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Discourse & Society

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First published online September 28, 2025

‘A great awakening of men of action’: What does the ‘right-wing Davos’ represent?

Huw Crighton Davies https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2659-1465 [email protected]View all authors and affiliations

Volume 37, Issue 3

https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265251368397

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Abstract
Introduction
Methodology
Analysis
Conclusion: Regressive neoliberalism
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
References
Biographies

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Abstract

The Financial Times called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s 2025 conference the ‘right-wing Davos’. The Alliance involves academics from elite universities, current and former members of government from the UK, Australia, Hungary, and the USA, global media personalities, international capital investors, and CEOs of major companies. Superficially, it appears to represent a motley association of self-described Classical Liberals, evangelists of free-market capitalism, ethnonationalists, atheists and conservative theologians. We need a better understanding of what unites this power elite because through its interventions it is seeking to radically change societies. The dataset is all the publicly available keynote speeches (32) given at ARC 2025. The method is the Discourse-Historical Approach. The analysis reveals a community unified by its opposition to a common enemy that the conference claims is destroying ‘Western Civilisation’ from within. By drawing on its bespoke history and a series of discursive strategies, ARC 2025 becomes a theatre of self-affirming ideological recursion that, despite each speaker’s different origins, converges on an ideology that morally justifies its members’ investments in fossil fuels, their social status, and right to intervene in society. Consequently, ARC’s regressive neoliberalism erases the boundaries between Christian nationalism, neoliberalism, and the far-right.

Introduction

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was registered as a company in 2016 (The UK Government, 2025b). Its two shareholders are the first co-founder, Paul Marshall, and the Dubai-based Legatum Institute (The UK Government, 2025b). The second co-founder, Philippa Stroud, previously served as Legatum’s CEO (The UK Government, 2025a). This is the same confederation (Marshall and Legatum) that owns and subsidises the loss-making, right-wing British television and YouTube channel GB News. Apart from Marshall, all of ARC’s persons of significant control reside in the UAE (The UK Government, 2025b). Its third co-founder, Jordan Peterson, is Canadian, and many of its advisory board members are American or Australian. ARC therefore embodies what its community often pejoratively refers to as ‘globalism’.

As such, ARC is part of an expanding global network of business interests, institutions, lobby groups, and think tanks. Many speakers represent affiliated organisations. For example, ARC figures such as Pesey, Ferguson, Murray, Birbalsingh, and Orr are involved in a similar institution called the Common Sense Society (Common Sense Society, 2025). Orr also sits on the advisory board of the Prosperity Institute, which is a think tank funded from Dubai by the Legatum Institute. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to fully document the web of financial and political interests linking ARC’s owners and advisory board.

The Financial Times quoted two attendees at its 2025 conference pithily describing ARC as the ‘Right-wing Davos’ for ‘vaguely like-minded people’ (Thomas and Fisher, 2025). I speculate that ‘vaguely’ is used here because, ostensibly, ARC includes members and speakers who are unlikely affiliates. For example, there are several self-declared atheists and rationalists sharing the stage with priests, theologians and new converts to Christianity. Professors from prestigious universities convene with ethnonationalists such as Murray who want Britain to be whiter (Murray, 2025). There are talks about energy, history, art, and AI that appear to have no common themes.

It is important to understand what unites this ‘vaguely like-minded’ community, as it clearly has a shared sense of purpose. Some of ARC members are driven individuals who invest in companies and educational institutions, donate to political parties, and buy media outlets. Others, like Peterson, command, vast, globally distributed, audiences of loyal followers. This combination of intent, capital, and cultural influence enables ARC to make credible claims about its ambition to remake society’s institutions.

For example, in his keynote speech, Harvard’s Ferguson (2025) stated that the ARC community is fighting what he called ‘educational degeneration’. He cited private institutions such as the University of Austin, where ARC members Michael Shellenberger and Winston Marshall (Paul Marshall’s son) address students, and where Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Ferguson’s wife) and Harvard’s Arthur Brooks serve on the advisory board (University of Austin (UATX), 2023). Ferguson and other ARC members also support an endeavour with similar intentions called The Heterodox Academy. Through such interventions, Ferguson (2025) argues, ARC is helping to ‘remake higher education’ by ‘challenging the sclerotic systems with their ideological blinkers that we see all across the English-speaking world’.

Marshall funds educational institutions, including Ralston College, where ARC co-founder Jordan Peterson serves as Chancellor (Kelly, 2023). Peterson and his daughter also run the online Peterson Academy. ARC member Alexander Pesey founded and directs the Institut de Formation Politique – a political education institute in France whose goal is to ‘identify, select, train, connect, and place in key positions any young leaders who want to serve our country and our civilisation’ (Pesey, 2025).

Although these institutions are on the periphery of higher education, this is not a fringe movement. Its website tells us members of ARC come from elite universities (Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard), occupy seats of government, have been rewarded by the state and the British Crown for their services, and they are capital investors and CEOs of major companies. The 2025 conference was addressed by the US Secretary of State for Energy and Speaker of The House, and the British Leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition.

