Tyson Foods sets net-zero emissions goal, but falls short on farming project
By Tom Polansek 

© Reuters/Mike Blake FILE PHOTO: Tyson food meat products are shown in this photo illustration in Encinitas

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Tyson Foods set a goal on Wednesday to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2050, after missing a deadline to improve U.S. farming practices as part of an earlier effort to cut emissions.


The new target by the biggest U.S. meatpacker by sales expands a previous goal of reducing emissions by 30% by 2030.

To achieve net-zero emissions, Tyson said it will plan for U.S. operations to use 50% renewable energy by 2030 and extend a program to verify sustainable production practices for cattle, among other steps.

"We believe progress requires accountability and transparency," said John Tyson, chief sustainability officer.

Three years ago, Tyson Foods pledged to improve environmental practices on two million acres (809,370 hectares)of U.S. farmland by 2020. So far, though, it has enrolled just 408,000 acres, according to the company.

Tyson said it now plans to meet its two-million-acre target by 2025.

The company does not own grain farms but has influence over farming as the U.S. meat industry's largest buyer of feed corn. Two million acres is enough land to grow corn to feed all Tyson chickens for a year.

The 408,000 acres represent land enrolled in a 2019 pilot program by Farmers Business Network, which sells agricultural supplies online, according to Tyson.

A pilot program run by another company, MyFarms, enrolled 11,000 acres in 2019, Tyson said. However, Tyson removed these acres last year due to a lack of data and discontinued MyFarms' pilot in 2021, according to the meatpacker.

For Tyson Foods, it was a big learning experience to determine how to obtain "high-quality information about what's going on at the farm in a way that is as frictionless as possible for all parties," John Tyson said.

Interruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic also hindered land stewardship work last year, Tyson said in a sustainability report.

Meatpackers including Tyson came under fire in 2020 as COVID-19 infections tore through slaughterhouses.

(Reporting by Tom Polansek; editing by Richard Pullin)

JBS Foods cited after worker dies in Colorado chemical vat

 In this Oct. 12, 2020 file photo, a worker heads into the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colo. Meatpacker JBS Foods Inc. faces about $59,000 in fines after a worker fell into vat of chemicals used to process animal hides and died at one of the company's meat processing facilities in northern Colorado, officials said. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)


GREELEY, Colo. (AP) — Meatpacker JBS Foods Inc. faces about $59,000 in fines after a worker fell into vat of chemicals used to process animal hides and died at one of the company’s meat processing facilities in northern Colorado, officials said.

The employee at the plant in Greeley fell into the vat March 27 while trying to install a paddlewheel used to churn the chemicals, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Investigators determined that JBS failed to adequately secure a trolley and hoist that were being used to lift the paddlewheel.

JBS and its Swift Beef Co. operations were cited for eight safety violations related to the accident, The Greeley Tribune reported on Wednesday.

“The employees at this facility deserve better than to fear for their lives and their safety when they come to work,” OSHA Area Director Amanda Kupper in Denver said in a news release.

JBS said in a statement that employee “health and safety is at the core of all our decisions,” and that the company is committed to providing a safe environment at its facilities.

The company has 15 business days from receipt of the citations, sent Monday, to comply with or contest them, or to ask to meet with Kupper.

OSHA fined JBS $15,615 in September 2020 for failing to protect its employees in Greeley from COVID-19. Six workers there died and nearly 300 were infected.

Laid-off: Former Tyson Foods chicken farmers face high costs switching to eggs

By Tom Polansek

April 30, 2024

REUTERS

 A worker sorts cage-free chicken eggs at Hilliker's Ranch Fresh Eggs in Lakeside, California, U.S., April 19, 2022. Picture taken April 19, 2022. 

REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

CHICAGO, April 30 (Reuters) - Some U.S. farmers who once raised chickens for Tyson Foods to slaughter are shifting to sell eggs instead after the meatpacker closed six plants, a move that left local suppliers with limited options for work.

In one example, former Tyson suppliers in central Virginia formed a cooperative that will produce cage-free eggs for Indiana-based Dutch Country Organics on a dozen farms, after Tyson closed its nearby Glen Allen plant last year.

In Dexter, Missouri, the world's biggest egg company, Cal-Maine Foods (CALM.O), opens new tab, in March finalized a deal to buy another chicken meat plant Tyson shuttered. Cal-Maine recruited local farmers to produce eggs.

The switch to eggs, which carries high costs, reflects the tough choices former Tyson suppliers around the country must make following the company's 2023 decision to shut plants in an effort to return to profitability in its chicken business after misjudging consumer demand.

Egg farming also comes with risk as lethal bird flu infections have hit laying hens harder than broiler chickens raised for meat. The virus flared up for a third year this spring, resulting in the culling of nearly 10 million hens involved in commercial egg production so far this year. Cal-Maine culled about 1.9 million, opens new tab birds this month after an outbreak in Texas.

MILLIONS TO UPGRADE
Former broiler growers must spend millions of dollars on barn and equipment upgrades to produce eggs, a notoriously volatile market, 18 poultry producers, government officials and industry experts told Reuters. Last year, egg prices tanked after reaching record highs due to the worst-ever outbreak of bird flu in poultry.

"It's a very expensive investment from the grower," said John Bapties, who is president of the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative and raised chickens for Tyson for 20 years before the Glen Allen plant closed.

His cooperative is placing hens in barns that formerly housed broiler chickens, and expects to sell cage-free eggs produced by about one million birds to Dutch County Organics within a year, he said.

Farmers needed to replace dirt floors in barns with concrete and install nesting systems for hens, among other costly renovations.

Taylor Lee, a former Tyson grower in DeWitt, Virginia, said he decided against the switch. He will focus on raising crops while keeping his poultry barns empty for now.
"They're painting a pretty picture with that co-op but it's $2.8 million roughly to upgrade my farm to egg production," Lee said.

Roger Reynolds, another Virginia farmer who supplied broiler chickens to Tyson, said he is considering producing eggs for Braswell Family Farms. His daughter found work there after Tyson's plant closure eliminated her job.

Producing eggs means a different way of life, Reynolds said. For one thing, hens lay most of their eggs in the morning, meaning farmers cannot go to church on a Sunday without checking their barns first, he said.

CAGE-FREE EGGS

The United States has about 125 million cage-free laying hens, about 40% of total layers, U.S. government data show. More are needed after some states banned sales of eggs from caged hens and restaurants committed to cage-free supplies, Dutch Country Organics CEO Lamar Bontrager said.

"I've been getting calls like crazy," Bontrager said. "Those guys are all concerned of where to procure their eggs."

Dutch Country sells eggs to retailers including Walmart (WMT.N), opens new tab, Kroger (KR.N), opens new tab and Target (TGT.N), opens new tab, according to Virginia officials.
Former broiler growers offer egg companies an opportunity to expand production because the farmers are already familiar with poultry.

"It's one of the ways that these companies are converting: by grabbing old barns," said Brian Moscogiuri, global trade strategist for Eggs Unlimited.

Tyson declined to comment. The company said last year that 55 broiler growers supplied the Glen Allen plant and that it offered them buyout packages. The plant had about 700 employees.

Tyson has laid off corporate employees and said it will close an Iowa pork plant, in addition to shutting chicken plants. Farmers depended on the plants as markets for their livestock.

The meatpacker is slated to report quarterly results on Monday.

In Arkansas, the third biggest broiler-producing state, Tyson closed two chicken plants. Some of its former growers found work supplying other chicken companies, said Jared Garrett, Arkansas Farm Bureau's director of commodity activities and economics.
"They lucked out," he said.

JOBS WANTED

Tyson closed chicken plants in Dexter and Noel, Missouri, with about 700 workers and 1,500 workers, respectively. Cal-Maine said it plans to initially employ about 100 people at the Dexter plant.

"While I welcome Cal-Maine's investment in Dexter, it does not right the wrongs of Tyson or guarantee new jobs for the more than 2,000 Missourians now out of one," U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said in a statement to Reuters.

David Wyman, Dexter's city administrator, also welcomed Cal-Maine, though it is expected to work with a fraction of the farmers who supplied Tyson. Cal-Maine said it expects to expand over time and that revenue opportunities will be as good or better than farmers had under previous contracts.

But some former Tyson suppliers are left with empty barns, Wyman said: "They're really in bad shape."

Egg farming is generally harder to get into operationally than raising chickens for meat; requires more capital and labor expertise; and carries higher disease risks, said Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor and agricultural economist at Cornell University.
"Due to the closure of the plants and termination of contracts, the switch is in a way a move of necessity," he said.

Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.


Reporting by Tom Polansek; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Anna Driver

Biden Launches Plan to Fight Meatpacker Giants on Inflation

Mike Dorning
Mon, January 3, 2022

Biden Launches Plan to Fight Meatpacker Giants on Inflation

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden promised to “fight for fairer prices” for farmers and consumers Monday as he announced plans to combat the market power of the giant conglomerates that dominate meat and poultry processing.

“Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation,” 

Biden said. “That’s what we’re seeing in meat and poultry.”

Biden joined Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Merrick Garland to meet virtually with ranchers and farmers to hear complaints about consolidation in the industry, ratcheting up a White House campaign blaming anti-competitive practices in the industry for contributing to surging food inflation.

Biden launched a portal that will allow producers to report unfair trade practices by meatpackers. He also highlighted initiatives the administration is taking to counter meatpackers’ economic power, including $1 billion in federal aid to assist expansion of independent processors and new competition regulations under consideration.

The announcement focuses fresh attention on Biden’s fight with the meat-processing industry and helps cast him as a president willing to take on powerful business interests over consumer prices. Many Democrats are concerned that months of negotiations over Biden’s economic plan have distanced him too much from the most pressing kitchen-table problems facing Americans.

Inflation has swiftly moved to the top of public concerns as the annual rise in consumer prices hit its highest level in almost 40 years. Meat prices, which in November were up 16% from a year earlier, have been the biggest contributor to grocery inflation. Meatpacking industry representatives blame soaring prices on labor shortages, rising fuel prices and supply-chain constraints.

