Origin Story

Welcome to Origin Story. This week we explore the world of think tanks, a term that has developed two very different meanings. To many people, it suggests deceptively named and opaquely funded vehicles for the political agendas of right-wing billionaires — think Tufton Street. Yet most of the world’s leading think tanks still cleave to the original intention of producing conscientious research and bold new ideas, independent of political parties. How and when did these paths diverge?

The first think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was born in 1910 during a period when governments were increasingly interested in using data and expertise to generate more rational policy-making. Accelerated by the calamitous irrationality of the First World War, this mission produced such influential bodies as Chatham House and the Brookings Institution.

The so-called eggheads proved their worth in a crisis, from the New Deal to the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the quintessential think tank (a term coined in 1958) was the RAND Corporation and the industry’s first celebrity was nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, a charismatic provocateur who boasted about “thinking about the unthinkable”.

In the UK, however, a new kind of think tank was being born. In 1955, chicken farmer Antony Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs as a power base from which the pioneers of neoliberalism could wage their long war against the Keynesian consensus, following Friedrich Hayek’s theory of political change. Their patience paid off. Along with the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute, the IEA built the framework for

Thatcherism in the 1970s. Likewise in the US, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute furnished Ronald Reagan with an armada of policies and advisers. The neoliberal revolution was incubated in these new-model think tanks. The centre-left was losing this war of ideas.

By the 1980s, then, think tanks had acquired a more controversial reputation, using their charitable tax status to funnel money from billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers into a vast network of organisations, books, journals, university programs and media operators, serving not just their ideological agendas but their financial interests. It was very far from the original notion of think tanks as a non-partisan “bridge between knowledge and power”.

What do the first think tanks tell us about the dream of government based on facts and expertise? Who were the tycoons and intellectuals who joined forces to launch a new wave of think tanks? How did Hayek’s followers build from scratch an infrastructure that made Thatcherism and Reaganism possible? How is that nakedly ideological projects can present themselves as philanthropy and anonymous, tax-free donations can shape our politics so profoundly? And why are the names of think tanks so interchangeably boring?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

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Reading list

Books

• Richard Cockett – Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter- Revolution 1931-1983 (1994)

• Paul Dickson – Think Tanks (1972)

• Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (2005)

• F.A. Hayek – The Road to Serfdom (Reader’s Digest abridged version) (1945)

• Jane Mayer – Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires Is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US (2016)

• Thomas Medvetz – Think Tanks in America (2014)

• Madsen Pirie – Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute (2012)

• James A. Smith – The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (1991)

Articles

• Dr James Barham – ‘Top Influential Think Tanks Ranked for 2024’, Academic Influence (16

October 2023)

• Tom Bawden – ‘The address where Eurosceptics and climate change sceptics rub shoulders’, Independent (10 February 2016)

• Chloe Farand – ‘Mapped: Whistleblower Accuses Nine Organisations of Colluding Over Hard Brexit’, DeSmog (23 July 2018)

• Richard Fink – ‘Structure of Social Change’, Philanthropy Magazine (Winter 1996)

• F. A. Hayek – ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’, University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949)

• Richard Kostelanetz – ‘One-Man Think Tank’, New York Times (1 December 1968)

• Jane Mayer – ‘Covert Operations’, New Yorker (23 August 2010)

• Jane Mayer – ‘Is IKEA the New Model for the Conservative Movement?’, New Yorker (15 November 2013)

• James G. McGann, ‘2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report’, University of Pennsylvania, Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (28 January 2021)

• Louis Menand – ‘Fat Man’, New Yorker (20 June 2005)

• George Monbiot – ‘Number 10 and the secretly funded lobby groups intent on undermining democracy’, Guardian (1 September 2020)

• New York Times staff – ‘49 Scholars Hold Man Up to Mirror’, New York Times (21 September 1958)

• David Perlman – ‘Man’s Actions Challenge a Braintrust’, San Francisco Chronicle (23 March 1958)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ever since the birth of evangelical Christianity in the 1730s, believers have disagreed over whether to dedicate themselves to changing society as well as converting individuals. For most of that time, the most activist American Protestants were politically progressive but that all changed in the 1970s thanks to two activist entrepreneurs: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

Falwell and Robertson turned televangelism, or the “electric church”, into a lucrative industry, producing celebrity preachers like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. They also had unprecedented political ambitions. Beginning with Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979 and expanding with Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the 1990s, their crusade sought to put social conservatism at the heart of the Republican Party and wage a culture war against so-called “secular humanism”. What Darwinism was to the original fundamentalists of the 1920s, abortion and homosexuality were to the new religious right.

