farage indep pty

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see natcon

mofo brexit reboot on net zero

he's a thinker now? or just Eur ~ EU hero?

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carole cadwalladr legal suppression Arron Banks - Wikipedia UK CRM

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9 26 ANOTHER CORRUPT SCANDAL FOREIGN $ THO us?

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AN 9 26 MOOCHI

Ex-official reveals who he thinks is actually 'dumber' than Trump

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AN 8 26

In the UK, the MAGA movement has been allying itself with the far-right/populist Reform Party — which is vehemently disdainful of Britain's Conservative Party in much the same way that MAGA disdains traditional conservatives in the United States. Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre examines this MAGA/Reform alliance in an article for the UK-based i Paper, arguing that it is a dire "warning" on far-right movement's ability to exploit widespread "frustration" and discontent.

Liberal Jean-Pierre, who served in the Biden administration after Jen Psaki (now an MS NOW host) left her White House press secretary position, explains, "Since leaving the White House in 2025 with Donald Trump returning to power, I have spent the past two years listening to people who feel politically unanchored.

Voters in the United States and the United Kingdom are turning to movements that promise simple answers to complicated problems because they no longer believe the major parties see what they see or feel what they feel. The appeal of Reform, Restore and fringe MAGA figures grows out of that frustration, and the links between Nigel Farage and American political voices show how these narratives travel across borders and feed the same fears."

Although Jean-Pierre, in her i Paper article, is highly critical of MAGA and Reform, she emphasizes that the "frustration" that they are trying to use to their advantage is quite real.

"After more than 15 years working in U.S. politics, including service to two presidents and most recently as White House press secretary," Jean-Pierre warns, "I have watched how quickly trust erodes when institutions fall behind the pressures people face. I sat in senior-level briefings where immigration, border security and crime were not abstractions but daily operational challenges."

Far-right MAGA Republican and "War Room" host Steve Bannon often describes himself as a "Leninist" — not because he favors communism, but because he embraces Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin's view that it is necessary to destroy in order to create. Jean-Pierre notes Bannon's alliance with Farage, describing "disruption rather than governance" as a key goal of MAGA and its UK counterparts.

"Movements like Reform UK and Rupert Lowe's breakaway party, Restore Britain, have stepped into that space with messages that feel direct and uncomplicated," Jean-Pierre observes. "They speak to voters who believe the country has lost control of its borders and who worry that national identity is slipping away. In the U.S., fringe MAGA voices push a similar story. They argue that institutions have failed and that only disruption can restore order. These groups do not operate in isolation. They borrow from one another, repeat one another and amplify one another…. The major parties do not need better slogans. They need to rebuild trust by addressing the underlying issues that have pushed voters away."

Jean-Pierre continues, "They need to modernize immigration systems, strengthen border management and speak honestly about crime and public safety. They need to reconnect with the realities people face and show they understand the pressures shaping daily life. If they do not, the political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic will continue to shift toward movements that thrive on fear rather than on solutions. And voters will continue to look for answers in places the major parties never expected."

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an tc 7 26

The European populist right has been at the top of the political agenda in recent days.

On July 7, everyone in France was waiting expectantly for a Paris appeal court to decide on whether Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), would be allowed to run in the 2027 presidential election after her conviction for embezzlement of European funds.

But just as the European media machine was gearing up for the verdict, across the Channel, Nigel Farage – the leader of Reform UK – announced on X that he would be making a “statement about his future”. This came after multiple allegations of undeclared gifts and an ongoing investigation into possible money laundering. Farage maintains that he has done nothing wrong.

The parallels were impossible to ignore. Here were two prominent European populist rightwing politicians whose political careers were being threatened by extensive and well-documented corruption claims. How would they respond?

We did not have to wait long to find out. Only hours after the verdict, Le Pen announced that she was now officially a candidate for the 2027 presidential election. Despite the fact that her initial conviction was upheld on appeal, she intends to contest the appeal court’s decision. This means she retains her presumption of innocence and is able to proceed with her election campaign as if nothing happened.

It is a remarkable sleight-of-hand; Le Pen has found the narrowest of legal loopholes through which to pass. In her announcement, she presented her decision as a democratic one: the French people should judge her, not the courts.