I have titled this article a ‘great awakening’ of ‘men of action’ (taking phrases from the speeches by Pesey and Mosely respectively) because ARC’s agenda is dominated by men: 83% of speakers are men and the conference has relatively little to say about women’s role in society. When it does, it is to function as full-time care-givers within traditional families (see Komisar’s (2025) keynote).

My analysis unfolds as follows: ARC uses various discursive techniques to construct an in-group and a common enemy. These techniques include conspiracy theorising that instensify this out-group’s influence, power, and threat. These and other claims at ARC are legitimised by references to the speakers’ credentials, an alleged public demand for ARC’s messages, and a bespoke interpretation of history within which there is no account of any challenges to capital – no slave rebellions and no working class political organisation. As environmentalism is a challenge to fossil fuel capital, ARC’s various speeches amount to a continuing moral justification for the in-group’s ideology that accelerates the convergence of elite conservatism, neoliberalism, and the far-right’s ideology in the form of ‘regressive neoliberalism’ (Adams, 2025: 1281).

Methodology

There is insufficient space to evaluate the various forms of critical discourse analysis (CDA) for their efficacy in this instance. While other modes of CDA would also help analyse ARC, I have chosen the framework developed by Reisigl and Wodak (2001) because their Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) is designed to analyse how ideologies and power relations are reproduced and legitimised in discourse.

It consists of five key elements (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 75). First, ‘nomination strategies’ that prompt the analyst to ask: who is included in the in-group and who is excluded as the out-group? And, how are these groups named or labelled? The second, ‘predication’ that involves examining the attributes assigned to these groups – how certain characteristics are used to create or reinforce category boundaries. Third, ‘argumentation’ encourages the analyst to identify the topoi (conventionalised argumentative structures or implicit rules) used to justify claims (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 45). Within argumentation, ‘topoi can be described as parts of argumentation that belong to the obligatory, either explicit or inferable’. They are ‘the content-related warrants’ or ‘conclusion rules’ that connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion and the claim’. As such topoi, ‘justify the transition from the argument or arguments to the conclusion’. They are therefore discursive shortcuts or techniques that speakers use to make their arguments seem reasonable or legitimate. Argumentation topoi often rely on the audience’s ignorance or willingness to defer to authority or submit to their cognitive biases and not interrogate the speaker’s claims. The fourth component of DHA is ‘perspectivization’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 75), which asks whose perspectives are included or excluded, and who is considered legitimate to speak on a topic or intervene in society? And, finally, there is ‘intensification/mitigation’, which asks the analyst to focus on how threats to the social order are either amplified or downplayed. As I will show below, in this case, all five components are put to use together at ARC to construct a positive self-image of the in-group for its public and frame the out group as a threat while legitimizing its wealth, social status, and interventions in society.

ARC has published 32 of its 39 keynote speakers on YouTube, which offers a transcription facility. Keynote speeches listed on ARC’s website by Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tony Abbott, Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan, Bari Weiss, Nigel Farage, and Oren Cass are, at the time of writing, unavailable on YouTube. I copied these transcriptions to use as my source material. And, because the AI that has transcribed the videos sometimes makes mistakes, I re-watched each video and made any necessary corrections to the transcript. Table 1 below represents a brief summary of each speaker’s message within the context of the conference.

Table 1. A list of all available keynotes at ARC and their meaning in context.

