. Indian modernizers refashioned this strongman aesthetic, mixed it with Scandinavian gymnastics, and then consecrated it with yoga exercises resurrected from the medieval period. Both European and Indian culturalists attempted to wrap it with the insignia of fascism. Their shared beliefs still resonate in our culture; that through discipline, purification, the restoration of virility, and weeding out all sickness, disability, and sexual deviance, a transcendent identity would emerge.[12]
The rise of this pureblood, organically genuine, disease free transcendent identity dovetails with the views that Naomi Klein would encounter at the extreme end of the New Age/Covid sceptic spectrum. Rather than engaging in Covid denialism, they cast the virus as a kind of cleansing, or “culling of the herd,” with some inserting ecofascist beliefs and conceptualising the pandemic as a means by which the natural world would be liberated from human stresses. However, Klein observes that the embrace of a certain amount of human death was becoming more overt and explicitly linked to opposition to vaccines. She quotes the chilling words broadcast by Rob Schmitt, a former Fox News host who switched over to Newsmax:
Are we at a similar inflection point to that of almost a century ago? Another ideologically deregulatory or neo-liberal model of capitalism crashed and burned in the global financial collapse of 2007-08, although the political effects; Brexit, the election(s) of Donald Trump as US President and the rise of populist far right parties across Europe, have taken longer to percolate through the system. But the tariff regime that Trump has instituted in his second term has sounded the definitive death knell for this second era of globalisation and taken in tandem with his ill-disguised rupture with NATO allies over Ukraine, the entire edifice of post war international trading, security, and judicial order. Now, just as in the early 1930s (and with the Thatcherite/Reaganomics consensus of the 1980s), progressives be they liberals or socialists of whatever hue find themselves unable to launch effective counter-hegemonic strategies against the multipronged and networked populist or Alt-Right insurgency which the investigative journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed terms the “Alt-Reich.”
In their war to destroy the West from within, Dr Ahmed explains how over the last hundred years, a shadowy network of American, British, and European extremists inspired by Nazi eugenics has worked energetically to construct an insidious new fascism or conservative totalitarianism, masquerading under the moniker of ‘freedom.’ He reveals why this network emerged, who is behind it, its modus operandi, and their aims: to replace Western democracies with a global techno-authoritarian order that protects elite power in our age of multiple planetary crises.
With no little regret and no sign of hubris, Ahmed writes how predictions he made in 2010 are not only coming to fruition but at a critical pivot in the development of the West. He warned that the entire mainstream party-political system would become completely discredited because of its inability to deal with the structural causes of escalating economic crises while mainstream policy solutions in the main contribute to them rather than ameliorate them. He forecast that the collapse of mainstream centre-left and centre-right political parties across the liberal democratic ‘estate’ could open up space for the growing legitimisation and representation of the far right in the context of massive structurally generated resources scarcities.[1]
Like academic specialists in the area of democratic theory such as Anne Applebaum, Moses Naim, Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatts, Dr Ahmed expresses a serious prognosis for the survival of democracy in the West. He views the rise of the far right as a planetary crisis which threatens to undermine the very foundations of free societies across the world, from the US to the UK, Europe and beyond. Drawing on 15 years of investigative reporting he reveals how the far right has grown since the 1930s from a fringe pariah into a mainstream force operating in the heartlands of Western power, where it is poised to subvert liberal democracy from within. To make the West ‘great again,’ this movement looks back fondly on forms of authoritarian politics which the West was supposed to have defeated and transcended but which never actually went away. They regrouped and adapted; exploiting the defects in liberal democratic institutions such as the inadequacy of checks and balances, the unaccountability of elites and the intrusion of their interests into the organs of media domination and have latched onto the grievances felt by many by the symptoms of the crisis in the fossil fuel economy (the decline of energy return of energy invested – ERORI); persistent economic malaise, costs of living crises and the chaotic movement of people across borders.[2]
Emergence of the Alt-Right
Far-right groups have seized upon this growing agitation and have homed in on these major symptoms, diverting from any understanding and appreciation of the systemic causes and origins of these crises and instead scapegoating as many features of the existing post-war international architecture as they can: from migration to multiculturalism to ‘globalism’. With the growing pessimism felt by many as to the capacity of this international architecture to solve contemporary problems, the far right has tried to exploit this sentiment with a view to reversion to an era of imagined greatness, drawing inspiration from the history of failed experiments with authoritarianism, fascism, and colonialism. Since 2015, there has been a truly global mobilisation and solidification of ideologically disparate far right networks in tandem with the “shocks” experienced by the liberal democratic world such as Brexit, the election(s) of Donald Trump as President of the US and kindred figures such as Presidents Bolonisario of Brazil and Duterte in the Philippines and the substantial electoral pluralities for far right parties in Europe in response in part to migration crises and loss of belief in the functional efficacy and perceived remoteness of the EU. The mobilisation of the global far right under the banner of nationalist populism has linked Trumpism to the UK Conservative Party, Reform UK, and European far right parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Freedom Party of the Netherlands, and the Sweden Democrats. Ahmed terms this rapidly expanding network “The Alt Reich.”[3]