Evangelicals gave Republicans their votes in return for policies but this quid pro quo was complicated by broken promises, overreach and scandal. The movement and the party developed a symbiotic relationship that proved mutually corrupting. Once evangelicals threw themselves behind the strikingly ungodly Donald Trump, conservatism seemed to overtake Christianity. Even as evangelical churches boom in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the American movement is losing support and influence, turning off young people with its intolerant dogma. Perhaps evangelicals were right to keep politics at arm’s length.

How responsible are Falwell and Robertson for our present era of conspiracy theories and culture wars? Did the fundamentalist tradition ultimately prevail or is this something else? What place is there now for liberal evangelicals? What happened to the big-tent message of Billy Graham and has evangelicalism today betrayed its roots in its quest for political power? And what influence is it having on politics in the UK?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985)

• Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954)

• D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to

the 1980s (1989)

• Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992)

• Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005)

• Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025)

• Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950)

• Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980)

• ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995)

• Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017)

• Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922)

• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)

• Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018)

• Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024)

• Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006)

• Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991)

• Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996)

• Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976)

Films and podcasts

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000)

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, written by Abe Sylvia and directed by Michael Showalter (2021)

• Inherit the Wind, written by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith and directed by Stanley Kramer (1960)

• The Testament of Ann Lee, written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet and directed by Mona Fastvold (2025)

• Things Fell Apart: 1000 Dolls, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (9 November 2021)

• Things Fell Apart: Dirty Books, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (16 November 2021)

• Things Fell Apart: A Miracle, presented by Jon Ronson, Radio 4 (23 November 2021)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Origin Story, the show about why we are where we are. This week we begin the story of evangelical Christianity and its influence on politics.

Starting in the 1730s, Protestants in colonial America replaced the dour strictures of the Puritans with an ecstatic, empowering new creed that promised salvation through conversion: the word evangelical means spreading the good news. Over the next 150 years it swept the country through waves of revivalism, as star preachers like Charles Finney and Dwight Moody professionalised the business of soul-saving. The movement changed Britain, too. 

Evangelicalism cut across all the major Protestant denominations but believers disagreed over the timing of the prophesied Millennium and therefore whether they should focus on converting individuals or reforming society. Activist followers of the Social Gospel were at the forefront of the fight to end evils like slavery and child labour. It was slavery that caused the formation of a more conservative Southern church.

By the early twentieth century, factional conflicts were piling up: over social reform, Biblical scholarship, the theory of evolution. Some evangelicals felt that there were effectively two religions, with liberals (or modernists) pitted against conservatives (or fundamentalists). The fundamentalists were gathering force until 1925, when Tennessee prosecuted a teacher named John Scopes for teaching Darwinism. A national media event, the trial made fundamentalism appear intolerant, ignorant and absurd, leading to decades of retreat and quiet rebuilding.

America’s post-war evangelical megastar was Billy Graham, whose canny big-tent messaging and horror of controversy chimed with President Eisenhower’s tolerant civic religion. But through radio, television and bestselling books, the new fundamentalists were laying the ground for a culture war. A string of controversies in the 1970s revealed a much more militant and aggressive form of Christianity that was determined to transform not just evangelicalism but all of America.

Why did evangelicalism become the dominant American religion and what part did British thinkers play? Who were the charismatic men and women who spread the word? Why did the battle between modernists and fundamentalists become so bitter, and how did the fundamentalists recover from the humiliation of the Scopes trial? How does the ambition to reform society complicate the task of conversion? And how did Martin Luther King inadvertently inspire the fundamentalists to finally become a political force?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Robert Ajemian – ‘Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word’, Time (2 September 1985)

• Anonymous – ‘Billy Graham: A New Kind of Evangelist’, Time (25 October 1954)

• D.W. Bebbington – Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to

the 1980s (1989)

• Paul S. Boyer – When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992)

• Peter J. Boyer – ‘The Big Tent’, New Yorker (15 August 2005)

