Interview with Paul Collits
An Australian Hero
Paul Collits is a hero to me.
Of all the interviews I have done so far, with so many amazing people, this is the most personal and significant.
In the darkest of the dark days, the people that I relied on the most to triangulate my sanity were Paul Collits, Michael Yeadon, Malcolm Kendrick, and Jeffrey Tucker.
Paul was different in two ways.
Firstly, he is Australian; there were very few sane people writing anything useful left in this country, and secondly, because of the sheer breadth and depth of his knowledge and insight, as you will soon see.
He helped me with far more than just navigating Covid insanity.
Having the opportunity to do this interview is an absolute honour, and truth be told, I was quite emotional when I first read it.
With thanks and gratitude to Paul Collits, for everything.
1. Paul, could you please start by giving readers a brief overview of your background and journey up to this point?
First, many thanks to you for arranging the interview. I am very happy to be involved. I am in my late sixties, now well and truly retired. I live in northern New South Wales, close to the Queensland border. Brisbane is the closest large city. We live in a large rural town of about 30,000 people. I have had a pretty varied career, but mainly I have worked as a civil servant (policy professional) and an academic. In the former role, I have worked for a State Government and for the Feds. In the latter role, I have been both a researcher and a teacher. I have also done a short stint working for a Senator (when I was much younger) and briefly as a local economic development practitioner, in both Australian and New Zealand. So I have had had pretty good exposure to all levels of government. Much of my career was spent in regional economic development, and much of my academic writing was in this area. My initial training was in political science (International relations, political theory, public policy, Australian politics) and my PhD was in urban planning. In “retirement”, I have written on a range of topics related to politics, philosophy, economics, policy, education, religion and public health. I have published in The Spectator Australia, Politicom, Quadrant, The Conservative Woman (UK), The Daily Sceptic, News Weekly and A Sense of Place Magazine. I am the Senior Political Commentator at Politicom. And I have a substack. Briefly, I wrote for The Freedoms Project, a pro-life, Christian-inclined blog.
2. In your writing, you often discuss the concept of "convergent opportunism". Could you explain what this means and how it relates to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
I think this phrase came from the British Covid hero and former Big Pharma executive, Mike Yeadon. I love Mike’s writing, sincerity, compassion, fierce independence and clear thinking. I think he landed on “convergent opportunism’ as his preferred explanation for the policy debacle over Covid. It is a middle position between the Hanlon’s Razor view – the decision makers were stupid – and the conspiracy theorists who think, probably correctly, that the Covid policy response was born of malfeasance and tyranny. For a political scientist like me, the convergent opportunism thesis had some appeal. It goes to the old Rahm Emmanuel dictum, don’t ever let a crisis go to waste. And to the public choice theory that public officials get captured by powerful interests and have their own private interests separate from the “public good”. Many actors had an interest in erecting the Covid State. And they did. There were the public health officials who discovered their fifteen minutes of glory and power. There were the pharmaceutical companies who spied profits. There were the globalists who saw opportunities for control. There were the petit fascists who luxuriated in the opportunity for social control and virtue signalling. There were the captured legacy media. There were the academics who got their grants from the Bill Gates class. There were many opportunists who saw Covid as chance to advance various agendas, all at the expense of the people. And subsequent events lend credence to the theory. Like the pandemic preparedness industry that has emerged. Interests converged. And they cashed in. Mind you, Mike Yeadon came to reject his earlier theory, and who now believes it was all planned, known and executed. Not merely convergent opportunism. There is much evidence to support his new position. Pretty much everything that the conspiracy theorists said of Covid has been proven to be correct. None of this, of course, has been admitted by the guilty parties. The powers that be cling, at best, to the position that “mistakes were made”. We still await Nuremberg Two.
3. You've been critical of the "pandemic preparedness" movement. Why do you believe this movement has been detrimental to society, and how has it influenced government policies during the COVID-19 crisis?