The different nodes in the Alt Reich have their own localised concerns, targets of opprobrium and political strategies but have their historical origins in the concatenation of ideas around Nazism in the 1930s. Since then, these ideas have mutated along a diversity of social and cultural trajectories into wildly differing permutations, many of which (especially Russophile groups and the anti-Islam English Defence League) stridently reject Nazism and fascism despite utilising, sharing, or sympathising their key precepts. The Alt-Right converges on a unitary plethora of tenets of two grand theories: the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘Cultural Marxism.’ The first is the belief that white or European people in the West are being replaced and dominated through mass foreign immigration and rising birth rates of ethnic minority communities, a process which will lead to a totalitarian Islamist takeover of Western political institutions. Some proponents of this conspiracy narrative invert in the most reprehensible manner possible the language of anti-racism by describing this mythical process as “white genocide” and that of anti-colonialism by talking about the “indigenous” population of Europe. The second is the belief that there is an ongoing academic, intellectual and cultural; assault on the Western ‘way of life’ driven by ‘the left’ over the past seventy years, aiming to replace traditional Christian and conservative values with liberal multiculturalism.[4] A common theme of both mythos is reference to the machinations and hidden agenda of cabals of transnational elites in seeking to effect such social engineering projects – a barely veiled reference to the shapeshifting and octagonal powers of Jews or Jewry.
Refashioning the fascist ideologies of the 1930s in a ‘post-modern context’, Dr Ahmed has traced out how these differing groups and networks across the US, UK and Europe are being turbocharged through the dark web and social media via toxic masculinist celebrities like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson and then given the seal of legitimacy by respected academic institutions and opaque think tanks. A global network of lobby groups - invariably funded by elites who have accumulated their wealth from extractive industries, finance, and technology, have channelled this wealth to a core transatlantic network of movers and shakers who, by weaponising data and information, have created the Alt-Reich. In the context of a global polycrisis encompassing the economic, energy and ecological spheres, this movement has driven a global radicalization process in which fringe extremist ideologies have been mainstreamed in many Western capitals and whose endpoint is the abolition of the checks and balances and autonomous institutions of liberal democracies. In this context, racism, xenophobia and populist ethnonationalism are tools used by these secretive networks to divide and weaken the public to make way for new forms of deregulated capital controlled by competing trans-national elites.[5] So far from ‘draining the swamp’, as Trumpites are so fond of calling for, these networks to swamp the terrain of democracy. The second Trump presidency looks to be a laboratory for this transformative agenda.
The Alt Reich And Vaccine Disinformation
A particular bete noire for anti-vaxxers and anti-globalists is the Microsoft founder and serial philanthropist Bill Gates. He is frequently and unjustly accused of being a eugenicist because of his concerns about global over population and his programmes for women’s health empowerment. For those who saw Covid pandemic lock down measures such as lockdowns, mask wearing and vaccine mandates as a presage to the Great Reset global agenda of the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates occupies a prized place in the rogues gallery. Since Gates may on the surface appear to be a tech bro archetype and since vaccine scepticism appears to embody libertarian, anti-statist concerns, it may seem counter-intuitive to conceive of the anti-vax movement and its “health freedom” agenda as an entry point into an understanding of nascent, Alt Right totalitarianism.Our starting point is the appointment of the notorious vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr as Health Secretary in Donald Trump’s second administration. This appointment is the anti-vaxxer movement’s Roe v Wade reversal moment; the culmination of the efforts a fringe but vocal fundamentalist lobby, versed like the pro-life or anti-abortion rights movement in the arts of pseudoscientific misinformation, and whose victory, like their pro-life cognates, will have untold public health impacts. Although since coming to office, Kennedy has rowed back from anti-vax fundamentalism, his past pronouncements do not inspire confidence for public health advocates. These include claims that Covid itself ‘ethnically targeted' White and Black people and spared Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese people. He also claimed that Covid vaccines, in turn, were weaponised against Black communities.[6] Playing upon the fears and ancestral memories of African-American and other minority communities of racist public health measures like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment is an egregiously cynical tactic of anti-vaxxers bearing in mind the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on ethnic minority and working class demographics.
