In today’s video, we’re going to look at how the
political right uses a network of fake research institutes to shape the news. Doing so is going to
involve touching-upon a number of deeply-important topics including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
and the ongoing conservative moral panic about “Critical Race Theory”. But, I want to start
with a story that’s altogether much… stupider. It was a little over a month ago now and I’d
just finished a long day of video editing when I wandered into my living room,
slumped down on the sofa and, more out of habit than any real enthusiasm, booted-up
the Twitter app on my phone. And, on doing so, I was met by a tweet sharing this incredible
headline: ‘The Moon should be privatised to help wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say’.
Just one more time in case you didn’t catch that: “The Moon should be privatised to help
wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say”. The tweet was from the official account of The
Independent, a British newspaper which occupies a similar(ish) position in the editorial
spectrum of UK media as The Guardian, with the fun quirk of being partly owned by a
Russian oligarch and allegedly part-owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. The tweet linked
to an article which detailed the publication of a new research paper written by an economist
called Rebecca Lowe. The paper argues that, with commercial ventures such as SpaceX, Virgin
Galactic and Blue Origin gaining momentum (along with plenty of other, less
high-profile projects), the time has come to establish a system through which
individuals (and, by extension, corporations) can take ownership of portions of the Moon, and
use those patches of “Moon land” to turn a profit. We’ll return to the report itself in a moment
but, back on Twitter, The Independent’s tweet promoting the article had gone what I’d describe
as very mildly viral. It wasn’t exactly Will Smith slapping Chris Rock or the Crazy Frog
or anything but, in the small neighbourhood of Twitter that my digital self calls home,
this was absolutely the post of the day. The response was, to put it mildly, not positive. I scrolled for a long, long time
while writing this and the only responses to the tweet I could find that weren’t completely
savaging the idea of “privatising the Moon” were from the report’s author and someone who works
for the organisation that published the document, both of whom did their best to hide their
disappointment at having their proposal for renting the moon out to billionaires
roundly rejected in the marketplace of ideas. In an interesting example of the weird
relationship between social media and the traditional news media in the present day,
this mild viral backlash meant that the report actually became a far bigger news story than it
had been previously. Prior to Twitter tearing into it, the only coverage the research paper
had received outside of that short write-up in The Independent had been from The Daily Star, a
tabloid which tends to publish articles of a much lower-brow variety. In the week following,
however, every newspaper in the country (and some from further afield) seemingly wanted to weigh-in
on the debate surrounding moon ownership. Articles were published in The National, The Guardian, Time
Out, the Tribune, the New Scientist, The Mary Sue. Even Ben Shapiro’s outlet The Daily Wire
tried to catch some clicks from the affair. Like the responses to the tweet from The
Independent that had first caught my attention, the various follow-up articles almost exclusively
took a negative view of private Moon ownership. The overwhelming feeling was that humanity’s
baby steps into outer space provide us with the opportunity to rethink how we organise our economy
and that it’s a waste of that opportunity to let the same economic system which has destroyed
this planet add the Moon to its body count. Okay, so why am I telling you this
story and what does any of this have to do with anything? Well, it would be
very easy to interpret what I’m calling the “privatising the Moon” affair as a sign of
a media ecosystem in the rudest of health; to frame this as an example of a journalist
engaging with cutting-edge research in order to facilitate healthy debate of a bold new economic
proposal. But, I want to suggest quite the opposite. Indeed, I would argue that the fact that
this debate about “privatising the Moon” was even had in the first place highlights a consistent
and habitual failure of contemporary journalism. See, peppered throughout the tweets and newspaper
articles responding to the research paper which sparked this whole conversation was the occasional
bit of eye-rolling by more dedicated politics nerds at the organisation which had commissioned
the report. For, while that initial tweet from The Independent had credited the idea of privatising
the moon simply to “economists”, reading further revealed the paper not to have been published in
a peer-reviewed academic journal but, instead, simply as a pamphlet by an organisation
called the Adam Smith Institute. Such a name might conjure-up images of
an elite academic institution staffed by respected professors; and that’s certainly
the goal. In truth, however, the Adam Smith Institute is little more than a propaganda outfit.
