rees-mogg ukip
JACOB SIS ANNUNZ
THIEL BOOST BK
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CHAPTER 1 THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL Peter Thiel and the Politics of Apocalypse To understand the right-wing radicalization of Silicon Valley politics, you must understand Peter Thiel. To understand Thiel, you must understand the formative role the book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State and its authors James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg played in shaping his political outlook. “The democracy of the future will be unpopular with many freedom-loving Americans,” wrote Jaan vanValkenburgh of the Memphis Commercial Appeal upon the book’s release in 1997. “While the Internet continues to provide new opportunities, it will also make the mediocre middle-class expendable and the uneducated, paupers. Nations will become antiquated, and talented individuals will no longer pledge allegiance to a country.” “Power and freedom will be held by the talented few,” she continued in a book review headlined “Gifted Elite Will Run Nationless, Ruthless World, Book Claims.” The book in question was a somber futurist manifesto that predicted
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Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Sovereign_Individual
The Sovereign Individual - Wikipedia
The Sovereign Individual: How to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state is a 1997 [a] non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, later republished on 26 August 1999 by Touchstone with the new subtitle Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.
...William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg (14 July 1928 – 29 December 2012) was a British newspaper journalist who was Editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. In the late 1970s, he served as High Sheriff of Somerset, and in the 1980s was Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain and Vice-Chairman of the BBC's Board of Governors. He is the father of the politicians Jacob and Annunziata Rees-Mogg.
Early life
William Rees-Mogg was born in 1928 in Bristol, England. He was the son of Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg (1889–1962) of Cholwell House[1] in the parish of Cameley in Somerset, an Anglican, and his Irish American Catholic wife, Beatrice Warren, a daughter of Daniel Warren of New York.[2][3] William Rees-Mogg was raised in the Roman Catholic faith.
He was educated at Clifton College Preparatory School in Bristol and Charterhouse in Godalming, where he was Head of School.[4][5]
Not yet eighteen, Rees-Mogg went up to Balliol College, Oxford, as a Brackenbury Scholar to read history in January 1946 as a place had fallen temporarily vacant. By the end of the Trinity (summer) term, he had been elected to the library committee (the junior committee) of the Oxford Union Society and was due to be an officer of the Oxford University Conservative Association under Margaret Roberts (the future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), President for Michaelmas (autumn) Term 1946.[6]
However, having spent two terms at Oxford he did not return in October. He later wrote that he had been forced to give up his place to a disabled ex-serviceman. From 1946 to 1948, beginning with an exceptionally bitter winter, he did his National Service in the Royal Air Force education department rising to the rank of sergeant. His duties included teaching illiterate recruits to read and write, and his reference from his commanding officer stated that he was competent to perform simple tasks under supervision.[6]
He returned to Oxford to complete his degree,[7] and became President of Oxford University Conservative Association in Michaelmas Term 1950 and President of the Oxford Union in Trinity term, 1951.[6][8] He graduated that term with a second-class degree.[6]
Career
Rees-Mogg began his career in journalism in London at the Financial Times in 1952, becoming chief leader writer in 1955 and, in addition, assistant editor in 1957.[9][10] During this period he was Conservative candidate for the safe Labour seat of Chester-le-Street in a by-election on 27 September 1956, losing to the Labour candidate Norman Pentland by 21,287 votes,[11] as he did in the subsequent general election by a similar margin.