In the meantime, Farage told his supporters that he is stepping down from his parliamentary seat of Clacton after being made the subject of a parliamentary inquiry into his alleged improprieties. This will trigger a byelection – but, in an equally remarkable gambling act, he plans to run himself in the hope of winning back his seat. Again, he is suggesting that this means letting the voters decide whether he is guilty or not.

Le Pen and Farage are both reading from a well-thumbed playbook. The people v the courts; voters v judges; the “transparent” legitimacy of the ballot box v the “opacity” of lengthy legal and regulatory proceedings. All of these tropes will be familiar to observers of populist politics in the United States, Hungary or Turkey.

The bigger question is: do voters care whether populist politicians break the rules? Le Pen and Farage are hoping that, like Donald Trump, they can simply swat aside legal and regulatory processes on the road to their ultimate electoral triumph.

Question of standards

There are many reasons to take Le Pen and Farage’s arguments with a pinch of salt. A closer analysis of the relationship between the populist right and corruption reveals a more complicated picture, perhaps especially in France, which is gearing up for its most important electoral cycle in 2027.

At face value, Le Pen has little to worry about since French politics is famously corrupt. Every French president of the Fifth Republic, except Charles de Gaulle and Emmanuel Macron, has a major corruption scandal to their name. Both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy have been found guilty of corruption by French courts. They have been joined by countless MPs and mayors over the years who have been convicted of similar crimes.

Until recently, this level of corruption was widely tolerated. French voters largely accepted that politicians would embezzle money, employ their family members on the public purse, or swing large public contracts for their benefit. They were more concerned with ideological faultlines than political integrity – and they displayed little of the hand-wringing that accompanied equivalent scandals like Watergate in the US in the 1970s or the “cash-for-questions” affair in the UK in the 1990s.

Yet this tolerance has begun to dissipate in recent years. Public anger towards politicians has reached unprecedented levels, most notably in recent protest movements such as the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests), and the deep personal hostility many French voters feel towards Macron.

Le Pen and the RN have provided a highly effective electoral outlet for this anger, and they have made much of their commitment to probity in public office. Le Pen even said herself that she would not run for election while wearing an electronic tag, and for many years the party campaigned for politicians found guilty of corruption to be banned from public office for life.

Rocky road to the Elysée Palace

But Le Pen and the RN’s role as standard-bearers of the “ordinary” French person’s rage against a “rigged” and “corrupt” political system is now under threat. By effectively stamping her dynastic authority on the party that was previously run by her father, and by blocking the rise of her young protege Jordan Bardella, Le Pen has boxed herself into a corner.

Her only way out is by the ballot box. Yet the chances of her winning the presidential election remain slim. She – and her party – lack the necessary support to win in the second round of the elections where vote transfers from eliminated parties and candidates determine the overall result, and she still suffers from a credibility deficit in comparison to more mainstream politicians.

She may well have made matters worse by giving her opponents a powerful stick with which to beat her. Even in France, accusations of corruption can be hard to shake off. And, as Le Pen and Farage know from long experience, it is just as possible to lose at the ballot box as it is to win.

Emile Chabal, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AN 9 25

During Donald Trump's first presidency, veteran television journalist Dan Rather used the words "flock of felons" to describe all of the Trump allies and ex-allies who were facing criminal charges — a group that included Michael Cohen (Trump's former personal attorney and fixer), Paul Manafort (Trump's 2016 campaign manager before Kellyanne Conway took over that position), Michael Flynn (a former Trump national security adviser), and GOP operative Roger Stone, among others. Most of the people Rather was referring to were Americans, but Trump supporter George Cottrell was British.

Cottrell was incarcerated for fire fraud in the United States. And according to the Daily Beast's Tom Latchem, he is "publishing a book about laundering money."

Latchem, in an article published on September 22, explains, "British aristocrat George Cottrell was arrested leaving the 2016 Republican National Convention, at which Trump clinched the presidential nomination. He had travelled there with one of the U.K.'s most virulent anti-migrant politicians, Nigel Farage, who is friends with the president and has met Trump in the Oval Office. The following year, Cottrell — nicknamed 'Posh George' — was sentenced to eight months in U.S. jails, having explained to undercover federal agents 'ways criminal proceeds could be laundered' on the dark web."

Latchem adds, "Now the 31-year-old, whose father went to school with Prince Andrew, is planning to play on his notorious reputation as a convicted criminal in a new book, titled 'How to Launder Money,' according to The Sunday Times."