Everyone knows (now) about Big Pharma. Less well known are the global public health tsars, housed in national bureaucracies, international governance institutions, research centres, universities, NGOs, corporates, the media, thinktanks, Big Philanthropy, and governments themselves. Klaus Schwab famously said that the World Economic Forum had “penetrated ze cabinets”. It certainly has. Just as Big Pharma has an interest in creating pandemics in order to find uses for their dangerous and ineffective drugs, governments and their puppet masters have an interest in control, in depopulation and in power. Back in the day, the Rockefellers determined that global control can be gained through crises, preferably crises at global scale that are said to “demand” global action in response. In the 1950s, the Rockefellers came up with financial crisis, climate crises and pandemics the perfect means of gaining global control of populations and pesky governments. One of the core means of assuring that governments played ball was to create globalist institutions, like the World Health Organisation, that could take over the functions of national governments. Another is to shape popular responses to global crises through fear-based propaganda. Create an expectation of crisis, create fear of the coming plagues, recruit hyper-connected actors to the cause, and use “science” or its illusion to suggest that “experts” and not elected governments should run things, and centrally plan responses. Vaccine nutters and global controllers like Gates provided big money to a global network of closely connected players, in the academy, in research institutes, in global institutions, and bought off the media, created narratives, and set up “events” to “plan” for the “inevitable” crises. He did this before Covid, in late 2019, and it worked. (See below). Since Covid, and despite all of the manifest failures and catastrophes of government public health policy, they are still at it, even more so, in planning future pandemic policy. From WHO to Davos and the WEF to the United Nations…
4. In your opinion, why did Australia seem to "fracture" into separate states during the pandemic, ultimately being ruled by what can be described as a collection of would-be dictators?
It turned out that the States still retain a lot of power, after all, despite the centralisation of much power in Canberra over the past century. The States still run the hospitals, the schools, the police, and their own borders. The Government of Scott Morrison surrendered authority to the States during Covid. This was spineless and based on fear of the already scared voters. He abandoned statesmanship and left the rule to thugs in State Government. He opted for a model of shared responsibility so as to avoid electoral pain. He created a National Cabinet to achieve this consensus model. This was a cop out and a disaster. The states pushed the boundaries of what they could do, and found compliant populations willing to give up their freedom for the “goodies”, like JobKeeper and JobSeeker, and the assurance of salvation from the coming vaccines. Australians, like other nationalities, bought the Covid lies and obeyed out of fear. They signed up for the track-and-trace technology, they suspected not the signs of coming tyranny, being large of supine disposition and clustered most in the most compliant quadrant of conformism. They became militant in their denunciation of covid dissidents, abusing vaccine doubters and lockdown laughers. They were cultural maskists, too. And dobbers. So, it was a lack of national leadership, cowed politicians fearful of backlash if they went “soft” on the virus – despite all of the science against lockdowns and in support of letting the virus run itself out, while protecting the vulnerable – a compliant population that simply didn’t question the elites’ lies, and State politician-tyrants who enjoyed the daily press conferences and the appearance of power, and who discovered, perhaps to their surprise, that the States can still be very powerful.
5. Some have compared Australia's relationship with the United States to that of an invisible star on the American flag, or a Sub-Imperial State. How do you view Australia's position within the context of the American Empire?
The Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard (1996-2007) was in Washington DC on the day of 9/11, due to address Congress. He was, not unexpectedly for a staunch American ally who happened to be almost on site for the attack, deeply shocked by the events. He stated that this was not the time for Australia to be an “eighty per cent ally” of the USA. And so, Australia went to war in the Middle East in what as to turn out a costly disaster for all concerned, with Iraq an unholy mess and Afghanistan returned to the Taliban twenty years on. Howard was criticized at the time by the left, and subsequently by some on the right who may have been queasy about the Iraq War (in particular), but went along with Bush 43 because we are a one hundred per cent ally. Howard was derided as Bush’s “deputy sheriff”. Now, while Howard’s Liberal Party remains a firm US ally, others on the right in Australia are not quite so friendly these days. And with reason. They see America as a political and judicial basket case, Washington DC as a swamp that is perhaps undrainable, they are embarrassed that Trump caved in to the Deep State over Covid, and has not apologised, they simply cannot understand how a crook like Biden can occupy the White House, and, especially with Ukraine, they see US foreign policy run by a weird concoction of neocons and the military industrial complex. They are also convinced that the democrat machine will again rig the election, and that Trump will fail again, irrespective of whether he is likely to make the nation great again. In summary, from my perspective, the alliance with the USA is far more nuanced than before, despite the elites’ continued embrace of the alliance, seen through defence agreements and initiatives such as AUKUS. It is hard to say whether the left still hates America in the way it used to. Our current Prime Minister sucks up to Biden, but, as a leftist, probably because Biden’s regime is far left as well rather than because of any deeply held labor Party love for the USA.
