Poland
---
merri ok
coal powered ipcc?
see orban noem cpac
SEE NATO ~ PUTIN
---
AN 5 26
President Donald Trump withdrew 5,000 soldiers from Germany earlier this month, and now allies are confused by the flip-flops about withdrawing soldiers from Poland.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and defense officials were confused as Trump decided to send in 5,000 soldiers into Poland when he'd just decided to withdraw 5,000 other soldiers, ABC News reported on Friday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on hand at the NATO summit this week, meeting with counterparts and explaining
“It is confusing indeed, and not always easy to navigate,” Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told reporters.
“We just spent the better part of two weeks reacting to the first announcement. We don’t know what this means either,” one of two officials told reporters anonymously.
For the past several weeks, it is as if Trump has forgotten or changed his mind about the goals and aims of his administration when it comes to the U.S. military footprint in Europe. There have been conflicting statements as Trump announced that he intended to draw down soldiers even more than the initial withdrawal from Germany, the *Associated Press said*.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz caused a stir at the end of April when he said that the United States was being "humiliated" in Iran.
"The problem with conflicts like these is always the same: it's not just about getting in; you also have to get out. We saw that all too painfully in Afghanistan, for 20 years. We saw it in Iraq," said Merz.
It was then that Trump announced the troop withdrawal.
U.S. Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich, promised on Wednesday, "We’re going to stay well-synchronized with our allies moving forward."
The U.S. has about 80,000 soldiers stationed in Europe and the Pentagon is required by NATO rules to keep 76,000 soldiers there along with major equipment. The drawdown could only happen with consultation with allies. Ahead of Trump taking office, Congress passed a measure that protected the alliance by requiring that the U.S. not withdraw from NATO without congressional approval.
"The president's view is, frankly, disappointment at some of our NATO allies and their response to our operations in the Middle East," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday.
Writing for Carnegie Europe, Rym Momtaz alleged this week, "Trump has transformed the alliance from an instrument of deterrence against Russia into an instrument of coercion against Europe."
He called it "pernicious and dangerous."
Noem urges Poles to elect Trump ally as CPAC ... - NPR
NPR
https://www.npr.org › 2025/05/28 › noem-cpac-poland
noem cpac poland from www.npr.org
May 28, 2025 — The Conservative Political Action Conference held its first meeting in Poland on Tuesday, just days before a presidential election between a ...
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Travels to Poland (324)
Homeland Security (.gov)
https://www.dhs.gov › medialibrary › assets
noem cpac poland from www.dhs.gov
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Jasionka, Poland, May 27, 2025.
FULL: DHS Sec. Kristi Noem speaks at first-ever CPAC in ...
YouTube · LiveNOW from FOX
172K+ views · 2 months ago
22:20
Secretary Christy Noom speaking at the first ever CPAC out in Poland. This is just days before a big presidential election is going to be taking place.
Kristi Noem Calls for Strong Leadership at CPAC Poland
cpac.org
https://www.cpac.org › post › kristi-noem-calls-for-stro...
noem cpac poland from www.cpac.org
Jun 3, 2025 — Just one week ago, Poland stood at a critical juncture as voters prepared for a decisive second round of presidential elections on June 1, ...
Noem blasts 'weak' European leaders, stumps for ...
ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com › Politics › story
noem cpac poland from abcnews.go.com
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday pushed for Karol Nawrocki to be president of Poland while speaking at the Conservative Political Action ...
LIVE: Kristi Noem speaks at CPAC 2025 in Poland
YouTube · Associated Press
11.1K+ views · 2 months ago
24:35
Watch live as U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual gathering of ...
"Noem urges Poles to elect Trump ally as CPAC holds its ...
Election Law Blog
https://electionlawblog.org › ...
May 31, 2025 — The current US Secretary of Homeland Security (with a cameo by John Eastman) expressly campaigning in Poland for a particular candidate in tomorrow's Polish ...
Kristi Noem slams 'absolute train wreck' Warsaw mayor at ...
YouTube · New York Post
26.4K+ views · 2 months ago
2:10
Kristi Noem slammed the Warsaw Mayor as an "absolute train wreck of a leader" while at the CPAC gathering in Poland. Noem spoke at the ...
After Noem's CPAC speech, Nawrocki wins Polish presidency
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com · Jun 2, 2025
1:00
Speaking in Poland on May 27, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stumped for conservative nationalist presidential candidate Karol Nawrocki.
Kristi Noem At CPAC LIVE | 'If I Had Vodka...': Trump Aide's ...
YouTube · Times Of India
1.7K+ views · 2 months ago
5:57:00
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem delivered a passionate speech as Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its first ...
---
AN 4 25 ROBT R
A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orban took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.
When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orban, and Orban started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.
John believes Trump is emulating Orban’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orban was Trump before there was Trump.”)
Orban’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:
One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.
Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.
Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.
Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”
Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.
Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.
Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.
John noted that Orban’s influence now reaches across Europe.
In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.
Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.
Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orban playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.
In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.
In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orban, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.
Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orban model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.
What lessons can be drawn from all this?
John believes that the best way to respond to Orban’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending.
He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.
John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orban playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values.
When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orban and Donald Trump.
John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential.
I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.
Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.
National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value. Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.
For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law.
These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.
NOW READ: There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/."
---
---
mma 5 23
In a conspiracy theory-laden segment, Fox Business seemed to openly plagiarize a recent article from its corporate cousin, the New York Post, while praising “the top five anti-Soros political leaders” supposedly resisting billionaire George Soros, whose philanthropic and political donations have turned him into a boogeyman among right-wing media.
On the May 15 edition of Fox Business’ Varney & Co., host Stuart Varney and correspondent Ashley Webster discussed what Varney described as “a group of conservative leaders” who want to “limit George Soros' influence on politics” in their home countries. Webster then went on to praise four foreign leaders from conservative and right-wing populist political parties —Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński, Albania's Belind Këlliçi, Italy's Giorgia Meloni, and France's Bruno Retailleau — as well as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, all of whom he described as “fighting back” against Soros.