Shares for meat companies were mixed. Tyson Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, climbed 0.7%, reversing earlier losses. JBS SA, the world’s biggest meat supplier, fell 4%.

Scott Blubaugh, president of the Oklahoma Farmers Union, praised the initiative. “Not since Teddy Roosevelt have we had a president that’s willing to take on this big issue,” he said.

But others were skeptical it would do enough. “The Administration has not announced that it will take decisive enforcement action to protect America’s cattle producers from the harms they’ve been experiencing for the past seven years, and we remain disappointed with that omission,” Bill Bullard, chief executive officer of R-CALF USA, a group that represents independent cattle producers.

Biden didn’t answer a question on whether he would seek to break up large meat-processing companies. His efforts to inject more competition in the industry run counter to decades of consolidation since the late 1970s as the industry shifted to larger plants to cut costs and courts adopted a more permissive interpretation of antitrust law.

Companies including JBS have said that a shortage of workers is affecting operations in every developed nation, limiting production increases and raising costs.

“Labor remains the biggest challenge,” Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for the North American Meat Institute, a trade group, said in a statement. “Our members of all sizes cannot operate at capacity because they struggle to employ a long-term stable workforce. New capacity and expanded capacity created by the government will have the same problem.”

Mike Brown, president of the National Chicken Council, a poultry trade group, said levels of concentration in the sector haven’t changed much over the past 20 years.

“It’s time for the White House to stop playing chicken with our food system and stop using the meat industry as a scapegoat for the significant challenges facing our economy,” Brown said in an emailed statement.

Biden singled out the meat and poultry processing industries for scrutiny in a July executive order on promoting competition across the economy. His top economic adviser later criticized meatpackers for “pandemic profiteering.” The U.S. Agriculture Department also announced plans in June to consider three new sets of regulations on unfair trade practices in livestock and poultry markets, with officials anticipating the proposal of new rules early this year.

The president has placed critics of corporate consolidation in key positions across his administration, including Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter as assistant attorney general for antitrust.

Four large meatpacking companies control 85% of U.S. beef processing capacity, according to data released by the White House. Other meat sectors are also highly concentrated, with four companies controlling 70% of the pork market and 54% of the poultry market, according to the White House.

A fact sheet the White House distributed to reporters asserts that as a result of that concentration, most livestock producers “now have little or no choice of buyer for their product and little leverage to negotiate.” Tyson Foods Inc. reported record profits on its beef processing in quarterly earnings released in November.

In November, ranchers received 36.7 cents for every dollar consumers spent on beef at the grocery store, down from 51.5 cents in 2015, according to the Agriculture Department. Fifty years ago, their share was more than 60 cents, according to the White House.

“This is a decades-long trend that we are seeing,” said Bharat Ramamurti, Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “The result, based on the economic literature, is higher prices for folks, fewer options for workers, which means that there’s downward pressure on wages. It also means that there’s less innovation and productivity.”

The aid for independent meat and poultry processors, which will come from Covid relief funds, includes $375 million for gap financing grants and $100 million for guarantees of loans made through private banks, according to the fact sheet.

Ted Schroeder, a Kansas State University agricultural economics professor who specializes in livestock markets, said it’s difficult to forecast the overall impact of Biden’s efforts, but expressed doubt the federal aid for independent processors will alter the market much.

Meatpacking is a cyclical business and processors may soon be squeezed again as droughts and higher feed grain prices drive up cattle prices, he said.

“How can smaller, higher cost, highly leveraged new plants hope to survive through such a market environment in the next few years? I am concerned many will not,” Schroeder said.

Biden to meet with farmers as he seeks to cut meat prices

President Joe Biden waves as he leaves St. Ann Roman Catholic Church after attending Mass in Wilmington, Del., Saturday, Jan. 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

By JOSH BOAK

AP

President Joe Biden will meet virtually with independent farmers and ranchers to discuss initiatives to reduce food prices by increasing competition within the meat industry, part of a broader effort to show the administration is trying to combat inflation.

The White House event occurs Monday afternoon as higher-than-expected inflation has thwarted Biden’s agenda. Consumer prices in November rose 6.8% over the prior 12 months — a 39-year high. Inflation has hurt Biden’s public approval, become fodder for Republican attacks and prompted Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to cite higher prices as a reason to sideline the Democratic president’s tax, social and economic programs.

Biden is building off a July executive order that directed the Agriculture Department to more aggressively look at possible violations of the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, which was designed to ensure fair competition and protect consumers. Meat prices have climbed 16% from a year ago, with beef prices up 20.9%.

The administration is targeting meat processing plants, which can shape the prices paid to farmers and charged to consumers. The White House issued a fact sheet saying that the top four companies control 85% of the beef market. In poultry, the biggest four processing firms control 54% of the market. And for pork, the figure is 70% for the four biggest firms

Biden plans to stress the plans to distribute $1 billion from the coronavirus relief package to help independent meat processors expand. He also plans to highlight funding to train workers in the industry and improve conditions, as well as issue new rules for meatpackers and labeling requirements for being designated a “Product of USA.”

The Justice Department and the Agriculture Department will launch a joint effort to make it easier to report anti-competitive actions to the government. The administration will also seek to improve the transparency of the cattle market.

The effort is part of a broader attempt to regain control of America’s economic narrative. Besides inflation, the repeated waves of coronavirus outbreak have dampened people’s opinions about the economy despite strong growth over the past year.

Biden will have an opportunity to highlight the economy’s strengths with the December jobs report being released Friday. Economists surveyed by FactSet expect that the United States added 362,000 jobs last month with the unemployment rate ticking down to 4.1%. Gains of that magnitude would indicate that the U.S. added roughly 6.5 million jobs last year, more than in any other previous year in a reflection of population growth and government spending.

Biden Unveils Plan to Boost Competition in US Meat Industry
January 03, 2022
Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland attend a video conference with farmers, ranchers and meat processors to discuss meat and poultry supply chain issues, on the White House campus, Jan. 3, 2022.

The United States will issue new rules and $1 billion in funding this year to support independent meat processors and ranchers as part of a plan to address a lack of "meaningful competition" in the meat sector, President Joe Biden said on Monday.

The initiative comes amid rising concerns that a handful of big beef, pork and poultry companies have too much control over the American meat market, allowing them to dictate wholesale and retail pricing to profit at the expense of their suppliers and customers.

"Capitalism without competition isn't capitalism. It's exploitation," Biden said. "That's what we're seeing in meat and poultry industries now."

A recent White House analysis found that the top four meatpacker companies – Cargill, Tyson Foods Inc., JBS SA and National Beef Packing Co. – control between 55% and 85% of the market in the hog, cattle and chicken sectors.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack speaks during a video conference on the White House campus in Washington, Jan. 3, 2022.

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) will spend the $1 billion from the American Rescue Plan to expand the independent meat processing sector, including funds for financing grants, guaranteed loans and worker training, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who was speaking at an event with Biden.

USDA will also propose rules this year to strengthen enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act and to clarify the meaning of "Product of USA" meat labels, which domestic ranchers have said unfairly advantage multinational companies that raise cattle abroad and only slaughter in the United States.

Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during a virtual meeting on the White House Campus in Washington, Jan. 3, 2022.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, also speaking at the event, said "too many industries have become too consolidated over time," and that the antitrust division of the Department of Justice has been chronically underfunded.

The Biden administration issued an executive order last year that advocated a whole of government approach to antitrust issues.

A central concern in agriculture has been meat prices, which have risen at a time when the White House is fighting inflation. An analysis in December by the White House economic council found a 120% jump in the gross profits of four top meatpackers since the pandemic began.

Reaction to plan

The meat industry has said the White House analysis was inaccurate and criticized the new plan.

National Chicken Council President Mike Brown called the plan "a solution in search of a problem."

North American Meat Institute spokesperson Sarah Little said staffing plants remains the biggest issue for meatpackers and that the White House plan would not address it.

"Our members of all sizes cannot operate at capacity because they struggle to employ a long-term stable workforce," she said. "New capacity and expanded capacity created by the government will have the same problem."

Eric Deeble, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, cheered the plan, calling it a "very positive step to ensure farmers and ranchers receive fair prices."

The anticipated rulemaking under the Packers and Stockyards Act "could have a significant impact," said Peter Carstensen, emeritus professor of law at University of Wisconsin-Madison and former antitrust attorney at the Department of Justice. But he noted that investment in independent processing itself would not address market concentration.

Austin Frerick, deputy director of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, an antitrust research center, said the plan does not go far enough to tackle the power of the top meatpackers.

"I do not believe this (plan) will meaningfully change the concentration numbers," he said.

PROFITEERING = INFLATION

Steak Prices Will Keep Rising, Major U.S. Meatpacker Says

Tatiana Freitas
Wed, May 4, 2022,


(Bloomberg) -- Beef will be getting even more expensive at U.S.

 grocery stores in the months ahead, according to one of the country’s biggest meatpackers.

National Beef Co., controlled by the Brazilian giant Marfrig Global Foods, sees relatively stable margins in the next two quarters, according to Tim Klein, who heads Marfrig’s U.S. operations. That means even though their costs to buy cattle are increasing, the company will ultimately be able to pass that on to consumers in the form of pricier steaks and burgers.

“Cattle prices will go up, and beef prices will go up with them,” Klein said during an earnings interview.

The cost of meat has been a focus as consumers grapple with the fastest inflation in four decades. The average price for ground beef in America grocery stores has jumped 18% from a year ago, according to the government data. American shoppers may adapt to inflation by switching to less expensive cuts, according to Klein.

Marfrig beat analysts’ estimates for earnings before items and revenue, posting a record for a first quarter. U.S. operations drove the gains, while South America’s unit started a recovery amid booming Chinese demand and improving cattle supply in Brazil, according to Miguel Gularte, who heads operations in the region. Marfrig’s slaughterings in Brazil rose 20% in the quarter, the double compared with the industry average, Gularte said.

Net income fell 61% from a year ago due to a non-cash loss on the mark-to-market of its stake in the food giant BRF SA. Starting next quarter, Marfrig will add BRF earnings to its balance sheet, according to Chief Financial Officer Tang David. Last month, Marfrig’s founder, Marcos Molina dos Santos, was elected BRF chairman.