Cottrell, now 31, was 22 when he travelled in the U.S. with Farage in 2016.

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Farage is a controversial figure in UK politics, distancing himself from the Conservative Party and mainstream Tories. But he is a strong supporter of the United States' MAGA movement and has made countless appearances on Fox News.

"Cottrell has remained close to Farage," Latchem observes. "His mother, Fiona Cottrell, is a Reform U.K. megadonor, while disclosures show George picked up the tab for Farage's £15,000 2024 hop to Florida for a meet-and-greet that included Elon Musk and Trumpworld figures. Reform says Cottrell is an unpaid volunteer. Cottrell appears to divide his time between London and Montenegro, where he has been a high-stakes presence and launched an unlimited company, Geostrategy International — raising transparency concerns among campaigners because such firms need not file accounts."

*Read Tom Latchem's full article for the Daily Beast at this link (subscription required).

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desmog 12 24

Right-wing populists enjoy stretching the boundaries of hypocrisy by raging about the crimes of the supposed “liberal metropolitan elite” from the comfort of Trump Tower or their financier-funded offices.

Four of Nigel Farage’s five MPs (including Farage himself) used to work in the City of London. James McMurdock worked for Lehman Brothers – the now-deceased investment bank that went bust during the 2008 crash, while both McMurdock and party chair Zia Yusuf spent time at Goldman Sachs, which attracted the following description from Rolling Stone magazine in 2010:

“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

As we all know, oil and gas reek of cash, so these investment funds and the pinstripe populists they bankroll have a vested interest in keeping fossil fuels flowing.

As revealed by DeSmog this week, Donald Trump’s new pick for UK ambassador has a cluster of oil and gas interests. Billionaire investor Warren Stephens and his family own a bunch of fossil fuel assets, including Stephens Natural Resources, which “continues to expand its production and reserves in the continental U.S. and offshore Gulf of Mexico”.

Campaigners have warned that Stephens’s appointment risks bringing a fossil fuel lobbyist in direct contact with the Labour government, potentially threatening its ambitious climate agenda.

Westminster is well acquainted with people like Stephens, whose vast corporate interests belie their anti-establishment prose.

This includes Tory peer Jon Moynihan (grandly known as Lord Moynihan of Chelsea), who has spent recent months blasting the UK’s climate targets, all while holding shares (worth at least £300,000) in fossil fuel giants including Shell and TotalEnergies. Truly a man of the people.

Elsewhere, dozens of campaign groups have penned a letter urging governments across the world not to fall for an industry-backed method of recording methane emissions. The groups say that the controversial GWP* system – which New Zealand appears close to adopting – is “open to significant abuse”.

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no lnx few

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/national-conservative-manifesto-a-plan-for-fascism-but-it-s-not-hypothetical/

'National Conservative' manifesto: A plan for fascism — but it's not hypothetical

[Viktor Orbán in 2014, Wikimedia Commons

Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election: ‘He has my complete support’]

Kathryn Joyce andSalon June 24, 2022

Last November in Orlando, dozens of the right's leading intellectuals, writers and think tank staffers gathered for the first meeting of the National Conservatism conference since the COVID pandemic hit, drawing journalists from across the political spectrum seeking to untangle what this high-brow gathering of avowed nationalists was all about. The emergence of the "NatCon" movement several years earlier had alarmed many liberal, centrist and even mainline conservative observers with its efforts to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism.But it energized many on the right who were starting to describe themselves as "post-liberal," meaning they were no longer satisfied with the conservative marriage of convenience that had existed since at least the Reagan era and had drawn together the religious right, anti-communists and free-marketeers in a potent but sometimes uneasy coalition. That consensus, they declared loudly, was dead, and a new conservative fusion must arise to take its place.

After the disruption of the pandemic, the loss of the presidency and the rage of Jan. 6, last fall's NatCon II conference was focused on the goal of building that new coalition along nationalist and post-liberal lines: blending extreme social conservatism with a skeptical approach to some forms of laissez-faire capitalism and a sharp hostility to both global or international authority and what they see as corporate-driven liberal cultural hegemony.

Now, the movement has formalized its ideas in a new manifesto, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles," released last week by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This ambitious document calls for the creation of a "world of independent nations" as the sole bulwark against "universalist ideologies" that would impose a "homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe." The credited authors include some leading lights of the NatCon world: Israeli political theorist and Burke Foundation chair Yoram Hazony, former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher.