Webster’s claims against Soros are reminiscent of the conspiratorial pablum continuously spewed by Soros-obsessed commentators in the United States. He remarked that the leaders say Soros seeks to “destabilize” countries from within by “promoting liberal values” and progressive prosecutors, and pushing "mass migration" to “undermine national sovereignty” — all concepts that have been endlessly promoted by Fox News and other right-wing outlets[ vid 5 15]
webster concluded his litany by brazenly declaring that Soros “believes that only by upending the status quo can a more perfect liberal, globalist society emerge.” The "globalist" modifier here is a now-notorious antisemitic reference casually employed by right-media media.
Bizarrely, the segment never mentioned the New York Post article from which it was clearly drawn (even repeating some exact language), even though the piece’s author, Miranda Devine, was the featured guest on the segment immediately preceding. Devine instead used her time to promote another obsession of right-wing fabulist media personalities: Hunter Biden’s laptop.
---
---
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/right-wing-zombie-populists-power/
After former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss announced her resignation, there was much talk in the British media about the Conservative Party making Boris Johnson prime minister again. It didn’t happen: the Tories ultimately went with 42-year-old Rishi Sunak, former chancellor of the Exchequer.Sunak took office on Tuesday, October 25.
Some journalists in the United States have put a positive spin on all the chaos at 10 Downing Street, arguing that the political downfalls of Johnson and later, Truss, show that at least the British right — chaos and all — still believes in democracy. According to that argument, the right-wing Tories who were shouting that Johnson had to go only to say the same thing about his successor Truss not long after that are quite a contrast to Republicans in the United States who are terrified to say one word against former President Donald Trump even after the violent January 6, 2021 insurrection.
For The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk, however, one of the biggest takeaways of Truss’ political downfall is the fact that some Tories were even talking about putting Johnson in 10 Downing Street again — which, Mounk argues, shows how resilient a right-wing “zombie populist” can be despite scandals and a record of “failure.”
READ MORE: [Boris Johnson couldn’t escape accountability – unlike Donald Trump: journalists
“After the extended chaos of the Johnson years and the short-lived debacle of Liz Truss’ premiership, Sunak was virtually the last remaining Conservative of any public standing who could credibly promise a modicum of competence and stability,” Mounk explains in a think piece published by The Atlantic on October 26. “Harder to parse is why Johnson was in contention at all. How could Johnson have come so close to returning from the political wilderness less than four months after disgrace forced the announcement of his departure from office?”
Mounk continues, “The story of Johnson’s near resurrection, though remarkable, is less peculiar than it might seem. Charismatic populists have a knack for making unlikely comebacks, even if their own friends and allies have long given them up for dead. And irresponsible politicians can do very well when they have a good feel for the pulse of public opinion. For this type of demagogue, Johnson’s enduring appeal is the norm, not the exception.”
When Mounk describes Johnson as a right-wing populist, he isn’t calling the former British prime minister an authoritarian — which is how he views Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. But he brings Johnson up to show the “staying power” that “populist leaders” can have.
“The plausible, if short-lived, prospect of Johnson’s return to Downing Street should be a warning sign of what is to come in other countries,” Mounk stresses. “For it illustrates three underlying truths about populist leaders that will continue to shape the politics of the United Kingdom and other democracies, including the United States, for years to come.”
Mounk continues, “First, populists have extraordinary staying power, showing virtual immunity from the sort of scandal, disgrace or failure that can finish a conventional politician’s career. Second, policy counts nearly as much as style:The degree to which a populist’s program is actually popular really matters. Third, because most of the politicians who are attacking democratic institutions at the moment come from the right, conservative parties have a crucial part to play in preserving democracy.”
Mounk adds, however, that the word populist “has never been a perfect fit for Johnson” even though it has often been used to describe him.
“While he has, at times, been willing to play dangerously fast and loose with democratic rules, he never attempted to concentrate power in his own hands or to impede its peaceful transfer,” Mounk argues. “A second term for Trump would presage a genuine democratic emergency; a return of Johnson would have been more likely to turn into a depressing farce.”
Mounk observes that “populists around the world” have “proved to have remarkable staying power, even after they were hounded from office in ignominy.”
“Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi left office in disgrace after being sentenced to a term in prison and ruining his country’s finances,” Mounk notes. “He later successfully appealed the criminal conviction. Now, he is a crucial partner in the country’s new government…. In the United States, Trump seemed to lose his hold over the Republican Party after the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Now, he appears poised to claim the party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election. Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Marcos family in the Philippines have all shown similar durability.”
The ability of “zombie populists” to make a comeback, Mounk warns, “should worry American readers.”
“Like other populists who have left power under ignoble circumstances, Trump retains significant public support,” Mounk writes. “If he runs in 2024, he can count on the passionate supporters who make up a large portion of the Republican Party’s primary electorate. And unlike some right-wing parties, the GOP seems to have neither the will nor the capacity to stand up to its most radical members. Before Trump has even declared his candidacy, most senior members of his party are scared to criticize him.”
READ MORE: How bankrupt liberalism is empowering fascist movements in Europe and the US
---
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-historian-reflects-on-the-return-of-fascism/
no lnx
A historian reflects on the return of fascism
Image via Wikipedia.
Written by Lawrence S. Wittner / Daily Kos January 6, 2020
Back in 1941, the year of my birth, fascism stood on the brink of conquering the world. During the preceding decades, movements of the Radical Right?mobilized by demagogues into a cult of virulent nationalism, racial and religious hatred, and militarism?had made great strides in nations around the globe. By the end of 1941, fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan, having launched massive military invasions of other lands, where they were assisted by local rightwing collaborators, had conquered much of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
It was a grim time.
Fortunately, though, an enormous movement arose to resist the fascist juggernaut. Led by liberals and assorted leftists around the world and eventually bolstered by the alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this resistance movement ultimately prevailed.
The antifascist struggle of World War II established the groundwork for a new and better international order. In January 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a major public address, outlined what became known as The Four Freedoms. The people of all nations, he proclaimed, should enjoy freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. That August, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill unveiled the Atlantic Charter, declaring that people should have the right to choose their own form of government, that force should be abandoned in world affairs, and that international action should promote improved living and working conditions for all people.