REST IN POWER

Mike Davis’s Many Contributions to Building a Better World Will Live On

No leftist writer can compare to Mike Davis — not in clarity, breadth, generosity, or ironclad commitment to the working class. Davis has died, but his ideas will continue to find life in generations of leftist activists and thinkers to come.

Madison Square Garden's interior filled with thousands of striking garment workers in 1958. A banner reads "On with the strike — on to victory!" Mike Davis remained resolute in his belief in labor's collective power. (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)

BY  BARRY EIDLIN
10.29.2022

 Jacobin 

Our mentors are dying.

At one level, this is a banal statement — an inevitable consequence of the forward march of time. But for those of us on the Left, there are historical and political factors that give it additional weight.

One consequence of the past several decades of defeat and demoralization for the Left has been a lack of generational replacement of leftist leadership and mentorship. Not only have there been fewer people available to serve as potential new leaders and mentors, but those of us who came of age politically between the 1980s and 2000s have had fewer and smaller movements upon which we could cut our teeth and develop as leaders and mentors ourselves.

As a result, it has fallen to veterans of the movements of the 1960s and ’70s to carry much of the weight of keeping the Left alive through difficult decades. That means that, as these veterans inevitably pass from the stage, the loss is that much more painful, their absence that much more deeply felt.

While we can appreciate this sociological observation about generational replacement at an intellectual level, it doesn’t change the fact that each individual death still feels like a gut punch. Knowing the history and sociology does little to soften the blow.

That is certainly the case when speaking of a figure of the caliber of Mike Davis, who died on October 25 at age seventy-six. We all knew this moment was coming after learning that he shifted to palliative care for his cancer a few months ago. But that didn’t prepare us for living in a world deprived of his prolific and penetrating insights.

Reading the tributes and remembrances that have flowed in over the past few days, it is hard not to be awed by the scale and scope of his reach. There is of course his immense body of writing, in which he managed to speak with authority, clarity, and insight on a dizzyingly vast array of matters without slipping into dilettantism.

From droughts and pandemics to urban development and resistance to labor history and politics, socialist strategy, and so much more, few others combined his careful research, clear-eyed analysis, political commitment, and eerie clairvoyance, all wrapped in dense yet riveting prose.

It won him a devoted readership across wide swaths of the US and global left, while also commanding respect in some of the halls of academia and the more mainstream public sphere. Few other thinkers occupy such a central place in graduate seminar syllabi and socialist reading groups while also being influential enough to attract the attention of the MacArthur Foundation and the ire of real-estate developers, along with attempts at exposés from the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Economist, among others. (The Los Angeles Times, for its part, shifted to more appreciative profiles of Davis later on).

On its own, Davis’s writing would be more than enough to be remembered as a giant of the Left. But he combined this with a lifetime of activism, organizing, and engagement, from his early years organizing with Students for a Democratic Society to participating in wildcat strikes as a truck driver and meatpacker to mentoring new generations of socialists in recent years. He was also generous as an academic mentor, taking the time to read, comment, and inquire about the work of graduate students and junior scholars just finding their way. Again, I am hard pressed to think of others who combined these qualities to the degree that Davis did.

Unfortunately, I cannot add any personal remembrances of Davis to this piece, as I never had the good fortune of meeting him myself, though I have long been in his orbit. I was first exposed to him as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, where politics professor Chris Howell kept a copy of Prisoners of the American Dream on reserve at the library for his students. Later, when I went to work for Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), Davis’s writings on labor and the Left became a critical part of my political education, which I read alongside those of Kim Moody, Mike Parker, Jane Slaughter, Bob Brenner, and others.

When I made the transition from labor organizer to labor scholar, Davis stayed with me. I assigned his work in my social movements class and my seminar on “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.” This ensured that I would have the privilege of revisiting and reengaging with his writing year after year. I never ceased to be amazed at the new insights I gleaned from each additional rereading and new ideas that would come to me after sitting with his work.

It reinforced for me not just how insightful Davis was as a thinker but how generative he was. He provided a jumping-off point for countless other scholars to take our own deep dives — even if we might never get as deep as he did.

Indeed, as I posted on social media back in 2018, as I was preparing to teach “Why the US Working Class is Different” in my seminar, “I’m amazed at how [Davis] can casually toss off ideas for about five dissertations in a single paragraph.”



Many of my students had similar reactions to his work, consistently mentioning it as a highlight of the course. Likewise, for me, teaching his work has been a highlight of my life as a professor.

I did come very close to meeting Davis this past September. I had wanted to interview him about his time doing rank-and-file organizing as a Teamster and meatpacker in the 1970s for a book I’m working on with Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht about the Left’s “turn to industry” in that period, when members of socialist organizations took jobs in factories for organizing purposes. It’s a part of Davis’s life that was often mentioned in various profiles but rarely explored.

After I learned of his shift to palliative care, I figured that I had missed my opportunity, but seeing several profiles of him based on lengthy interviews published in the following months made me think that I might still have a chance. So I emailed him and was surprised to receive a reply almost immediately. He was happy to talk but could likely only handle an hour-long interview. We made plans for me to travel down to San Diego the following week, with the caveat that I should check with him the day before.

As scheduled, I wrote him the day before and received a reply: “I had a visit from my end-of-life physician this morning and she bluntly told me cancel all interviews or visits from friends. Apologies.”

While we had to cancel the visit, I was at least able to share with him how much his work influenced my own, how much my students get from reading him, and to thank him for his contributions toward building a better world.

Those contributions may now have come to an end, but they will live on in every student and organizer whose world will make a little more sense, and whose path to changing it will be a little clearer, thanks to Mike Davis.

Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MIKE DAVIS 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/10/mike-davis-1946-2022-enemy-of-state.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/10/what-they-learned-from-dresden-searing.html

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

EXPLAINER: Twitter, Musk and the Delaware Chancery Court


Thu, July 14, 2022 



DOVER, Del. (AP) — Twitter Inc.’s lawsuit to force billionaire Elon Musk to make good on his promise to buy the social media giant will be resolved in a small but powerful Delaware court that specializes in high-stakes business disputes.

Twitter has sued Musk in Delaware’s Court of Chancery in an effort to force him to complete a $44 billion takeover deal reached in April.

WHAT IS THE LAWSUIT ABOUT?

Musk, the world’s richest man, pledged to pay $54.20 a share for Twitter but now wants to back out of the agreement. He claims the company has failed to provide adequate information about the number of fake, or “spam bot,” Twitter accounts, and that it has breached its obligations under the deal by firing top managers and laying off a significant number of employees.

Twitter argues that Musk, CEO of electric car maker and solar energy company Tesla Inc., has operated in bad faith and is deliberately trying to tank the deal because market conditions have deteriorated and the acquisition no longer serves his interests. According to the lawsuit, the value of Musk’s shares in Tesla, which he was to draw upon to help finance the acquisition, has declined by more than $100 billion since November.

Either Musk or Twitter would be entitled to a $1 billion breakup fee if the other party is found responsible for the agreement failing. Twitter wants more, however, and is seeking a court order directing Musk to follow through with the deal.

WHEN DOES THE TRIAL START?

Twitter lawyers are asking the court to expedite the case. They have proposed a four-day trial starting Sept. 19.

WHAT IS THE COURT OF CHANCERY?

The Court of Chancery, established in 1792, traces its roots to the High Court of Chancery of Great Britain, which in turn evolved from an earlier institution in feudal England known as the King’s Chapel. The court, overseen by the lord chancellor as “keeper of the king’s conscience,” served as an alternative to the more rigid and inefficient common law courts. It held the power to offer remedies such as injunctions, estate administration, and, notably, “specific performance,” which can force a party to complete a transaction against its will.

The 230-year-old Court of Chancery typically handles civil cases where a plaintiff is seeking non-monetary damages. Such cases can include disputes over property boundaries and land purchases, guardianship appointments, and estates, trusts and wills.

More often than not, they involve business disputes pitting companies against disgruntled shareholders, or parties to failed mergers and acquisitions against one another.

HOW DOES THE COURT OF CHANCERY WORK TODAY?

The seven judges on the Delaware Court of Chancery exercise these powers today, making it a key venue for high-stakes business disputes. Delaware features a well-established and carefully nurtured body of corporate case law dating to 1899 and is the corporate home to more than 1 million business entities, including more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies. Many merger agreements, in fact, specify that any disputes will be heard by a Delaware Chancery Court judge.

“It’s not that they are necessarily more brilliant than judges in other states, they just have a lot of exposure to this stuff and are pretty sophisticated about it,” said Lawrence Hamermesh, executive director of the Institute for Law & Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

HAS MUSK BEEN IN THIS COURT BEFORE?

Musk is no stranger to the Court of Chancery. Earlier this year, he emerged victorious in a shareholder lawsuit accusing him of a conflict of interest in Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, a struggling solar panel company in which Musk was the largest shareholder and also served as board chairman.

Hamermesh, a former professor of corporate and business law at Widener University Delaware Law School, noted that the specific performance sought by Twitter is a “pretty rare” remedy, and that it’s uncertain whether the court will force Musk to consummate the deal.

“There are a lot OF? instances where a judge could say, ‘Buyer, you’re in breach,’ but the remedy is a termination fee,” he said. “Given what I have seen so far, my gut instinct is that Twitter’s got the upper hand legally. Whether they’ll get the full specific performance or just the breakup fee is a little harder to say.”

HOW HAS THE COURT ACTED IN THE PAST?

If the court does force Musk to close the deal, it would not be without precedent.

In 2001, poultry giant Tyson Foods Inc. was ordered to complete its $3.2 billion acquisition of meatpacker IBP Inc. when a judge granted IBP’s claim for specific performance.

More recently, a Chancery judge last year ordered private equity firm Kohlberg & Co. to close its $550 million purchase of DecoPac Holdings Inc., which sells cake decorations and technology to supermarkets for in-store bakeries. Vice Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick said Kohlberg had failed to demonstrate that a decline in DecoPac sales amid the coronavirus pandemic constituted a “material adverse effect” allowing the buyers to walk away. McCormick, who was sworn in as Chancellor, or head judge of the court, just one week after her ruling, described it as “a victory for deal certainty.”