Keynote speaker	Title	Main ideological message within context of ARC
Alexandre Pesey	The new French Revolution has begun!	To win the civilisation battle, we (ARC) need to populate society’s institutions with people who share our ideology.
Arthur C. Brooks	The science of happiness	The Science tells us that to be happy you must be a religious conservative.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali	They dreamt of world government	Society needs to return to a Christian nationalist ‘operating system’.
Bishop Barron	What does it take to save a civilisation?	We (ARC) are fulfilling an organic, necessary, and unmet need for people to turn to God.
Bjorn Lomborg	An inconvenient truth: Our climate policies can’t save the environment. So what will?	Societies should adapt to climate change, which isn’t as bad as the experts misleading us are saying.
Brendan McCord	AI will shape the future, but who will shape AI?	AI should be piloted by a combination of Classical Liberal and libertarian ideas.
Chris Wright	It’s time for reality in our Energy Policy	Decarbonising is naïve, economically illiterate, and so morally wrong it’s evil.
David Brooks	How the elite rigged society (and why it’s falling apart)	The Trump regime’s anti-elite populism is fraudulent.
Douglas Murray	Age of reconstruction	Progressivism and multiculturalism have failed, it is time to rebuild with cultural conservatism, and to defund the NHS.
Eric Weinstein	You’re in a war (and you don’t even know it)	This is largley an incoherent stream of consciousness. The main message seems to be that hidden conspiracies are suppressing human flourishing and preventing physicists (i.e. Weinstein) proving Einstein was wrong about space and time.
Erica Komisar	How a narcissistic society created the mental health crisis (and vice versa)	Only the traditional family with the mother at home prevents mental dysfunction in children.
Ian Rowe	What are the FOUR pillars of human flourishing and success?	A combination of traditional family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship can overcome any structural inequalities.
Jeff Rosen	Why Gen Alpha needs to read Greek philosophy	Self-mastery is the solution to social problems, rather than structural change. Nothing else useful has been learned since the 18^th Century.
John Mackey	Whole foods CEO explains the history of capitalism	Under capitalism, everyone wins.
Jordan Peterson	Sacrifice or chaos?	Purpose and fulfilment comes from sacrifice (to will of the divine).
Jordan Peterson	How to weather the coming storm	Social Darwinism favours believers in God. (The ‘faithful’ who adhere to ‘the pattern of divine adventure and growth’ will ‘have numberless descendants’).
Katalin Novák	How Hungary is turning around its demographic crisis	The demographic crisis is our greatest threat. We need to look to Hungary because its leaders have the answer to it.
Kemi Badenoch	Western civilization in crisis	Conservativism, a smaller state, and purging the ‘poison’ of progressivism will save Western Civilisation from the enemy within.
Konstantin Kisin	We’ve been lied to	The out-group hates ‘our’ civilisation. The net-zero agenda is anti-human, clean energy is not cheap and abundant energy (unlike fossil fuels).
Louis Mosley	Bursting the Big Tech bubble (and what happens next)	AI should be piloted by the values of 17th Century Protestantism.
Makoto Fujimura	The universe is a rhapsody of jazz.	Truth, beauty, and justice comes from God.
Michael Shellenberger	AI won’t save us – Because intelligence was never the problem	Not believing in God makes you less intelligent and gullible enough to believe in ‘faddish’ concepts such as ‘white privilege’.
Mike Johnson	Speaker Johnson delivers remarks at alliance for responsible citizenship	ARC’s bespoke interpretation of liberalism and conservative Christian nationalism will save the West from the enemy within.
Niall Ferguson	What DOGE is trying to fix and why it matters	The state needs to radically shrink and be run by the principles of Protestant neoliberal capitalism.
Os Guinness	Secular humanism has failed	We must return to a faith-based society because the Enlightenment project has failed.
Paul Marshall	Europe’s going bust over net-zero (and the rest of the world doesn’t care)	Advocates of net-zero are economically illiterate, naïve and mentally ill.
Pete Richardson	How to find your life’s purpose	You need to fulfil God’s purpose for your generation by using the talents assigned to you by God.
Philippa Stroud	Take back what was stolen	We are in an existential good v evil struggle against the enemy within.
Robert Bryce	The people climate activists leave behind	We have a moral responsibility to keep investing and using fossil fuels because they benefit the poor.
Scott Tinker	What you don’t realise about global energy	We need to continue using fossil fuels for humanitarian reasons.
Sophie Winkleman	What have we done to our children?	Technology has robbed a whole generation of its mental health and education.
Stephen J. Shaw	Everything you know about overpopulation is wrong.	The Science is telling us the real crisis is the lack of families having children in the West.

To help understand this community’s discursive strategies, as well as his keynote speech at ARC 2025, I also included Marshall’s rare personal disclosure of his politics in 2021 on a platform he owns – Unherd. His article in 2021 is particularly useful not only because we get an insight into his worldview, but because, as I will evidence below many of the keynote contributions to ARC reflect his ideas back to him throughout the conference.

Analysis

Common enemies

In his keynote speech, Peterson (2025) associates ARC with the Biblical Ark that carried a chosen few who were called upon to restart civilisation after the Flood. This reveals the nomination and predication strategies at work at ARC. Members of the in-group nominate themselves as the chosen few. This time, however, the Flood is to be understood as a metaphor for one ARC’s nominative out-groups – immigrants – summoned by another out-group that I will identity below, rather than the God of The Old Testament.

Meanwhile, ARC’s stage backdrop and furniture are white, connoting the in-group’s Christian moral purity and reinforcing the category boundaries. The frequent references to God and scripture by some speakers further anchor this reading. However, not all speakers use religious references, and some have publicly declared their atheism. So, what unites them?

Various speakers at ARC, through their nomination and predication strategies, contribute to the discursive construction of their common enemies. This can include any of the following: progressives, secularists, environmentalists, scientific experts on climate change and physics, advocates of net-zero, historians of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, as well as any supporters of immigration, multiculturalism, economic regulation, and state welfare.

Collectively, these common enemies are often referred to within the ARC community as ‘cultural Marxists’ – a discursive shortcut for anyone the community seeks to position as a threat, thereby activating the responsibility topos (i.e. the argument that these individuals or groups are so dangerous that something commensurate with the danger must be done).