These public declarations?coupled with the widespread discrediting of rightwing parties, movements, and ideas?led directly to the establishment, in 1945, of the United Nations. According to the UN Charter, the purpose of the new world organization was to “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” and “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”
And, in fact, in the decades following World War II, there were significant strides forward along these lines. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, setting forth fundamental rights to be protected. Furthermore, much of Europe, the cockpit of two terrible world wars, cast aside nationalism to establish a federal union. Moreover, a wave of decolonization freed much of the world from foreign rule, UN forces engaged in numerous peacekeeping operations, and the United Nations and many national governments established economic aid programs for the world’s poorest countries.
Admittedly, national policies sometimes fell short of the new internationalist, antimilitarist, and égalitarian ideals and programs. Governments?and particularly governments of the major powers?all too often ignored the United Nations and, instead, squandered their resources on military buildups and terrible wars. Many governments also had a spotty record when it came to respecting human rights, promoting social and economic progress, and curbing the rising power of multinational corporations.
Even so, for decades, humane domestic policies?from banning racial discrimination to scrapping unfair immigration laws, from improving public health to promoting antipoverty efforts and workers’ rights?remained the norm in many nations, as did at least a token genuflection to peace and international law. Political parties with a democratic socialist or liberal orientation, elected to public office, implemented programs emphasizing social justice and international cooperation. On occasion, though far less consistently, centrist and communist governments fostered such programs, as well. Only parties of the Radical Right attacked these policies across the board; but, swimming against the tide, they remained marginal.
Nevertheless, in the last decade or so, enormous headway has been made by movements and parties following the old fascist playbook, with rightwing demagogues trumpeting its key elements of virulent nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, and militarism. Seizing, particularly, on mass migration and funded by avaricious economic élites, the Radical Right has made startling progress?undermining the European Union, contesting for power in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece, and taking control of such countries as Russia, India, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, and, of course, the United States.
Long before the advent of Donald Trump, the Republican Party had been shifting rightward, pulled in that direction by its incorporation of Southern racists and Christian evangelicals. This political reorientation sped up after the election of Barack Obama sent white supremacists into a frenzy of rage and self-pity.
Trump’s 2015-16 campaign for the presidency accelerated the GOP’s radicalization. Drawing upon unusually hate-filled rhetoric, he viciously denounced his Republican and Democratic rivals. Along the way, he engaged in his characteristic lying and mocked or incited violence against his critics, the disabled, immigrants, racial minorities, Muslims, women, and the press. His racism, xenophobia, and militarism, combined with his thuggish style and manifest lack of qualifications for public office, should have doomed his campaign. But, instead, he emerged victorious?a clear sign that a substantial number of Americans found his approach appealing.
==
Salvini, however, wasn’t able to wrangle all of Europe’s far-right authoritarians. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose far-right Fidesz party ultimately won a landslide in the EU elections, apparently couldn’t see fit to hang with the small-fry whose parties have yet to rise to ruling status. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who leads Poland’s ruling far-right Law and Justice Party, has issues with the many Russia-facing right-wing leaders in Salvini’s coalition and was not present. And Nigel Farage was too busy selling his insta-party (just add money and stir up the populace), simply called the Brexit party, to the electorate to show up. Since the elections, Salvini has so far failed to woo Orbán, who just declined the Italian leader’s invitation to join the bloc of far-right parties he is building within the European Union.
==
Europe, where right-wing populist movements have begun to successfully oppose gestures toward dealing with climate change, gaining both attention and votes in the process. In Poland, for instance, just such a party led by President Andrzej Duda has come to power and the promotion of coal production has become the order of the day.
===
https://thinkprogress.org/europe-bans-one-of-americas-most-prominent-white-supremacists-34b34726f623/
no lx twt
Europe bans one of America’s most prominent white supremacists
Jared Taylor claims he can no longer travel through the continent.
CASEY MICHEL
MAR 31, 2019, 10:06 AM
American white supremacist Jared Taylor says that he can no longer travel throughout Europe. CREDIT : YOUTUBE
AMERICAN WHITE SUPREMACIST JARED TAYLOR SAYS THAT HE CAN NO LONGER TRAVEL THROUGHOUT EUROPE. CREDIT : YOUTUBE
Jared Taylor, one of the most prominent white supremacists in the U.S., claimed on his website on Friday that he’d been “banned from Europe” until 2021.
The ban came as Taylor attempted to transfer in Switzerland for a flight to Finland. According to Taylor, Swiss police informed him that Polish authorities had barred Taylor from traveling through the Schengen Zone, a 26-country area of Europe allowing visa-free travel.
“I will spend the night at the airport, and tomorrow I will be deported,” Taylor wrote. “I am free to walk around the terminal, I can make phone calls and use the internet, and I have a meal voucher that is supposed to last me for the next 12 hours. The officer kept my passport, though, and won’t give it back to me until I board the flight home.”[twt]
Jason Wilson
?
@jason_a_w
Jared Taylor of American Renaissance says he has been banned from Europe until 2021, seemingly at the instigation of Poland, where he has given talks to nationalist groups (via @FFRAFAction)
36
7:46 AM - Mar 30, 2019
17 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Taylor had been planning on speaking atwhite supremacist conferences in Scandinavia, including one on Saturday in Stockholm that featured other well-known fascists like Mark Collett and Greg Johnson.
View image on Twitter
Anti-Fascism & Far Right
@FFRAFAction
??MINI-THREAD??
Further evidence of transnational organising on extreme right.
Today in Stockholm Sweden there is an international alt-right/Identitarian conference - Scandza Forum.
This is now an annual event. It was held in Oslo in 2017 & Stockholm last year
4:01 AM - Mar 30, 2019
It’s unclear why Polish authorities issued a blanket ban against Taylor. Taylor attributed the ban to a 2018 trip to the country, where he gave multiple television interviews. During that trip, Taylor said that Polish police said he was “spreading a totalitarian ideology.”