At “Defeat the Mandates” rallies, RFK Jr warned in relation to Covid 19 vaccines that “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attack like Anne Frank.” Always judge a scoundrel by the degrees of obscenity of their Nazi or Holocaust comparisons. On a marginally less offensive level, speaking against vaccine mandates, he warned “if you give a government the right to silence their opponents, they now have a licence for any atrocity.”[7]
RFK Jr has also repeated the totally debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. On the polio vaccine, in 2022 a lawyer associated with Kennedy submitted a petition to the US Food and Drug Administration arguing for revocation of its approval claiming that the agency had not conducted adequate safety studies.[8]
Of course, disinformation tales were legion in the pandemic era. The American filmmaker Steve Peters, who directed the conspiracy film Died Suddenly which when first broadcast in 2022 was viewed 20 million times in the first few months and was featured prominently on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show and continues to be popular, persistently argues that Covid-19 vaccines cause blood clots and lead to sudden deaths, part of a depopulation plan on the part of the government. This claim rests on a video from embalmers saying that they were seeing a large number of blood clots in the bodies that they were preparing and that this was due to the Covid vaccine. Independent analysts found that several deaths reported in the video came not for people affected by Covid but from other maladies ranging from epilepsy to road traffic accidents. Data from the Centres for Disease Control showed only four cases of blood clots per million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. An unaffiliated embalmer debunked the clot claims by pointing out clots were a common phenomenon with the dead due to embalming fluids, low temperatures in morgue refrigerators, and dehydration in the dying patient. Yet depressingly, people still believed the clot-causing narrative.[9]
The Eugenicist Lineage of Wellness/Anti-Vaxxer Movements.
In her deconstruction of the ideologies of the alternative health and wellness movements which has spawned contemporary anti-vaccination agitation notes the following amalgam: a poisonous compound enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity and divinity and their polar opposites: unnaturalness, bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, and damnation.[10]
Fitness and alternative health subcultures have long mixed with fascist and supremacist movements. In the United States, early fitness and bodybuilding enthusiasts were also enthusiastic about eugenics, and the prospect of breeding for what they saw as a superior human form. Nazism was suffused with health fads and extreme occult beliefs, which were all suborned in the project of building an Aryan super race of godlike men.[11] The modern yoga movement – which arguably is the glue that holds the entire network of New Age and wellness precepts together, was a bizarre colonial collision between European racial anxieties and Indian cultural modernisation imperatives. Europeans, afraid of racial decline as the borders of empire became porous through global trade and increased long-haul travel, concocted an exercise ideology to inoculate the once-proud national body against corruption. Indian modernizers refashioned this strongman aesthetic, mixed it with Scandinavian gymnastics, and then consecrated it with yoga exercises resurrected from the medieval period. Both European and Indian culturalists attempted to wrap it with the insignia of fascism. Their shared beliefs still resonate in our culture; that through discipline, purification, the restoration of virility, and weeding out all sickness, disability, and sexual deviance, a transcendent identity would emerge.[12]
The rise of this pureblood, organically genuine, disease free transcendent identity dovetails with the views that Naomi Klein would encounter at the extreme end of the New Age/Covid sceptic spectrum. Rather than engaging in Covid denialism, they cast the virus as a kind of cleansing, or “culling of the herd,” with some inserting ecofascist beliefs and conceptualising the pandemic as a means by which the natural world would be liberated from human stresses. However, Klein observes that the embrace of a certain amount of human death was becoming more overt and explicitly linked to opposition to vaccines. She quotes the chilling words broadcast by Rob Schmitt, a former Fox News host who switched over to Newsmax:
I feel like a vaccination in a weird sway is just generally going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there – maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.[13]
This view of pandemics serving the plans of the divine or nature are directly descended from the stories that European conquerors and colonists of the Americas told about the diseases that ravaged Indigenous populations – already weakened after the theft of their lands and despoilation of their food sources by settlers – actually being God’s handiwork, a divine indication that these continents were ordained for white Christians. “A wonderful plague” is how King James of England described pandemics in the 1620 Charter of New England. “Almighty God, in his great goodness and bounty towards us” had sent it “among the savages." In 1634, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the diseases that devastated the native Algonquian-speaking peoples in similar terms:
