How a would-be pigeon-killer became a Fox News pundit
This article is more than 8 years oldJason WilsonAt a conservative convention in Colorado, I heard a familiar Australian voice. Meet Nick Adams, whose career trajectory is depressingly typical on the right
At the end of last month, for my sins, I attended the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado. The last thing I expected was to find there was third-division Australian political hacks.
The big drawcards for the faith-and-flag US conservatives in attendance were speeches from the (mostly dead-end) presidential candidates whose appeal is entirely to the rightward edge of the US Republican party. More interesting for me were some of the filler sessions, which hinted at the political right’s global institutional capacities.
One fun panel was on “the decline of the Mainstream Media”. Mentally, all the panellists were in that topsy-turvy world where the the multinational conglomerates that produce most newspapers and current affairs broadcasts are in the grip of the political left. I was less struck by the formulaic content than I was the panel’s composition, which had a decidedly international flavour.
The chair was Englishman Raheem Kassam, who glories in the title of editor-in-chief of Breitbart London. This is the trans-Atlantic expansion of the original US Breitbart bilge pump, which came to prominence by making up stories about community organising group Acorn. Kassam’s took time out recently to be Nigel Farage’s adviser ahead of and during the British general election.
Another Englishman, Ben Harris-Quinney, was representing the Bow Group, a London thinktank long associated with the Conservative party. That association has become less certain during Harris-Quinney’s chairmanship, after he endorsed Ukip ahead of the recent UK election, several research fellows resigned, and several of the Tory grandees who are patrons of the organisation expressed their strong disapproval.
Completing the international contingent was Australia’s own Nick Adams, billed as a “bestselling author and Fox News commentator”. Adams started out in Sydney as a Young Liberal activist. He was elected to Ashfield council while still a student, and in 2005 became the country’s youngest deputy mayor. In office, his big idea was to kill the municipality’s pigeons in order to reduce the spread of Avian flu.
Ashfield should be inhospitable to pigeonsNick Adams“Ashfield should be inhospitable to pigeons,” he said at a council meeting. Avian influenza does not respect borders ... I’m not an expert. I’m not an accountant. I’m certainly not a pest controller. Don’t ask me about procedure. What I would like to see is no pigeons in our area.”
He also appeared to think immigration was part of the council’s brief, and took time out to denounce multiculturalism: “It creates groups and pockets of people that of course, then feel that there are certain elements of superiority and inferiority and I think that we need to be united.”
He ran into political trouble because his attempts to launch himself as a motivational speaker in the US meant that he was frequently absent from council meetings. A journalist asked him what his story was, Adams answered with a tirade of abuse, and he was consequently suspended from the Liberal party for six months.
Later, he turned up as the PR guy for “The Halloween Institute”. This was a fictional front group which organised a “protest” attended exclusively by paid lingerie models, got a whole lot of free media for a costume hire store, and earned everyone who carried the story a deserved shellacking on Media Watch.
At this point, Adams seemed destined to become a footnote in some future history of Australian political chancers. But nope, there he was, giving an unctuous on-stage introduction to the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who in 2013 appointed Adams an “honorary Texan”.
He finally did get that speaking career started after he moved across the Pacific, and now has an agency to take care of him. He also has columns at conservative clearinghouse Townhall and is a “fellow in anglosphere studies” at Colorado Christian University.
Adams has published books addressed to the US conservative movement (The American Boomerang does brisk business on Amazon, and has been blurbed by everyone from Dick Morris to Chuck Norris). His schtick has gotten him a slot on Fox News’s talking heads roster (you may remember when he showed up saying that Australian public opinion might turn against our gun laws after the Lindt Cafe shooting).
And you really must check out his motivational videos.
The fact that people like Adams can fall upwards into cushy sinecures and media careers – and indeed the fact that known blunderers like Harris-Quinney can get a berth at an occasion where people are auditioning for the Republican party presidential nomination – tells us something about what philosopher William Connolly calls the right’s “resonance machine”. And not just that it’s well-funded.
It also tells us that in this context, ideas as such are not very important. Mostly they have long been settled. Foreign policy should be hawkish, government small, borders fenced, taxes lowered, and flags honoured. Most important, the traditional family should not only be the symbolic heart of the nation, but the locus of all privilege.
These basic ideas animate conservatives from Canberra to Colorado Springs, from Huntsville to Hampshire. They persist not because they are persuasive, but because – through media outlets, the output of think tanks, educational institutions, and sheer habit of mind – they have become lodged at the level of people’s identity.
This ethos and its howl of rage for lost privilege must be ceaselessly confirmed, from a number of different directions. Hearing the same bromides delivered with energy in an Australian accent provides further confirmation that the whole world really is as the conservative weltanschauung says it is. Adams doesn’t need a new tune to get his break, he’ll get enough cheers by producing a variation on an old one.
It may be that we on the left spend too much time cheering on TV satirists who “destroy” elements of an obviously self-contradictory ideology. People like Adams are beyond parody.
By contrast, we may not spend enough time thinking about their success in reiterating a story that enables individuals within a movement to make sense of their lives, and which moves them at an affective level. We may never have the resources to replicate the right’s infrastructure, but we should have the capacity to help people integrate politics into a whole way of life. Otherwise, the joke’s not on Nick Adams, it’s on us.
- This article was amended on 15 July 2015 following a complaint.
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