Taylor is best-known for cloaking his white supremacy behind a facade of so-called “race realism,” which claims that intellectual differences between races are inherent. He gained prominence in 2016, when Richard Spencer — one of the most well-known faces of the so-called “alt-right” movement that backed then-candidate Donald Trump — cited Taylor as his mentor.
As it is, Taylor is the latest white supremacist prohibited from traveling to certain other countries to spread his ideology. Spencer has likewise been banned from Europe, also at the request of Polish authorities. Milo Yiannopoulos, who has worked closely with white supremacists in the past, was also recently banned from Australia, and Lauren Southern, who claims she’s not a white supremacist, has been banned from traveling to the U.K..
The move to bar Taylor — and having European countries enforce their borders against unwanted individuals — sent other white supremacists into fits. One, Hunter Wallace, said the “moral rot of Europe can’t possibly get much deeper,” a take echoed by Scott Greer, who wrote for Richard Spencer’s white supremacist journal. Nicholas Fuentes, who attended the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, described it as a “stab in the back.”
The ban also comes alongside increased scrutiny about trans-national white supremacy, much of which emanates from the U.S. Taylor has long served as one of the most well-traveled mouthpieces, having toured North America, Europe, and Russia to push his brand of hatred. The ban also comes less than a month after a white supremacist shooter killed 50 Muslims in a New Zealand mosque, the most violent act of white supremacist terror in years.
---
==
==
The elections of illiberal leaders in Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe are clear danger signs. Viktor Orban’s hand has been strengthened in Hungary by the waning influence of Angela Merkel in Germany and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.
==
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176359/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_drowning_liberalism_in_the_bathtub/
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams, a new book by TomDispatch regular John Feffer, is just being published. Of it, Adam Hochschild, another TD favorite, writes, “‘John Feffer brings to this story a traveller’s eye, a rich store of experiences, and a wise perspective. His thoughtful book is a reminder that few nations, anywhere, easily throw off the heritage of tyranny.” As you’ll see, his new book is related to today’s post and it goes instantly on my must-read list. So pick up a copy yourself. And remember that, for a $100 contribution to this website ($125 if you live outside the USA), a personalized, signed copy of Feffer's riveting dystopian novel and Dispatch Book, Splinterlands, is still available for anyone in an end-of-year giving mood. Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]
By the time you read this, the latest brouhaha will undoubtedly be history -- or do I mean “fake history”? -- and largely forgotten. It will have been replaced by an explosion of media coverage about some other nightmarish set of presidential tweets or comments. After all, it’s a pattern. I’m referring to President Trump’s recent retweeting of three videos of purported Islamic mayhem. They came from the Twitter feed of Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a British ultranationalist group, Britain First, that had previously sparked its own terror incident, the stabbing to death of Labor parliamentarian Jo Cox by a man shouting “Britain First!” In 2016, Fransen herself was convicted of “religiously aggravated harassment” for abusing a Muslim woman in a hijab in front of her children. One of those videos of hers supposedly showed a “Muslim immigrant” in Holland beating up a boy on crutches. (The incident actually happened, but the attacker was neither a Muslim nor an immigrant.)
When criticized by British Prime Minister Theresa May for using the fraudulent materials of such an extremist group, our commander-in-tweet lashed out (initially tweeting the wrong Theresa May) and wouldn’t back down or even remove the videos from his Twitter feed. Fransen, who instantly gained 22,000 new Twitter followers for her fringe positions in England, thanked him fervently. (“God bless you Trump! God bless America!”) Meanwhile social media lit up with Islamophobic sentiments both in the U.S. and Great Britain.
Such events are regularly reported as uncontrollable presidential interruptions of other important events on the Trump agenda -- that week, the Republican tax “reform” bill -- which only frustrate his chief of staff, flummox his advisers, and generally distract the administration from everything that truly matters. Don’t believe it for a minute. There’s method, however intuitive, in Trump’s madness, in those endless tweetish controversies, in his regular immersion in conspiracies (think: birtherism), implosions that plunge the president and his 43.6 million Twitter followers into a deep, dark world alive with horror and terror, whether of the Muslim or even the football variety.
As TomDispatch* regular John Feffer, author of the new book *Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams, points out today, the “wild conspiracy theories” that go with this sort of politics have lifted not just Trump, but a whole raft of right-wing authoritarian types to power across Eastern Europe in recent years. This sort of thinking, especially with an Islamophobic edge, has helped drive Trump and a whole set of Trump-like Eastern European leaders to unimagined heights of success and has helped them remain there, too. So don’t expect the president’s outbursts, his Islamophobic tweets, or any of the rest of it to end soon. It rallies the base. It works and he knows it.
As Feffer explains today, those Eastern Europeans learned all of this long before Donald Trump hit the political stage. So what they’ve done and how they’ve lasted is worth taking a moment to contemplate as you consider Donald Trump’s future (and ours). Think of their examples as warnings not to sell him and the method in that madness of his short. Tom
What’s the Matter with Eastern Europe?
Welcome to the Birthplace of Trumpism
By John Feffer
He was a rich businessman, an outspoken outsider with a love of conspiracy theories. And he was a populist running for president.
In 1990, when Donald Trump was still beyond the furthest outskirts of American politics, Stanislaw Tyminski was trying to become the new president of post-communist Poland. He shared something else with the future Trump: nobody in the political elite took Tyminski seriously.
That was a mistake. He was the standard-bearer for a virulent right-wing populism that would one day take power in Poland and control the politics of the region. He would be the first in a long line of underestimated buffoons of the post-Cold War era who started us on a devolutionary path leading to Donald Trump. Tyminski’s major error: his political backwardness was a little ahead of its time.
In true Trumpian fashion, Stan Tyminski couldn’t have been a more unlikely politician. As a successful businessman in Canada, he had made millions. He proved luckless, however, in Canadian politics. His Libertarian Party never got more than 1% of the vote.
In 1990, he decided to return to his native Poland, then preparing for its first free presidential election since the 1920s. A relatively open parliamentary election in 1989, as the Warsaw Pact was beginning to unravel, had produced a solid victory for candidates backed by the independent trade union, Solidarity. Those former dissidents-turned-politicians had been governing for a year, with Solidarity intellectual and pioneering newspaper editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime minister but former Communist general Wojciech Jaruzelski holding the presidency. Now, the general was finally stepping aside.