But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them: So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place.[14]
Fascism in its modern form (if one agrees that today’s far rightist movements are analogous to those of the 1930s) does not come accompanied by uniformed paramilitary forces or the symbols of raw brute power such as the fasces rods. It is besuited and tries to conceal their genocidal Jew hatred and their overt white supremacism and the discredited pseudoscience around race and eugenics that provided the ideological ballast of the Nazi and fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. They do not publicly eschew democracy but seek to recast it in more populist authoritarian forms such as the illiberal democracy of Viktor Orban’s Hungary. But the modern far right have found new targets to other: Muslims, immigrants, the EU, and other “globalist” institutions such as the WEF and the UN and centres of “wokedom” such as universities, the arts, and the NGO sector. In the guise of anti-elitism, rejection of expertise and scientific enquiry and even of Enlightenment values dominate Alt Reich discourse. One destructive consequence has been the transmission of hostility to public health authorities over vaccination and Covid pandemic measures. While sometimes coated in the patina of the wellness and alternative health industries. the eugenicism and hatred of the “nanny state” and socialised medicine courses through the veins of the anti-vaxxer and anti-Covid lockdown movements. This links in nicely to the libertarian and ultra-deregulatory capitalist ideology to the tech bros such as Elon Musk and the titans of Big Data such as Pete Thiel the founder of the health data behemoth Palantir who welcome the data harvesting El Dorado aka Cambridge Analytica that the removal of regulatory frameworks governing their operations will open up.
The opening months of Donald Trump’s Second Presidency offer a stark insight into the dystopia that the Western world’s first Alt-Reich government offers. But since the Alt-Reich is built is built on such a pyramid of misinformation, it will ultimately fail like Nazi Germany and the USSR failed as government and key economic sectors will not in the long term be able to survive as day to day functioning ultimately depends on the capacity of individuals, corporates and state bodies to make informed, rational choice orientated decisions.
References.
[1] Nafeez Ahmed (2025) Alt Reich. The Network War to Destroy the West from within. London: Byline Books p.3
[2] Ibid, p.7
[3] Ibid, p.8
[4] Ibid, p.9
[5] Ibid, pp.10-11
[6] Ahmed (2025) p. 411
[7] Elaine C. Kamarck and Darrell M. West (2024) Lies That Kill. A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press p.69
[1] Nafeez Ahmed (2025) Alt Reich. The Network War to Destroy the West from within. London: Byline Books p.3
[2] Ibid, p.7
[3] Ibid, p.8
[4] Ibid, p.9
[5] Ibid, pp.10-11
[6] Ahmed (2025) p. 411
[7] Elaine C. Kamarck and Darrell M. West (2024) Lies That Kill. A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press p.69
[8] What RFK Jr Has Said About Polio Vaccines. Martha McHardy. Newsweek 18 December 2024
[9] Kamarck and West (2024) pp.68-69fg
[10] Naomi Klein (2023) Doppelganger. A Trip into the Mirror World. London: Allen Lane p.165
[11] Ibid
[12] Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker (2023) Conspirituality. How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat. New York: Public Affairs Books p.72
[13] Klein (2023) pp.165-66
[14] Ibid, p.166
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBarry did you seriously cite the CDC as some sort of impartial authority for data?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h2362
And as far as I know RFKjnr wasn't claiming ALL childhood vaccines caused autism but rather when they were bundled together there appeared to be a correlation. I could be mistaken. I do know he ripped Fauci a new arsehole and called him a liar in his book, regards the pandemic and Fauci's VERY prominent role in Gain of Function research ( he fucking admitted it in his own emails)...why didn't Fauci just sue him for slander? Because...he couldn't. It wasn't slander it was fact.
I know I sound like a crazy antivaxxer but I'm not. I have to get the shots for my job and I'm the first in line for the flu shot because I had a real bad dose of it when I was 16. My wife and kids are vaxxed too. But we went along with what the MSM told us and if it happened now I'd tell them to shove it up their holes. Know one person who died after the shot and at least two who've had injuries straight after. We were lied to. The pandemic was the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom of society to the top in history, and even more galling was the fact that during this vaccination effort they had to change the definition of what a vaccine is. I was fully vaxxed and still caught covid twice.
Not a vaccine. A massive cash grab by pharmaceutical companies who pay the CDC and the main stream media and who got a sweet deal so they could never be charged...and don't have to release their research for 75 years! And all this because Fauci funded gain of function research in wuhan china, at a facility that even the CIA was very concerning regards containment.