But the list of signatories is much longer, and also far broader, ranging from right-wing mega-donor Peter Thiel to former Trump administration staffers Mark Meadows and Ken Cuccinelli, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, multiple officials from Hillsdale College— a nerve center of contemporary right-wing politics — and numerous other think tank staffers and writers from across the spectrum of conservative media.

The manifesto hasn't gotten much attention so far — which isn't surprising, considering how much else is happening in the political realm. A column by David von Drehle in the Washington Post declared its contents akin to fascism, and a more substantial fisking in The Bulwark by Cathy Young found it "a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology." That's not wrong. But it's also worth observing that, in the battle to build a new conservative coalition, much of the NatCon platform has already won.

As Young notes, many of the NatCon's 10 priorities read, at first, like banal restatements of conservative ideology in general: national independence, the rule of law, God and public religion, free enterprise, family and children. But in ways both subtle and unsubtle, those familiar terms don't all mean what you'd think.

The NatCons hope to divorce nationalism from its association with the Nazis, who they claim were not "nationalist" at all.

The first two items, national independence and rejecting globalism and imperialism, follow one of the core, if questionable, goals of the NatCon movement, which is to divorce the concept of nationalism from its most powerful associations, such as the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which National Conservatives see as imperialist. Instead, NatCons want to attach the term to smaller, scrappier scrappy countries that resisted the Nazis or Soviet Communism.

While the manifesto holds that "Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course," in alignment with its own legal, cultural and religious traditions, it warns against their "transferring" authority to any "transnational or supranational bodies" and advocates opposing "imperialism in its various forms." Those forms include modern-day China and Russia, of course, but also "the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image."

The "liberalism" described here, as in most NatCon contexts, isn't the center-left politics of the Democratic Party, but rather "classical" liberalism, focused on individual rights, free trade and pluralistic cultures, which until recently was embraced by most mainstream conservatives as well. But within the post-liberal and NatCon world, that small-l liberalism contained the seeds of conservatism's undoing, leading inevitably to the big-L liberalism of progressive ideology by creating a culture in which it's too hard to raise children along traditionalist lines. In this view, societies that uphold pluralistic tolerance and diversity are inherently unfair by denying the majority the right to live in a culture that supports their values — in essence, allowing the minority to oppress the majority.

While both Young and von Drehle read the jabs at boomer "imperialism" as allusions to the Iraq War — which is at least partly true — "empire" for NatCons also has a larger meaning. First, they believe that international compacts, accords and governing bodies like the European Union or the UN infringe on national sovereignty, particularly when it comes to social issues. In the movement's conference this March in Brussels, Hazony sought to align the NatCon vision with Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin's disdain for borders and national independence, he suggested, mirrored the attitudes of bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington. The obvious subtext was that Hungary and Poland — two post-liberal, overtly nationalist countries greatly admired within the movement — were facing EU sanctions over a variety of human rights issues, which Hungarian and Polish leaders rejected as an attempt to squash the rights of the nation-state, and sympathetic fellow speakers cast as the workings of a new "evil empire."

"Empire," in the NatCon world, refers to the right's long, losing battle in the cultural sphere, these days largely waged against what American conservatives call "woke corporations."

Secondly, and more broadly, "empire" in the NatCon world also refers to the sense of fighting a long, losing battle on the cultural front, largely against what American conservatives have taken to calling "woke corporations." This can take the form of Twitter bans, corporate Pride celebrations or the Walt Disney Company lobbying against Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. (That same call to fight back against supposed ideological imperialism also underlies Rufo's recent calls for conservatives to "lay siege" to America's cultural institutions.)

That leads to one of the manifesto's next items, on "public religion," which declares that "No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God" and that therefore the Bible must be restored to its place "as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike."The manifesto goes on to say that, "Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private."

At the NatCon convention in Orlando last fall, that idea was the centerpiece of the conference's most significant panel, as Hazony and three other writers from different corners of the right debated whether a new conservative coalition could be founded on the premise that wherever Christians compose the majority of a nation, they should be allowed to set the terms of public life, with "carve-outs" for Jews and other religious minorities, but no pretense of a neutral public square.

Around the same time, several writers in the greater post-liberal orbit — including one of that night's panelists, Sohrab Ahmari — issued a rhyming call for Western countries to adopt the idea of "cultural Christianity." These writers were part of a loose coalition of post-liberals interested in the Catholic right idea of integralism, which argues that governments should "inculcate virtue" in the public, and laws should therefore focus less on individual freedoms than on the common good — as understood by conservative Christians, of course.The shift towards a call for "cultural Christianity" instead, was a pragmatic softening of that idea: rather than unrealistic proposals for a theocratic "confessional state," the writers argued that maintaining the trappings of public religion in "post-Christian cultures" — as seen in Donald Trump's patently insincere Bible-waving — can help create a society more hospitable to the faith.

Ahmari now appears to be on the outs with the NatCons over his opposition to aid for Ukraine, and is not among the manifesto's signatories. But the fact that this idea became one of the top items in the manifesto suggests that Orlando's trial balloon has become a core NatCon principle. But it also illuminates the apparent meaning behind a troubling section on national government, where the manifesto proposes that while federalism is generally a good thing, central governments should be ready to "energetically" intervene in states "in which lawlessness, immorality and dissolution reign." As Young notes, it's hard to read this as anything other than a potential crackdown on "blue states," which might encompass everything from banning Drag Queen Story Hours (one of the founding bugaboos of post-liberalism) and "immoral" books to National Guard raids on cities that allow homeless encampments.

Federalism is generally a good thing, the NatCons agree. But governments should "energetically" intervene where "lawlessness, immorality and dissolution reign" — in other words, a crackdown on Drag Queen Story Hour.

Other sections argue that "unconstrained individualism" and "sexual license" have harmed the traditional family; that free enterprise must be modified to serve the nation's general welfare, probably by banning "vice" industries and companies that "censor" political speech; that if universities are overly "partisan and globalist in orientation," they should be defunded until they "rededicate themselves to the national interest"; and that immigration should be overhauled or perhaps shut down entirely until more controlled and "assimilationist policies" are developed. (Last December, many people in the NatCon orbit were excited by the campaign of far-right French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who vowed to take France "back from minorities that oppress the majority.")

So far, Young writes, this all amounts to little more than "flexing" by the terminally online. But if conservatives manage to retake the government in upcoming elections, the manifesto could "become the seed of a plan."

That's true enough. But it's also true that many of these ideas have already spread well beyond the ranks of the NatCon faithful. At CPAC Hungary a few weeks ago in Budapest, speaker after speaker extolled ideas that would have fit in seamlessly in Orlando, starting with the opening speech by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who championed "national conservatism" as part of his 12-point recipe for conservative success.

A drumbeat message throughout the conference, which drew government and political party leaders from numerous European countries alongside many American right intellectuals, was the sacred sovereignty of "the nation-state," under threat from both the "globalist agenda" and "major multinational corporations" who were working together to "undermine faith and nation."

Rick Santorum spoke about the need for societies to maintain a core "national identity"; Nigel Farage hailed sovereign states that stand up "against the globalist establishment"; andMark Meadowsdeclared that conservatives fighting to maintain family and nation in the face of "the open society" and corporations, should remember that "The empire of Caesar was defeated by the empire of a carpenter."

Anti-immigrant talk was vehement and ubiquitous, with mass migration described as a "weapon of mass destruction" worse than a nuclear bomb and the claim — less than a week after a gunman radicalized by "great replacement theory" killed 10 Black people in Buffalo — that leftists are seeking to eradicate "white Western nations." The most bombastic rhetoric came not from Hungarians defending their effective ban on Muslim immigration, but from Hillsdale College professor David Azerrad — one of the first names listed below the new NatCon manifesto — who said that bringing in "untold millions of people of different colors, creeds and cultures for decades on end" was the sort of thing "tyrants do to conquer a broken people," and that the "ruling class" of Western countries had come "to equate whiteness with evil" and so had decided to make their nations "less white" through "third world immigration."

And it's not just CPAC. Republican-dominated states like Florida and Texas, are doing their utmost to emulate Hungary, the country NatCons view as their primary model. (In April, manifesto signatory Rod Dreher suggested that Florida, in fact, "is becoming our Hungary.") The notion that conservatives are valiantly confronting a progressive cultural empire as powerful as any invading force from history has become the backbone of myriad cultural panics over things like CRT and LGBTQ rights, recasting the squelching of minority rights as a liberation struggle. Public universities in red states are already facing threats to their funding unless they appease conservative leaders. And corporations across the country are facing new campaigns to punish them for supposedly "woke" activism.