Running in addition to Mazowiecki was former trade union leader Lech Walesa, who had done more than any other Pole to take down the Communist government (and received a Nobel Prize for his efforts). Compared to such political giants, Tyminski was an unknown.
All three made promises. Walesa announced that he would provide every Pole with $10,000 to invest in new capitalist enterprises. Mazowiecki swore he’d get the Rolling Stones to perform in Poland. Tyminski had the strangest pitch of all. He carried around a black briefcase inside which, he claimed, was secret information that would blow Polish politics to smithereens.
Tyminski managed to get a toehold in national politics because, by November 1990, many Poles were already fed up with the status quo Solidarity had ushered in. They’d suffered the early consequences of the “shock therapy” economic reforms that would soon be introduced across much of Eastern Europe and, after 1991, Russia. Although the Polish economy had finally stabilized, unemployment had, by the end of 1990, shot up from next to nothing to 6.5% and the country’s national income had fallen by more than 11%. Though some were doing well in the new business-friendly environment, the general standard of living had plummeted as part of Poland’s price for entering the global economy. The burden of that had fallen disproportionately on workers in sunset industries, small farmers, and pensioners.
Mazowiecki, the face of this new political order, would, like Hillary Clinton many years later, go down to ignominious defeat, while Tyminski surprised everyone by making it into the second round of voting. Garnering support from areas hard hit by the dislocations of economic reform, he squared off against the plainspoken, splenetic Walesa.
Tyminski did everything he could to paint his opponent as the consummate insider, a collaborator with the Communist secret police in his youth. "I have a lot of material and I have it here… and some of it is very serious and of a personal nature," Tyminski told Walesa in a debate on national television, holding that briefcase of his close at hand. Walesa retaliated by accusing him of being a front man for the former communist secret police. Tyminski was forced to admit that his staff did include ex-secret policemen, but he never actually opened that briefcase. Walesa was resoundingly swept into the presidency by an electoral margin of three to one.
Stan Tyminski eventually took his wild conspiracy theories and populist pretensions back to Canada, a political has-been. And yet he was prescient in so many ways (including those charges against Walesa, who probably did collaborate briefly with the secret police). The liberal reforms that Eastern Europe implemented after the transformations of 1989 were supposed to be a one-way journey into a future as prosperous and boring as Scandinavia’s. Tyminski, on the other hand, had conjured up a very different, far grimmer future -- unpredictable, angry, intolerant, paranoid -- the very one that seems to have become our present.
Tyminski’s “children” now govern nearly every country in Eastern Europe, and the United States, too, is in the grip of a Tyminski-like leader. Perhaps these illiberal leaders have reached the peak of their influence -- or have they? The opposite scenario is too dismal to contemplate: that the political climate has irreversibly changed and liberalism has irrevocably weakened in the U.S., in Eastern Europe, everywhere.
All (or at Least a Few) Aboard
Imagine the history of Eastern Europe after 1989 as a train leaving a decrepit station where tasty snacks and interesting reading material aren’t available, the public address system issues garbled announcements, the bathrooms are out of order, and the help desk unstaffed. As the final boarding chimes echo through the station, the passengers pile onto the train. A lucky few are in a first-class car with access to a surprisingly good cafe and plush sleeping compartments, a somewhat larger group in the reserved second-class seats, and everyone else crowded into totally rundown cars with appalling seats. The ultimate destination all of them have been told is a lovely terminal with well-provisioned stores, clean public restrooms, and a responsive administrative system in a city and country equally well run.
Think of this as the train of “transition.” Everyone on it seems convinced that they’re en route to a stunning market democracy in a post-Cold War world where political differences and ideological struggles have lost their relevance, where as American political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously put it in 1989, the “end of history” is in sight. "Today,” Fukuyama wrote a couple of years later, “we have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist." Pragmatic decisions are all that’s left, and they’re to be chewed over by policymakers and implemented by bureaucrats.
If Eastern Europeans knew what they’d left behind and were fervent about where they were heading, they had little idea about the nature of the journey they were undertaking. German political scientist Ralf Dahrendorf tried to provide a few time stamps for such a transition: six months to create parties and political institutions, six years to establish the basis for a market economy, and 60 years to build a proper civil society. Except for some cranky members of the extreme right and a few Stalinist leftovers, everyone in the region seemed to back this liberal project, seeing it as a ticket into the larger European community.
For the first few years, the train of transition rolled along. There was grumbling in the back cars, but everyone was still on board with the overall plan to reach Western Europe or bust.
As it happened, the first-class passengers were easily transported to the heart of the sunny West. The second-class passengers barely made it across the border. And the rest didn’t get far beyond that original, disheveled station.
Mind the Gap
When I first traveled across Eastern Europe in 1990, the very year of the Polish presidential election, many of the people I interviewed expected to be living like Viennese or Londoners within five years, a decade at the most. If this was a delusion, it was one partially fueled by the outside advisers who flooded the region in 1990. Planners from the U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, put a five-year window on their assistance package.
And for some, the transition did last only a few years because cities like Warsaw in Poland quickly became high-priced locations for international corporate offices and NGOs. So the capital cities of Eastern Europe made the trip west, while smaller cities and towns and, above all, the countryside remained mired in the past. This urban-rural gap mirrored the one that still persists between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. In 1991, according to the World Bank’s figures, Hungary’s per capita gross domestic product was $3,333, Austria’s $22,356. By 2016, Hungary’s had risen to $27,481, while Austria’s stood at $48,004. In other words, though the gap had been narrowed considerably, as with other Eastern European countries -- Poland ($27,764), Romania ($22,347), Bulgaria ($20,326) -- it had at best been cut in half.
“In 1965, West Germany was already the wealthiest and most productive country in Europe,” Adam Jagusiak, a former peace activist and Polish Foreign Ministry employee, told me in an interview in 2013. “It took them only 20 years. They produced more than France and Britain. They had their Wirtschaftswunder, their economic miracle. What’s most disappointing for most people, not just me, is that after 23 years we cannot close the gap… Poland would have to grow 10 percent annually to close the gap. That’s a neck-breaking pace, like Japan in the 1950s and 1960s or like South Korea in the 1970s. We grow maybe two or three percent.”