Deeply secretive about where its money comes from, the organisation’s sole reason for existing
is to churn-out dubious “papers” and “studies” which give academic-sounding support
to political policies which benefit large corporations and the super-rich. Following
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, the Adam Smith Institute came out in opposition
to seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs, comparing the implementation of such sanctions
by NATO-aligned countries to European Jews being forced to sell their property as they
fled the holocaust. Really classy stuff… The Adam Smith Institute is not alone in this line
of work. It’s one of many so-called “think tanks” which, over the past 50 years, have become
an inescapable feature of formal politics. You’ve probably heard of some of these
organisations: the Heritage Foundation, the Henry Jackson Society, the Institute of
Economic Affairs. Bridging the gap between lobbying groups, PR firms and universities,
think tanks exist across the political spectrum, but they’ve become a particularly
favoured tactic of the political right (who are both willing to be far more unscrupulous
in dressing-up pure propaganda as “research” and have far more money to spend in promoting
their ideas). Wealthy libertarians such as Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos pump money into
these faux-academic institutions as a means to launder political policies and ideas which
serve to reduce their tax bill and strip-away any regulation which might impact the
ability of their businesses to turn a profit. As we’ll see throughout the rest of this
video, the impact that these organisations have on our politics is immense. There are
plenty of political policies in place today that would be unthinkable without these
fake research institutes having helped to falsely portray them as being grounded in
objective evidence. Some of the most familiar arguments in favour of conservative economic
and social policies, assumed by many people to merely be common sense, are also the result
of these organisations’ propaganda efforts. It won’t surprise long-time viewers of my
channel, however, to learn that, in order to truly understand how think tanks operate in
the present day, I think we need to briefly look at where they came from. Because, it’s only
through doing so that one can begin to comprehend the deeply weird (yet highly influential) position
these fake experts occupy in our political system. But, before we talk about that, I want to
suggest that, if you’re liking this video, you’ll also probably like a video I made last
year about how who owns the media affects what stories get reported on and how. And, if you
want the best experience for watching that video, then you’ll want to do so on Nebula. Nebula is the
Streamy Award-nominated streaming service created by a bunch of educational YouTubers and owned
by those creators themselves (including me!). It allows you to watch my videos with zero
ads anywhere on the site, along with those of plenty of other creators you already know and
love. Once you’ve watched my video on media bias, for example, you’ll probably want to check-out
Second Thought’s videos on the topic and then you’ll likely want to watch Super Bunnyhop’s video
about Media Literacy and Game News which gives a really interesting, behind-the-scenes insight
into how news outlets decide what to report on. If you’re interested in signing-up for Nebula, then you’ll want to know that the best way of
doing so is through a partnership that we’ve put together with another streaming
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If you’re actually interested in the future of Moon settlement, for example, I really enjoyed
Return to the Moon, which provides a great insight into what it’ll take to build moon colonies and
how close to a reality that dream currently is. Curiosity Stream and Nebula make for great
companions to one another and so we’ve partnered to put together a bundle deal in which signing up
to both services is actually cheaper than signing up to either service on its own. If you head to
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subscription, with Nebula thrown-in for free. And, by using that link to let them know
that I sent you, you’ll also be helping to support my channel and enabling me to
continue to make videos like this one. Which we will return to right now. So, the story of the modern-day
think tank begins in America, in 1916, with this brilliantly bearded fellow: Robert S. Brookings. Brookings was very much
the Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg of his day. He’d made his fortune manufacturing, transporting
and selling wooden furniture. And, he must’ve had a pretty good eye for dining room tables because,
by the age of 47, he’d become so unbelievably wealthy that he was able to pack-in his day job
entirely andfocus on the larger questions in life. Which… I mean… it’s not like a businessman getting
into politics has even been a bad idea, is it? See, if you were a wealthy industrialist
in turn-of-the-century America, then you were all about the two “P”s:
philanthropy and progressivism. By philanthropy, I of course mean sharing a portion of your wealth
with honourable causes. This was the era of Carnegie and Rockefeller, both of whom loved to