Sorry you can't see this.
Steve - Barry, like his nemesis Frankie, does his research on the topics he writes about. His pieces are always stimulating even if they often don't chime with what the rest of us think.
DeleteI like your own take on things and you could be right here but it sounds like conspiracy theory in part which sort of pushes you to the outside line from the get go.
I think there is a lot about Covid that still needs to be explained. My own view is that governments in general panicked themselves into a response because they had insufficient time to think their way into it. The vaccine was not meant to stop Covid but to lessen its effects. Time and research will determine how efficiently it worked. Did the pharmaceutical industry benefit from it? Doubtless. Was it a conspiracy hoax to allow them to facilitate 'the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom of society to the top in history'? I very much doubt that - Imperialism, the Industrial revolution probably fit the bill better in terms of wealth transfer.
In these societies there is always a capital logic driving the economy and shaping society. Working out exactly how it proceeds is not so easy.
I know you are not anti-Vax and, like Paddy Mooney, ask relevant and serious questions of institutions that do not want questioned. Long may that continue.
I think the central thrust of Barry's argument is the rightward drift that we are witnessing internationally. Given that fascists rarely call themselves fascists, it is worthwhile probing behind their self-proclamations and judge their actions against Eco's 14 characteristics of fascism while bearing in mind that Brendan O'Neill was right when he claimed that the term fascist has become just another way to call somebody a bastard.
Not being a medical person, I am always guided by the science.
Because the BMG is also very critical of Kennedy, it's observations on Fauci are not to dismissed easily.
DeleteAM- The term conspiracy theory is used in a modern context to suggest an outlandish or unreasonable position against orthodoxy so I'll take that a badge of honour! Question for you and Barry though, do you believe that the coronavirus had a zoonotic origin as proffered by Beijing? That it came from a bat via an intermediate host animal ( the suggested pangolins if you recall). Or do you find it a little bit coincidental that the virus first pops up in Wuhan, right slap bang next to a Level4 Biohazard lab where they just so happened to be working on gain of function research, on -get this- bat coronaviruses, and this same lab is the one Fauci via the National Institute of Health and in who's own emails even states the "virus (covid 19) looks gentetically altered".
DeleteSometimes if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...even the CIA will say its a duck..
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/26/cia-now-backs-lab-leak-theory-to-explain-origins-of-covid-19
And that was at the behest of the Biden administration!
Steve - well, it certainly was not an insult to you!!! I wasn't making the case that you were a conspiracy theorist because I know you to be anything but. I just felt tha way the argument was laid out exposed you to the risk of sounding like one around one point.
DeleteIn the modern global context what you describe as conspiracy theory is better described as dissident thinking.
Conspiracy theory is so well documented that there are reams of explanation: belief without evidence probably best sums it up. A bit like religion in that respect.
On another topic, have you been following the UK Supreme ruling? A serious victory for both science and women's rights over pseudoscience and ideology.
Nah I know you weren't Anthony we've been conversing on TPQ for awhile so know pretty much where we both stand, quite alike in some areas!
DeleteI did see the ruling but I was touched with a bit of despair- do we really need legislature in 2025 to rule on what commonsense has made innate for several millennia? What does that say about us as a species? That we were so caught up in emotion that fact became a weapon that emotion could wield? Or the most marginalised among us now feel even more isolated? I am governed by compassion for everyone but feel very conflicted by this.
Steve - as a screw in the jail often said, common sense is not that common otherwise everybody would have some. The government failed to protect women's rights so the court made up the deficit.
DeleteBack in the day when neighbours and friends of loved ones murdered by unionists terrorists suggested 'collusion' with the security forces etc, they were dismissed as ludicrous by the authorities etc. Other than a small number of the public that agreed with them the rest of the general public accepted the declarations of the police, courts and politicians. Fast forward to the present day and only a staunch advocate of British rule would still deny there wasn't any collusion I.e we endured a 'conspiracy theory' back then. What that period in our life should teach us that govts are pretty ruthless towards its citizens when they choose to. They may dress it up in different ways but govts don't give a shite about the public other than to make sure they are obedient to the system(pay taxes and do what you are told). Hence why the politicians who claimed they wanted to protect granny during the covid shakedown and guilted and smeared anyone who smelt a rat are the same people today shafting granny and any other vulnerable section of the public(non tax payers).