For example, Peterson (2018) and other keynote speakers such as Hirsi Ali (2024), as well as numerous members of the Advisory Board – such as Birbalsingh (Barnes, 2025), Shellenberger (2025b), Cates (Penna, 2023), and Guinness (2023) have all described the power and threat of ‘cultural Marxists’. When doing so, none of them acknowledge that this refers to a common conspiracy theory found in manifestos of far-right mass murderers (Woods, 2024) – it is presented as a self-evident intellectual term. Even if they never mention the specific phrase, many speakers seek, in some way, to challenge one or more of the various constituencies contained within this ‘cultural Marxist’ out-group. As I will explain, ARC seeks, conversely, to legitimise itself by distancing itself from this out-group.

Non-religious speakers therefore employ a series of topoi to present themselves as the antithesis of cultural Marxists; as being uncontaminated by ideology. Though their analysis consistently leads to conclusions that serendipitously align with ARC’s ideological priorities.

This construction of the in-group and out-group contributes to the perspectivization process within which speakers, presented at ARC as world-leading experts, use appeals to authority, conceptual jargon, straw men and other fallacies, omissions and misrepresentations, and moral judgements to delegitimise genuine empirically validated expertise. For example, Marshall deploys a strawman to claim the out-group believes ‘humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress’, which he then uses to associate science with authoritarianism (Marshall, 2021). To use the authority topos, he quotes neoliberal economist Hayek: ‘flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason’ could lead to ‘totalitarian democracy’ (Marshall, 2021).

Meanwhile, religious speakers at ARC appeal to the authority of various biblical and cultural references to conjure images of a righteous conflict. ARC’s co-founder Stroud (2025) references Tolkien to romanticise this battle in epic, existential terms – positioning attendees as heroic figures in a mythical war within which they must ‘light a beacon’ and ‘grasp a sword’ to ‘claim back what has been stolen’ from an ‘enemy’ that has ‘whispered lies and led the prodigals off as slaves’.

Such symbolic wars require a foe that justifies the protagonists’ enmity. Marshall and others at ARC therefore use deviance topoi. They combine ‘abnormalisation’ (Cammaerts, 2022) and abjectification tropes to pathologise out-group with disease and contamination metaphors and further intensify category boundaries. For example, Marshall claims advocates of net-zero are ‘infected’ by an ‘ideological zeal’ (Marshall, 2025).

Speakers use this strategy throughout the conference. For example, in her keynote, the leader of the British Conservative Party describes ‘left-wing progressivism’ as ‘poison’ (Badenoch, 2025). Weinstein (2025) says, ‘I can tell you that the schools are infested with an orientation that is against the family, against the natural order, and against society itself’.

The function of conspiracism for ARC

However, despite its power to bring down Western Civilisation that has been built by centuries of Protestant ‘men of action’ and Classical Liberalism, overall, the conference is unable to decide if the out-group is powerful or weak. Guinness (2025) claims, its members ‘are within our gates’ and ‘powerful’. Yet, Peterson (2025) compares the out-group to an ‘immature 2-year-old pursuing immediate gratification’. And Shellenberger (2025a) told ARC that, the out-group of ‘moralizing men, the woke men, are actually weak men’. He argues that the out-group is gullible because it does not believe in the Christian God. ‘The problem of disbelieving in God, he tells ARC, is that ‘a man ends up believing anything’, including ‘new fads’ such as ‘white privilege; and ‘white supremacy’. He claims that in secular societies these beliefs lead to ‘panics’ that ‘sweep through the population, driven by the media, without any basis in reality’ (Shellenberger, 2025a).

This contradiction, between the out-group’s power and weakness, is logically resolved with conspiracism. In ways that intensify the out-group’s power and influence, speakers routinely assert unevidenced causal relationships between the out-group, ulterior motives, and outcomes that offend the in-group’s ideology.

According to ARC, the out-group may be feeble as individuals but through its ‘long march’ through institutions such as universities, public service media, and the World Economic Forum it becomes powerful enough to usher in totalitarian rule and destroy of ‘Western Civilisation’.

Guinness (2025) refers to ‘powerful movements within our own societies against the freedom of self-government’. Hirsi Ali (2025) blames ‘the globalists’ who ‘dreamt of world government’ and have ‘transformed the modern university into a place for brainwashing young minds into hating their national identity’.

Similarly, without providing any evidence, Shellenberger (2025a) claims Klaus Schwab, from The World Economic Forum, ‘controls the free leaders of Europe, including Ursula von der Leyen’. He says ‘the plan’ is ‘to link your vaccine history, your social media posts, and your bank accounts. The idea would be that tweet the wrong thing or refuse to get the jab, and you could find your bank accounts frozen’ (Shellenberger, 2025a). Weinstein (2025) agrees that ARC is fighting a war against ‘Klaus’, ‘The World Economic Forum’, and ‘Davos’. He tells the audience that they are ‘all combatants to the people who practice hybrid warfare. We can all be manipulated from abroad. Tokyo Rose is everywhere’, the Biden White House ‘deliberately stagnated fields of theoretical physics’, ‘every hotel is a spy agency, and ‘you are constantly going from object to object that has a portal to spy on you’ (Weinstein, 2025). Marshall ends his Unherd piece with conspiracism – suggesting politicians had an ulterior motive (rather than trying to contain the virus) for quarantining citizens in their homes during the pandemic (Marshall, 2021).