6. The concept of "the long march through the institutions" is a recurring theme in your writing. Could you explain what this means and how it has manifested in Australia and other Western nations?
The long march is a Marxist strategy for capturing power by infiltrating the key institutions of society and embedding revolutionary ideologies to effect permanent social change. They target and seek to undermine the key institutions of social power – the family, the Church, the bureaucracy, the universities, the media. It was born of the Italian Marxist Gramsci and perfected by 1960s radicals in the USA and Europe. Marxists came to believe that the working class was useless in advancing the communist revolution, and that the real action was not in the economy but in the culture. Especially after the collapse of Stalinism and the USSR in the 1980s, they realised that the workers didn’t want socialism but had aspirations to middle class comforts. The Marxist pivot was secured by then. The post-Gramsci strategy was firmly in place. The fruits of the strategy are plentiful. The bureaucracy is captured, as are the universities, the NGOs, the churches, and even right-of-centre political parties. It has been a brilliant and successful strategy. The modern Marxists now hate the working class and their (perceived) racist, homophobic, xenophobic attitudes. The beauty of the long march strategy has been that no one knew it was happening, until it was too late. The capture of the public imagination has been comprehensive. The leftists could never have imagined, for example, that their ideology would so totally capture the corporations, who now embrace woke ideology and are that ideology’s chief champions. Complete victory. And vindication of the Gramsci plan.
7. Jane Halton, a key figure in Australia's pandemic preparedness efforts, might be described as a "smoking gun". Could you explain her role in laying the legal groundwork for what ultimately happened in Australia during the pandemic?
Jane Halton is a “retired” senior health bureaucrat from Australia. She is also impeccably connected to the establishment here, being married to a very senior public sector statistician who happens to be the brother of Brett Sutton, Victoria’s former Chief Health officer responsible for enforcing the Western world’s toughest and most brutal lockdown. Halton left the Australian public service for international roles in public health, including at the World Health Organisation. I have previously termed her Bill Gates’ girl down under, for her role in the CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) , Gates’ funded Event 201 in October 2019, which conducted simulations of a coronavirus-type pandemic mere months before the Wuhan outbreak. Astonishingly, and with much lobbying of governments by Gates and others in the “family” – see Fauci, Daszak, Baric, Jeremy Farrar, Neil Ferguson, Tedros, Schwab, Deborah Birx, Walensky and friends – CEPI’s simulation turned into global pandemic policy. Halton was therefore front and centre in the push to enforce lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine rollouts and the defenestration of democracy and economic strength across the world. She is the international health bureaucrat’s international health bureaucrat, and continues to be closely involved with the organisation of the next global public health panic. She chairs the OECD’s health committee and numerous other international bodies. She is an enemy of freedom and human rights to health autonomy. She has escaped punishment, has not apologised, and must be outed. Inevitably, she did a review of aspects of Covid vaccine policy for the Australian Government, avoiding the real issues, like excess deaths, vaccine harms, the failure of lockdowns, and the rest of the existential harms done to our nation by covid policy. An unelected member of the administrative state, Halton would be utterly unknown to most Australians. Hence her extreme “covert power”. Halton’s continued presence at the global health policy table will ensure she will have a central role in future pretend health crises.