The liberal project succeeded in ushering virtually all of Eastern Europe into the European Union. But in the end, because of the persistent gap between expectations and reality, voters began to look around for something different.
Opportunism Knocks
Stan Tyminski ran for president before unemployment in Poland soared from 6.5% in 1990 to 20% by 2002. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán had far better timing.
Orbán was a young lawyer in Budapest in 1988 when he helped found a liberal party that you had to be under 35 to join. Fidesz, the Alliance of Young Democrats, won a commendable 21 seats in the 1990 elections, good enough for a sixth-place showing. Four years later, that country’s former Communist Party (renamed the Socialists) came out on top, while Fidesz dropped a couple spots. What disappointed Orbán far more, however, was the way the Alliance of Free Democrats -- the “adult” version of Fidesz -- opted to form a coalition government with the Socialists.
That was the moment when, having second thoughts about liberalism as a vehicle for his own personal ambitions, he began to transform both Fidesz, which dropped its under-35 requirement, and himself. When economic “reform” shocked Hungary as it had Poland, Orbán recast himself as an increasingly illiberal Hungarian nationalist and his once-liberal party became a pillar of the new right. In 2010, he became prime minister for the second time, a position he’s held for the last seven years.
In a remarkable number of ways Orbán anticipated Donald Trump. He reversed his country’s longstanding mistrust of Russia by openly courting its president, Vladimir Putin, and pledging to transform Hungarian politics along the lines of that country’s “illiberal state.” He railed against mainstream journalism, attempted to bend the judiciary (and the constitution) to his will, and rigged the state apparatus to benefit his supporters. In perhaps his most ominous twist, Orbán courted the Hungarian version of the alt-right with relentless anti-immigrant statements and the occasional anti-Semitic gesture.
The Polish right wing was so enamored of Orbán’s success that, in 2011, former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced that “the day will come when we will succeed and we will have Budapest in Warsaw.” Four years later, his Law and Justice Party took power on a mixed platform of populism and conspiracy theories reminiscent of Stan Tyminski’s.
Now, Donald Trump is constructing Budapest in Washington D.C., as he unwittingly follows Tyminski’s and Orbán’s trajectory. The reality TV star cultivated his status as an extreme outsider. During the Obama era, he identified a political opportunity on the right and, in September 2009, switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Seven years later, having combined outlandish conspiracy theories (think: birtherism) with an astute critique of liberal elites, he squeaked into power. He surely owes something to native (and nativist) traditions from Huey Long to Ross Perot, but he shares so much more with his compatriots across the Atlantic.
That transatlantic commonality begins with his canny exploitation of the gap between expectation and reality. The United States, like Eastern Europe, was going through its own “economic transition” in the 1990s. Millions of Americans expected the new economy -- the global economy, the digital economy, the service economy, the sharing economy -- to produce new jobs, better jobs. And it did generate enormous wealth, but mostly, as in Eastern Europe, for a narrow, highly urbanized slice of the population. Income inequality has increased so dramatically that the American world now resembles the nineteenth-century Gilded Age.
In the eras of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, the liberal project meant government intervention in the economy on behalf of working Americans and the disadvantaged. By the time Bill Clinton took the White House in 1993, the focus of the “new” Democrats was already shifting to global free-trade deals that would only accelerate the country’s loss of manufacturing jobs and a harsh vision of social spending represented most starkly by Clinton’s grim version of welfare reform. Meanwhile, the increasing coziness of the “new” Democratic Party and Wall Street would lead to significant financial deregulation that, in turn, would produce an economic meltdown in 2007-2008.
Although Barack Obama would prove progressive on some issues, he would also embrace Clintonesque positions on trade, social welfare, and Wall Street. As in Eastern Europe, such a liberal project would leave many people behind. So no one should have been surprised that these disappointed voters would eventually seek their revenge at the polls, as traditional Democrats in working-class neighborhoods began to vote Republican.
Aided by “dark money” and his dark mutterings about migrants, Mexicans, and Muslims, Trump rode a wave of Eastern European-style disenchantment to the Oval Office. Now, he’s taking his revenge not just against the neoliberalism of the Clinton and Obama years, but the entire twentieth-century liberal understanding of the state.
Conservative anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist once remarked that his dream was not “to abolish government” but “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The question today in both Eastern Europe and the U.S. is: Have Trump, Orbán, and others shrunk liberalism to such a degree that they can now drown it in that bathtub?
The Future of Liberalism
...
---
NYT
WARSAW — Polish officials are bragging: On President Trump’s way to the Group of 20 summit this week, he is coming to Poland first, choosing it over more powerful American allies like Germany, France or Britain.
“We have a new success, Trump’s visit,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the governing party and Poland’s true power broker, said in a speech last week. Mr. Trump’s visit, he said, is causing other European countries to “envy” Poland.
That remains to be seen. Mr. Trump’s last visit to Europe in May unnerved American allies, causing some leaders to rethink the United States’ relationship with the Continent. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has already said that she expects difficult talks with Mr. Trump when he arrives in Hamburg on Friday for the G-20 economic summit meeting.
For Mr. Trump, the stop in Poland on Thursday is something of an appetizer before the main course, a visit to a friendly right-wing, populist government with a kindred approach on any number of key issues, from immigration to global warming and coal mining.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
LIVE BRIEFING
Thousands Protest in Hamburg as Trump Meets With Merkel Before G-20 JULY 6, 2017
Opinion Contributing Op-Ed Writer
The Next Economic Powerhouse? PolandJULY 5, 2017
Angela Merkel Sets Collision Course With Trump Ahead of G-20 JUNE 29, 2017
Merkel, After Discordant G-7 Meeting, Is Looking Past Trump MAY 28, 2017
Trump Appears to Push Aside the Leader of Montenegro MAY 25, 2017
Opponents worry that the visit will be seen as a tacit endorsement of a Polish government that has been criticized by its European Union partners for moves to co-opt the news media, its political opponents and, most recently, the courts.