Conspiracies are not just explanations. At ARC, they are incorporated in intensification strategies that reinforce category boundaries and binary distinctions. For this conference, the out-group always has a hidden ulterior motive. This also contributes the perspectivisation process – the in-group’s ‘special insight’ into these causal relationships implies they have a particular authority to speak on these topics.

Credentials and authority

To confer intellectual respectability and credibility on such techniques, speakers use the appeal to authority topos and refer to academic concepts such as postmodernism as symbolic currency to imply that they are offering a scholarly analysis. They then conflate this reading with moral condemnations characteristic of a 17^th Century Protestant church pulpit. For example, ARC co-founder Jordan Peterson calls the out-group ‘cynics’, ‘postmodernists’ and ‘Neo Marxists’ (Peterson, 2025) who, reassuringly for the conference, he says will be punished in the afterlife (for their crime of sabotaging the Judeo-Christian West): ‘The postmodernists be damned, which is virtually a certainty, by the way’ (Peterson, 2025).

Speakers at ARC repeatedly invoke academic and scientific credentials and institutional prestige as a discursive topos to legitimise ideological claims. ARC is only sceptical of science that challenges its ideology; otherwise the science is settled and unambiguous. The science of climate change is repeatedly dismissed as flawed, ideologically motivated and over-reaching: a tool for the intolerant, power-hungry and corrupt to exploit. Meanwhile, the science of demographic decline is unquestioned and framed as an emergency call for wealthy Christian nationalists to breed more children. Similarly, A. Brooks (2025) uses scientific authority to naturalise conservative ideological positions.

Response to public demand

Religious speakers, meanwhile, distance themselves from what the conference may appear to be in the eyes of journalists – ‘the right-wing Davos’, according to the Financial Times. As Barron (2025) claims, the conference is not a meeting of self-serving elites (like Davos), but a vital and timely response to an organic and unmet demand for Christianity across ‘the West’: ‘young people in the West’ have the ‘same cry’: ‘We want God! We want God! We want God!’ (Barron, 2025). This activates the topos of responsibility - the conference is framed here as a response this public demand rather than a meeting of millionaires that no-one outside the in-group requested.

Bespoke history

Several keynotes speak of crisis, catastrophe and decline. This is epitomised at the end of Ferguson’s (2025) keynote when he displays Thomas Cole’s Destruction (1836), which draws on Classical aesthetics to suggest that Western Europe is at the same stage of civilisational collapse. Weinstein (2025) agrees that, in this state, Europe is the ‘most dangerous place on Earth’. Guinness (2025) reinforces the severity of the zero-sum crisis: ‘We’re at the showdown moment in Western civilization’.

ARC’s keynote speakers adopt this framing by extensively using ‘we’ and ‘our’ to construct the in-group, celebrating ‘Western Civilisation’ as the in-group’s achievement. This strategy involves recruiting members to the in-group retrospectively from history. For example, Barron (2025) references historical figures to develop an association between religious belief and intellectual and cultural achievement. Within this narrative frame, various speakers claim ideas, values and ideological conditions for a perfect society emerged during the 17^th Century, peaked during the 19^th Century and are then deliberately destroyed by the enemy within during the 20^th Century. Because speakers offer such a bespoke interpretation of history, the tableau is often confusing and contradictory.

Marshall (2021) writes that ‘Classical Liberalism’, ‘moored’ by Christian values, emerged during the ‘Civil War’ and was institutionalised by ‘the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights’. Mosley (2025) repeats a version of this analysis: ‘The 17^th Century produced its share of Great Men thinkers like Milton’ and ‘men of action like Cromwell’ who was ‘a crusader for Christ and Liberty whose conscience led him to refuse the crown and extend religious tolerance to an extent unknown in his day’. He goes on to compare the Parliamentary Puritans to Elon Musk’s Doge employees: ‘raw ill-mannered young who say similar things’ (Mosley, 2025).

As well as Marshall and Mosley, Ferguson (2025) laments the waning influence of Protestantism. As a Professor of History at Harvard, Ferguson lends the authority topos to this narrative. He claims, ‘The cultural unmooring of the English-speaking world and of Protestant Europe is one of the most striking and understudied phenomena of modern times’ yet ‘it may be the most profound reason why we are not all thriving’ (Ferguson, 2025).

For Marshall, society reached its apotheosis in Britain during the 19^th Century. As he writes, in 19th Century Britain his ideology ‘carried all before it in the pursuit of great causes — widening the democratic franchise, opening the economy to free trade, educational reform, laying the foundations of the welfare state, eradicating the global slave trade’ (Marshall, 2021).

