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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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Sep 13
🧵

OK, I'll bite.

The word Fascism isn't 'meaningless'.

To spell out why, we need to unpack both the underlying implication of Andrew Doyle's argument and the reasons why it fails to adequately account for contemporary political dangers. Image
Andrew Doyle asserts that the term "fascism" is misused to the point of recklessness, echoing George Orwell’s 1944 observation that the word had been rendered meaningless. Doyle’s concern is not uncommon—but imho, it’s ultimately misplaced, especially in today’s context.
While it’s true that “fascism” is sometimes deployed rhetorically or hyperbolically (eg by Trump), Doyle’s framing dangerously downplays the genuine resurgence of fascist-adjacent movements across the Western world and undermines the analytical clarity necessary to confront them. Image
Read 23 tweets
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Sep 8
🧵

Boris Johnson appears to have had a secret meeting with billionaire Peter Thiel - perhaps the most fanatical of the libertarian Oligarchs and co-founder of the controversial US data firm Palantir, the year before it was given a role at the heart of the UK’s pandemic response. Image
A month after entering No 10, Johnson and his senior adviser Dominic Cummings had a meeting with Thiel, leaked files suggest.

Johnson is now likely to face questions about whether the non-disclosure amounts to a breach of the ministerial code.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/s…
The hour-long afternoon meeting on 28 August 2019 was marked “private” in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings.

Read 12 tweets
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Aug 31
🧵

Elon Musk has been amplifying far-right accounts again, including Tommy Robinson, Rupert Lowe, and numerous anonynmous known #disinformation superspreader accounts like 'End Wokeness'.

Let's examine the context for yesterday's march in Richard Tice's constituency, #Skegness. Image
After decades of neglect, Skegness (pop 20K), stands out on key socio-economic markers on national averages: residents are older; whiter; lower full-time employment; higher rates of few/no qualifications; and concentrated deprivation - it's far-more deprived than most of England. Image
History repeatedly teaches us that burdening already struggling communities is a recipe for disaster.

These communities have been crying out for help for DECADES, but successive UK Govts have largely ignored their pleas, and continued to increase inequality, which harms us all. Image
Read 60 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Aug 28
🧵 @Rylan Asylum seekers coming here aren’t technically "illegal." International law (the 1951 Refugee Convention) allows people to seek asylum in any country regardless of how they arrive or how many countries they pass through, as long as they're fleeing persecution or danger.
Allow me to explain why asylum seekers aren’t “illegal”, and how misinformation and nasty demonising and scapegoating rhetoric by certain politicians and media, including news media, has made some British people less welcoming of asylum seeekers.

@Rylan
People fleeing war, torture, or persecution have the legal right to seek asylum.

The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK helped write, says anyone escaping danger can apply for asylum in another country no matter how they arrive: claiming asylum isn't a crime.

@Rylan
Read 23 tweets
GET A GRIP Profile picture
Aug 27
Farage's illiberal, immoral, & unworkable authoritarian plan involves ripping up human rights laws forged after WWII, which protect British people, & wasting £billions of UK taxpayers' money, giving some of it to corrupt misogynistic totalitarian regimes.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
Image
Leaving the #ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying international conventions

The UK would be an outlier among European democracies, in the company of only Russia and Belarus, if it were to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Opting out of treaties such as the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against torture and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention would also be likely to do serious harm to the UK’s international reputation.

It could also undermine current return deals, including with France, and other cooperation agreements on people-smuggling with European nations such as Germany.

The Society of Labour Lawyers said the plan would “in all likelihood preclude further cooperation and law enforcement in dealing with small boats coming from the continent and so increase, rather than reduce, the numbers reaching our shores”. 

Farage said he would legislate to remove the “Hardial Singh” safeguards – a reference to a legal precedent that sets limits on the Home Office’s immigration detention powers – to allow indefinite detention for immigration purposes. This would be highly vulnerable to legal challenge.

Many of the rights protected by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act are rooted in British case law, so judges would still be able to prevent deportations, even without international conventions.

x.com/docrussjackson…
Reform UK’s grotesque far-right mass deportation plan is not just economically and socially illiterate (Britain an ageing population and low birth rate) rely on striking “returns agreements” with countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan, offering financial incentives to secure these deals, alongside visa restrictions and potential sanctions on countries that refuse.

These are countries where the Home Office’s risk reports warn of widespread torture and persecution.

It would risk the scenario of making payments to countries such as Iran, whose regime the UK government has accused of plotting terror attacks on British soil.

The Liberal Democrats called the payments “a Taliban tax”, saying the plan would entail sending billions “to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat”. They said: “Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to a group so closely linked to terrorist organisations proscribed by the UK.”
Read 13 tweets
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Aug 25
🧵

The internet never forgets.

A thread of tweets posted by Lucy Connolly.

A reminder of the one, viewed 310,000 times, for which she was jailed, which urged people to burn down asylum seeker hotels after the #Southport attack - which had nothing to do with asylum seekers. Image
While all these tweets of Connolly's were made before her incendiary post, they don't say which year they were posted.

They can be accessed here, via The Wayback Machine, which has archived more than 916 billion web pages.

Draw your own conclusions.

web.archive.org/web/2024080616…
Connolly's tweet (top right) was in response to the tweet on the left, which criticised Laurence Fox for posting an upskirt photograph of Narinder Kaur.

The next one (right centre) was Connolly asking Kaur if she had 'flashed her gash'.

The third discusses a teenage experience. Image
Read 16 tweets

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