Delete'Following the science' is fine and dandy but I would suggest the people who echo that mantra are as bad as the religious fanatics who believe what they are told without question or indeed refusing to do their own research too I.e 'scientists' can lie too just like religious leaders. In my own town folk are dropping like flies and their loved ones quietly point to the 'safe and effective' jab as the turning point. I would even suggest it has effected the public that so much so that new mothers are increasingly questioning all jabs hence why we are witnessing a push by public service bodies to get the mmr jabs etc. Those bodies know that more and more people are refusing them. I know 5 mothers that have refused to jab their kids since the coronie.........I didn't know one before the coronie. I have even heard teachers in a local school say to colleagues 'have you noticed the unvaccinated kids don't get as sick as the vaccinated ones?' Just saying.
Mick O - it is very doubtful that only a handful of people believed there was collusion. It is much more likely that the vast majority of the nationalist community believed it - it was a well-established common-sense belief in the communities we lived in. It was not a view just held by a small number of self-proclaimed enlightened people. The British believed it as did the loyalists. How could it be otherwise when they were responsible for it? The state used the conspiracy theory to evade responsibility and deny the evidence before their eyes.
DeleteWhich is different from the type of conspiracy theory that holds to the view that Covid enabled the biggest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top without a single shred of evidence to show it and in circumstances where the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism easily outpaced the Covid era in wealth transfer.
Every society in the world has a government – do you propose doing away with governments? Even under a fascist dictatorship which you may or not favour it would still be a government. To the extent that a government doesn’t give a shite we are going to have the same with every single government because in your view it is what governments do. So your point is?
Follow the science is a great rule of thumb for the very reason that to follow the science is to follow critically. That is what science is – the enemy of dogma and certainty. No tablets of stone handed down from on high. Faith is not needed for science – you can check that it either works or its doesn’t. Follow the science is most unlike religious fundamentalism because under the latter you are not allowed to question god. His word is absolute.
Provide the statistics for all the people dropping like flies in your town so that we can get a measure of it and for the vaccinated kids who have autism more than the unvaccinated kids. I know five people at least who believe the world is 6000 years old. Doesn’t amount to much. Much like people will tell you they saw the statue move. I know people who were anti vax prior to the virus and people who are anti vax after it. A better barometer are the scientific surveys that show a diminution in vaccination confidence post-Covid. One study suggests it dropped in 19 out of 20 countries. Much more reliable than the five people you know. Geologists have established a time sequence for rock formation stretching back millions of years – much more reliable than the five people I know.
People should do their own research – and then share the results so that we can see it is not David Icke they have researched.
Scientists can lie – they lied about no link between tobacco and lung cancer – the scientific consensus showed their lies up as rubbish; they lied that evolution was a myth and that the earth was 6000 years old. Again the scientific consensus exposed their lies. The best adjustor of science is science. No one can point to a superior system of knowledge throughout the course of human history. That is why we go to health professionals not faith healers when we are ill. When I am dying, I will want a useful doctor by my side not a useless priest.
Never met anyone who didn't know or believed collusion happened.
DeleteOn the jabs- I don't remember anywhere near the amount of football players who collapsed with cardiac arrest before the pandemic -Erikson and Ageuro are the two big names who collapsed on the pitch, and that Fiorentina player before Christmas. I can't remember this happening in the 80's or 90's? But after the jabs..
Steve - we were watching it on our TV screens - British Army joint patrols with the UDA. The view that the state forces worked hand in hand with the loyalists was prevalent even for cases when it wasn't the case. But Mick's point stands about the state labelling any objections as conspiracy theory - although they didn't use the term as such that I recall, more a case of it being republican propaganda.
DeleteSoccer players were dropping before the jab. We had the guy at Bolton Fabrice Muamba, plus players in the Spanish and South American leagues. A cardiac surgeon watching the game came onto the pitch and worked on Muamba with the Spurs and Bolton medics for 80 minutes before they managed to stabilise him.
I saw first hand collusion between Loyalists and the forces of the state. I was there.
DeleteBut to the same degree as after the jab? Maybe I have confirmation bias?
It has always been something that has happened. We are discussing anecdotal stuff here, plucked from memory without the benefit of the data. In time further research might enlighten us as to the effect. There have always been stories of this that and the other happening to people who have been vaccinated. But for it to have any more consequence that killing spiders causing it to rain we would need lots of data. You might have confirmation bias or I might be in denial - either way, I think we need more research.
DeleteI always think of those people who swore they saw moving statues. We know it didn't happen but that doesn't make the belief any less genuinely held. More data and more tolerance will go a long way in improving society.