Some fear that the visit may further widen a fissure between East and West in the European Union, which Mr. Trump has disparaged previously, and embolden leaders like Mr. Kaczynski and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has been similarly criticized for a light authoritarianism.
One of the few points of tension is Russia, which Mr. Trump seems to like and Poland, as a former Soviet satellite, has a long history of regarding warily.
Poles will also be listening carefully for whether Mr. Trump reaffirms the United States’ commitment to respond to an attack on another NATO member. He failed to do so in a previous European tour, to the dismay of longtime European allies, which he instead upbraidedasnot paying their fair share for the alliance.
Mr. Trump is to meet Thursday morning with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, and attend a session of the Three Seas Initiative Summit, a gathering of Central European leaders.
Finally, he will deliver what the White House is describing as a major speech in the Warsaw square that was the epicenter of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II.
“He will praise Polish courage throughout history’s darkest hour, and celebrate Poland’s emergence as a European power,” Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, said during a White House briefing last week.
“He will lay out a vision, not only for America’s future relationship with Europe, but the future of our trans-Atlantic alliance and what that means for American security and American prosperity,” General McMaster said.
Critics worry that if Mr. Trump makes no mention of the concerns of the European Union and others about moves by the governing Law and Justice Party to assume greater power, it will only encourage Mr. Kaczynski to accelerate the pace of his party’s moves.
The latest is for broad change to the Polish courts, which the government says is an attempt to reform a widely reviled institution. Opponents call it part of a campaign to blunt potential opposition.
The push was quietly delayed by the government in the days leading up to Mr. Trump’s arrival late Wednesday, so as not to overshadow the visit.
“They went step by step,” said Adam Bodnar, Poland’s official ombudsman, who has come out against the court changes.
Shortly after taking power in late 2015, he said, Law and Justice first hobbled and then co-opted the constitutional tribunal, turning it from a check on the constitutionality of new laws to a rubber stamp for the government.
Then the party removed independent oversight from the secret services, asked the justice minister, a party stalwart, to also act as chief prosecutor and transformed public-owned news media into pro-government
==
T
rump, in Poland, Asks if West Has the 'Will to Survive' - The New York ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/europe/donald-trump-poland-speech.html
4 days ago - ... Mr. Trump's persona and his policies, ranging from addressing climate change ... But he said nothing about the right-wing government's crackdown on ... President Trump with President Andrzej Duda of Poland in Warsaw on Thursday. ... “We'll see what happens — I don't like to talk about what we have ...
Right-Tilting Poland Welcomes Trump as Europe Watches Warily ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/world/europe/poland-trump-visit-g20.html
6 days ago - In Warsaw, Donald Trump will find a warm welcome, but also wariness about Russia and worry about how he will react to Poland's rightward ...
Trump's speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto - Vox
https://www.vox.com/world/.../trump-alt-right-poland-defend-west-civilization-g20
4 days ago - Trump's speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto ... over everything fromclimate change to migrant policy, and French President ...
==
w/o borders
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/climate-deniers-atlas-foundation
Climate Change Deniers Without Borders
How American oil money is pumping up climate change skeptics abroad—and how they could derail any progress made in Copenhagen.
—By Josh Harkinson
| Tue Dec. 22, 2009
Writing two weeks ago in Poland's most popular tabloid, the Super Express, an economic analyst named Tomasz Teluk claimed that a potential climate agreement in Copenhagen might double Poles' electricity bills, hobble his coal-dependent country, and even lead to one-world government. Fortunately, he wrote, the "'global warming' scare" has been hugely overblown: "As each of us learned in elementary school, carbon dioxide is a gas essential to the development of life, not a poison, so you do not have to eliminate it at any price."
Teluk, the founder of the Globalization Institute, a libertarian think tank, is Poland's most prominent climate change skeptic. He has become a hero to Polish conservatives, who have convinced their government to resist strong emissions cuts and block the European Union from giving climate change assistance to developing nations. A leading Polish financial newspaper recently named his institute the country's best think tank. But Teluk is hardly a homegrown climate skeptic. Much of his rhetoric, such as his claim that CO2 is good for you, echoes the well-worn claims of American skeptics. And much of Teluk's newfound visibility can be traced back to his long-standing ties with conservative patrons and energy interests in the United States.
Americans have provided Teluk with jobs, fellowships, professional contacts, and money. This year, the Globalization Institute won a $10,000 grant from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think-tank incubator that's funded by ExxonMobil. Teluk isn't alone. The Globalization Institute is part of a loose network of some 500 similar organizations in dozens of countries that are often bankrolled by American foundations that are, in turn, backed by carbon-spewing American industries. The foreign groups' finances are opaque, yet an Atlas Foundation spokesman acknowledges that some of them wouldn't exist without dollars being pumped in. In the coming months, these groups will lead the fight in their own countries to derail the shaky deal made in Copenhagen—which will likely prompt American skeptics to cite widespread international opposition to taking action on climate change.
With US-backed overseas think tanks parroting denier talking points in dozens of languages, the echo chamber is already up and running. "The correct policy approach to [the] non-problem [of climate change] is to have the courage to do nothing," writes British skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton in an article summarized in Chinese on the website of the Beijing-based Cathay Institute for Public Affairs. As the United States stonewalled sub-Saharan African countries' demands for more climate-related foreign aid in Copenhagen, the IMANI Center for Policy and Education in Ghana and three other African think tanks backed by American interests signed on to a letter blaming poor nations for invoking "the climate change scapegoat to explain hunger, sickness, and climate vulnerability."
This September, after President Obama repeatedly cited Spain's success creating green jobs, congressional Republicans flew in Gabriel Calzada, president of Spain's Instituto Juan de Mariana, to present a study claiming that each green job created in his country destroyed another 2.2 jobs. "Europe's experience actually suggests that this is precisely the wrong approach," he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. (The study was debunked by the Spanish government.)