On the flip side, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster declared in 2018 that a pharmaceutical company targeted for a merger had experienced such a decline in its financial condition that it amounted to a material adverse effect, allowing the proposed buyer to terminate the deal. The ruling marked the first time the court found the existence of a material adverse effect, or MAE, in a business transaction. It allowed German health care company Fresenius Kabi AG to walk away from its planned $4.3 billion acquisition of U.S. generic drugmaker Akorn Inc.

Randall Chase, The Associated Press

JBS Canada beef processing facility in Alberta resumes production after cyberattack

CALGARY — The JBS Canada beef processing facility in Alberta has resumed production after a cyberattack that impacted the company’s operations in North America and Australia.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The JBS Canada facility in Brooks, Alta., employs more than 2,800 people.

Some plant shifts in Canada were cancelled Monday and Tuesday, according to JBS Facebook posts.

The world's largest meat processing company was the target of an organized cybersecurity attack, affecting some of the servers for its North American and Australian IT systems.

It said its backup servers were not affected and that it was not aware of any evidence that any customer, supplier or employee data had been compromised.

The company said Tuesday it was making progress in resuming plant operations in the U.S. and Australia. It said several of its pork, poultry and prepared foods plants were operational as well as the Canadian facility.

JBS notified the Australian government the ransom demand came from the ransomware gang REvil, which is believed to operate in Russia, according to a person familiar with the situation who is not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The attack was the second in a month on critical U.S. infrastructure. Earlier in May, hackers shut down operation of the Colonial Pipeline, the largest U.S. fuel pipeline, for nearly a week. The closure sparked long lines and panic buying at gas stations across the Southeast. Colonial Pipeline confirmed it paid nearly US$5 million to the hackers.

JBS is the second-largest producer of beef, pork and chicken in the U.S. If it were to shut down for even one day, the U.S. would lose almost a quarter of its beef-processing capacity, or the equivalent of 20,000 beef cows, according to Trey Malone, an assistant professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.

The JBS plant closures reflect the reality that modern meat processing is heavily automated, for both food- and worker-safety reasons. Computers collect data at multiple stages of the production process; orders, billing, shipping and other functions are all electronic.

It's not the first time a ransomware attack has targeted a food company. Last November, Milan-based Campari Group said it was the victim of a ransomware attack that caused a temporary technology outage and compromised some business and personal data.

In March, Molson Coors announced a cyber attack that affected its production and shipping. Molson Coors said it was able to get some of its breweries running after 24 hours; others took several days.

Following the incident involving Colonial, Canadian pipeline companies TC Energy and Enbridge said they regularly take precautions, including technology and training to protect their operations from cyberattacks.

Cybersecurity experts say a common way for hackers to penetrate security is to trick employees through emails or texts that allow disruptive software into corporate systems.

A Proofpoint survey of 1,400 chief information security officers from 14 countries, found that email fraud was identified as the top cybersecurity problem for the Canadian CISOs.

Other problems cited by the Canadian respondents to the first-quarter survey was the use of unauthorized devices or software, as well as weak passwords.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 2, 2021.

— With files from The Associated Press

The Canadian Press

JBS RESTARTS 
By Nandita Bose and Tom Polansek

© Reuters/Bing Guan FILE PHOTO:  JBS USA Worthington pork plant in Minnesota

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) -JBS SA employees were scheduled to return to U.S. meat plants on Wednesday, a day after the company's beef operations stopped following a ransomware attack.

A notorious Russia-linked hacking group is behind the cyberattack against JBS that disrupted meat production in North America and Australia, a source familiar with the matter said.

Brazil's JBS controls about 20% of the slaughtering capacity for U.S. cattle and hogs, so the plants' reopening should prevent a severe supply chain disruption at a time consumers are already facing high meat prices and general food inflation.

JBS, the world's largest meatpacker, said on Tuesday night it had made "significant progress in resolving the cyberattack."

The "vast majority" of the company's beef, pork, poultry and prepared foods plants will be operational on Wednesday, according to a statement.

The cyberattack followed one last month by a group with ties to Russia on Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel pipeline in the United States, which crippled fuel delivery for several days in the U.S. Southeast.

The cyber gang goes by the name REvil, the source said.

Cybersecurity investigators have previously said they believe some members of the REvil ransomware team are based in Russia. The prolific ransomware group, which is perhaps best known for attacking an Apple Inc supplier named Quanta Computer earlier this year, has previously posted in Russian on cybercrime forums, marketing stolen data.

In the Quanta Computer case, the hackers sent extortion threats and demanded a payment of $50 million for the company to regain access to its systems.

With North American operations headquartered in Greeley, Colorado, JBS sells beef and pork under the Swift brand, with retailers like Costco Wholesale carrying its pork loins and tenderloins.

U.S. beef and pork prices are already rising as China increases imports, animal feed costs rise and slaughterhouses have confronted a labor shortage since COVID-19 outbreaks shut down many U.S. meat plants.

JBS also owns most of chicken processor Pilgrim's Pride Co, which sells organic chicken under the Just Bare brand.

The company's operations in Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom were not affected by the attack, JBS has said.

JBS canceled an early shift on Wednesday at its beef plant in Greeley, but a later shift was scheduled to resume normally, representatives of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 7 said in an email.

A JBS beef plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, told its workers on Facebook it would resume normal schedules in all departments.

Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) cattle futures rose on Wednesday after tumbling on Tuesday as the JBS plant shutdowns prevented farmers from delivering their cattle to slaughter plants.

Over the past few years, ransomware has evolved into a pressing national security issue. A number of gangs, many of them Russian speakers, develop the software that encrypts files and then demand payment in cryptocurrency for keys that allow the owners to decipher and use them again.

(Reporting by Tom Polansek and Caroline Stauffer in Chicago and Nandita Bose in Washingon; editing by Steve Orlofsky and Nick Zieminski)

  

Air Canada pilots union to seek conciliator, says parties are far apart in talks

Ian Bickis, The Canadian Press

Air Canada pilots intend to request help from a federal conciliator to assist in stalled contract negotiations with the airline, the union representing them announced Sunday.

The Air Line Pilots Association, representing more than 5,000 Air Canada pilots, said the two sides are not close to a deal despite a year of contract talks, including close to six months of voluntary mediation.

"Unfortunately, Air Canada continues to undervalue your contributions to the success of this airline," said Charlene Hudy, head of the union's Air Canada contingent, in a video message to members.

She said that while talks have allowed the two sides to reach important agreements, they remain too far apart in negotiations and so pilots will be leaving the voluntary process on June 15. 

The union says it will file a notice of dispute to inform the federal Minister of Labour that they've attempted, but failed, to reach a collective agreement, and to request the minister assign a conciliator.

Air Canada said in a statement that the airline remains committed to achieving a fair, negotiated agreement.

"Air Canada has worked hard and in good faith to reach a new collective agreement with ALPA under the bargaining protocol and the talks conducted under the bargaining protocol led to significant progress," it said.

The airline said it will continue to push for an agreement in the coming months under the normal bargaining process, insisting customers can continue to book and travel with confidence on Air Canada.

Canadian pilots have been seeking gains that will bring them closer to deals won by their counterparts in the U.S.

Between March and September last year, pilots at Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines secured agreements that included four-year pay hikes ranging from 34 per cent to 40 per cent.

Hudy has called the wage gap between Canadian and American pilots "unacceptable."

The Canada Labour Code stipulates the minister has up to 15 days to appoint a conciliator, after which a 60-day period of talks begin. If no deal is reached in the talks, there's a 21-day cooling-off period before the union could be in a position to strike. 

Last week, WestJet Encore reached a deal with its pilots to narrowly avoid a potential strike. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 2, 2024.

Operations suspended at British Columbia's Gibraltar copper mine due to worker strike

The Canadian Press

A worker strike has forced Vancouver-based Taseko Mines Limited to suspend operations at its Gibraltar copper mine in central British Columbia, about 200 kilometres south of Prince George.

The company issued a news release on Saturday saying negotiations for a new contract with unionized workers ended late Friday with no deal.

It says it then shut down mining and milling operations before midnight, and only essential staff remain to maintain critical operations.

Unifor says its Local 3018 members voted to strike today, accusing Taseko of refusing to negotiate "basic terms of a new collective agreement."

A news release from the union says contract negotiations began in February, and the workers' latest contract expired on Friday.

The release says Unifor Local 3018 represents about 550 workers at the mine, which is the second largest open-pit copper mine in Canada and the largest employer in the region.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 1, 2024.

 

Cargill shifts beef production after weeklong strike at Canada plant

Gerson Freitas Jr., Bloomberg News

Signage is displayed outside the Cargill Inc. meat plant in Chambly, Quebec, Canada, on Monday, May 11, 2020. The case-ready facility for beef, pork, chicken and sausage has shut down as the company is “concerned about the number of cases in the community and among our employees,” according to a May 9 statement. Photographer: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

Cargill Inc. is shifting beef production to other facilities after halting operations at a Canadian plant due to a weeklong strike at the facility.

Beef processing at Cargill’s Dunlop plant in Guelph, Ontario was halted after about 1,000 workers took to the picket lines on May 27. The plant has capacity to process 1,500 head of cattle per day. The workers rejected a proposal that the US meatpacker said would have raised wages by 9.3 per cent in the first year of a four-year agreement.

“While we navigate this labor disruption, we will shift production to other facilities within our broad supply chain footprint to minimize any disruptions to our customers,” a Cargill spokesperson said.

The Ontario plant suspension comes as profit margins of North American beef producers have been under pressure due to a shortage of slaughter-weight cattle.

World's biggest meat company linked to 'brutal massacre' in Amazon

Investigation traces meat sold to JBS and rival Marfrig to farm owned by man implicated in Mato Grosso killings  

Protests against the illegal timber trade in Brazil have highlighted the number of people killed while defending the forest. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Published on Tue 3 Mar 2020

A new investigation has linked the world’s biggest meat company JBS, and its rival Marfrig, to a farm whose owner is implicated in one of the most brutal Amazonian massacres in recent memory.