AM, your long reply to my comment suggests you havnt done your research for eg there are plenty of doctors who echo concerns about the jabs etc and may I say understand the 'science' better than you or I. If you want to have faith from your usual promoters of the science then so be it, best of luck to you. Ironically just like religion you often bash you may be becoming a fanatic of what you believe the science is. A kind of blind faith in it too. Again best of luck.
DeleteMy experiences in my town I mentioned above are merely my views and it is what is it....my views. Paul Frew MLA for eg has been requesting the data release of excess deaths the last couple of years in n.ireland and for some reason the state body has been prevaricating and that was after the state changed the rules on 'excess deaths'....but unlike him most of us will wait til the tv tells us the science or if there is a problem otherwise we will just carry on having blind faith that everything is grand.
Re coroniebalonie.........people don't realise the amount of loot went into the propaganda/marketing in promoting the covid narrative. Part of that was the tainting,demeaning and mocking of anyone that went against it. I would dare say there are folk still effected by that propaganda I.e afraid to speak out in case they are mocked etc. Just silently regretting they listened to the propaganda.
We all make decisions in our life on who to trust and believe. Some people are blessed with good judgement and some are not.
Mick,
Deletemaybe I have not done the research. Or maybe you fail to grasp the point being made. No point in us arguing over it - the reader can decide.
There are doctors who opposed the jab. We saw that during the event. You just haven't named a single one so that we can judge what these particular doctors said and how their critiques were dealt with by the scientific community.
The act of opposing something confers no validity whatsoever on the case being made. The point of critique has to be demonstrable and have merit within the scientific community. There are geologists who know more about geological science than you or me. But when they tell you and me that the world is 6000 years old, they are not doing science but pseudo science. Same for those pathologists who tell us there is no link between lung cancer and cigarette smoking.
I have confidence in the scientific consensus based on a wealth of evidence. Faith is for religion based on the absence of evidence.
The last thing I am is a fanatic about anything. I don't like fanaticism, whether from political ideologues or religious fundamentalists. My preference for science is based not on faith but on the evidence for it being an unrivalled system of knowledge. If you know of a better system, share it with us.
Blind faith - I have it in nothing. I have reasoned confidence in quite a lot of things. You are fully entitled to your view. I see nobody objecting to that. Long may Paul Frew continue to push for information. Society benefits from more information rather than less. Yet he hails from a party where 40% called for Young Earth Creationism to be taught in schools despite it being scientifically nonsense, so you might be forgiven for wondering how serious he is. I don't know anybody other than bible bashers and members of political cults who have blind faith.
Being of the long established secular tradition I am happy to mock religion. If you can point to one sensible religious belief that I bash, I'd be happy to hear it. When Free P bigots stand outside gay night clubs signing hymns, why not mock them? They like to mock gays. When Catholic bigots wave rosary beads at women going to Marie Stopes, why not mock them? They like to mock women.
Nobody is blessed with anything, although you are using a figure of speech. I often get told my judgement over the years has been pretty solid. Maybe, maybe not. I remember on this very blog being told by commenters during the Repeal debate that the anti-abortion lobby was going to win. Their judgement was not that good. But, hey, discussion is not a vanity contest so making a misjudgement is nothing to be ashamed of just as a good judgement is nothing to boast about. At the heel of the hunt our own judgement might lead us to think our wives are the most beautiful women in the world and our children the smartest, to cite Mencken. Very few will agree with us.
. . . science being by far the best system of knowledge the world has ever produced. Without it we would still believe the earth is flat or was created in 7 days or that the human species is not the outcome of evolution, we just got here by magic!!
ReplyDeleteNo argument there, but science shouldn't be a bought congress either.
DeleteSteve agreed - but then it wouldn't be science. Science has no popes or Czars who can pronounce infallibility. It is imperfect but then it would not be science if it were perfect. The scientific consensus has served humanity well. Without it we would be living and dying like medieval peasants imbibing incense rather than medicine. Imagine a world without science - it would be diabolical. Imagine one without religion - it would be pretty much ok.
DeleteSteve, I am not invalidating your personal experiences with the vaccine. But there was more than an undercurrent of eugenicism in ant-vax and anti-lockdown sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic with Boris Johnson's "let the bodies pile high" quip.
ReplyDeleteAnd the belief in the early stages of the pandemic, that herd immunity was the best antidote to it. In other words, let the virus rip through the population eliminating the elderly and unhealthy to enable the survival of the fittest and productive.