8. Collectivist ideologies seem to have a strong hold on popular narratives. What strategies do you think conservatives and libertarians can employ to create a compelling, unifying narrative of their own?
First, I think there is now a large, growing and distinct third group of dissenters from the collectivist mindset and policy drive. These are the outsiders who cherish freedom, recognise that it has been taken from them, and hate the privileged insider class and all of its works. They aren’t necessarily conservatives or libertarians in the traditional sense, but they are dismayed and disillusioned. They want governments to keep their promises, safeguard the interests of the dispossessed, stop being crooked, disengage from corporate power, stop giving jobs to their mates, and to take elections seriously again. Covid radicalised them. They are nationalists, and reject globalism. They possibly read Compact magazine if they are intellectually inclined, rather than Reason or National Review. The new divide is insiders versus outsiders, and the rejection of executive power and the deep state. So the hew hybrid, call it social conservatism + social democracy, isn’t the same as the old enemies of collectivism, and the new enemy isn’t just collectivism either. So I would recast the question a little. Which isn’t to say that collectivism isn’t a problem. It just now has several new faces, like the nanny state, the administrative state, the post-Covid state, the military fact-checker complex, the cancel culture, the woke establishment. It is a hydra-headed beast. What are the push-back alternatives? Conventional party politics is out as a solution in the age if the UniParty, where the two major parties in each polity are often in agreement on the big issues, and often the only difference between them is the speed at which we are hurtling towards the cliff. So it is a must to support minor freedom parties and build coalitions that will hopefully win seats in legislatures and hold to account whichever of the major parties holds power. Electoral systems work against this and against minor parties. Outside of electoral politics, there are two possible strategies. One is to abandon the system altogether, to retreat to the cave. The American writer Rod Dreher calls this the Benedict Option. Perhaps the “cave” is a foreign country like Hungary (at present). Since all of the Western institutions have been captured, there is little hope (in our lifetimes) of a reversal of direction in the bureaucracy, the NGOs, the corporates, the universities and the legacy media. The other option, which a number of thinkers have suggested, is to form “parallel societies” and operate outside the system. Shop local. Use cash. Have large families. Home school them. Form online and other communities of shared interests. Avoid paying tax. Get offline where possible. Shun social media. Avoid digital ID if you can. But still engage with civil society. Attend peaceful protests against tyranny. Conventional politics and ideologies are legacy tools. Most politicians are chancers, bought up or ineffectual and spineless. Playing those games is a waste of time, when the enemy is at the gate already.
9. Climate change is another topic you've written about extensively. Could you walk us through the "five stages of descent into climate madness" that you've identified?
I once asked the doyen of Australian climate realists, Ian Plimer, why he still bothered to fight the good fight on climate change. My view is that this war is over, and no amount of rational, evidence based argument against the net zero nutters will persuade them to change their minds. Ian agreed up to a point, but said that he and others on the side of climate truth had a duty to place on the record the real picture, for future generations and future historians. Hence his continued crusade. I largely stopped writing about climate change a decade ago, since rational debate is now impossible with climate emoters, and, in any case, the private equity funds that run the world had put their chips on renewables. Nevertheless, the deceptions over climate policy are real, disastrous and ongoing, so one does have that duty. Especially when clowns like Michael Mann win court cases against the likes of Mark Steyn. The “climate madness” consists of a series of highly dubious propositions linked by a false logic path, and the acceptance of this nonsense by policy-makers and the public, or at least enough of the public for politicians to fear the electoral consequences of climate “inaction”. These propositions are as follows. The earth’s temperature is rising. It is rising substantially. The rise is caused by man. Governments of the world can do something about this. Governments of the world should do something about this. None of these propositions is true. Yet we have global action on climate, action that will impoverish the world’s economies, kill countless people, destroy freedom and blast us all back to the stone age. So, what are the five stages of descent into climate madness? First, there was the greenhouse gases theory of the Swede Arrhenius, and others, and the linking of rising emissions to the industrial revolution. Next came the realization by early generation green radicals that climate could be the big global threat they could use to garner support for their extremist anti-capitalist crusade. Third came the end of the Cold War and the eclipse of traditional Soviet style Marxism, and the emergence of cultural Marxism and post-modernism as drivers of leftist thought. The pivot away from the working class and towards alleged victims of oppression came with a green tinge, and the acceptance of “sustainability” as the new unifying ideology of radicals. Fourth came the leftists’ capture of science and scientists only too eager to garner harvest the research funding that the new world promised. This has been called academic “grant troughing”. Finally, the last stage has been the capture of both governments and corporates by the watermelon ideology, as James Delingpole has called it. It is all another example of convergent opportunism, you might say. Everyone in the establishment is a winner. Greenies win. Academics get their grants. Politicians salve their consciences. Bankers and other capitalists get their profits through green-washing and ponzi schemes, their green investments typically paid for by the taxpayer. Bureaucrats have new jobs for life. Yes, it turns out that the case for taking up the fight, seemingly hopeless, remains strong.