dish out cash in return for the modest gesture of having their names chiselled in massive letters
on the side of a library or lecture theatre. By progressivism, I mean a new political philosophy
that was taking the American elite by storm. Now, while related, it’s important to say that
the progressivism that gained traction at the beginning of the 20th century wasn’t quite
the same as what’s sometimes referred to as “progressivism” in American political
commentary today. These titans of industry weren’t about to call for a Bernie Sanders style
“political revolution”. Instead, for rich folks, turn-of-the-century progressivism was all
about taking a more “evidence-based” approach to politics. In an era of continuous
labour disputes, strikes and lock-outs, figures such as Robert S. Brookings felt
that politics had grown too ideological, and that society would benefit, instead, from a
more reasoned approach which found solutions to society’s ills in the then-blossoming field
of economics and other social sciences. It was to this end that, in 1916, Brookings
founded the Institute for Government Research. His goal was for this organisation to hire a ragtag
bunch of economists and other social scientists to conduct studies and undertake research
which could then be shared with politicians (and those who vote for them) to help them make
more informed, rational decisions. Again, allergic to what he thought of as “ideological” thinking,
the Institute was to be, in Brookings’ own words, ‘free from any political or pecuniary interests’
and would simply ‘lay before the country in a coherent form the fundamental economic facts’ as
objectively as possible. And, if anyone’s worried that Brookings was being a little modest in his
founding of the Institute for Government Research, fear not, he renamed it the Brookings
Institution a few years later. Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that this
notion of being able to “transcend ideology” and enact a perfectly “logical” politics is… a load
of rubbish. As Abigail Thorne of Philosophy Tube highlights in her video on Jordan Peterson, what
one considers to be “ideological” and what one views as just “logical” is itself informed by
one’s ideological view of the world; this is, in turn, often shaped by one’s material
interests. It speaks volumes, for instance, that the Brookings Institution was a committed
opponent of the New Deal, arguing instead that FDR should have responded to the Great Depression
with the implementation of austerity measures. Nevertheless, there was clearly some degree of
intellectual freedom at the Brookings Institution. In 1933, for example, one Brookings researcher
wrote a paper which called for the nationalisation of the American coal industry, which is unlikely
to have been the natural political position of the Institution’s capitalist benefactor.
Brookings’ reputation for high-quality, independent research led to a small
coterie of similar organisations popping-up over the following decades.
The National Bureau for Economic Research and the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, for example, both similarly hired researchers to produce
reports on economic trends and defence policy. In all honesty, these early think tanks were
pretty boring. They largely consisted of a bunch of policy nerds sitting in offices,
writing books and compiling studies that very few people actually read. Yet,
soon, all of that was to change. See, as the 20th century wore on, the
brief trend among the super-rich for having a social conscience began to wane.
The economic elite in both America and Europe increasingly began to embrace
a politics of libertarianism or what’s now often called neoliberalism. These
political philosophies viewed state intervention in the economy—whether that be progressive
taxation, the provision of unemployment benefits or the requirement of workplaces to
comply with health and safety regulations—as denying rich people their fundamental human right
to get even richer. What they needed, however, was a way of making this clearly self-interested
worldview palatable to the general public. A key figure in this campaign was a British
businessman called Antony Fisher. Fisher first became interested in neoliberal economics when he
read an abridged version of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom; which is essentially the sacred
text of people who like to shake their fists at “big government”. Fisher sought-out Hayek at a
public lecture at the London School of Economics and explained that the book had inspired
him to embark upon a career as a politician. Hayek, however, convinced Fisher that he
could have far more influence over politics by using his time (and wealth) to found a
“research institute” devoted to producing “evidence” to support the
implementation of right-wing policies. There were a handful of pre-existing organisations
which Fisher was able to draw inspiration from when he founded the Institute of Economic
Affairs in 1955. Since the mid-1940s, concerned groups of businessmen in the
United States had begun to fund so-called “research organisations” which, on the surface,
seemed similar enough to the bureaucratic offering of the Brookings Institution. With names such
as the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education, they certainly
sounded mundane enough. Yet, these organisations were driven by a far clearer political agenda.