The report by Repórter Brasil comes as JBS faces growing pressure over transparency failings in its Amazon cattle supply chain.

On 19 April 2017, nine men were brutally murdered in what became known as the “Colniza massacre”. The men had been squatting on remote forest land in the state of Mato Grosso when their bodies were found, according to court documents. Some showed signs of torture; some had been stabbed, others shot.

According to charges filed by state prosecutors in Mato Grosso, the massacre was carried out by a gang known as “the hooded ones”. The aim, they said, was to terrify locals, take over land they lived on and extract valuable natural resources. The first reporter to reach the lawless, far-flung region only got there a week later.

 

House of farmer and evangelical pastor Sebastião de Souza in Taquarussu do Norte, Brazil, one of the men murdered in the Colniza massacre. Photograph: Fabiano Maisonnave/Courtesy of Climate Home

On 15 May 2017, prosecutors said they had charged Valdelir João de Souza, a farmer who owned two timber companies on neighbouring land, and four others with homicide and forming or being part of an illegal paramilitary group. Prosecutors said de Souza had ordered the massacre, although he had not been present when it occurred.

Since then de Souza has been a fugitive. But in April 2018 two adjacent areas of land – Três Lagoas and Piracama farms - in nearby Rondônia state were registered under his name (one of the oddities of the Brazilian property system is that landowners register their own land and boundaries). The two farms covered 1,052 hectares (2,599 acres) in an area set aside by the government for low-income agricultural workers. Satellite images show extensive deforestation on the Três Lagoas farm in 2015.


Meat company faces heat over ‘cattle laundering’ in Amazon supply chain

Government sanitary records seen by Repórter Brasil show that on 9 May 2018 143 cattle were sold by the Três Lagoas and Piracama farms to a farm owned by Maurício Narde.

Minutes later Narde’s farm sold 143 animals of the same sex and age – 80 female cattle between 13– 24 months old and 63 female cattle over 36 months old – to a JBS meatpacker.

In June 2017, according to court documents in a separate case, Narde worked at a sawmill owned by de Souza in Machadinho d’Oeste in Rondônia state. He still works at the same sawmill, although it has since changed its name and is no longer controlled by de Souza. Reached by telephone by the Guardian, Narde confirmed the transaction but did not explain why he had sold the cattle after buying them minutes beforehand.

“We buy and sell, just to keep things moving,” he said, before deciding not to answer any more questions and concluding the interview.

Cattle laundering involves the selling on of cows raised illegally on deforested land to ‘clean’ farms. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Greenpeace

The quick sale of the cattle suggests what environmentalists call “cattle laundering” – when cattle from a farm that has environmental issues sells cattle to a “clean” farm. This gets around monitoring systems because meat companies including JBS do not monitor these “indirect suppliers”.

“This series of coincidences suggests a common practice, which is the triangulation of animals,” said Mauro Armelin, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil. “It is a practice that could indicate cattle laundering.”

On 25 June 2018, according to government sanitary records, Três Lagoas also sold 153 head of cattle to the Morro Alto farm in Monte Negro, Rondônia, owned by José Carlos de Albuquerque.

In the following months de Albuquerque sold dozens of head of cattle to JBS and Marfrig slaughterhouses.

De Albuquerque told Réporter Brasil that the sale had never been completed – but the report cited sanitary records showing the cattle had, in fact, entered the Morro Alto farm. Contacted by the Guardian by phone and email, he declined to answer questions.

The Repórter Brasil investigation highlights the difficulties that Brazil’s big meat companies have in monitoring their supply chains.

JBS and other big companies such as Marfrig committed to not buying from farms involved in illegal deforestation in two separate agreements signed with Greenpeace and Brazilian prosecutors in 2009 and subsequent years. Under the Greenpeace deal, the companies also promised to remove producers accused of land grabbing or convicted in rural conflicts from their suppliers lists. The deal with federal prosecutors similarly bans farms that have been convicted of involvement in rural conflicts, or that are being investigated.

Greenpeace quit their deal in 2017, after JBS was fined for buying cattle from farms in illegally-deforested areas in the Amazon state of Pará. An audit by federal prosecutors found that 19% of the cattle JBS purchased in the state in 2016 had “evidence of irregularities”.

  

Large meat companies have promised not to buy cattle from farms that encroach on indigenous lands. Photograph: Paulo Pereira/Greenpeace


In the years following the cattle agreement, JBS made enormous progress in improving its monitoring of Amazon suppliers and the company defended its sustainability in a statement.

“We monitor over 280,000 square miles, an area larger than Germany, and assess more than 50,000 potential cattle-supplying farms every day, as well as conducting daily checks of all purchases to ensure compliance with strict standards. To date we have blocked more than 8,000 cattle-supplying farms due to noncompliance,” it said.

But while the company now has a complex system in place to monitor its direct suppliers, it is still unable to monitor its indirect suppliers – those farmers who sell to farms that then sell on to JBS.

Revealed: fires three times more common in Amazon beef farming zones

De Souza’s case has yet to be concluded. Ulisses Rabaneda, a lawyer representing de Souza, told the Guardian that he had decided not to reply to questions from the media at this stage in the court proceedings.

In an interview with the Gazeta Digital in 2019, de Souza said he was innocent of all charges, had never been involved in death squads, and remained a fugitive because he was scared he would be murdered by the real killers if he handed himself in.

“I never went around armed, so why at my age of 41, with solid companies, a peaceful life, no debts, without any problems, would I do something so barbaric?” de Souza said in the interview. “I built everything with the honesty and effort of my family. Why would I throw it all away?”

JBS told Réporter Brasil that de Souza was not a supplier and that it does not “acquire cattle from farms involved in deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous reserves of conservation, rural violence, land conflicts, or that used slave or child labour”.

“JBS reiterates that any attempt to link the company to the person mentioned in the report, who was never on its list of suppliers, is irresponsible,” the company told the Guardian.

Marfrig declined to comment on the investigation and sent the statement it had previously sent to the Guardian in December in which the company recognised that 53% of its Amazon cattle comes from indirect suppliers.

“Marfrig is fully aware of the challenges related to the livestock production chain and recognises its role as an important transformation agent to ensure production vis-à-vis the conservation of Brazilian biomes, especially the Amazon,” the company said.

  

Marfrig has recognised that over half of its Amazon cattle comes from indirect suppliers. Photograph: Ricardo Funari/Greenpeace

It detailed measures including a supplier monitoring platform and its Request for Information (RFI) tool, in which suppliers voluntarily list the farms they may have acquired animals from. The company says a third of the cattle it sources in the Amazon come with an RFI, and it is now working to improve the process with World Wildlife Fund.

In 2017, a Greenpeace report published after the Colniza massacre said a company owned by de Souza, called Madeireira Cedroarana, had accumulated around $150,000 (£116,000) in unpaid fines over a decade from Brazil’s environment agency, Ibama.

Between January 2016 and October 2017 the company exported thousands of cubic metres of timber to the US and Europe. In 2018 it changed its name to Colmar Madeiras; it continues at the same address, but de Souza is no longer its controlling partner. In the interview with Gazeta Digital, he said his company had challenged fines it had received.

JBS IS ALSO IN ALBERTA AND OTHER PROVINCES IN CANADA  

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/12/all-news-that-fits-washington-post.html

'Crystallizing into a kind of quasi-fascist politics': How postliberalism made inroads with disenchanted leftists

Victor Orbán in 2012, Wikimedia Commons
Kathryn Joyce and
Salon November 22, 2022

LONG READ

On a Friday night in early October, in a downtrodden city in eastern Ohio, a speaker laid out a grim vision. At the height of 2020's first, most terrifying wave of COVID-19, an employee at a Chinese slaughterhouse led his coworkers on a walkout. For years, the state-owned company had abused its staff with continual video surveillance, punishing production quotas and demerits for bathroom breaks. Now it was casually disregarding their safety during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Following the walkout, the employee was fired, and then vilified through a PR campaign that denounced his protest as immoral and possibly illegal.

After a pause came the reveal: That hadn't happened in China, but in New York City's Staten Island; the hero wasn't a Chinese meatpacker, but a young warehouse worker named Chris Smalls; the villain wasn't the Chinese government but Amazon.com. The speaker went on, quoting from Karl Marx about "masters and workmen" and the "spirit of revolutionary change" before clearing his throat to deliver another correction: Apologies, that was actually Pope Leo XIII.

Both jokes were preface to a larger punchline, one that's particularly relevant after the 2022 midterm elections: This wasn't happening at a Bernie Sanders rally or a Democratic Socialists of America meetup, but a decidedly conservative conference at Ohio's Franciscan University of Steubenville, a center of U.S. right-wing Catholic thought. The speaker (and conference organizer) was Sohrab Ahmari, a Catholic writer best known for his 2019 polemic against conservatives insufficiently committed to the culture wars. The conference, "Restoring a Nation: The Common Good in the American Tradition," was a showcase for the modestly-sized but well-connected Catholic integralist movement, part of the broader current of conservative thought known as postliberalism.

Over the two-day conference, 20 speakers, including then-Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, hammered home the argument that the same faith used to justify abortion bans and curtail LGBTQ rights also demanded a different approach to the economy, one that might plausibly be called socialist. Laissez-faire capitalism, speakers said, wasn't the organic force conservatives have long claimed but the product of state intervention; ever-expanding markets hadn't brought universal freedom but wage-slavery and despair; Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal — demonized on the right for generations — was in fact a "triumph for Catholic social thought"; social welfare programs were good.

All that might be striking enough. But the conference also served as something of a rebuttal to another gathering of right-wing intellectuals that had taken place a few weeks before: the third major National Conservatism conference, held this September in Miami. The two conferences — one in a hollowed-out former steel town, the other in a $400-per-night golf resort — represented two sides of what some partisans recently called a "fraught postliberal crack-up." Broadly speaking, these are ideological kin: members of the Trump-era intellectual "new right" who see themselves as rebels fighting an elite "Conservative, Inc." But it's a family in the midst of a feud, and the public split signified by the two meetings comes after months of less visible infighting over questions only hinted at in headline Republican politics.