10. You've been critical of Australian feminism. Do you believe there are unique aspects to feminism in Australia that set it apart from feminist movements in other parts of the world?
I can’t really comment on feminism in other countries, but will focus instead on some of the harmful consequences of feminism and especially me-tooism as they have emerged in Australia. I suspect that Australian feminism isn’t that different from the practices and views of the sisterhood in other places. Some of the worst consequences of feminism as it emerged in the 1960s have been the trashing of the traditional family, the raising of children by childcare workers, the lies told to women that persuaded several generations to assume they have to be wage slaves, making taxpayers pay for the raising of children in childcare centres, at great and growing cost, massive house price inflation resulting from the emergence of two income families as the norm, and the hounding of innocent men wrongly accused – either through the courts or in the court of public opinion – of sexual assault. It isn’t just feminism on its own, of course. It is leftist feminism typically part of an ideological package that also includes socialism, multiculturalism and environmentalism. Few radical feminists are not also rabid socialists, greenies, anti-Israel and supporters of mass immigration. They often support the suppression of free speech, create moral panics over rape and sex abuse, and especially go after the churches and churchmen. We saw the destruction of Cardinal George Pell’s reputation and his imprisonment on false charges, and the attack on him was led by radical feminists in the Victorian legal system, the police, the publishing industry and the media. I have written upwards of 50,000 words on the Pell case, and was threatened by The Age newspaper with contempt of court over one of the articles I wrote.
11. The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its annual meeting in Davos have been the subject of much controversy. What are your thoughts on the role of the WEF in shaping global policies and narratives?
As I have noted, the WEF has “penetrated ze cabinets”. It isn’t just some country club for rich, greenie wankers, who meet in the snow once a year. It isn’t simply a fantasy made up by “conspiracy theorists”. Yes, thousands of gas guzzling private jets ferrying oligarchs into a Swiss village do make for good copy and a charge of hypocrisy. Their use of $3000-a-time sex workers, the same. These people are not clowns. They make a difference to the world. Money talks. So does proximity to power. It has become clear who really has that power, and it isn’t the puppet politicians. Establishment types like the Spectator’s Toby Young like to mock those who see the world run by Bond villains. They are so unawake it isn’t funny. As many others have pointed out, Klaus Schwab, initially a messenger boy for Henry Kissinger, writes books on his and the WEF’s vision for the world, and he means business. They are not secretive, not like the Bilderbergs, the Trilateral Commission, the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome and the other world-dominator types, with whom the WEF share fraternal bonds and overlapping membership. The WEF puts it all out there, and hides nothing. They are confident that half the world will agree with them, and the other half ill shrug them off. They in. The things they are pushing, with real resources and lethal intent, include the destruction of farming, global digital vaccine passports, WHO control of national public health policy, digital currencies, the end of cash, programmable spending by individuals, social credit, depopulation, eugenics, abortion, socialism for the peasants, the end of global travel for the masses, and censorship. Oh, and the much-adored Chinese model. The penetration of ze cabinets has included Australia. The Health Minister during Covid was a former employee of the WEF. Many other Australians, like the American born Julie Inman Grant, our eSafety Commissar, who is a Davos girl, are regulars. Former participants in the WEF’s Young Global Leaders Program are scattered across the world’s governments. And the merest casual observer of world politics these days will have noticed the utter alignment of the policies of all the major parties, of whichever hue, with the tripe coming out of Geneva. No coincidence, that.