Their role was no longer to undertake research which could inform recommendations for
political policy but to pick a conservative, libertarian or otherwise right-wing policy their
funders would want to see implemented and then work backwards to piece together some research
which showed that policy to be beneficial. Fisher’s creation, the Institute of Economic
Affairs, was an overwhelming success. Over the course of 20 years, it waged a
quiet yet dedicated campaign to popularise free-market economic ideas
among British politicians and those who voted for them. These efforts
would pay-off in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister and began to
implement many of the IEA’s favoured policies. Fisher was not content with influencing British
politics, however. Spurred on by the victories of the IEA, he soon set about internationalising
this model of propaganda with an academic facade, founding the Manhattan Institute in America, the
Fraser Institute in Canada and the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia. In fact, all in
all, Fisher has been credited with contributing to the founding of 150 of these institutes across the
globe, all with the goal of providing advocates of unregulated capitalism with academic-sounding
evidence to support their arguments. The most influential of what were slowly becoming
known as “think tanks” in the United States, however, was not one of Fisher’s. The
Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 with a donation of $250,000 from Joseph Coors,
then president of the Coors Brewing Company (a position we can only assume he obtained
through merit). If Antony Fisher established the model for the modern-day think tank,
then the Heritage Foundation perfected it. The Foundation did away with book-length
studies and original research almost entirely; instead focussing on the publication and
circulation of “policy briefs”. These consisted of super-short pamphlets containing “evidence”
to prove why a certain bill being considered by the US Congress was good or bad which would
be distributed to politicians and journalists to try and shape the political and
media conversation around that bill. Much like the Institute of Economic Affairs
in the UK, the Heritage Foundation (and other right-wing think tanks like it) played
a key role in popularising libertarian and neoliberal ideas among the American public.
In doing so, they helped lay the groundwork for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. As more
and more businesses and rich folks began to donate greater amounts of money to support their
work, the Heritage Foundation also began to put pressure on politicians themselves. When Reagan
first took office in 1981, Heritage presented his administration with a 3,000-page, 20-volume report
called Mandate for Leadership, which detailed all the policies they thought he should implement.
And… it worked. By the end of Reagan’s first term, he had enacted around half of the reforms
the Heritage Foundation had pushed for. While the first think tanks were founded with
the intention of having at least a modicum of intellectual independence, then, during the
second half of the 20th century, they became increasingly partisan. Later organisations
such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Heritage Foundation were able to draw on
the relatively good reputation of firms such as the Brookings Institution to dress-up their
propaganda as legitimate, serious research. One measure of the extent to which these
organisations have managed to infiltrate our politics is the sheer number of think tanks
that exist in the present day. Researcher Lynn Hellebust recalls that, in 1945, there were
just 62 think tanks in America. By the 1990s, she counted more than 1,200. Globally, a report
published by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 estimated that there were
now 11,175 think tanks working to influence policy across the world. While this figure
includes some organisations which lean towards more legitimate research activity, right-wing
think tanks remain the most well-funded and thus the most influential. Many of these
exist under the umbrella of the Atlas Network, an international organisation funded by the personal
foundations of various right-wing billionaires including Charles Koch, which provides grants
and training to more than 500 think tanks which push for the adoption of libertarian
and neoliberal policies across the globe. While we’ve already touched upon a few ways in
which think tanks manage to achieve this end, however, I want to continue by focussing more
explicitly on some of the tactics which these fake research institutes use to influence
which political policies get passed and which get ridiculed as “extreme” or “unworkable”. In
doing so, we’re going to take a look at a few concrete examples of think tanks shaping how
certain topics get talked about in the media as well as thinking about how all of this
might give us a slightly different perspective on that debate surrounding the
so-called privatisation of the Moon. As we saw towards the end of the previous section,
one way in which think tanks work to influence what political policies get passed is through
directly engaging with politicians. This might include a whole range of activities from simply
sending them a briefing document which encourages them to support or oppose a certain bill, right up
to writing entire drafts of proposed legislation. This has been something that has been
repeatedly evident during the process of the UK leaving the European Union. When, in
2018, it appeared that parliamentary deadlock might lead to the passing of a compromissory