DeleteAs a response you would expect that from the political right spectrum. Ireland's historical memory would not exclude what laissez faire (some think even worse) did in the 1840s with a similar attitude of let the bodies pile up. The virus required government intervention: the debate with the benefit of hindsight-fused reflection is around what form that intervention should have taken. I think this is where the insights of activists like Paddy Mooney are beneficial. Paddy is of the Left but was very sceptical about what the government was doing at the time.
DeleteI know your not invalidating my experience Barry, we are interrogating ideas not the people holding them.
DeleteAs for herd immunity, this is a slight misunderstanding. The reason why we should never vaccinate during a pandemic is for the simple reason being that you create variants of the virus, which is what we saw (Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron and all the sub linages we have today). Yes the misguided most compassionate thing to do is vax and hope it works but it was the wrong thing to do, particularly when they brought out an experiment 'rNA' shot which they couldn't possibly know the long term effect, given that regular vaccines have to go through many years of trials.
I was pro vax and pro lockdown but realise now if it happened again it should be no lockdown, immunocompromised and high risk groups self isolate and be issued with antivirals which to the horror of Big Pharma are cheap and out of copyright.
Steve, science will most likely come up with the data around the vaccine in terms of lives lost and saved, benefits and harm.
DeleteI was pro vax but that is as a result of positively viewing vaccination throughout my life rather than being enamoured to this particular vax. And then watching the types who line up to oppose vaccination - you might recall the religious racketeers waving their holy books and screaming at it to go away in the name of their imaginary god. Internationally, the far right seemed to latch onto it the same way they latch onto abortion. Throw all that into the mix, people who rely on the health system without having expertise in medicine will opt for what seems the least worst course.
Intelligent alternative voices emerged and featured in televised debates. They were quite impressive. They seemed to be guided by science and facts, making the type of points you do. I guess, for me, it was a bit like listening to arguments opposed to abortion. If they are not religious, I always find them worthwhile hearing, to see what can be learned from them; if there is anything in them that might cause me to change my mind. I am never going to listen to a religious argument for anything. That does not mean I would not listen to religious people making an argument regarding social policy.
Also Steve RFK Jr is on record as stating that he had not know or heard of any autistic people as a young man which is extremely offensive to late diagnosed ASD adults such as myself.
ReplyDeleteI believe you Barry, I do not know enough about him save him not being sued for slander by Fauci despite many serious allegations in his book. Question though, how old are you and what childhood vax did you receive? Same as all of us in the UK?
DeleteI see a row is currently taking place between RFK and the CDC over autism.
ReplyDeleteSteve, I am now 64. I was diagnosed with ideomotor dyspraxia aged 39 and ASD aged 40. I was born well before MMR therefore. But had the same jabs as everyone else in the UK.
ReplyDeleteBarry - I think your health issues are your own private business although you have always been very candid about them. Steve was not putting you under pressure to reply.
DeleteHorrified to think I was putting you under pressure to respond, my apologies. Was genuinely just curious.
DeleteIn 2009, I read an article by David Rothscum on The Corbett Report. Instead of saying "open the link", I've copied and pasted the complete article, adding hyperlinks.
ReplyDeleteThe Biochemical Manipulation of Humanity
Many prominent scientists and authors have on various occasions stated that in the future, the common people would be manipulated through chemicals in their food, water and injections, to suit the needs of the people that govern them.
In his 1931 book, the Scientific Outlook, Bertrand Russell wrote:
“Perhaps by means of injections and drugs and chemicals the population could be induced to bear whatever its scientific masters may decide to be for its good.”
One of the most famous examples of the idea of biochemical manipulation of the underclass was raised in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in 1932. In Brave New World, the lower classes are exposed to a variety of chemicals before they are "born" that reduce their intelligence and adult height, and prepare them for the role they will fullfil when they grow up. Alcohol is used, lower castes receive less oxygen, and they are exposed to x-rays. The lower castes are also exposed to certain hormones to make them infertile. 70% of women are exposed in the womb to male hormones, and turned into so called "freemartins", sterilized women who exhibit masculine behavior.
Bertrand Russell wrote in 1952 in "the impact of science on Society", that:
Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.
Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin, wrote in his 1952 book,
'The Next Million Years ' that:
Looking a little deeper there is the possibility of substantially altering the intellectual and moral natures of individuals by some sort of hormonal injections; already great effects have been produced on animals.
John Holdren, who currently works for the Obama administration as his adviser on science, wrote in 1977:
Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.
and this shows that the Zionist banking oil cartels are tampering with what we eat an drink in order to have us transition?
DeleteNo worries, Steve
ReplyDelete