12. In your article "Demography and Replacement Down Under", you discuss the challenges posed by Australia's current immigration policies. What do you see as the long-term consequences of these policies for Australian society and culture?
Mass immigration is a blight on Australian culture and a ponzi scheme for the economy. We now have, post-Covid and under a far-left Government, upwards of half a million migrants arriving every year. This was never agreed to by voters in any election. A referendum on the subject would end in catastrophic defeat for supporters of huge migrant numbers. The arrivals put upward pressure on infrastructure costs, housing prices and the cost of living. They lead to the apartment booms in our cities, where often the jerry-built structures simply fall down after a few years. The apartment boom has become a form of urban blight, especially in middle ring suburbs traditionally the homes of the middle classes and older people and families. These are now under threat from the vertical expansion said to be needed because of the exploding population. (The trendy new urbanism embraced by most town planners is, of course, a cause as well as bloated in-migrant populations. Mass immigration has also led to the formation of enclaves. We don’t have multiculturalism so much as multi mono-culturalism. Half of Australia’s people now have at least one parent born overseas. About one third were born overseas themselves. And the mix is by no means conducive to social harmony, as many Jews here are now finding out. One commentator has noted that “they hate us before they get here”. Many new Australians do not accept our values, yet we keep on bringing more in, in increasing numbers. It is a recipe for disaster. Some have called it “replacement theory”. If you don’t like the population, at its racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic values, well change the population. Leftists call this theory a nasty conspiracy theory. To me it is simple reality, and it is utterly plausible that replacement is the aim, as well as the effect, of the policy. And the economic impact? Neutral, at best, many economists agree. Business love mass migration – cheap labour to do the nasty jobs many Australians won’t do. Governments keep inviting more migrants in order to cover up their own economic mismanagement.
13. Many of your articles touch on the theme of elite control and manipulation. How do you think the average person can resist these influences and maintain a sense of autonomy in their lives?
See also the answer to Q 8. Many people have traded freedom for convenience, and boredom for wall-to-wall entertainment, since the arrival of smartphones. A retired Australian judge, in explaining the willingness of our people to follow Covid tyrannical instructions, once said Australians were content so long as they had Netflix, full bellies and a warm place to defaecate. He had that pretty right. In other words, many are in the passive conformist quadrant in the quadrant of conformity. They don’t see, for example, digital IDs as anything to be remotely worried about. How the active dissidents and non-conformists can change the attitudes of the former group is a question to which I have no real answers. For those who do wish to resist, as I have said, do all of the things that the elites don’t want you to do. Use cash, form parallel communities, ditch the search engines that lie and track you, live off-line, shop local, ditch the big corporates, throw away the newspaper subscriptions, avoid tax, scrub social media. Elite control is worsening, so the task will only get harder. Bringing the dangers of elite control, even the existence of it, to the attention of the unawake will get harder over time, but also it will become more urgent. Some observers have argued that using rational counter-arguments is pointless, at least at the beginning of a process of educating others. Data comes later. First try emotive counter-arguments, exaggerate, get their attention, find personal examples of general phenomena. Tell people how many people YOU know who have had vaccine injuries, rather that quoting the latest study by (for example) Denis Rancourt or Steve Kirsch or Bret Weinstein, brilliant and necessary though their work is. In other words, there are two issues with resistance. There is your own resistance as an individual or family. Then there is influencing the broader debates and the behaviour of others.
14. You've written about the importance of community and the dangers of social atomization. In an age of increasing digital connectivity and globalization, how can individuals and communities maintain a sense of rootedness and belonging?