Marshall’s (2021) interpretation of history is recited back to him by those who also suggest societies last flourished during the 19th Century. Shellenberger (2025a) tells ARC that ‘loneliness has been growing in societies ever since the late 19^th Century’. Shellenberger (2025a) tells ARC that ‘loneliness has been growing in societies ever since the late 19th century’. Hirsi Ali, (2025) lauds the ‘old liberals of the 19^th Century had passionately believed in the nation state’. She claims that the out-group, ‘modern liberals’, ‘trashed the nation state’ by reasoning that nationalism had ‘caused the Holocaust’ (Hirsi Ali, 2025). Marshall refers to these modern liberals as ‘Progressives’, such as ‘Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times and Enlightenment liberals such as Bentham and Rawls’ (Marshall, 2021).

To explain this decline, Marshall (2021) indicts a ‘new, anthropocentric way of thinking’ that ‘arrived in the 18^th Century, bringing with it an alternative understanding of human nature, a new theory of human knowledge and a new calculus of virtue’. Guinness (2025) argues that this ‘was intended to implement the replacement for the Christian faith’. Marshall (2021) wants to return to a period when ‘meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible’ (Marshall, 2021). Barron agrees, ‘When God is bracketed, God is set aside or forgotten, societies tend to collapse’ (Barron, 2025). And, Hirsi Ali (2025) echoes this conclusion in her keynote, attributing Western decline to forgetting the ‘the Judaeo-Christian story of the Bible’ and ‘the Biblical understanding of human sinfulness’.

ARC’s narrative is confusing because speakers suggest a long 19^th Century, where Marshall’s utopia ended either at around the beginning or the end of Thatcher’s Prime Ministership (1979–1990). Thatcher was an exponent of traditional values such as the Protestant work ethic, and Protestant-inflected thrift and economic self-reliance. Yet, according to Fergusson, ‘Protestant Europe’ (including Thatcher’s UK?) and ‘the English-speaking world have, since 1981, (during Thatcherism) moved away from traditional to secular values’ (Ferguson, 2025). Alternatively, Hirsi Ali (2025) states in 1992 that, ‘Europe’ (including post-Thatcher UK?) was ‘still rooted in the Calvinist and Catholic Traditions’.

Ferguson (2025) disagrees with Marshall, Guinness, Barron and others about the Bible’s supremacy. He argues that, ‘All the good ideas necessary for a successful and flourishing civilization were had in the Scottish Enlightenment in the late 18^th Century.

ARC’s interpretation of history can also be described as ideological because it depends on omission and selectivity topoi and requires the exploitation of denial and ignorance. It offers a partial and exclusionary form of liberal philosophy, within which there are no non-Christian contributions to liberal thought, and no mentions of any liberal traditions outside the Anglo-American context. Equally, within ARC’s history there are no backlashes against progress; there is no resistance to liberal reforms from established churches, no religious intolerance enforced by violence, no conflict between religious authority and individual liberty, and no crimes such as sexual abuse within religious institutions. Unless it is to be dismissed as part of the out-group’s lack of insight and rigour, any discussion about the function of slavery, racism and violence within the British Empire is completely absent within ARC’s speeches.

For example, within The Scottish Enlightenment, that Ferguson valorises, the research and teaching of ‘Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, David Hume, James Cowle Prichard, Robert Knox and Arthur James Balfour proliferated racist ideas against African, Asian, Middle Eastern and other non-European peoples that underpinned enslavement and colonialism’ (Curry and Frith, 2025: 7).

This cannot be dismissed as a consensus ‘of its time’ because Stewart ‘repeatedly criticised Hume’s ‘inhuman opinion that the negroes being inferior to the Whites ought to be Slaves’, as well as Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that Africans ‘are not capable of much Reflection & their intellectual powers are very blunt [. . .] much inferior [to us] in Judgement’. However, ‘it is vital to note that Stewart agreed with Hume and Jefferson that non-European races were indeed inferior, but thought that they were not naturally inferior’ (Curry and Frith, 2025: 39).

When Marshall (2021) refers to ‘poison stemmed from the Enlightenment itself’ he is referring to secularism rather than this scientific racism. Rosen (2025) also summons a romanticised vision of American Founders that ignores contradictions between their virtue rhetoric and practices, especially their ownership of slaves and their exclusion of women and non-property owners from full citizenship.

These omission and selectively topoi are commonly used throughout ARC. As is the virtue by association topos that also counts on ignorance or forgetting. ARC’s declension narrative is therefore powered by a selective and partial interpretation of history. Within this, there is also no account of any challenges to capital – no slave rebellions and no working class political organisation. If we see environmentalism as challenge to capital, as I will show below, ARC’s bespoke history helps justify this community’s ideology.

Opposition to decarbonisation

Marshall’s (2025) keynote speech is predominately about decarbonisation’s threat to capital in the form of profits from fossil-fuel production. To make his case he weaves various argumentation topoi, nomination and intensification strategies to stitch together the conference’s thematic strands. Marshall and ARC continues to develop a binary distinction between the in-group and the out-group, to which he adds advocates of decarbonisation, whom he says, are ‘destroying our ancient rural landscapes’, the ‘English Countryside immortalized by constable and Turner’, ‘wrecking our industrial base’ and ‘impoverishing our people’ (Marshall, 2025).

