Thread by @docrussjackson

#Thread

'The Common Sense Society' is a libertarian group founded in 2009, which "helps future leaders explore the nature of liberty & its relationship to human equality, the rule of law, the market, social institutions, our cultural inheritance, & personal responsibility." 😬

Companies house suggests the CSS is a Private Limited Company based in Hexham, Northumberland, with two Directors: Greggs' former MD, Sir Michael Darrington, & corporate lawyer Andrew Davison OBE (ex-Chair of Greggs Foundation), of law firm Muckle, based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Emma Webb is Director of the UK branch of the Common Sense Society.

She is also host of Newspeak, the ghastly but little known #TuftonStreet-based New Culture Forum’s weekly current-affairs show.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1387088535254093833?s=20&t=ryFwtM2kvRNyhJCpz3Ci6A

Emma Webb was previously deputy research director at Toby Young's Free Speech Union, & now sits on their advisory council. She was the co-founder of campaign group Save Our Statues, along with Robert Poll, who in 2021 was the Reform UK candidate in the #LondonAssembly Elections!

Emma Webb was also was director of the Forum on Integration, Democracy & Extremism at right-wing opaquely funded #TuftonStreet 'think tank' Civitas, which started out as the Health & Welfare Unit of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). 😬

Emma was also a research fellow at the Centre on Radicalisation & Terrorism at the Henry Jackson Society. In 2017, co-founder Matthew Jamison wrote he'd never have imagined the HJS "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist... propaganda outfit"!

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1575158556445343744?s=20&t=YPdsGv5BkdOgcKU7mVdJ4A

In 2017, controversial right-winger Roger Scruton was invited to give lectures by the Common Sense Society in Budapest.

Scruton has written about Hungary’s “Jewish intelligentsia” & its connection to the “extensive networks around the Soros Empire.” 😬

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1536281792919093249?s=20&t=YPdsGv5BkdOgcKU7mVdJ4A

The Common Sense Society Council of Trustees also includes Professor Niall Ferguson of another opaquely funded right-wing free-market 'think tank', The Centre for Policy Studies, & Alexandre Pesey, founder of the Institut de formation politique. 😬

edition.cnn.com/2022/09/04/eur…

The Common Sense Society recently hosted an evening featuring Anthony Malcolm Daniels AKA Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing 'think tank' founded by IEA founder, Antony Fisher! 😬

commonsensesociety.org/event/common-s…

Daniels represents the intellectual "Common Sense" wing of the swivel-eyed free-market hard-right: he claims the cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries is basically due to an awareness of "rights", & a sense of entitlement, without responsibilities. 🤪

He denigrates 'sentimentality' as becoming entrenched in British society as "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality", & claims the ideology of the Welfare State (introduced to alleviate widespread suffering) is used 'to diminish personal responsibility'. 😬

He pushes the historically recent far-right trope that multiculturalism & cultural relativism are at odds with 'common sense' & that 'left-wing intellectuals have destroyed the foundation of culture & refuse to acknowledge this by resorting to the caves of political correctness'.

And of course, the Common Sense Society is part of the same unhinged extremist 'anti-woke' libertarian ecology which brought us the Koch-funded Spiked, & the Academy of Ideas, founded & directed by predictable pro-fracking crushing bore & ex-Revolutionary Communist, Claire Fox.😬

"Sometimes, the merest whiff provides all information required for an instant and thorough understanding of an object’s purpose, motivation and methodology.  Common Sense Society is another link in the far-right circle jerk." ducksoap.wordpress.com/2022/10/26/com…