At the center of this feedback loop is the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which has supported more than 30 other foreign think tanks that espouse climate change skepticism. Atlas has given the Instituto de Juan Mariana more than $100,000. In 2008, it gave the IMANI Center for Policy & Education a $100,000 grant. It has also funded skeptic groups in the four nations whose governments just inked a controversial, last-minute climate deal with the United States in Copenhagen: the Cathay Institute in China, the Liberty Institute in India, the Free Market Foundation in South Africa, and the Instituto Liberdade in Brazil.
Founded in 1981 and named after Ayn Rand's free-market amorality tale, Atlas Shrugged, the Atlas Foundation has spent more than $20 million seeding some 200 libertarian think tanks across the globe as part of its Atlas Network. Much of its money has come from Phillip Morris; foundations tied to the Koch family, oil magnates who are leading funders of denier groups; and the Earhart Foundation, which was created from the profits of the now-defunct White Star Oil Company. Since 1998, ExxonMobil and its foundations have given Atlas nearly $1 million. Between 2002 and 2008, the last year for which tax records are available, Atlas' budget more than tripled, nearly hitting $7 million, with the largest single portion going to grants for "think tanks in different regions of the world."
The Atlas Network overlaps with other international networks that share its climate change skepticism and fossil fuel funders. Foundations linked to ExxonMobil, the Koch family, and other conservative interests have donated more than $1 million to Canada's Fraser Institute, which in turn supports a network of think tanks in 71 countries that promote "economic freedom." Exxon, the Kochs, and other foundations tied to American oil money have also helped bankroll the British-based International Policy Network. In 2007, IPN created the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, a group of 59 "independent civil society organizations" from 40 countries, "as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change."
Some US companies and climate denial groups have taken a more targeted approach to funding their foreign allies. In 2004, ExxonMobil gave $80,000 to the Centre for the New Europe-USA for its "global climate change education efforts." In 2007, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which has received money from Exxon, granted $135,000 to four skeptic think tanks in Canada and New Zealand, followed by $182,000 to foreign groups in 2008, according to tax filings (it didn't say which groups received the money). The Washington, DC-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow supports a German affiliate, CFACT-Europe, which put on a conference for climate change skeptics in Berlin earlier this year and protested the climate talks last week. "We want to get rid of this whole climate topic to focus on environmental problems again," CFACT-Europe director Holger Thuss said before marching with about 30 other demonstrators through downtown Copenhagen.
Thuss is reluctant to admit his ties to American donors. "We are not funded by the same people [as CFACT-US]," he said, though CFACT's president told Mother Jones that he gives the European group "a little bit of support when we can." Other leaders of foreign think tanks are similarly dodgy. Emmanuel Martin, who edits the French-language website Un Monde Libre and frequently disputes climate science on his blog for the newspaper Le Monde, at first told me that "Atlas has not given me any orders or any financing on anything to do with the subject" of climate change. When told that an Atlas employee in Washington had described him to me as "our editor" and said that "he gets a lot of support from Atlas," Martin clarified that "Atlas effectively finances a good part of our events" but maintained that his writings are entirely his own.
Yet Martin's Un Monde Libre website is part of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity, a program that operates websites in 14 languages. (Atlas inherited the program from the libertarian Cato Institute in January.) Martin and other local "intellectual entrepreneurs," as Atlas calls them, translate and syndicate Atlas-generated content, such as a recent interview about Climategate with Cato's resident global warming skeptic. "We provide the literature and ideas," says Global Initiative general director Tom Palmer in a recent video promoting the program. "We go and find the entrepreneurs, and then we can slot them right into all of the flagship programs that have made Atlas so successful."
"There are some [think tanks] that wouldn't be able to survive without us," says Austin Petersen, Atlas' new media program manager. "But they get grants from all kinds of different places, not just from Atlas. There is no way we'd be able to support the whole network by ourselves."
In an email, Teluk of Poland's Globalization Institute writes that direct financial support from American funders "was not crucial" to launching his group. Yet he's clearly benefitted from their support in other ways. Teluk says he was first exposed to free-market think tanks at a conference in Rome hosted by the International Society for Individual Liberty, a libertarian group based in Arizona. He later won a scholarship at George Mason University's Institute for Humane Studies, a haven for climate change deniers that receives funding from the Koch family foundations. In 2003, while working toward his doctorate in philosophy in Krakow, Teluk got a job with TCS Daily, an online opinion journal published by the DCI Group, a PR firm known for its corporate Astroturf campaigns. TCS received $95,000 for "climate change support" from ExxonMobil that year. "Quite frankly, someone that doesn't have their PhD, they aren't a noted academic yet," says Todd Kruse, who hired Teluk while serving as a vice president at DCI, "and getting published on a journal like that gets them noticed and helps them branch out."
Recounting his professional history on the Atlas website this summer, Teluk thanked Kruse for helping to launch his career. He also mentioned current DCI vice president Henrik Rasmussen and TCS founder James K. Glassman, a former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy in the previous administration who now leads the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University. (Neither responded to requests for comment.) Teluk wrote that "it would have been impossible to create" his own organization without them.
In 2005, Teluk founded the Globalization Institute in Gliwice, a small city near the Czech border. Shortly before international climate negotiators gathered in Poland for a final round of pre-Copenhagen negotiations in late 2008, the Globalization Institute published a book in Polish titled The Mythology of the Greenhouse Effect. The book spawned more than a dozen articles in leading Polish media outlets; several were op-eds penned by Teluk under headlines such as "Environmentalists Cause the Greenhouse Effect." More recently, the Globalization Institute and its allies circulated an open letter to the Copenhagen negotiators demanding "Free trade, no climate taxes!" and calling climate change "nothing more than a scientific hypothesis." The institute's science advisory board includes Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation staffers.
Teluk is confident that he's helping keep Poland out of a global suicide pact. "We are one of the most recognized groups opposing 'global warming' hysteria," he writes in an email. "We are present in all mainstream media, dailies, TV, radio and Internet. Decision-makers read our reports, books and comments." He adds: "There is no scientific evidence that current global warming is caused by humans. CO2 is a gas of life, not a poison. We believe that a movement that calls a gas of life 'a poison' is a movement against human life."