• Isaac Chotiner – ‘How Donald Trump Is Teaching Christians to Abandon Empathy’, New Yorker (1 April 2025)

• Whitney Cross – The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York 1800-1850 (1950)

• Jerry Falwell – Listen, America!: The Conservative Blueprint for America’s Moral Rebirth (1980)

• ‘The Gospel According to Ralph Reed’, Time (15 May 1995)

• Frances Fitzgerald – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017)

• Harry Emerson Fosdick – ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ (21 May 1922)

• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)

• Hal Lindsey – The Late Great Planet Earth (1970)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Billy Graham’s Movement Lost Its Way’, New Yorker (21 February 2018)

• Michael Luo – ‘The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind’, New Yorker (4 March 2021)

• Michael Luo – ‘How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again’, New Yorker (29 July 2024)

• Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• George M. Marsden – Fundamentalism and American Culture: Second Edition (2006)

• Pat Robertson – The New World Order (1991)

• Damian Thompson – The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium (1996)

• Kenneth L. Woodward, John Barnes and Laurie Lisle – ‘Born Again: The Year of the Evangelicals’, Newsweek (25 October 1976)

Films and podcasts

• The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2000)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story and part two of the story of J.K. Rowling. In this episode we turn away from her life story towards her public statements and the information she is consuming.

In 2020, Rowling publishes her first full-length statement about her gender-critical beliefs and it becomes her defining issue. We unpack some of the phrases she uses and the books she is reading and we explore what the science says about key issues: safety in trans-inclusive spaces, trans women (and women with Differences in Sex Development) in sports, and healthcare provision for gender-questioning youth.

Since 2018 trans people in the UK have faced an enormous backlash: rising prejudice, restricted healthcare, political abandonment and obsessive media hostility. And Rowling has put herself in the forefront. Her tone has become more aggressive and her activism more overt, accelerated by Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. So when HBO announced its ambitious new Harry Potter TV series last year, in the midst of the Trump administration’s war on trans Americans and the UK Supreme Court’s explosive ruling on gender identity, it became a battleground. It’s hard to separate the art from the artist when supporting the art means funding the artist’s activism.

How did Rowling move from the appearance of moderation to explicit militancy and how does that align with her professed values? Are her arguments supported by the research? How did anti-trans sentiment go mainstream so quickly? What are the ethics of continuing to consume Rowling’s work? And is the viciousness of right-wing transphobia causing some people to think twice about the consequences of their beliefs?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

Articles

• O. Rose Broderick – ‘Evidence Undermines “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” Claims’, Scientific American (24 August 2023)

• Cass Review: Final Report (2024)• Christina Cauterucci – ‘Impeccable Timing, Pamela Paul!’, Slate (16 February 2023)

• Theara Coleman – ‘A timeline of JK Rowling’s anti-trans shift’, The Week US (April 2026)

• Matt Craig – ‘J.K. Rowling is a Billionaire — Again’, Forbes (30 May 2025)

• Laura Dattaro – ‘Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity’, The Transmitter (14 September 2020)

• Caroline Davies – ‘JK Rowling’s journey from Harry Potter creator to gender-critical campaigner’, Guardian (18 April 2025)

• Sarah Ditum et al. – ‘An Oral History of the Gender War’, The Radical Notion (Autumn/Winter 2024)

• Alona Ferber – ‘Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”’, New Statesman (22 September 2020)

• Molly Fischer – ‘Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?’, The Cut (22 December 2020)

• Amelia Hansford – ‘JK Rowling sets up “women’s fund” to support gender-critical legal cases’, Pink News (26 May 2025)

• Nick Hilton – ‘JK Rowling, Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist’, New Statesman (15 January 2024)

• Katherine J. Igoe – ‘JK Rowling’s Under-the-Radar Book Series Gives a Clear Picture of Her Beliefs’, Marie Claire (5 August 2020)

• Jessica Kant – ‘Anatomy of a Moral Panic’, jessk.org (3 February 2024)

• Jessica Kant – ‘Welcome to the anti-trans outrage factory’, jessk.org (8 February 2026)

• Alice McCool – ‘How the US Christian Right and Anti-Abortion Lobbyists are Reshaping NHS Policy’, Byline Times (2 April 2026)

• Parker Molloy – ‘The IOC’s New Policy Isn’t Really a Trans Story’, The Present Age (26 March 2026)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Origin Story. This week we begin the story of J.K. Rowling and how the world’s most beloved author became its most divisive. How did she become obsessed with trans rights and how did her colossal wealth and celebrity shape the backlash?