Rees-Mogg moved to The Sunday Times in 1960, later becoming its Deputy Editor from 1964[10] where he wrote "A Captain's Innings",[12] which many believe convinced Alec Douglas-Home to resign as Tory leader, making way for Edward Heath, in July 1965.[11]
Rees-Mogg was editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. In a 1967 editorial entitled "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?",[a][12] he criticised the severity of the custodial sentence for Mick Jagger on a drugs offence.[13] With colleagues, he attempted a buyout of Times Group Newspapers in 1981 to stop its sale by the Thomson Organisation to Rupert Murdoch, but was unsuccessful.[14] Murdoch replaced him as editor with Harold Evans. Rees-Mogg wrote a comment column for The Independent from its foundation in the autumn of 1986 until near the end of 1992,[15] when he rejoined The Times,[16] where he remained a columnist until shortly before his death. In his Memoirs, published in 2011, he wrote of Murdoch: "Looking back, he has been an excellent proprietor for the Times, but also for Fleet Street."[17]
Rees-Mogg was a member of the BBC's Board of Governors and chairman of the Arts Council, overseeing a major reform of the latter body which halved the number of arts organisations receiving regular funding and reduced the Council's direct activities. Having been High Sheriff of Somerset from 1978 to 1979,[18] he was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1981 Birthday Honours[19] and knighted by Elizabeth II in an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 3 November 1981.[20] In the 1988 Birthday Honours, Rees-Mogg was made a life peer[21] on 8 August that year as Baron Rees-Mogg, of Hinton Blewitt in the County of Avon,[22] and sat in the House of Lords as a cross-bencher, having twice attempted to become a Conservative MP in the 1950s.[23] He was a member of the European Reform Forum. The University of Bath awarded him an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Laws) in 1977.[24]
He co-authored, with James Dale Davidson, three books on the general topic of financial investment and the future of capitalism: Blood in the Streets, The Great Reckoning, and The Sovereign Individual. Published in 1997, The Sovereign Individual argues that in an internet age the nation state will become outmoded, and an era of the individual will develop. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, stated in 2014 that The Sovereign Individual was the most influential book he had read.[25][26] The Sovereign Individual has had a strong influence on neoreactionary (NRx) politics.[27]
Writing in The Times in 2001, Lord Rees-Mogg, who had a house in Somerset, described himself as "a country person who spends most of his time in London", and attempted to define the characteristics of a "country person". He also wrote that Tony Blair was as unpopular in rural England as Mrs Thatcher had been in Scotland. By now his liberal attitude to drugs policy had led to his being mocked as "Mogadon Man" by Private Eye.[13] The magazine later referred to him as "Mystic Mogg" (a pun on "Mystic Meg", a tabloid astrologer) because of the perception that his economic and political predictions were ultimately found to be inaccurate.[14][28]
Rees-Mogg served as the chairman of the London publishing firm Pickering & Chatto Publishers and of NewsMax Media and wrote a weekly column for The Mail on Sunday.[29] He also collected 18th-century literature.[30]
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1997 BK SOV IND
E. Glen Weyl and Jaron Lanier criticized in 2022 its predictions about Fujimori's self-coup, cocaine traffic in the United States, bankrupt Canada, right-wing coups, cryptocurrencies and income redistribution. They point the processes predicted by the book are not unavoidable and point to Thiel, Sebastian Kurz and Jacob Rees-Mogg helping accelerate the power of the state to provoke a reaction enabling its collapse.[13]
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William Rees-Mogg: A Remembrance
By James Dale Davidson | Saturday, 29 December 2012
I first met William Rees-Mogg more than three decades ago. I was back in the U.K. for a summer trip through the Highland haunts of my father's ancestors. After a week overdosing on oatmeal and haggis, however, I was ready to enjoy some English summer. When I was lucky enough to cage an invitation to join a weekend house party at White Barn, the country home of Sir Philip and Lady Goodhart, I jumped at the chance.
The Goodharts had graciously provided me with lodgings when I was at Oxford. Their estate at the top of Boar’s Hill overlooking Oxford was just barely within the range required to satisfy the university's peculiar residency requirement. To meet degree qualifications, one must sleep within six miles of Carfax, the central square of Oxford.
Fittingly, as William and I were to become collaborators and co-authors, our first discussion was about books. William had just left The Times of London as editor-in-chief and had taken up a new career as an antiquarian bookseller, trading through a Pall Mall bookstore, Pickering & Chatto. It was a task for which he was well suited as he knew a prodigious amount about books and intellectual history.
As it happened, I had been in Edinburgh a few days earlier where I visited the University of Edinburgh Press in hope of finding a straggling copy of the 200th anniversary edition of Adam Ferguson's “An Essay on the History of Civil Society.”
Unhappily, however, the book was out of print. I was advised that the only way to obtain a copy would be to seek out an early edition from an antiquarian bookseller. When I encountered William Rees-Mogg at the country house party, I seized on the good fortune to recount my adventures in search of Ferguson's fine book, which I had coveted ever since reading excerpts from it at the Bodleian library when I was at Oxford.
With very little coaxing, William kindly agreed to search out an old copy for me. Within a matter of weeks I was the proud owner of a well-preserved first edition. If I recall rightly, I paid 1,000 pounds. It was one of the best purchases I ever made because it helped initiate a friendship and long intellectual partnership.
Within a few months, William and I had embarked on a newsletter publishing project that was eventually to evolve into a collaboration in writing three books: “Blood in the Streets,” “The Great Reckoning,” and “The Sovereign Individual.”
For a senior figure in the establishment, Lord Rees-Mogg was a remarkably open-minded libertarian and I would say something of a free spirit.
He was not the least bit shy about joining me in making some outlandish predictions: At a time when the Cold War still seemed to be going strong, we told the world that the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse. When Newsweek dismissed our claim that communism was on its last legs, and that there could be another 1929-style collapse, as “an unthinking attack on reason,” Lord Rees-Mogg chuckled with amusement. He seemed to genuinely enjoy tweaking the establishment in which he was well ensconced. He knew many of the great figures of his time, but was by no means persuaded that all was right with the world.