deal in which the UK would continue to have some regulatory alignment with the EU on trade, the
Institute of Economic Affairs worked with more hardcore Brexiteers in Parliament to launch
their own proposed deal document called Plan A+ (2018). The writing of the IEA’s proposed deal
was supported by a grant from the Atlas Network and was, unsurprisingly, a libertarian’s
dream with provisions that would have essentially abolished the National Health
Service in favour of privatised healthcare. In fact, the publication of this document ended
up causing some problems for the Institute. See, most think tanks in the UK and the US (and
likely elsewhere) are non-profits or charities. Legally, this means they have to retain some level
of plausible deniability about their political allegiances; they’re not propaganda outlets,
they’re just educators who just happen to always end up educating people that privatisation
and low taxes for billionaires are good. The Heritage Foundation in America, for
example, includes a disclaimer at the bottom of all their policy reports which states
that ‘nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Heritage
Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress’.
Which is particularly funny when it’s printed on the bottom of reports called things
like Is Social Security Worth Its Cost?. So obvious were the Institute of Economic Affairs’
attempts to influence the Brexit process, however, that it ended up being issued with a formal
warning by the UK Charity Commission; a warning the Commission then withdrew when it was pointed
out that, if it was going to criticise the IEA for undertaking political activities then
it would probably have to also criticise every other think tank and… I guess that was
a can of worms it was just easier not to open. All of this, however, is a far cry from the
debate about Moon privatisation that I discussed at the beginning of this video. For, while the
publication of the paper that started that debate probably didn’t go nearly as well as
the Adam Smith Institute had hoped, it’s unlikely that they ever thought it was
going to lead to the immediate adoption by the UK Government of policies which would allow Elon
Musk to become custodian of the Moon. Instead, the release of that paper was part of the other
side to the work of think tanks: influencing the ways in which we talk about politics through
the sustained manipulation of the media. One way in which think tanks achieve this is by
intervening in already-ongoing political debates through arranging media appearances
for their so-called researchers. Whenever a proposed political policy is being
discussed on the news, think tanks will work hard to ensure that a member of their staff is
present to put across the views of their employer. Take this recent clip from the BBC News
Channel in which the topic being discussed was the UK Government’s plans to forcibly
migrate asylum seekers to Rwanda. This is an initiative that has been widely condemned
as inhumane and cruel by human rights groups. Nevertheless, in their reporting on the topic, the
BBC chose to bring on a guy called Sam Armstrong, who works for a think tank called the Henry
Jackson Society. To the average viewer, the Henry Jackson Society likely sounds
like a legitimate research institution. By extension, most people will assume Armstrong to
be a qualified expert on the topic of immigration. In reality, the Henry Jackson Society is
an organisation which essentially exists to promote Islamophobia in British society. Its most
famous alumnus is Douglas Murray, whose book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and
Islam (2017) was described by The Guardian as ‘an attenuated version of the great replacement
theory for the Telegraph-reading classes’. Like the Adam Smith Institute, the Henry Jackson
Society is deeply secretive about who funds it, yet researchers at the University of
Bath have identified as one of its largest donors Stanley Kalms, a former
businessman and Conservative Party activist who later switched his allegiance to Nigel
Farage’s far-right UK Independence Party. In 2020, it was also revealed that the Henry
Jackson Society had received £80,000 from the Home Office itself (that’s the body
which is in charge of UK immigration policy). Far from an independent expert, then, Armstrong
(himself a former Conservative Party activist) is little more than a propagandist. Given
that the organisation that pays his salary has received funding from the very same
government body that is responsible for conceiving of the policy he was invited onto
the BBC to discuss, it’s little surprise that he chose to argue that the forced migration of
vulnerable people is a great thing, actually. Figures from think tanks are constantly
called-upon to contribute quotes to articles or appear on the news, with little time or space
given to the matter of who funds their operations. This is partly the result of naivety on the part
of journalists, but it’s largely down to how sophisticated think tanks are at playing the media
game. See, if you’re a television producer trying to book guests, identifying actual experts and
persuading them to come on your show is difficult and time consuming; most university professors,
for example, don’t have full-time publicists. Contrast this with the Adam Smith Institute, which
has a mobile number on the bottom of its website which it encourages journalists and
producers to contact 24 hours-a-day. If you need a guest quickly, it’s clear
who you’re going to get in touch with. In their efforts to manipulate our political
