If I were to describe the four thousand people who attended the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship 2025 Conference last week—added to a who’s who of speakers—the phrase that comes to mind is “Counter-Elites Assemble,” with a nod to 2012’s The Avengers. Given London’s ExCeL is approximately the size and scale of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, the sense that one was in an airport minus the planes was palpable. The place is huge, and so for those three days were the personalities it (barely) contained.

　　These counter-elites comprise governments-in-waiting for the countries most heavily represented (Australia, Canada, France, UK), as well as from countries where counter-elites have already triumphed (USA, Argentina). They are organised and—unlike in 2016—engaging in careful policy development. The extensive Australian input on this point is notable: people in other nations want a bit of Australia’s high state capacity and are willing to listen to those who helped produce it.

　　This development—included in my ARC ticket was a fat goody-bag full not of conference stash or an ARC mug but multiple booklets of crunchy, carefully costed policy analysis—is taking place untrammelled by a need to moderate aims they now know to be widely popular. On this point, Javier Milei and Donald Trump have provided proof of concept. Both men are now either more popular or as popular than they were when elected—and they were popular then—probably the most significant indicator of a “vibe shift” or “preference cascade.”

　　Why Counter-Elites?

　　They’re counter-elites because they share many, if not all, of the same characteristics with those they oppose. Jordan Peterson is a product of UToronto and Harvard. Helen Joyce went to Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. JD Vance is a Yale man. I could go on. All—to greater or lesser degrees—reject the bulk of what they were taught at university about social justice, feminism, inequality, race, environmentalism, colonialism, and economics. Many are liberals, but they reject much of left-liberalism and all left progressivisms.

　　However, most were forced to read and respond to it—something I (Oxford, Edinburgh) have experienced as well. This makes them dangerous to their ideological opponents, and often more able. Most modern leftists refuse to engage with conservative or classical liberal thought, even excluding mild figures like Michael Oakeshott or F. A. Hayek from their literary diet.

　　In identifying and describing counter-elites, I’m drawing on Peter Turchin’s thinking. I’m neither rejecting nor endorsing his wider claims about elite overproduction and consequent civil disorder, though. It’s important in this context to remember that counter-elites have power—less of it than ruling elites, true—but still considerable.

　　Often, this combines cultural with economic power. Jordan Peterson is a phenomenon in part because he started with culture and has now moved towards social organisation and policy development. Elon Musk is a phenomenon because he started in business and manufacturing but now combines it with policy development and cultural heft. This places them and people like them in a strong position to seize their respective countries’ commanding heights, as Musk has done and Peterson is likely to do following the results of the next Canadian election.

　　What do they believe?

　　Like their opponents, the ARC-ers are ideologically diverse, while being broadly right-leaning. There is significant disagreement, however, especially about economic policy—and those wrangles do traverse the conventional left-right divide. The Australians and Argentinians present were uniformly pro-free trade (and free trade is indeed very good for both countries) but the Americans and some of the Europeans far less so. This has come about for two reasons.

　　Foolishly, open borders (or something quite close to it) have been allowed to be coupled in the public mind with free trade. At the same time, historic claims made for the positive effects—economic and otherwise—of high rates of immigration have been falsified. The claim is only true when immigrants are selected and, importantly, refugees are also selected—that is, assessed before admission in much the same way as regular immigrants. That means most are excluded based on poor cultural or religious fit, regardless of how much they may be persecuted in their countries of origin. When academic economists make claims in favour of free trade or in opposition to industrial policy, they are often discounted or ignored because they were wrong about immigration.

　　The Australian position on this point is also thereby explained.

　　Mind you, the joy various speakers got out of shredding mainstream economists—academics and regulators like the Bank of England were written off as dopey, partisan hacks who can’t count and produce papers that don’t replicate—was a sight to behold. A sub-group among the counter-elite economists is also responsible for working out the extent to which the modern progressive left—that seemed until January 20 to bestride the Anglosphere and EU like a colossus—is utterly dependent on state largesse. In the last three years—as support collapsed at home—the UK’s pro-trans “charity” Stonewall received the bulk of its funding from the State Department, for example. Leftists generally can’t make money, so they have a parasitic relationship with taxpayers and donors. This explains why DOGE’s first target was USAID, which turned out to be as Musk described: “just a ball of worms.”

　　A dead cat strategy can be even more effective when what you’re doing is popular—as many of Trump’s executive orders currently are—and the dead cats themselves are more than mere diversions.

　　Consistent with the name, the ARC-ers are more comfortable with religion than existing elites: mainly Christianity, but there’s considerable affection for Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Islam, meanwhile, is bluntly characterised as a civilisational enemy and a religion of bloody disorder. Despite the presence of significant numbers of atheists—including prominent ones like Cynical Theories coauthor James Lindsay—the religiosity surprised even some of my American friends.

　　The tension between soaring religious expression and crunchy policy depth was evident throughout the conference, but most obvious in the debates around border control and the rejection of victimhood claims based on historic disadvantage (even Jews got a slap, at least in private conversation, if they went too far with it). A re-balancing towards national sovereignty and strict border control means rejecting the imago dei (about which many Christians spoke, often movingly) as a policy guide. Australian-style immigration policy applied across the developed world would entail accepting that not all groups and religions are equal—let alone individuals—and that not all pleas for help or experiences of historic victimhood deserve a hearing. This is something with which political Christianity struggles, as the public TwitterX spat between JD Vance and Rory Stewart over it three weeks ago illustrates.

　　The Christian patina—but not, notably, the Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist one—also did not work well with what is a widespread rejection of the “liberal international” or “global rules-based” order. As with economics, this is something over which the ARC-ers disagree. While we delegates were all in various conference sessions and break-out debates, Trump was busy hanging Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy out to dry via Truth Social. Unsurprisingly, Trump and Vance’s policy in Ukraine has also divided the political right outside ARC. Current global debate over the issue is best described as furious.

　　I plan to write in more detail about Ukraine in the future, but for now, I’ll make a couple of observations based on what I saw.

　　The most obvious one is that Ukraine—likely at Zelenskyy’s behest, and in response to a Biden White House plus a liberal-progressive EU—oriented its entire propaganda campaign from 24 February 2022 onwards towards appealing to the global liberal left, even the global progressive left. Those of us familiar with the country (I wrote an entire book about it) understood this was nonsense. On some metrics, Ukraine is more conservative than Russia (among other things, it has many conservative Catholics, which Russia lacks).

　　This attempt to manufacture wokery for global consumption had the effect of creating a toy Ukraine stripped of both its history and culture, as well as aligning it in the minds of many members of the US public with bonkers crap like “men are women” or “there is no crisis at the US border” or “America is a white supremacist nation.” This reached its nadir when Canada’s Speaker of the House of Commons invited a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteranto its Parliament and hailed him a war hero.

　　As was clear within 24 hours of the US election result, voters were so repulsed by the river of bullshit flowing through their country that they were willing to call other, more arguable things—the global rules-based order is one—into question. Meanwhile, Europeans are being reminded daily how unwise it is to get their energy policy from a teenage Swedish school truant.

　　Coeval with this is the fact that, for Trump, the Ukraine war is personal. The country—and Zelenskyy himself—is associated with the Biden family, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and vast corruption. These are all things about which Trump is right to be angry, even if one loathes his vindictiveness. A couple may stay together after adultery by one of the pair, but the relationship is never the same.

　　A Hail of Dead Cats

　　One reason both the Democrats and press are reeling—and intense debate over Ukraine has not dented Trump’s popularity—is the way he and his team are releasing executive orders. This takes in careful choices about what matters are dealt with (genderwoo, USAID, DEI, Israel-Gaza, Department of Education, Ukraine), but is also an example of what Steve Bannon calls “flooding the zone,” throwing out so many newsworthy stories its difficult for opponents to respond.

　　There’s a concept in Australian political analysis—which several people brought up at ARC in conversation with me—I think more enlightening than Bannon’s phrase. It goes by the name “dead cat strategy” or “throwing a dead cat on the table.” Traditionally, it’s used as a distraction if your side is in a bit of political bother. In 2013, Boris Johnson described how “they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

　　However, a dead cat strategy can be even more effective when what you’re doing is popular—as many of Trump’s executive orders currently are—and the dead cats themselves are more than mere diversions. There are errors great and small in Musk’s claims (here is a detailed analysis of his Social Security comments from a Trump voter who happens also to be a mathematician), but because Trump keeps throwing a dead cat on the USA’s dining-room table just at the point his opposition have removed the previous one, these criticisms seldom make their way to the wider public. The whole exercise is a hail of dead cats.

　　Trump’s decisive electoral victory is also disrupting politics in the rest of the Anglosphere plus France and Germany. Musk is happy to be Trump’s social media battering ram. ARC, meanwhile, is providing much of the intellectual and policy heft for a global counter-elite insurgency.

　　No wonder security around the ExCeL was tight. I had to point out—especially to naïve, used-to-safety Australians—that the many working dogs and their handlers had nothing to do with drugs. They were explosives detection dogs, and the brains-trust assembled in that venue was indeed a target.