One speaker is under investigation for right-wing extremism, others argue the Christchurch mosque shooter 'had legitimate concerns', gay marriage is 'a destructive experiment', & the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory is real!
The far-right ♥️ #NatCon
Who funds it?
The #NatCon2024 Brussels event was sponsored and coordinated by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a Hungarian 'think tank' funded by oil & gas money, & which received more than £1.3 BILLION in Hungarian state funding in 2020.
Nigel Farage's entirely predictable #NatCon2024 speech was live-streamed on the far-right #propaganda channel GB "News", bankrolled by bigoted evangelical "Christian" billionaire Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund has £1.7 BILLION invested in fossil fuels!
The #NatCon organising committee features Frank Furedi, Exec Director of MCC Brussels, who delivered the 2020 annual lecture at #TuftonStreet's Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, on the subject “eco hysteria”!
British #NatCon2024 speaker, Dr James Orr, linked to unhinged billionaire Peter Thiel, responded to a video of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London, which showed Muslim protestors praying, by stating: “Import the Arab World, become the Arab World”. 😬
#NatCon is a project of a right-wing think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation, which has links to an Israel-based Zionist research organisation, founded in 2019, but it was registered as a private limited company in the UK by Cambridge Uni's James Orr.
A #THREAD from last year on the The Edmund Burke Foundation, which brings together the far-right in Europe & the US, the various brands of the far-right, & gives them a framework, a common language, and a shiny brand to follow: 'National Conservatism'.
Life was demonstrably worse in the 1979 than it is today.
Zymunt Bauman calls this yearning for an imagined past, ‘retrotopia’, in which the ‘Volk’ (the ‘simple folk’, who Reform UK claim to represent) are constructed as homogenous, Christian, white, & ‘indigenous’.
Life was demonstrably inferior in the 1970s compared to today for almost everyone in England.
Life expectancy in the UK in 1980 was 71 for men and 77 for women. By 2019, life expectancy at birth in England had increased to 79 years for men & 83.5 for women.
1. Economic Hardship
In 1979, the UK economy was struggling with high inflation, unemployment, and a budget deficit. This eroded purchasing power, making essentials like food, clothing, and housing more expensive relative to wages. "Stagflation" was a significant problem.
'Anti-elite man of the people' Nigel Farage, educated at one of the most expensive private schools on earth, is now the highest paid MP in the UK. His basic annual MP salary is £91,346 plus expenses.
The UK National Living Wage for people aged 21+ is just £12.21/hour.
Let's take a look at some of Nigel Farage's additional earnings that he's legally obliged to declare in the MPs Register of interests - and which contains a few surprises - starting with GB "News".
Between 16th July 2024 and 15th January 2025, Farage decalred earnings of £264,790 for his work as a presenter on Reform UK Ltd's 24/7 propaganda channel, GB "News", co-owned by Islamophobic billionaire hedge-funder, Paul Marshall.
The front-page article, published in the Daily Telegraph, claiming “London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population” was covered across the media and widely discussed by politicians and others.
The claim that “One in 12 in London is illegal immigrant” is based on this report, commissioned by Thames Water, conducted by the research company Edge Analytics in February 2023, which the Telegraph says it obtained “under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
The EDL is an Islamophobic protest movement aimed at preserving UK identity and culture in the face of a perceived Islamization of the UK and Europe.
So is Reform UK.
The EDL reinforce the notion of the “nationalist subject” - a fallacious conception of citizenship - that wrongly assumes members of the majoritarian culture are possessed of certain core values, beliefs, and traits that embody the true essence of the nation.
🧵 Quite a few politically & historically illiterate brainwashed Trump-supporters replied or quote-tweeted the tweet below to tell me lifelong democratic socialist George Orwell was not in fact a democratic socialist. Truly Orwellian. So I asked Oligarch Musk's Grok about it...
In the preface to her newly reissued book, 'Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan - 30th Anniversary Edition', historian @NancyMacLean5 reflects on the resurgence of white power nationalism and political violence in contemporary America.
MaClean is known for her prescient best-selling 2017 book about the post–WWII conservative thinkers and policymakers who shaped the hyper-neoliberal #Project2025, 'Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America',
Evidence of why her prize-winning book has aged well and why @OxUniPress decided to republish it is obvious: numerous instructors continue to assign it, countless historians cite it, and the best Klan scholars have given it well-deserved praise.