The public got a rare glance at this libertarian aspect of his personality when Rees-Mogg championed Mick Jagger after the latter received a harsh prison sentence for a trifling drug offense in 1967. In a Times editorial entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?” (borrowing a line from Alexander Pope), he called upon the courts to free Jagger, a first offender who was apprehended with a French seasickness pill in his pocket. As Rees-Mogg recalled, “it was on open sale in France but required a prescription in England.”
It was later alleged that the Rolling Stones were targeted by a narcotics informant who said he was recruited by the U.K. and U.S. federal governments to help set up the drug bust for the purpose of causing the Stones legal problems. Rees-Mogg's editorial led to a rapid reversal of Jagger's conviction, although it did not altogether obviate legal problems for the band as both Jagger and Keith Richards had difficulties obtaining visas for years thereafter because of having been convicted of drug-related offenses. Still, Jagger later told Rees-Mogg's youngest daughter Annunziata that her father had “saved his career.”
I don't know how much Lord Rees-Mogg did for Mick Jagger's career, but he did a lot for mine. He was a very good writer. He could rapidly and lucidly turn out copy, scribbling longhand on a yellow pad almost as quickly as if he had been a stenographer taking dictation. I struggled and worked hard to formulate my contributions to our books together. He always seemed to assimilate with ease ideas I struggled to form.
If I do say so myself, even now some 14 years after the publication of our most recent collaboration, “The Sovereign Individual,” it can still be read without embarrassment.
When I heard the sad news that William was gravely ill, I spent a moment reviewing some of the reviews, one of which reported words that William originally wrote:“Modern society is vulnerable. As vulnerable as the plate-glass towers of the World Trade Center.” Three years before 9/11 he foresaw the vulnerability with clarity. As the reviewer put it, it was “a startling sentence. Why haven't the flakes of the world adopted this book as a new mystical text to replace the obvious cases of Nostradamus? Any book that has such tragic insights on the first page is worth exploring.”
Strangely, although our books were largely about the impact of technology in changing society, I believe that Lord Rees-Mogg was the only man I've ever known who lived through so much of the 20th Century without ever driving an automobile. In some ways, he was an anachronism, an old-fashioned gentleman in a not so genteel world. I will miss him.
Editor's Note: See also "Lord Rees-Mogg, Former Chairman of Newsmax, Dies at 84."
James Dale Davidson is an economist and co-author of three books with William Rees-Mogg. His latest book, “Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World,” was published in August. Davidson is also a contributor to Newsmax’s Financial Intelligence Report, and a member of the Newsmax Board.
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Ukip and The Brexit Party - United Kingdom
Ukip has for long attracted climate science deniers into its ranks. And earlier this year, Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage, who has a history of spreading misinformation about climate change, launched The Brexit Party to contest the European elections.
As DeSmog previously reported, the Brexit Party includes a number of opponents to measures to tackle climate change. including Ann Widdecombe, one of five MPs to oppose the Climate Change Act in the UK. Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who advocated investments in the Canadian tar sands and sister of climate science denying Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is also a marquee candidate. She joins chairman of Turning Point UK George Farmer and Welsh MEP Nathan Gill, both of whom have questioned mainstream climate science and the need for action..
In the meantime, Ukip’s candidates are continuing the party’s climate science denial tradition.
Ukip MEPs were among a small band of right-wing members to vote against the ratification by the European Parliament of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The party’s current manifesto calls for the country’s 2008 Climate Change Act to be scrapped, and promotes measures to rejuvenate the UK’s coal industry.
Ukip leader Gerard Batten, also a candidate, has defended Ukip’s policy, suggesting there was no need for “a man-made climate change policy”. Candidate Alan Graves Senior likewise confirmed the party’s policy tweeting: “It is not a case of denying climate change it is more that we do not accept it is all man-made”.
And Ukip MEP **Stuart Agnew** previously described global warming as “a scam” and used a series of cold winters to justify his belief that global warming is not happening.
Other candidates in the elections, including Paul Oakley, Richard Braine, and Richard Elvin have also touted climate science denial.
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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/12/turning-point-meet-trump-allied-climate-science-denying-fossil-fuel-funded-ultra-conservative-us-student-group-coming
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Turning Point: Meet the Climate Science Denying, Fossil Fuel Funded US Student Group Coming to a UK Campus Near You
By Richard Collett-White • Tuesday, March 12, 2019 - 00:34
Turning Point UK tour advert]
The US leaders of a scandal-hit American student movement are touring the UK this week, following the launch of a British branch of the organisation last month.
Advocating climate science denial, “free markets and limited government”, and with numerous links to the fossil fuel industry and Donald Trump, Turning Point claims to have a presence on more than 1,300 college campuses and high schools, engaging in “over 500,000 face-to-face conversations with college students each semester.”