discourse, however, most think tanks are far more ambitious than simply wanting to respond to
whatever the topic of the day is. As we saw in the case of the Heritage Foundation in the previous
section, most of these fake research institutes are willing to undertake far longer-term work
to change public attitudes about certain issues. One good example of this relates to the welfare
state, government benefits and social security payments. If you’ve ever got into an argument with
someone about whether the government should give money to people who are low-paid, unemployed
or unable to work, then they might’ve raised the concept of “welfare dependency” which, as
the UK-based Centre for Policy Studies puts it, ‘is an economically destructive phenomenon which
[...] reduces the incentive to work and earn more whilst keeping people trapped in a cycle of
low aspirations, low productivity and low pay’. The argument is essentially that, if you’re too
generous with state benefits, people will become over-reliant on that money to the point where
it kills off their drive to ever find work. The idea of “welfare dependency” is so
widespread in debates surrounding social security that one would assume that it stems from some
highly-revered study. But, that’s not the case. In fact, the idea that one can become
“dependent” on state welfare was first blasted into the mainstream
by this guy: Charles Murray. Now, if you’ve heard of Charles Murray, it’s
probably for his co-authorship of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which famously suggests that
differential outcomes between black and white Americans are not the result of structural
racism but, instead, of genetically-determined differences in intelligence between those two
groups. What you might not know is that Murray is a think tank guy through-and-through. He currently
works for the American Enterprise Institute, but spent much of his career at the
billionaire-funded Manhattan Institute. It was the Manhattan Institute that
funded the writing of Murray’s first book, Losing Ground (1984), which argued that the
advent of welfare programmes for the poor had ‘made it profitable for the
poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long
term’. Murray concluded that the only way to combat what he saw as a growing dependency
among poor people on “hand-outs” from the state was to scrap ‘the entire federal welfare and
income-support structure for working-aged persons, including [Aid to Families with Dependent
Children], Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Workers’ Compensation, subsidised
housing, disability insurance and the rest’. Despite Losing Ground being panned by academic
sociologists and economists who criticised it as a shoddy, politically-motivated piece
of research, the media-savvy Manhattan Institute was able to use the book as the
basis for starting a debate in the media about the efficacy of social security programmes.
Armed with this concept of “welfare dependency”, it was suddenly possible for
those arguing for the complete abolition of government support for society’s most
vulnerable to portray themselves as benevolent saviours who simply wanted to defend the
poor from being coddled by the state. In fact, the end result of the reframing of the
welfare state which Murray began is not to be found, as one might assume, in the cuts to social
security programmes enacted by Ronald Reagan. Reagan was quite happy to demonise the poor
with tropes such as that of the “welfare queen”. Where we really see the impact of Losing
Ground is in the reforms of Bill Clinton 10 years later. For, so normalised had
this view of the welfare state as a hindrance rather than a help to
those who received it become, that Clinton was able to declare that he was
going to ‘end welfare as we know it’ with pride, and position his cutting of financial support to
poor, unemployed mothers as a compassionate act. The real power of think tanks, then, and the
reason that the super-rich and large corporations divert significant sums of money to
funding them, is their ability to, through sustained effort over whole decades,
change the terms of political debate. Through pumping-out questionable
research, think tanks are able to make the self-interested policy demands of the elite
appear to be grounded in evidence. And they are able to use their skill at manipulating the
media to push those ideas on the general public. Through this process, actions which at one
point might have been seen as shocking—such as a society refusing to provide assistance to its
poorest members—come to be seen as common sense. All of which brings us back
to the Adam Smith Institute and their proposal to give
billionaires dominion over the Moon. I think there’s a bunch of potential
explanations for what the Adam Smith Institute’s intentions were in trying to
promote this idea that we urgently need to establish a system of private property rights
on the Moon. Judging by how much of the paper is spent not actually discussing the moon at
all but, instead, introducing the reader to John Locke’s moral justification for the
establishment of private property rights, it’s possibly just a bait-and-switch
in which the Institute is using the “sexy” topic of commercial space activity as
an excuse to talk about how great the private ownership of natural resources is. Or, maybe this
is the beginning of a prolonged campaign to try and get the voting public on-side with the idea
of Jeff Bezos building a golf course on the moon. Unsurprisingly given who published it,
if you go away and read the paper itself, you’ll most likely be massively underwhelmed.
It’s more of an extended think-piece than a rigorous examination of space law and the author,
Rebecca Lowe, is forced to admit within it that her proposals are completely unworkable in
the absence of an internationally-recognised model for setting and enforcing laws in
outer space. It certainly seems unlikely that this research would be deemed diligent
enough to withstand a peer review process. As I mentioned earlier, it’s safe to say that the
launch of this paper probably didn’t go quite the way the Adam Smith Institute had hoped. In fact,
with all the hatred the idea attracted, we could say it went about as well as a SpaceX rocket
launch. And yet, despite the mediocrity of the research paper itself and the organisation which
was publishing it having an established history of releasing shoddy work that solely serves the
interests of its corporate funders, it still made headlines. At a time when energy bills, rents
and inflation were on the rise, it led to many hours of human thought and labour being wasted
on a conversation about something as remote to most of our lives as Moon law. Which goes to show
that, even when things don’t go exactly to plan, think tanks retain an ability to set the terms of
our political debate; to use their considerable resources to shape the news, forcing everyone
else into a position where they can only respond. In fact, while I was researching this video,
I gradually realised that another news event of the past 18 months is entirely the work
of right-wing think tanks. The present moral panic amongst American conservatives surrounding
“Critical Race Theory” can entirely be laid at the feet of a network of such organisations in the
United States who have not only worked to promote this confected outrage but, in their nurturing
of the man who has been its biggest proponent, Christopher F. Rufo, were essential to giving
it a degree of credibility in the first place. I was going to include a discussion of
“Critical Race Theory” in this video, but the resulting script ended-up sounding
a bit like two videos had had a car crash. So, if you’d like to see a sequel to this video,
then let me know. Otherwise, next time you’re reading the newspaper or watching the news, take a
closer look at who’s being quoted or interviewed, because, whilst expertise can be something to be
celebrated, not all “experts” are created equal. Thank you so much for watching this video,
I hope it’s been worthy of your time! If you have any friends (either online or off)
who you think also might be interested in it, then I’d be super grateful if you’d consider
sharing it with them. Thanks as ever to Richard, Sindre Nilsen, Kaya Lau, David Brothers,
Allan Gann, Luke Meyer, Gary, Diccon Spain, Bill Mitchell, Al Sweigart, Z.C. Reese, Shab
Kumar, Anil, Alexander Blank, Niels Abildgaard, Sophia R, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew
Herbert Camacho, Sergio Suarez, Alexandra McGinnis Wortendyke, Nicolas Jacquemart, strangeweekend,
Ricardo Fernandez de Cordoba, Richard Rappuhn, Udo, Dan Gittik, Eliot Day, Malik Hamidi, Carl
Erik Patrik Iwarson, Sumanth Varma and Amit Singh Parihar for being signed up to the top tier of
my Patreon, if you’d like to join them in getting early access to videos, copies of the scripts to
them and more then you can find out how to do so at patreon.com/tomnicholas. Thanks again
for watching and have a great week!