We’re telling two parallel stories. One is how Joanne Rowling transformed into J.K. Rowling. The first Harry Potter book comes out of dark times: a shattering bereavement, a terrible marriage, relative poverty and a crushing sense of failure. When it is published in 1997, it changes Rowling’s life beyond recognition: the publishing industry’s equivalent of Beatlemania. By 2000, the attention is overwhelming and the religious right is denouncing her for endorsing witchcraft. By the time she moves into fiction for adults in 2012, her life seems guarded but stable. But then she joins Twitter and becomes very interested in online discourse at the birth of “cancel culture”.

The second story is about feminism’s fraught relationship with trans inclusion and the concept of gender identity. This has divided feminists since the second wave in the 1970s but it came to the fore in 2010s as trans visibility reached an all-time high and so-called “gender critical” feminists rallied to oppose the introduction of self-ID legislation. Disparate issues such as prisons, sports and youth healthcare were pulled into a movement that fundamentally denied gender identity. In the US, anti-trans activism was another wedge issue for social conservatives but in the UK it emerged from the centre left — and that’s where Rowling came in.

This is also a story about social media and what happens when a disagreement about civil rights plays out on Twitter. That’s where, in 2017, Rowling begins quietly expressing interest in anti-trans voices. After some initial denials, she breaks cover in 2019 by supporting Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who claims to have lost her job due to her gender critical views. Overnight, this one tweet transforms Rowling’s reputation, mainstreaming the movement while dismaying many Harry Potter fans and horrifying trans people. This is the rupture. There is no turning back.

What can Rowling’s early life tell us about the path she has taken over the last decade? What is her relationship to fame and fandom? Why did the question of trans rights become all-consuming? What do gender critical feminists believe? And why can people not even agree on what words to use? It’s a story of obsession, polarisation, celebrity, Twitter and how people can radically change.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

Articles

• Decca Aitkenhead – ‘JK Rowling: ‘The worst that can happen is that everyone says,‘That’s shockingly bad”’, The Guardian (22 September 2012)

• Julie Bindel – ‘Gender benders beware’, The Guardian (31 January 2004)

• Jackson Bird – ‘“Harry Potter” Helped Me Come Out as Trans, But J.K. Rowling Disappointed Me’, New York Times (21 December 2019)

• Theara Coleman – ‘A timeline of JK Rowling’s anti-trans shift’, The Week US (April 2026)

• Caroline Davies – ‘JK Rowling’s journey from Harry Potter creator to gender-critical campaigner’, Guardian (18 April 2025)

• Sarah Ditum et al. – ‘An Oral History of the Gender War’, The Radical Notion (Autumn/Winter 2024)

• Alona Ferber – ‘Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”’, New Statesman (22 September 2020)

• Molly Fischer – ‘Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?’, The Cut (22 December 2020)

• Simon Hattenstone – ‘Harry, Jessie and Me’, The Guardian (8 July 2000)

• Paris Lees – ‘On Germaine Greer and the Hypocrisy of the “Left”’, Vice (20 November 2015)

• Eve Livingston – ‘How an Online Forum for Moms Became a Toxic Hotbed of Transphobia’, Vice (6 December 2018)

• Dorian Lynskey – ‘The Burchill Ultimatum’, 33 Revolutions Per Minute blog (14 January 2013)

• Ian Parker – ‘Mugglemarch’, New Yorker (24 September 2012)

• Aja Romano – ‘Is J.K. Rowling transphobic? Let’s let her speak for herself.’, Vox (30 May 2025)

• J.K. Rowling – ‘Text of J.K. Rowling’s Speech’, Harvard Gazette (5 June 2008)

• Amia Srinivasan – ‘Who Lost the Sex Wars’, New Yorker (6 September 2021)

Books

• Hannah Barnes – Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (2023)

• Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

• Shon Faye – The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (2021)

• Helen Joyce – Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality (2021)

• Sean Smith – J.K. Rowling: A Biography (2001)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices