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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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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
GET A GRIP Profile picture
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
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 19
🧵

Reform UK’s head of Policy is a privately educated son of immigrants called Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf.

Yusuf is a shameless liar.

Below, I'll expose just a few of his more recent brazen lies and misleading claims about asylum seekers, immigrants, and ‘foreign nationals’.
In the September 2025 @SkyNews Immigration Debate, chaired by Trevor “Muslims are not like us” Phillips, Reform UK’s head of policy Zia Yusuf made a series of inaccurate and highly misleading claims about migration, and more recently, on @BBCNewsnight, about social housing. Image
These assertions are easily disproved with publicly available data, but often go largely unchallenged on air, despite being about some of the most sensitive and polarised issues in politics.

Yusuf started by claiming that UK net migration “last year” was “about a million.” Image
Read 39 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 17
🧵

When a newspaper repeatedly publishes misleading, distorted, or outright inaccurate stories, the public expects independent regulators to step in.

What if I told you the editor responsible for these stories is now in charge of writing the very rules that govern press ethics? Image
Privately educated Chris Evans, editor of The Daily Telegraph since 2014, has—since January 2024—simultaneously served as Chair of the IPSO Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, the body that drafts, reviews, and rewrites the ethical rulebook that the UK press is meant to follow. Image
Evans holds this regulatory role at a time when his own paper is producing more factual corrections and clarifications than almost any other major UK outlet — with an overwhelming concentration in politically weaponised right-wing themes.

telegraph.co.uk/news/0/telegra…
Read 25 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 11
🧵 OPEN LETTER

Defend the @BBC Before It’s Gone

The BBC isn’t perfect — but it’s ours. As coordinated attacks on its independence intensify, I warn that if we don’t defend it now, we may lose more than a broadcaster — we may lose a cornerstone of British democracy... Image
As a long-time critic of the @BBC, let me spell it out: what we’re seeing right now isn’t organic outrage — it’s a sophisticated coordinated campaign by ideological enemies and commercial competitors to undermine the BBC’s independence and funding. Image
If you can’t see that, you’re being played — and that’s exactly the point.

Let’s start with Michael Prescott, author of the dodgy dossier leaked exclusively to The Telegraph, who is a PR man and former political editor at Murdoch’s Sunday Times.

news.sky.com/story/who-is-m…
Read 40 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Nov 10
🧵

Growing numbers of people are angry and disillusioned with the political establishment.

Desperate voters are easy prey for manipulative populists—as they were in Germany in the 1930s.

But the problem isn't immigrants or religious minorities. It's always wealth distribution. Image
The story of wealth in Britain over the past eight decades since WWII is not one of ‘the invisible hand’, but of deliberate policy choices—choices that once built one of the most equal society in modern history, but now sustain one of the most unequal in the developed world. Image
Data tracking wealth distribution from 1945 to 2025 reveal a striking U-shaped curve: a rapid reduction in wealth inequality after World War II, making Britain one of the most equal countries on earth by the mid 1970s, followed by an unbroken rise.

Read 31 tweets

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