Earlier this month, after the midterms failed to deliver a promised "red wave," those fights spilled into the headlines, as Republicans' disappointed hopes led to some of the first open shots in what's been a cold civil war over the party's future. Partly that fight revolves around whether Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will lead the GOP into the 2024 presidential election. But it goes much deeper than that, and the fight also has implications that go well beyond the right.

The midterms gave conservatives of all stripes something to claim, or to denounce. Activists who spent the last two years sniffing for "critical race theory" and "gender ideology" in public schools cheered DeSantis' re-election as proof that maximalist culture war is the key to Republican success. Anti-Trump conservatives pointed to culture warriors' widespread losses elsewhere as proof the GOP needs to come "home to liberal democracy." In a New York Times op-ed, Ahmari chastised conservatives who'd spent the run-up to the election mocking an overworked Starbucks barista as one likely reason that "the red wave didn't materialize." Vance's victory in Ohio was simultaneously touted as proof that right-wing populism remains viable and that "the culture war still wins."

Others called on Republicans to actualize their claim to be the new party of the "multiracial working class." The ecumenical religious right journal First Things exhorted conservatives to join picket lines. The conservative policy think tank American Compass unveiled a comprehensive "New Direction" economic agenda, repurposing lyrics from the Clash to propose things like realigning financial markets with the common good. In schmaltzier fashion, Trump strode into a Mar-a-Lago ballroom to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy to the "Les Misérables" anthem "Do You Hear the People Sing?"

And after days of lambasting "Washington Republicanism" for offering little of substance for the working class, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., issued a proclamation: "The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new."

* * *

The right-wing populist wave that elected Donald Trump in 2016, like the U.K.'s Brexit vote a few months earlier, is typically described as a watershed moment for conservatism. But the fact of the Trump revolution arrived before the theory. Something had clearly changed in the political order, but Trump's impulsiveness and lack of coherent ideology or policy agenda created a vacuum that needed to be filled, retroactively, by intellectuals on the right.

A variety of themes emerged from those efforts. One was an "America First"-inspired rehabilitation of nationalism, long tarnished by its association with authoritarian movements in pre-World War II Europe. Another was heard in Steve Bannon's call to dismantle the "administrative state" of unelected bureaucrats who might stand in Trump's way. A third was the conviction that classical liberalism — in the historical Adam Smith sense of that word, which prioritizes individual rights, pluralism and free trade and which guided both parties for generations — had been a catastrophe, replacing traditional norms with a destructive free-for-all.

As postliberals like Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, author of the influential 2018 book, "Why Liberalism Failed," argue, classical liberalism promised peace and prosperity but instead delivered an era of haves and have-nots, swapping good jobs for dehumanizing gig work, empowering corporations to enforce a homogeneous global monoculture and promoting social policies that led people — particularly working-class people — away from traditionalist values like church, marriage and parenthood. In that light, conservative regions' higher rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and opioid deaths weren't evidence of red-state hypocrisy but rather an unrecognized form of class warfare.

The right's retconned Trumpist ideology also made a meta-argument: that the conservative "fusion" that had defined the Republican Party since the 1960s — uniting religious traditionalists, Cold Warriors and free marketeers in opposition to communism — had ultimately failed.

In 2019, Ahmari and a cadre of mostly conservative Catholic intellectuals gave voice to that argument through a group manifesto, "Against the Dead Consensus," which declared (several years before Josh Hawley) that the old conservative coalition was over and something new must take its place. Two months later, Ahmari wrote a follow-up, declaring never-Trump National Review writer David French the poster boy of that dead consensus, for being the sort of conservative who would defend Drag Queen Story Hours on the grounds of free expression. There was no polite, pluralist way to fight such an abomination, Ahmari argued, only a zero-sum approach to fighting the culture war "with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good."

Language like "the Highest Good" was a hat-tip to integralism, a right-wing faction of Catholicism that aspires to effectively re-found America as a Catholic "confessional state," where state power is subordinate to the church and government is devoted to fostering public virtue and the "common good." Part of that project aims to replace the longstanding conservative legal ideology of constitutional originalism (as championed by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his followers on the current court) with "common good constitutionalism" (primarily theorized by Harvard Law professor and former Scalia clerk Adrian Vermeule), wherein the law works as "a teacher" to instruct, and enforce, public morality. In other words, if the actual public doesn't want to live by conservative Christian ideology, a new governing class should impose it.

That premise has led other Catholics (conservative and liberal alike) to condemn integralism as reactionary and authoritarian. When integralists weren't being intentionally vague about their plans, critics charged — in a widely-discussed 2020 Atlantic essay, Vermeule declined to specify what common good constitutionalism would mean in practical terms — those plans are frightening, as in one integralist text that suggests limiting citizenship and the vote to members of the faith.

James Patterson, a political science professor at Ave Maria University, has written about integralism's troubled lineage going back to pre-World War II European fascist or authoritarian movements, including the Spanish Falangists that supported dictator Francisco Franco or the antisemitic Action Française that grew out of France's Dreyfus Affair. On Twitter recently, a Catholic parody account posted a satirical book jacket for an "updated and honest" edition of Vermeule's latest book with images of combat boots and a tank and an invented blurb from Ahmari: "Finally we can stop pretending what we're really talking about."

But the postliberal critique resonated beyond the cloistered world of right-wing Catholic discourse, intersecting with another post-Trump project: the rapidly-growing national conservatism movement. Led by Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, author of the 2018 book "The Virtue of Nationalism," the NatCons also see classical liberalism as fatally flawed — its central premise of a neutral public square, where no religion or culture reigns over any other, is nonsense, because liberalism is both a competing worldview and a slippery slope, inevitably leading to cultural revolution. As Hazony often argues, within two generations of the Supreme Court's ban on religious instruction in public schools, marriage rates and religious observance had plummeted and "woke neo-Marxism" took their place.

Since its first conference in 2019, NatCon has come to represent a series of positions: hostility to transnational bodies like the EU and UN; a quasi-isolationist skepticism of foreign entanglements; sharp reductions or a complete moratorium on immigration; realigning the free market with national interests (variously described); and, most importantly, replacing the illusion of a neutral public square with the conviction that, "Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision," as a recent NatCon statement of principles holds.

From the get-go, there were important differences between the integralists and NatCons. Catholicism makes a fundamental claim to universality (and some integralists speak wistfully of empire), which fits uneasily with NatCons' nation-centric vision. Integralists have far more ambitious economic plans than most NatCons would support.

But there were important commonalities too: a mutual opposition toward mainstream conservatism, a largely shared rejection of liberalism, a common desire to return Christianity to the center of American public life. Both camps swooned for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and saw his avowedly "illiberal" "Christian democracy" — with its expanded government power, sharp restrictions on immigration, repression of LGBTQ rights and pronatalist family subsidies — as the primary model to emulate. Both sides also benefited, to one degree or another, from the largesse of right-wing donors who are funding numerous projects (and candidates) on the "new right."

"If anti-communism bound together the old conservative consensus," said Jerome Copulsky, a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, the new right's coalition "is animated by antiliberalism and a belief that a high degree of religious and cultural uniformity is necessary for social cohesion and political legitimacy."

But there are problems with building alliances on the basis of shared enemies, Copulsky warned. "The coalition-building is about the Venn diagram of who they don't like: liberals, 'woke' multiculturalists, non-traditional sexuality and gender roles. But as they move forward, their different understandings of what they want to put into place will bring out the tensions and contradictions of their alliance. The 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' attitude only goes so far."

* * *

Over the last year, that exact problem has played out through quarrels fought on social media, in new right publications and on conference stages. It was even visible in the difference between this year's NatCon conference in Miami and the one held a year before.

In November 2021, multiple new right camps converged in Orlando for NatCon 2. The heart of the conference was an evening panel featuring the nationalist Hazony and integralist Ahmari, as well as "anti-Marxist classical liberal" Dave Rubin and British neocon Douglas Murray, all discussing whether a new alliance could be forged. Hazony, an Orthodox Jew, had a surprising suggestion: Bible instruction must be restored in public school, as a crucial first step toward reasserting America's identity as a Christian nation and a "conservative democracy."

There were tensions, most notably around the fact that Rubin and Murray are both gay: would there be room, Rubin asked, for him and his family in this new right? But after reaching apparent agreement that the problem wasn't gay people per se but rather expanded trans rights or LGBTQ representation in schools, the session closed as it had begun, with the PA system playing "We Are Family."

That unity was short-lived. This September, when NatCon reconvened in Miami, the only panelist who returned was Hazony himself, reflecting a number of upheavals in the preceding months.

One seeming result was that this year's NatCon — the movement's largest to date — reflected a marked increase in hostility toward not just "gender ideology" but LGBTQ rights in general. In one plenary address, a seminary president declared that in order for conservatives to resist "the fantasy and folly" of transgenderism, they must also reject same-sex marriage: "He who says 'LGB' must say 'TQ+.'" Another speaker argued that the failure of any major U.S. institutions to denounce "the LGBT agenda" proved that America has become "basically anti-American." NatCon's own statement of principles, released just months after asking two gay men to help build the new right, defines marriage as only between a man and a woman.

In part, this shift reflected some conservatives' belief that NatCons' tent had gotten "a little too big." One right-wing website used a photo of the 2021 panel to warn about "the quiet rise of LGBTQ influence in Christian and conservative circles." Rubin had also become the center of a conservative firestorm, after he announced that he and his husband were expecting the birth of two babies being carried by surrogate mothers — news that sparked not congratulations but widespread denunciations of both Rubin and any conservative who stood by him.

But the altered mood also reflected something else, Hazony told Salon: The Supreme Court's June decision overturning Roe v. Wade had opened a new world of conservative possibilities, and the sense that it might be "possible to restore an earlier constitutional order." Post-Dobbs, conservatives giddily discussed which Supreme Court precedents they might topple next, and the 2015 Obergefell decision that had legalized same-sex marriage nationwide was high on the list. To Hazony, it suggested a rapid revival of the desire to reassert biblical values in the political sphere. Conservatives wanted to go for it all.

In his own conference address, Hazony called on conservatives to commit to being "fully Christian in public," arguing, "The only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity." For the politicians in attendance — including DeSantis, Hawley and Florida's two Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott — that meant not just mouthing platitudes about God-given rights, but insisting that American freedom comes from the Bible. Less than an hour later, Hawley happily obliged, declaring, "Without the Bible, there is no America," with a fervor matched by other speakers eagerly reclaiming the label "Christian nationalist" as a battle cry.

Perhaps even more conspicuous were the missing Catholic integralists, who in 2021 had provided much of NatCon's intellectual framework. This year, their absence prompted so many subtle, and less subtle, asides throughout the conference that one confused audience member raised his hand to request an explanation.

A British priest who said he'd been invited to affirm that, contra some people, Catholicism and national conservatism go together just fine, suggested that the integralists' seeming boycott amounted to useless theological squabbling: Who cared "how many integralists can dance on the head of a pin"? In a breakout session, another Catholic panelist suggested it was "cringe" for integralists to believe they'd ever set the moral framework for a "basically Protestant nation."

The biggest rebuke came from Kevin Roberts, the recently-appointed president of the Heritage Foundation, the great white whale of institutional conservatism, which has been shaping Republican priorities since the first years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Roberts' presence at the conference was itself a coup. Two years earlier, Hazony said, Heritage had attacked him for "importing nationalism" into the U.S. Now the foundation had underwritten much of this year's conference, had met with NatCon leaders to discuss their statement of principles and had published a 20-page booklet recounting a conversation between Roberts and Hazony on "Nationalism and Religious Revival." In a line widely quoted after the conference, Roberts declared, "I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement, but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours."

Roberts, who describes himself as a Catholic populist, also admonished his missing coreligionists ("Integralists, heal thyselves!"), accusing them of rejecting "conventional constitutional" politics and seeking to "subordinate the state to an institutional church" in ways that would discredit both. Alluding to the fact that many prominent integralists are recent Catholic converts, Roberts continued that, while he shared many of their frustrations, "and I certainly rejoice in their religious conversion," their zeal had "led them into error."

The integralists fired back. At the start of the Miami conference, Ahmari tweeted that he was "emphatically not a 'NatCon.'" The movement's academic Substack published a long theological rebuttal to Roberts' claim that integralists wanted to establish a theocracy. Another writer asked whether NatCon's big tent still had room for integralists. When Gladden Pappin, cofounder of the conservative journal American Affairs and a professor at the University of Dallas, repeated the question on Twitter, Hazony responded with exasperation: Pappin could answer that question himself, since he'd spoken at a NatCon event several months earlier.

"In my view, conditions of ongoing animosity and hostility between NatCon and the five or six of you would be a colossal waste of time," Hazony wrote. "However, if you decide that a strategy of hostility, boycott or insults is the way to go — I can assure you that a wiser Catholic intellectual leadership will arise to take your place."

* * *

"There is clearly some kind of break," Hazony told Salon, but he saw it arising primarily from the integralists' side. Several had been invited to sign NatCon's statement of principles in June, but all had refused. Ideological differences that were "soft-pedaled a year or two ago" were suddenly getting "a high-octane emphasis."

For Hazony, the primary issue was about how conservatives understand China, the rising superpower that NatCons see as America's No. 1 rival. Their conference had banned all speakers who are "pro-Xi, pro-Putin, racists or antisemites," although that standard seems malleable at times. (As Political Research Associates' Ben Lorber reported, this year's NatCon included a meditation on the viciously xenophobic French novel "Camp of the Saints," approving mention of antisemitic Action Française leader Charles Maurras and an address by a former Trump speechwriter fired for alleged ties to white nationalists.) But some integralists, Hazony charged, had "always had a soft spot for dictatorship, for imperialism and for China," and in recent months that had become impossible to ignore, as members of the movement wrote articles praising China's government or culture.

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right."

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."

Both Thiel and Klingenstein spoke at NatCon this year, and a handful of other NatCon speakers attended the integralist conference too. But on the whole, Hazony said, Compact was a bridge too far for most NatCons. While many in the movement were open to "rethinking the commitment to the free market as an absolute principle," and might even support targeted business regulations, he said, there was "no appetite, no capacity among nationalist conservatives to accept the ideal of social democracy as an alternative to the market mechanism."

Integralists had their own complaints. Some also involved foreign policy questions, like whether NatCons' enthusiastic defense of Ukraine amounted to a creeping neoconservative revival, or whether their strident hostility to China reflected warmed-over Cold War politics. But their main concern was more fundamental: NatCons, they charged, were abandoning the populist promise of Trumpism for a seat at the establishment table.

To be sure, NatCon 3 featured critiques of big business, but, with limited exceptions, most amounted to dragging "woke corporations." Ron DeSantis (introduced in Miami as "the future president") spoke dutifully about how free enterprise should be seen as a tool to help "our own people" rather than an end in itself. But his real firepower was saved for war stories: his battle with Disney over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, his resolution banning state pension funds from weighing environmental or social justice concerns in investment decisions, a promised law to help Floridians sue tech companies that commit "viewpoint discrimination."

Other speakers called for blacklisting banks that disinvest in fossil fuels; seizing universities' endowments; and making it illegal for employers to ask if applicants attended college, in order to disincentivize young people from entering the "inherently liberalizing environment" of higher education. (In a more recent example, after contrarian billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and numerous companies stopped advertising on the platform, Republicans suggested that congressional hearings into "leftist corporate extortion" might be in order.)

To Ahmari, this amounted to "fake GOP populism." "This may sound strange coming from me," he said — that is, the guy who made his name by denouncing "David Frenchism" — "but it's just culture war." He was increasingly convinced that whipping up Twitter wars over corporate gestures towards progressive politics was the kind of conservatism "designed to ensure" that nothing important ever changed. "It's easier to pick a fight over Disney than to take on corporate power as such."

"There is this emerging sense on our side," Ahmari continued, "that the old Reaganite establishment is reconsolidating itself under the banner of NatCon or populism, but the agenda and personnel haven't changed." For instance, he said, the Heritage Foundation's Kevin Roberts calls himself a populist, but this summer tweeted the Reaganesque claim that "Government is not the solution, but the obstacle, to our flourishing." If the new right wanted to "get in bed with Heritage," Ahmari wrote this summer in an essay lambasting "Fusionism 2.0," that was fine. But then it didn't get to call itself populist; he refused to be such "a cheap date."

Integralists also expressed a worry shared by radical movements since time immemorial: Their language and ideas were being co-opted and neutralized by either establishment Republicans or elements of the new right all too eager to go mainstream.

Now that postliberals had made certain policy ideas "trendy," said Gladden Pappin, who's written extensively about replicating Hungarian social policies in the U.S., others on the right were "trying to fill them with concepts that bring it back down to classical liberal conservatism." You'd see people suggesting, he explained, that the foundation of conservative family policy should be religious liberty and right-to-work laws, or libertarians saying, "You know what supports the common good? Radical free markets."

Postliberals weren't the only ones drawing that conclusion. When Roberts told NatCon that Heritage was part of their movement, supporters celebrated it as "the moment they went mainstream." But other attendees remarked that they were increasingly unsure of how NatCon actually differed from regular "con." New York Times columnist Ross Douthat warned that the movement risked being "reabsorbed into the GOP mainstream without achieving its revolution," so that a hypothetical President DeSantis might call himself a national conservative while pushing through more tax cuts for the rich. New York Magazine described this year's conference as having "the flavor of a party convention," albeit one headed toward a "middle ground between Reagan and Mussolini."

Perhaps this evolution was both natural and inevitable. If national conservatives originally intended to build a new right, James Patterson wrote recently, its current, apparent reconciliation with fusionism reflects changed political realities. In 2019, when NatCon held its first conference, the Trump presidency was in full swing and the movement sought to fill the ranks with true believers. By their next meeting in 2021, Republicans were newly out of power and eager to forge alliances to win it back. This year, Patterson noted, the Dobbs decision demonstrated that there might be life in the "dead consensus" yet, since a Supreme Court dominated by old-line originalists — not their "common good" critics — had just delivered the right's biggest victory in decades.

"They're learning the lessons of why the last fusion collapsed," said Jerome Copulsky: Different factions of the right can work together easily enough until their movement begins to gain power. Then they come to realize "that someone's policies will be implemented, that there will be winners and losers in this coalition."

The NatCons feel pretty sure which of those things they are. At one point during this year's conference, Hazony recalled, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler — perhaps the preeminent voice of the evangelical right — excitedly told him, "This is what it was like in the 1980s when the Moral Majority was first getting organized." In a midterm postmortem with British outlet The Spectator, Hazony sidestepped the question of whether Trump or DeSantis would win the right's civil war. NatCons would rally around Trump, or someone else, he said; either way, their ideology would lead.

* * *

In response, integralists vowed to build a coalition of their own. "NatCon is trying to put the constellation of right-wing organizations back together," said Pappin, "whereas I'm trying to articulate a political vision that could be successful at governing and also oriented towards the common good."

Considering various constituencies that have swung right in recent years — like law-and-order Latinos in Texas or the Midwestern white working class — Pappin said he was more interested in finding ways to keep them in the fold. That could happen through "something that a lot of Republicans would call left-wing economics," he suggested. "Can Republicans articulate a vision that might be more traditional morally, but also favor a supportive state?" Compared to efforts to reassemble the old right-wing fusion, Pappin asked, which was real coalition building?

"U.S. conservatism has so long been associated with pro-capitalist policies that we sometimes forget that conservative movements in other countries can look extremely different," said University of Michigan political scientist Matthew McManus, a progressive who's written extensively about the modern right. Postliberals' favored models in Hungary and Poland demonstrate that, he said, with expansive social welfare programs tied to "socially conservative and exclusionary practices."

It's not unthinkable that such a political gumbo might also work in the U.S., said University of Oregon professor Joseph Lowndes, co-author of "Producers, Parasites, Patriots." A clear lineage can be traced, he said, from the populist presidential campaigns of paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan in 1992 and 1996 through the Tea Party to Trumpism to projects like Compact today. "Not to put it in crude Marxist terms, but when you're under the material conditions of a second Gilded Age, when you have real gaps in wealth and neoliberalism becomes less and less credible," Lowndes said, "it opens up space for something that could wed the cultural politics of conservatism to a social order that seems more humane."