The scandal-hit group has been plagued by incidents of racism and allegations of illegal campaign spending since its launch, with its “professor watchlist” accused of stymying academic freedom.
Nonetheless, Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) founders are in town this week for a three-stop tour of the UK, making appearances in London, Nottingham and Brighton, where Sussex University Conservative Society is hosting an event.
So, what can we expect?
Read more about Turning Point and Charlie Kirk in DeSmog’s Disinformation Database
Trans-Atlantic Strategy
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With a multi-million dollar annual budget, the group is known for its slick videos and well-funded campaigns. But the online launch of itsUK spin-off just over a month ago quickly descended into chaos when hundreds of parody Twitter accounts appeared, leaving people wondering which were real and which were fake.
At the time, Turning Point UK (TPUK) received the blessing of various leading pro-Brexit politicians, including Conservative MPs Priti Patel, Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg, as well as former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
A leaked memo from fellow US youth conservative organisation, Young America’s Foundation, warned its activists about associating with Turning Point, however, referencing the group’s alleged harbouring of “racists and Nazi sympathizers.”
Similarly, the UK Conservative Party advised its student associations “not to work with [TPUK] in any capacity”.
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Speakers at a TPUK event in London on Sunday included Chloe Westley, campaign manager of campaign group the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which shares offices at 55 Tufton Street with the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s premier climate science denial group. And among the guests at TPUK’s formal launch event in December were climate science denier columnists James Delingpole and Rod Liddle, Buzzfeed reported.
At that event, TPUSA co-leader Candace Owens made headlines after statements she made about the way people associate nationalism with Adolf Hitler:
“He was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine,” she said. Owens later clarified on Twitter that she in no way supported the actions of Nazi Germany.
Climate Science Denial and Fossil Fuel Funding
When asked at the launch event to reveal who funds TPUK, John Mappin, a Scientologist who owns a castle in Cornwall and is one of the key figures behind the group, answered: “Well, the whole idea is to stay anonymous… That's how they do it in the United States. It actually doesn't matter who funds it because it’s about the ideas.”
But some of TPUSA’s funding has been revealed. And, given the group’s penchant for climate science denial, unsurprisingly a lot of it seems to come from the fossil fuel industry.
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TPUSA previously produced a video that claims NASA scientists are “wrong about climate change”, and founder Charlie Kirk has publicly supported President Trump’s assertion that he will withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.
TPUSA also played a key role in organising opposition to student campaigns for universities to divest from fossil fuels. In 2016, the organisation distributed a pro-fossil fuels guide for campuses called “Fossil Fuels Save Lives,” which claimed that students were being “indoctrinated to believe the myth that fossil fuels are dirty.”
A leading figure for the UK group, Darren Grimes, who is embroiled in a scandal over spending on the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum, has also expressed scepticism about the threat of climate change. He tweeted in response to recent school strikes for climate that:
Darren Grimes
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@darrengrimes_
I used to bunk off of school during PE - if only I could’ve used ‘climate change’ as an excuse and have it legitimised by our left wing media and politicians! Nightmare.
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Kirk, who set up TPUSA in 2012, has openly admitted soliciting funds from the fossil fuel industry, acknowledging in an interview with the New Yorker that some of TPUSA’s donors “are in the fossil-fuel space.”
He has also spoken and fund-raised at fossil fuel industry events, including with the National Mining Association and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), a trade association representing US oil and gas producers.
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Turning Point has a partnership with Prager University, a non-profit largely funded by fracking industry billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks which seeks to spread “'Americanism' through the power of the Internet.”
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TPUSA is also funded by the Hanley family, who own Hanley Petroleum, as well as the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which act as a vehicle for big donors to funnel donations anonymously to conservative organisations, many of which spread doubt about climate science.
In particular, the Donors Trustacts as a vehicle for donations from the Koch brothers, owners of the US’s largest privately-owned fossil fuel company. The Kochs fund organisations including the Heritage Foundation and the Foundation for Economic Education, which in turn sponsor TPUSA events.
The groups also share some personnel. Adam Brandon is both President of Koch-funded FreedomWorks and sits on the TPUSA advisory council. Tommy Hicks is similarly on the national board of the American Enterprise Institute’s Enterprise Club and a TPUSA advisory council member.
Turning Point is not the Kochs’ first foray into UK politics. Previous DeSmog investigations have shown how the fossil fuel magnates fund alt-right media voices centred around Spiked and the Living Marxism network, and use their UK connections to influence the Brexit debate.
TAGS: Turning Point USACharlie KirkTurning Point UKfossil fuel fundedclimate science denial55 Tufton Streetkoch industriesKoch Family FoundationsDonors TrustBrexit
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