This question is linked to my answers to Questions 8 and 13. There is a crisis of meaninglessness in the West, a crisis of alienation, a crisis of addiction and a crisis of loneliness. The evidence for these trends is everywhere, and their relevance to the collapse of community is equally clear. Robert Putnam in his famous book, Bowling Alone, cottoned on to it, well before the advent of the Web 2.0 and social media arrived and took over so many lives. And way before Covid lockdowns crushed the whole notion of “community”. Other observers have picked up on aspects of the crises. Like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, Australia’s former Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, the late Roger Scruton, and the writers at Compact magazine. What is the evidence? Friendship has given way to fake friends online, half of marriages break up, children are lonely and suffer from depression and anxiety, suicides are increasing, JD Vance and others have highlighted the opioid crisis, huge numbers of people are medicated for mental health ailments, violence is increasing, identity hatreds now trump civilised debates and friendships across the aisle are far fewer. The sense of place is diminished, belonging now means belonging to victim groups rather than real communities, and globalization and mass migration are killing nationhood and patriotism. Working from home and online learning are destroying real work and real study, respectively. These are existential threats to the traditional order, an order thoroughly upended by the class of 68 and the post-modernist ideas they transmitted. Again, as in answers to Questions 8 and 13, the choice is retreat to the cave, live and operate in parallel societies, build real as opposed to online communities, speak out on the ills that befall us. Or simply go with the trends and watch our societies sink into the mire. One solution sometimes floated is localism, and this sums up much of the thinking of those who argue for “parallel societies”. There are many who do not see any of these things as problems to be addressed or even lamented. This, above all, is our biggest problem. And I don’t just speak of the enemies of freedom and community, but also of those who simply shrug their shoulders. Those who appeal for world peace normally say – start at home, be people of peace yourselves. This strikes one as pretty lame, but what else is there?
15. Finally, what projects or topics are you currently focused on, and how can interested readers stay informed about your work and engage with your ideas?
With the world as insane as it is, with democracies trashed, with individual rights removed, with government out of control, with traditional families and their values under constant siege, with world war a real possibility, and with education systems failing, the world of a political commentator is “target rich”. As a political scientist, I tend to focus on government failure and on the changing nature of ideology. Australian politics are always in view, with both major parties abandoning their roots and their base and an election coming in a year’s time. I write less on conservatism than I used to, less on climate change and less on US politics. The 2020 presidential election took away a lot of my interest in taking American politics seriously, the system is so flawed. Trump’s performance during Covid disillusioned me. Covid provided a rich vein of commentary, such was the sheer madness and evil on display as well as the abandonment of all pretence at following medical science and good practice. The absence of any apologies by anyone means that there is still work to be done in outing the Covid criminals. And the ramping up of post-Covid totalitarianism, seen in the war on cash, digital IDs and the institutionalisation of cancel culture, as merely three example deserves ongoing exposure and critique. The changing dynamics of ideologies and new, hybrid ideological forms are of increasing interest to me, especially the increasing convergence of social leftism (and globalism) with belief in the virtues of economic freedom on the one hand, and the emergence of social democrat/social conservatives on the other. The former has solidified into a distinct class, with progressive, green, pro-Covid-state, woke, globalist worldviews emerging across the political spectrum and solidifying. This is likely to be a history of ideas project. I am still interested in classical liberalism, from my Master of Arts thesis days in the 1980s. In that project, I examined the crossovers in libertarian thought exemplified by FA Hayek and Robert Nozick. Finally, because of my writing gig at Britain’s Conservative Woman (TCW), I have spent an increasing amount of time studying British politics.
Paul’s Newsletter | Paul Collits | Substack
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All you need is one little crack in people's confidence and then it all comes tumbling down. It worked for me like that. Before covid I never really questioned climate change, but I also wasn't all in on it. But due to the lies during covid, I started thinking: what else do they lie about.
WOW What an amazing summary of the world’s situation, as heartbreaking, as it is. Thank you for sharing this.