There is no mention of other possible culprits that, in the many decades since Turner, have altered the landscape of the countryside including fossil fuel production, industrial development, cars, airports, financial speculation and profiteering from natural utilities, and hyper-intensive industrial farming. ARC’s framing of Western Civilisation in a state of crisis caused by someone else – this community’s out-group – and its bespoke history absolves its in-group and its ideology of any responsibility for changes the landscape as well as social and economic inequalities, pollution, and the carbon emissions that are causing global warming.

In their intensification strategy Marshall and others such as Lomborg (2025) and Wright (2025) claim the out-group is harming the national interest. Opponents of net-zero such as Lomborg are nominated as experts on climate. Through the process of perspectivization they are established at ARC as rational and scientific compared to (genuine) climatologists. Marshall claims the ‘net-zero zealots’ whom for ideological reasons alone, refuse to ‘dig for reliable sources of energy like coal’ or ‘drill for offshore oil and gas’ and instead they are ‘driving up our energy and electricity costs’ by ‘taxing carbon emissions’. Marshall calls these acts of ‘national economic suicide’ (Marshall, 2025).

Marshall further stigmatises and pathologises the out-group by likening its commitment to net-zero to mental illness called ‘climate derangement syndrome’ (Marshall, 2025). Again, he exonerates carbon-producing corporations. He does not blame them for causing recording-breaking global temperatures, a succession of extreme weather events, and the public’s ‘climate anxiety’. Instead he accuses former Vice President Al Gore of ‘launching climate anxiety on the world’ in 2009 (Marshall, 2025). This is a well-used tactic of climate sceptics and deniers to frame the fight against global warming as irrational, even insane (Reisigl and Wodak, 2017).

The out-group, Marshall implies, is also morally inferior to the in-group because it has ‘luxury beliefs’ (Marshall, 2025), suggesting it is putting its self-enriching ideological interests before the interests of the poor. He is also inverting the out-group’s accusations against investors such as himself who are profiteering from fossil fuels while parts of the world become unliveable without protections from extreme weather events. Alternatively, speakers at ARC tell the audience that unlike the out-group, they are the custodians of the poor’s interests. Marshall says net-zero is ‘immiserating and its main victims are the poor’ (Marshall, 2025). The US Secretary of State for Energy calls Net Zero 2050 ‘a sinister goal’ (Wright, 2025). This message is amplified by Kisin, who implies net-zero advocates have the ulterior motive of depopulating the planet in a way that gestures to conspiracy theorists: ‘At the core of the net-zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet, that if only we could stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe’ (Kisin, 2025).

In another example of ideological recursion, Bryce (2025) reinforces this message by activating responsibility and morality topoi while declaring decarbonising is unconscionable because it punishes the poor. Likewise Tinker (2025), who frames the intensification of fossil fuel production as humanitarian cause to help the poor and needy. Speakers therefore adopt the language of hated secularism to moralise their cause. Bryce calls the continued use of fossil fuels ‘energy humanism’ and the commitment to decarbonise an ‘anti-human theology’ (Bryce, 2025). The continued – even intensified – use of fossil fuels is therefore presented as non-ideological, rational, and moral.

In an inversion of Foucauldian notions of power (members of the in-group often blame Foucault for undermining Western civilisation), pro-fossil fuel speakers at ARC suggest the science of climate change is a social technology of power that is being exploited by ideologues. As the US Secretary for Energy says in his conference address, advocates for climate action ‘use’ climate as ‘a powerful tool’ ‘to grow government power, top-down control, and shrink human freedom’ (Wright, 2025).

As such science and technology are characterised as double-edged concepts that should not be in the ‘wrong hands’. As Mosley (2025) explains, ‘Artificial intelligence in particular could in the wrong hands become the most powerful tool of censorship, tyranny and dehumanization – already we have seen how AI can be aligned for political correctness’. Instead, he says, technology should ‘interact with old notions of liberty and religion’ bequeathed by ‘great men’ such as ‘Oliver Cromwell’. ARC, therefore, is not just about crisis and decline, it offers solutions that help further explain how and why the motely community shares a common purpose.

ARC’s message

The interpretive flexibility of concepts such as of ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ combined with ARC’s bespoke historical analysis and its faith free-market capitalism allows atheist white ethnonationalists, neoliberals, and devout Christians to agree on what needs to be done.

ARC’s message is that ‘Civilisation’ can be rescued from its enemies within with small-state, free-market, capitalism powered by fossil fuels and a return to a ‘Judeo-Christian’ society, which resembled the British Empire at its peak. Almost every speaker adopts an aspect of this ideology in some form. For Marshall this will reset ‘Western Civilisation’ to its utopian past. To reinforce this conclusion, various British speakers appeal to the prejudices of American free-market conservatives in the audience who are opposed to state health care. For example, the NHS, says Murray, ‘is a world leader in killing the elderly’ (Murray, 2025).

