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@docrussjackson
Nov 23, 2021 • 30 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
#THREAD

The Heritage Foundation is a dangerous & very influential US neoliberal free-market fundamentalist think tank that represents the interests of the 0.1%

Charles WL Hill: "given that the Heritage Foundation has a political agenda, its work should be viewed with caution."
In 2005, Heritage established the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

Thatcher herself maintained a long relationship with The Heritage Foundation. Shortly after leaving office, Thatcher was honoured by Heritage at a September 1991 dinner.
The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, & is one of many climate change denial organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil.

The Heritage Foundation strongly criticized the Kyoto Agreement to curb climate change.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
The Heritage Foundation projected that the 2009 American Clean Energy & Security Act would result in a cost of $1,870 per family in 2025 and $6,800 by 2035; although the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that it would only cost the average family $175 in 2020.
The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of voter fraud. Hans von Spakovsky, who heads their Election Law Reform Initiative, played an influential role in making alarmism about voter fraud mainstream among Republicans, despite having no evidence.

washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Following the 2020 presidential election—in which President Donald Trump made baseless claims of fraud after he was defeated for re-election—the Heritage Foundation launched a campaign in support of Republican efforts to make state voting laws more restrictive.
The antidemocratic Heritage Foundation, through its political arm, Heritage Action, plan to spend $24 million over two years across eight states to support efforts to restrict voting, in coordination with the Republican Party & other conservative groups.

motherjones.com/politics/2021/…
Over 20 election bills introduced by Republicans in early 2021 were based on a Heritage letter & report. They also mobilized in opposition to a Democratic bill to establish uniform nationwide voting standards, reform campaign finance law, & prohibit partisan redistricting.
Heritage Action spent $750,000 on television ads in Arizona to promote the false claim that "Democrats... want to register illegal aliens" to vote, even though the Democrats' legislation creates safeguards to ensure that ineligible people cannot register.
newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…
In 2021, the Heritage Foundation said one of its two priorities (along with pushing to tighten voting laws) was to push Republican-controlled states to ban or restrict critical race theory instruction - despite it being a perfectly respectable established academic sub-discipline.
Leading Conservatives Priti Patel, Liz Truss, Sajid Javid, Liam Fox, Daniel Hannan, & Owen Paterson & their donors have close ties to influential think tanks like the radical-right Heritage Foundation - determined to roll-back abortion rights in the US.

bylinetimes.com/2021/08/24/the…
Facing accusations of downplaying Islamophobia & known for his controversial & reactionary views, the "temporary" contract for the role of UK head of the 'Commission on Countering Extremism' was recently extended for the Heritage Foundation's hard-right extremist Robin Simcox.
The scariest thing about hard-right extremist weirdo Simcox is that while at the Heritage Foundation he argued that making white supremacy the subject of a "countering extremism policy" was mostly driven by "political correctness" & could be "overreach"!

independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…
The key point to remember is that this unimaginably well-resourced, antidemocratic & reactionary hard-right free-market think tank is part of a global network representing the interests of the 0.1%, which has it's eyes on the #NHS, & is now embedded in the heart of the UK Govt.
Groups like the Heritage Foundation & the UK Government threaten our freedoms with their unhinged, divisive & hateful 'anti-woke' rhetoric.

To paraphrase divisive hateful ex-corporate lobbyists & divide & rule specialist Priti Patel: Decent people should not tolerate this evil.
This #THREAD explores how Priti Patel learned the very effective dark arts strategy of 'Divide & Conquer' - now deployed by the Tory Government against the British people - when she worked for Weber Shandwick, representing the interests of Big Tobacco.

The Tufton St climate change denialist think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation had been partly funded by the Donors Trust, a “dark money ATM” for right wing business interests such as Charles Koch, which has strong links to the Heritage Foundation.

opendemocracy.net/en/global-warm…
The GWPF also received $210,525 in 2018 & 2020 from the US based Sarah Scaife Foundation – set up by the billionaire libertarian heir to an oil & banking dynasty, which was among the largest contributors to the climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.
The Sarah Scaife foundation has $30m worth of shares in 22 energy companies including $9m in Exxon & $5.7m in Chevron. It has bankrolled numerous conservative causes, including the right-wing Daily Caller news site & the UK Govt's friends, the Heritage Foundation think tank.
The Donors Trust has significant links to Koch family foundations, & like ALL Tufton St think tanks, “The groups funded by Donors Trust more or less pursue the same agenda—eliminate regulations, kneecap unions, shrink government, & transfer more power to the private sector.”
The Donors Trust gives significant sums to the Heritage Foundation, which has recently hosted Conservatives like Brandon Lewis, Priti Patel, Oliver Dowden, who recently gave a weird culture war speech about the ‘privet hedges of suburbia’, & Lord Frost.

leftfootforward.org/2022/03/oliver…
Dowden's absurd & embarrassing Heritage Foundation speech was - like any far-right conspiracy theory YouTuber - basically a 'random culture war phrase generator': "cancel culture"; a “woke psychodrama”; left wing activists "engaged in a form of Maoism".

huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/oliver-d…
Frost said that in Dowden, Lewis & Patel speaking at the Heritage Foundation “They are also a tribute to the huge role that Heritage, & you personally, Nile (Gardiner, Telegraph columnist & Heritage Foundation employee) here at the Margaret Thatcher Centre, have played in this.” ImageImage
Nile Gardiner, former aide to Thatcher & Director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, plays a leading role in connecting the architects of Brexit to US conservative funders through his Heritage role. Here’s the panel of an event he hosted online in 2021: Image
See @bakerstherald for analysis of one of the most dangerous people on earth, Matthew Elliott, & all the other key players in what is effectively a subversion of democracy & decency on an unimaginable scale, which is already having catastrophic results

bakerstreetherald.com
The Heritage Foundation pushed Brexit because it wants Britain to become a deregulated free-for-all for corporate power.

“unshackled from the strictures of EU bureaucracy, the British economy could register substantial improvements in key policy areas such as business freedom.” Image
Frost argued that Brexit allowed the UK to evade the “constraints on national democracy & freedom of choice” imposed by the EU.

Given recent profoundly antidemocratic developments in the UK, this is Orwellian double-speak on steroids.

It's now clear where culture war rhetoric coincides with right-wing populist nationalist/deregulatory antidemocratic libertarian (& some may say #neofascist) ideology: Frost went on to blame internationalism for creating “political disaffection” & “identity politics”.
This is similar to Dowden’s culture war rhetoric in his speech to the Heritage Foundation: the West WAS under attack by the forces of multicultualism & globalism, but now, thanks to Brexit it’s back, reasserting those national borders - but just not the problematic Irish one.
This @BylineTimes article explicitly links the culture war rhetoric now frequently deployed by hard-right politicians, pundits & press, with the frightening realpolitik of eroding democracy & essential safeguards, & transferring wealth from poor to rich.

bylinetimes.com/2022/02/14/rum…

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More from @docrussjackson

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Dec 12
🧵

Reform UK’s slick, stage-managed launch of a Christian Fellowship in St Michael’s Church is not some harmless Christmas-season publicity stunt. It is a clear and brazen step towards the Trumpification of UK politics, where religion is weaponised as a tool for cultural warfare and political mobilisation.

This is not organic Christian revival. It’s strategic political engineering.

Behind this development sit figures who have spent years trying to inject a US-style fusion of right-wing politics and religious identity into British political culture:

• Paul Marshall

A billionaire media financier with a clear ideological project: to build a hard-right cultural and religious counter-establishment. Through GB “News”, The |Spectator and UnHerd and other platforms he has amplified narratives about “woke attacks” on tradition, identity, and Christianity. The Islamophobic tweets he liked are disgusting. His network provides the media oxygen for precisely the kind of politicised Christianity on display at the Reform launch.

• James Orr

A Cambridge academic and prominent Anglican conservative intellectual, closely connected to the “post-liberal” movement and hard-right US conservative and Hungarian organisations. Orr openly promotes the idea of restoring Britain’s “Christian identity” through politics — a framing that sits uncomfortably close to the Christian-nationalist rhetoric of the US right. His advisory role to senior Reform figures is a clear sign of the ideological hardening underway.

• Danny Kruger

Long known for advocating a more “muscular” Christian politics, Kruger has repeatedly argued that the UK should explicitly root its laws and social policy in “Judeo-Christian values” - a dog whistle I explain in the next tweet.

This is the British echo of US culture-war evangelicalism: turning religion into a political badge, not a spiritual or moral tradition. His involvement in shaping Reform’s policy direction cements the party’s shift toward faith-infused populism.

• Calvin Robinson

Though no longer in the Church of England, disgraced former GBN presenter and political extremist Robinson remains one of the most prominent voices pushing an aggressive “anti-woke, anti-liberal” form of Christianity in the media — including endorsing narratives that paint inclusive or progressive churches as heretical. His alignment with Reform’s messaging shows how the party is deliberately courting polemical, grievance-driven Christian activism.

Together, these figures represent a new coalition: a British attempt to import the US religious-right model, with all its corrosive social consequences.

Using St Michael’s Cornhill — a church rooted in the conservative evangelical network — as the backdrop for this political spectacle is shocking in a UK context.

This is not merely a “religious event attended by politicians.” It was a political rally held in a church, wrapped in Anglican aesthetics.

The Church of England has historically avoided such political entanglement precisely because it knows how dangerous it is to let a religious institution become a vessel for partisan identity politics.

Britain is not America — but Reform UK wants to change that

What we are seeing is the deliberate construction of a political identity rooted in far-right themes lurching toward a contemporary form of Christofascism:

grievance Christianity
nostalgia for a mythic “Christian Britain”
hostility to minorities and multiculturalism
anti-LGBTQ+ theology rebranded as “family values”
anti-immigrant populism framed as moral duty
and a narrative of cultural siege identical to the US evangelical right

It is the Trump playbook, translated into British idiom.

This is disturbing, because once a political movement fuses religious identity with national identity, democratic debate changes: Opponents are no longer wrong — they are heretical. Policies are no longer argued — they are sanctified. Compromise becomes betrayal. And politics becomes a zero-sum culture war.

Britain has largely avoided this polarising poison. Reform UK is now trying to inject it directly into the bloodstream of national politics.

Reform UK’s “Christian Fellowship” is not about faith. It is the public unveiling of a British Christian-nationalist project — backed by wealthy ideologues, amplified by culture-war media, and borrowing heavily from the most divisive elements of the US right.

It is a serious warning sign of where Reform UK intends to take the country: toward a politics defined by religious grievance, cultural division, and the erosion of the pluralistic norms that have protected Britain from the worst excesses of American political extremism.
Concerning Paul Marshall:
Concerning James Orr:
Read 10 tweets
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Dec 9
🧵

How have populist UK politicians and Britain’s right-wing press and broadcasters got away with repeating — day after day, year after year — the brazenly false and wildly misleading claim that we live in a “high-welfare, high-tax” country? Image
Why the “High-Welfare, High-Tax” Myth Persists.

The claim that Britain is a “high-welfare, high-tax” country is a shameless lie—brazenly false—as OECD and OBR data consistently show: the UK's tax take is ~36% of GDP (mid-table globally, and well under the EU average of 40.5%). Image
The UK's total tax take of 36% is far under France's 45% or Denmark's 46%. Welfare benefits spending (including state pensions) is a modest ~11% of GDP—among the lowest in the OECD, well below the EU average of 17.5%, and just under half that of France (20.5%) and Italy (20%). Image
Read 31 tweets
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Dec 8
🧵

Not only has Nigel Farage shamelessly normalized far right discourse, but Reform UK have welcomed a new generation of young, radicalised, Andrew Tate fanboys who think it's acceptable to spread divisive bigoted lies and disinformation, and to make crass bigoted 'jokes'. Image
Joseph Boam is a radicalised 22-year-old Tate fanboy who started out as a Tory, running as a district councillor, then switching to Reform UK in 2024 and becoming a councillor in May 2025 representing the Whitwick division on Leicestershire County Council for the Reform UK party. Image
A former KFC worker, who has worked with his dad on sheds and property renovation, despite his total lack of any relevant experience or knowledge of the area, he was appointed Council deputy leader and cabinet member for adult social care—which ispatently absurd. Image
Read 14 tweets
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Dec 5
🧵

‘The Psychology of the New Far Right: Privilege, Fear, and Media Power in the Rise of Authoritarianism.’

Fear, belonging, and power are being manipulated into a frightening new age of populist outrage and algorithmic media, argues Dr Russell Jackson.

bylinesupplement.com/p/the-psycholo…
I've reproduced the article in 🧵 form, below, because its a subscriber only article from @BylineTimes.

You can subscribe here, and I would encourage you to - Bylines tells the stories and undertakes investigations many national news media fear to.

subscribe.bylinetimes.com
Across the West, figures such as Trump, JD Vance, Farage, Johnson, Tice, Kruger, and Lowe helped normalise far-right populist rhetoric within mainstream politics. Their appeal is anti-elite—yet they themselves embody the privilege they claim to challenge.

populismstudies.org
Read 91 tweets
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Nov 21
🧵

In May, Reform UK became the UK’s first party to accept crypto donations; experts warned of major money-laundering and foreign interference risks.

The NCA says Tether—backed by Reform’s £13.7M donor Christopher Harborne—has been used by Russia to fund its war in Ukraine. Image
A multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto—digital tokens hiding users’ identities—has enabling “sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state”.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
In 2023, the hedge fund co-founded by GB "News" owner Paul Marshall, who employs 60% of anti-Net Zero Reform UK's MPs, had £1.8 BILLION invested in fossil fuel firms.

Harborne (who has Thai citizenship under the name 'Chakrit Sakunkrit) also makes money from fossil fuels.

Read 17 tweets
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Nov 19
🧵

I and countless others are sick to death of the billionaire-funded Reform UK propaganda machine, GB “News”, and their decontextualised ‘facts’ that would make Goebbels blush.

Let’s examine the claim that “one quarter of foreign sex offenders come from just five countries”.
Yes, the raw data comes from a genuine Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prison census, but the way it’s being weaponised is deeply misleading.

The statistic sounds explosive, and deliberately so: a factoid engineered to sound like a revelation of hidden danger.
The right-wing information pipeline: a cherry-picked fragment of official data stripped of context, laundered through an opaquely funded “think tank” that isn't a think tank, amplified by billionaire-funded media, and weaponised by opportunistic politicians for electoral gain.
Read 38 tweets

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