To that end, Patrick Deneen's forthcoming book, "Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future," calls for replacing "the self-serving liberal elite" with a "new elite devoted to a 'pre-postmodern conservatism'" that's aligned with the working class. Compact's own hybrid politics, said Ahmari, represents a similar attempt to forge a "positive vision" that is "liberated from the dogmas of the establishment right" and thus creates space for alliances with the left.

In practice, that has meant that Compact publishes essays on unions or trust-busting from conservatives and lefties who agree to disagree about cultural questions like abortion and same-sex marriage. Ahmari — who's undergone his own political odyssey, from socialist to neocon to postliberal, and increasingly these days, something like post-conservative — says he hasn't changed any of his positions on social issues but believes that building economic alliances can "lower the temperature" of those disagreements. "If you just have less corporate power," he proposed, "then whatever the corporate agenda is, wokeism or whatever, it doesn't bear down on ordinary people so much."

As for conservatives who dismiss their vision as a pipe-dream, Ahmari said there are "far fewer Americans than these folks think who favor the idea that the government is always an obstacle" and far more who might be mobilized by the resurrection of a mid-century conservatism at peace with the New Deal. After all, he said, "the last time Catholics voted as a united bloc was for the New Deal coalition."

That's not quite the whole story, argues James Patterson, recalling substantial Catholic infighting over FDR's agenda. But beyond historical quibbling, he says, the postliberal conviction that there is an untapped reserve of fiscally liberal, socially conservative voters waiting for something like integralism ignores the fact that most people who fit that demographic aren't the proverbial white working class but rather immigrants and people of color likely to be suspicious of a movement that "cites the Francisco Franco right." (Not coincidentally, Lowndes notes that Pat Buchanan's father was a legendary Franco fan and Buchanan himself called the dictator a "Catholic savior" and "soldier-patriot.") In an earlier critique of the new right's courtship of the working class, the left-wing journal Jacobin argued that right-wing populism is only viable in the context of "historic levels of demobilization and disorganization for the working class."

Perhaps, Patterson said, the integralists were setting their hopes on J.D. Vance (as of this month a senator-elect), and the possibility that their movement might influence, or even staff, his Capitol Hill office. After all, a sub-tenet of integralism is the contention that the movement doesn't need a majority, if enough believers can place themselves inside "the shell of the liberal order" to effect "integralism from within."

That's one answer, said Copulsky, to the question of how either side of the new right expects to "shape a culture when the majority of the public doesn't agree with you anymore." Neither the NatCons nor the integralists represent a majority position, "so they either have to go convert a bunch of people or use the coercive power of the state to make people follow their rules."

"People are always like, 'Who cares about the integralists? No one's going to vote for this,'" added Patterson. "But what if they don't know they're voting for it? What if J.D. Vance doesn't even fully know what he's getting himself into?"

* * *

Over the course of the new right feud, both sides have accused the other of betraying the cause. Integralists accused NatCons of being closet liberals and channeling populist anger towards safe external enemies. A NatCon speaker dedicated a podcast episode to arguing that "Catholic Integralism Is an Op," intended to "collect and discharge" Trumpist energies in ways "that are ultimately harmless." In short order, the allegations became as tangled as leftist infighting that dates back to the Russian Revolution. (Online, it became inscrutably meta, as when one "crypto-fascist" "anti-leftist Marxist" launched a Substack series charging that all dissident publications serve as an "exhaust valve for middle-class discontent.")

Shortly after Compact launched last spring, journalist John Ganz called the magazine an "unholy alliance" that recalled previous efforts to combine "socialism + family, Church, nation." Specifically, Ganz wrote, it sounded like a 19th-century proto-fascist French movement that synthesized left and right positions and whose adherents often called themselves "national socialists" — a term, Ganz notes, "that once sounded fresh and innovative."

Other observers pointed to a more recent analogue: the New York critical theory journal Telos, founded in the late 1960s by New Left devotees of Herbert Marcuse, but which by the 2010s was better known for its association with far-right thinkers who inspired the alt-right.

Telos' metamorphosis, explains Joseph Lowndes, who watched some of it happen, wasn't a simplistic example of "horseshoe theory" but rather the result of the people behind the project, frustrated by their search for an effective form of dissent, accepting "easy, far-right answers to complicated social and political questions." After Trump's election, Lowndes wrote about Telos' strange history as a warning: At this precarious moment in history, he argued, there were "two off ramps" from the vast inequalities of neoliberalism. One led to a very dark place.

Overall, Ganz views the postliberal movement as a "boutique intellectual project," a "tiny sect arguing with other intellectuals." But the possible inroads it might make with a disillusioned "post-left" were worrisome, he told Salon: "There's this broader thing going on where disenchanted leftists, who view their leftism as cultural revolt against liberalism, are becoming actually, substantially conservative. And they're crystallizing into a kind of quasi-fascist politics."

Beyond publishing articles about how the GOP might reconcile with unions, Compact has also published work by monarchist "neoreactionary" Curtis Yarvin as well as a number of leftists, or "post-leftists," who generally agree with the right on social issues: anti-immigration social democrats, anti-"gender ideology" radical feminists, leftists who see "wokeism" as "capital's latest legitimating ideology" (e.g., union-busting companies that fly Pride flags or post about Black Lives Matter). In September, the magazine published an essay exploring, with cautious sympathy, a hashtag movement called #MAGACommunism, which calls on leftists to abandon "toxic" social progressivism in favor of "the only mass working-class and anti-establishment movement that currently exists in America."

"[N]ot quite what I was going for," tweeted Compact cofounder Edwin Aponte in response. By then, Compact's resident Marxist had been gone from the project for several months, after disagreements over the leaked Dobbs decision forced him to conclude that his politics were irreconcilable with those of his colleagues and ultimately led to the dissolution of their partnership.

Aponte told Salon that when he first joined the project, as a Bernie Sanders leftist disillusioned with the collapse of that movement, he and his co-founders agreed to avoid issues like abortion "because, per them, they weren't interested in relitigating settled issues. But the second the Dobbs decision dropped, it was no longer a settled issue." When Compact published what Aponte saw as a "weirdly triumphalist article" proposing that Republicans respond to the fall of Roe by creating Hungary-style family subsidies, he had something of an epiphany.

"It revealed what they really cared about, and it was something highly specific and normative: that you can have a generous and materially comfortable state, as long as all these moral and cultural conditions are met," said Aponte. "On the surface, we wanted the same things. But the motivations behind it were different." It wasn't that he doubted their sincerity, he said, so much as that "the engine behind it is what goes unsaid, and is what actually matters more." For his right-wing partners, he said, "those material politics are a means to an end, rather than an end. And the end they have in mind is not something I think is good or just."

Exactly what that end is, Aponte doesn't feel sure, but he saw some troubling signs.

In late September, Compact held its first public event in an arthouse theater in downtown Manhattan: several dozen 20-somethings gathered in a basement screening room to listen as Anna Khachiyan, co-host of the quasi-socialist podcast Red Scare, introduced "heterodox economist" Michael Lind for an academic lecture about models of social organization.

It was one version of the weird, politically amorphous downtown scene where, as journalist James Pogue described in Vanity Fair last April, "New Right-ish" politics and converting to Catholicism "are in," and where Peter Thiel may or may not be "funding a network of New Right podcasters and cool-kid culture figures as a sort of cultural vanguard." (Earlier that month, the New York Times reported that a new Thiel network is channeling millions towards media projects, including journalism and "influencer programs.")

It's a scene suffused with a sense of ironic transgression, Ganz says, giving a "performance quality" to everything, "like part of this cultural revolt is about making yourself into a spectacle." For example: in recent weeks Khachiyan has promoted a "based literary journal" that includes an extended interview with her alongside a celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse and an exploration of whether the blood libel — the centuries-old conspiracy theory that Jews ritually murder Christian children — might actually be true.

"I don't think that white working-class voters who are even a little bit Trumpy are interested in this ideology," said Ganz. "It's a hipster thing trying to pass as working-class stuff, so it's kind of fake, but kind of scary. I don't really know where to situate it."

Throughout history, Aponte said, "Authoritarian reactionary movements have gained support and energy from such incoherence and contradictions." This movement seemed to have sufficient gravitational pull, he said, that "everyone starts falling in and gradually being converted. I've seen it happen with people I thought were really good leftists, who, next thing I knew, had turned into racists, transphobes and homophobes."

"Everyone's kind of on board, the specifics are blurry, but the direction is titled one way, whether anybody wants to acknowledge it or not," Aponte continued. "That's something we haven't seen in a long time. It's a vibe, and the kids love it, because the kids are not happy — justifiably so. It's a really spooky and dangerous time, and I feel foolish for participating. I feel bad."

In the end, what unites the right's various factions will likely hold more weight than what divides them. Generally speaking, said McManus, the right is better than the left at putting aside its internal differences to unite against a common foe. In J.D. Vance's speech in Steubenville, he called for a ceasefire in the new right's civil war. "We can't be so mean to one another," he told the audience, noting that all conservatives who challenge GOP orthodoxies are taking risks. They were right to be on guard against "Fusionism 2.0," Vance acknowledged, but perhaps the best way to prevent that was "being charitable to one another's ideas." After all, they had real enemies to fight, like transgender health care.

"We need to do more on the political left to inoculate people against the temptation to move in these radically right directions that can masquerade as a genuine critique of the status quo," said McManus. "Some people are being very foolish in toying around with these movements," perhaps because they don't take new right fulminations against trans rights or its idolization of Viktor Orbán seriously, believing "they won't actually go that far." In fact, McManus said, "There's a very large wing within these movements that wants to go exactly that far. Some of them want to go even further."

On Twitter, Aponte tried such an inoculation, addressing warnings to "all my heterodox former-leftist friends" that he'd "seen what lies behind the curtain." "[B]e careful with whom you ally," he wrote. "Their enemies might be your enemies for a just reason, but the devil is in their programmatic details."

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