The Atlas Junk Tank

I've been so immersed in American news these days, it's a conscious effort to check out what shenanigans Ford is pulling in Ontario. Of course, it's just more of the same bullshit: Trump-lite. Destroy the useful buildings, like the Science Center, and rebuild some garbage spa or ballroom or a tunnel, whatever you can dream up, likely all as a means to pocket money through subcontracting scams, like they did way back in the Iraq invasion, where there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers.  

Digital Warrior on Bluesky explains the cause of the connection succinctly:

"If you've been wondering why Canada's right wing sometimes sounds like the US right wing, a lot of it is imported infrastructure, not organic debate. Same story beats, same villains, same panic triggers tuned for repetition and amplification. Start here [Tyee article]. This piece names Canadian media nodes tied to AtlasNetwork partners and maps the full pipeline in plain terms. Think of it less as a news story and more as a supply chain diagram for political narratives. Atlas Network is the backbone. It connects, funds, trains, and promotes hundreds of think tanks globally so local groups can push the same deregulation agenda with local accents. It scales ideology through partnerships, not elections. The mechanism: money funds research, research manufactures credentialed experts, and experts become recurring guests or hosts. That is how advocacy gets laundered into news. Viewers get repetition, not transparency, and it starts to feel like consensus. 

Immigration is the most portable script in the playbook. The facts may differ country to country, but the structure stays identical: blame newcomers for housing, wages, and safety, then sell hardline policy as common sense realism. Watch how online harms panic gets used as a deregulatory weapon. Child safety becomes the hook, then the real target becomes any guardrail on harassment or hate speech. Free speech ends up protecting platforms and operators, not citizens. Climate messaging follows the same pattern. Not denial, just delay and inversion: net zero is a scam, regulation is tyranny, oil is the victim, NGOs are the threat. It protects extraction while sounding like neutral common sense.The tell is asset reuse. When the same tight set of organizations and spokespeople cycle through immigration, healthcare, climate, and free speech, that is not pluralism. That is a coordinated influence network running message discipline.This is not a censorship argument. It is a provenance argument. If a broadcast segment is driven by a funded advocacy pipeline, audiences deserve to know: affiliations, donors, conflicts. Label advocacy as advocacy. Stop laundering it as journalism. Atlas Network is the backbone: it connects and resources hundreds of partner think tanks, trains messengers, and turns donor-funded agendas into “common sense” via research, spokespeople, and media amplification [Intercept article]."

The Tyee article (Feb. 2026) calls the Atlas Network a "U.S. dark-money coalition of billionaire libertarian ideologues," and lists some of the Canadian groups that are directly linked: the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Second Street, the Montreal Economic Institute, and the Fraser Institute. They're heavily influenced by oil and gas lobbies, or they are oil and gas lobbies. The Intercept article (Aug. 2017) outlines how the Atlas Network built up institutions across Latin America. It explains the path from Hayek to Reagan to now, and how to convince the public to agree:

"Think tanks are traditionally associated with independent institutes formed to develop unconventional solutions. But the Atlas model focuses less on developing genuinely new policy proposals, and more on establishing political organizations that carry the credibility of academic institutions, making them an effective organ for winning hearts and minds. Free-market ideas — such as slashing taxes on the wealthy; whittling down the public sector and placing it under the control of private operators; and liberalized trade rules and restrictions on labor unions — have always struggled with a perception problem. Proponents of this vision have found that voters tend to view such ideas as a vehicle for serving society’s upper crust. Rebranding economic libertarianism as a public interest ideology has required elaborate strategies for mass persuasion. But the Atlas model now spreading rapidly through Latin America is based on a method perfected by decades of struggle in the U.S. and the U.K., as libertarians worked to stem the tide of the surging post-war welfare state."

I wrote about the Atlas Network back in December 2023, after reading this De Smog article, then again later that month quoting George Monbiot. Monbiot called the group "this overarching meta junk tank set up by Antony Fisher ... whose purpose is to coordinate the activities of these dark money neoliberal networks." Environmental groups have been aware of this cabal for a while. Now we need everyone to recognize what's happening to have any hope for democracy's survival.

On Useful Anger: Cohen's All the Rage

How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us. 

He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and from how rage plays out in the world to how it manifests in our own minds, all with a thread of climate change activism throughout. Ideas are illustrated with examples from fictional characters, historical figures, and his own family. It hardly seems possible to do all that in just 195 pages, yet the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read, comfortably shifting from micro to macro issues to explore four kinds of rage.

DEFINITIONS

In day-to-day conversations, we use “rage,” “anger,” and “aggression” almost interchangeably. We do the same for “emotion” and “feeling” and for “drive” and “instinct.” The book uses these terms more precisely, so a bit of a glossary might be useful. The order of events that occurs when we’re outraged becomes important. Cohen explains that aggression is often the way we respond directly to a stimulus, and anger is what happens after that first spark of action, when we choose to hold it back. He explains it succinctly in an interview with The Philosopher:

“Aggression is a kind of stimulus response. It’s what we do with a provocation, which might be an injury; it might be a humiliation, an insult of some kind, something that arouses us to retaliation. Aggression is the way that we get rid of that load of stimulus in action. … Anger is a way of holding on. Feelings are ways of holding on to stuff. When we can’t bear to feel something we instead discharge it in action. … Anger is something that you’re left with when action is unavailable to you or perhaps when you try to take the experience to a higher level, i.e. to maintain it in the consciousness as something to experience and process psychically rather than discharge in an action. That’s why psychoanalysis tends to think of anger as a human achievement.”

It’s not the case that we’re insulted, then feel anger, and then rationally decide to act or not act, even if it sometimes feels like that. Instead, the impetus to act is immediate following an enraging stimulus, and the restraint is what leads to the feeling of anger. I think that’s the idea. It’s counterintuitive to me, so it’s useful that it was repeated a few times in the book.