Ferguson agrees that to become prosperous again, ‘the West’ must reduce public spending and return to Protestant capitalism. Hirsi Ali (2025) objects to the ‘administrative state’ calling it a wasteful ‘bloated bureaucracy’. Badenoch also argues that cultural conservatism and shrinking the state will save the West from its enemies within. Other speakers problematise taxation. For example, Pesey says ‘we have the same problem that in your countries and on some we’re even better we got the gold medal for taxation’ (Pesey, 2025).

The Alliance frames this as ‘Responsible Citizenship’: as economically liberated individuals taking responsibility, sacrificing themselves to a higher moral purpose defined by God. As ARC’s co-founder, Peterson, calls it, ‘the deification of the principle of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice—the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community’ (Peterson, 2025). The state, he says, should be ‘organized under the divine principle of sacrifice desert to bloom and the land to abundance’ (Peterson, 2025).

The only dissenting voice at ARC to challenge the community’s image of itself is D. Brooks (2025). He said to ARC that ‘this may not please you but we produced Trump’; ‘some people think Donald Trump is a populist, but Donald Trump and Elon Musk went to an Ivy League school and became billionaires. JD Vance went to Yale, Pete Hegseth went to Princeton, Steven Miller went to Duke, Fox News types like Laura Ingraham went to Dartmouth. They represent the educated elite’ (Brooks, 2025). He concludes that they are ‘astoundingly incompetent’ and their ‘elite narcissism causes them to eviscerate every belief system they touch’.

A significant proportion of Marshall’s wealth is attributable to his investments in fossil fuels. According to DeSmog, campaigners who investigate global warming disinformation, others involved in Legatum Institute have similar financial interests (Bright and Grostern, 2023). However, given a lack of transparency and global offshoring of wealth and accounts, it is difficult for any researcher to provide detailed evidence for such claims within the UK’s jurisdiction. According to filings with the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Marshall’s fund owns shares worth £1.8 billion in fossil fuel firms. This includes companies that specialise in extracting, refining, transporting and distributing fossil fuels (Bright and Grostern, 2023). The fund reports a £175.6 million shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies (Bright and Grostern, 2023).

Given that ARC’s main shareholder and co-founder has these investments, ARC’s case for fossil fuels, its opposition to net-zero and other forms of market intervention, ARC’s ideology is also its moral justification for its leader’s wealth. Despite centring the power of sacrifice, this involves no sacrifices or concessions to the physics of global warming and no compromise on the living standards of the rich. Again, ARC’s discourse relies on selectivity, omission and ignorance. The ethics of forcing developing countries and geographically vulnerable populations to adapt to climate breakdown (while the West ‘innovates’ its way out of the crisis and ARC’s elite continues to profit from it) are never discussed at ARC.

Conclusion: Regressive neoliberalism

ARC is a theatre for what Miller-Idriss (2020) calls ‘radicalising myths’. It claims the past was superior on the basis of a selective, partial and misleading interpretation of history. It indulges this nostalgia to summon a purer and more ordered era that was colonial, Christian, and patriarchal. Its members use the concepts of ‘Western Civilisation’ and ‘Judeo-Christian’ values to frame their identity as fixed, ancient, uncontaminated, and superior, and claim this is under attack from a conspiring Other. Speakers at ARC blame the West’s imminent downfall on modern liberalism, feminism, multiculturalism, or, in more suggestive ways, immigration and Islam, then often use conspiracism create what Wodak (2019) calls ‘unreal scenarios’ within which members of the out-group are pulling the strings to manipulate macro events. These are all characteristics of the far-right (Kingdon, 2024; Valencia-García, 2020; Wodak, 2019).

The effect is to create a cultural firewall against the out group and a justification for ethnonationalism, aggressive securitisation and border control. Immigrants can never belong unless they can prove their multigenerational ‘ancestry’, ‘Judeo-Christian’ values, or otherwise pass for white European.

Yet, ARC is not a prototypical far right movement (Shroufi, 2024). Its conference does, however, erase the boundary between its Christian nationalism, its neoliberal commitments to a deregulated economy and small state, and the far-right. It therefore contributes to accelerating the convergence of these ideologies (Brown, 2019; Callison and Manfredi, 2020; Cooper, 2021; Fekete, 2018; Saull, 2018; Slobodian, 2025). Ultimately, ARC represents ‘regressive neoliberalism’ (Adams, 2025: 1281) because it gives licence to its members to roam the globe, spending their profits from fossil fuels on private universities, media outlets and other political interventions, exonerated from any guilt and inverting accusations of elite self-interest. Meanwhile, ARC’s enemies and scapegoats must remain confined to their geographical and normative boundaries that are codified in law, institutionalised, and aggressively policed by the in-group, albeit without the extreme violence committed by ‘men of action’, such as Cromwell, in the past.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Huw Crighton Davies https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2659-1465

References

Adams P (2025) Pedagogy and positioning theory: Relationships and the formation of context. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 33(4): 1277–1297.