The seeds of the NatCon plan are now germinating, and its leaders are planning ahead. Two days after the release of the manifesto, Yoram Hazony tweeted an addendum, saying it was "not time to compromise," but rather to "Consolidate our camp," "Clarify its vision" and "demonstrate our strength."

desmog

April 19, 2024 – UK Edition

Two stories this week highlighted the way giddy Westminster journalism can provide saturation coverage and still miss the point.

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss toured media studios plugging her book and talking about how a shadowy “deep state” plotted her downfall. Despite the attention, it was left to DeSmog to reveal that her book calls for landmark climate laws to be “abolished”, and that she claims to have tried to stop the UK from hosting the COP26 climate summit.

Across the Channel, the row over a Belgian mayor’s attempt to shut down the National Conservatism conference made headlines. But as Sam Bright reported, one of the groups behind the far-right jamboree is bankrolled by a Hungarian oil company – a notable fact given the event’s attacks on climate action.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/global-warming-policy-foundation-net-zero-watch-koch-brothers/

pix 

Steve Baker MP, a trustee of the lobby group, has led the opposition to the government's net-zero policies

An influential Tory-linked lobby group leading the backlash against the UK government’s net-zero policy has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from an oil-rich foundation with huge investments in energy firms, openDemocracy can reveal.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which also campaigns as Net Zero Watch, has also received more than half a million dollars through a fund linked to the controversial billionaire Koch brothers.

The GWPF has long refused to disclose its donors and claims it will from anyone with an interest in an energy company.

But tax documents filed with US authorities and uncovered by this website reveal the network of dark money behind it for the first time – including the $30m shares in 22 companies working in coal, oil and gas that are held by one of its donors.

shadow climate secretary Ed Milibandsaid: “US right-wing groups with links to big oil are desperate to stop action against the climate crisis. Now they are trying to extend their reach into UK political debate."

A registered UK charity, the GWPF is one of the most vocal groups in British politics opposing the government’s ‘net zero’ plans and has been at the forefront of recent calls to restart fracking.

The Tufton Street-based group’s trustees include former chancellor Nigel Lawson and Steve Baker, who leads the ‘Net Zero Scrutiny’ group of backbench Tory MPs and was recently criticised for sharing a paper by the group that denied the climate crisis.

Over four years the GWPF’s US arm, the American Friends of the GWPF, received more than $1.3m from US donors. At least $864,884 of this has been channelled to the UK group, with some being held back for expenses.

Of the £1.45m that the GWPF has received in charitable donations since 2017, at least 45% has come from the US.

American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy

The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s US ‘friends’ group did not have to declare the sources of this so-called ‘dark money’ – but openDemocracy has discovered through the filings of other groups that:

• Between 2016 and 2020 the American Friends of the GWPF received $620,259 from the Donors Trust. Described as a “dark money ATM” for the US political Right, the secretive trust has given hundreds of millions of dollars to more than 100 groups working to cast doubt on the scientific consensus behind climate change.
• The Donors Trust has received millions from the Koch brothers, who inherited their father’s oil empire and spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding the climate denial movement before David Koch’s death in 2019. More recently, it received nearly $4.8m from America First Works, a non-profit closely tied to Donald Trump that contributed millions to his failed 2020 reelection bid as well as to campaigns to restrict mail voting. The GWPF told openDemocracy that the Donors Trust was simply a “middleman, matching donors to those seeking funding” and that it was “able to vet [donors with which it was matched] in line with our funding policy”.
• TheGWPF also received $210,525 in 2018 and 2020 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation – set up by the billionaire libertarian heir to an oil and banking dynasty. The US-based foundation has $30m worth of shares in 22 energy companies including $9m in Exxon and $5.7m in Chevron, according to its financial filings. It has bankrolled numerous conservative causes, including the right-wing Daily Caller news site and the Heritage Foundation think tank.

“It is disturbing that the Global Warming Policy Foundation is acting as a channel through which American ideological groups are trying to interfere in British democracy,” said Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Founded by Lawson and university lecturer Benny Peiser in 2009, the GWPF has long been accused of promoting climate denialism.

Last week, Peiser the unfounded claim that Putin has “colluded with the green movement in Europe and all over the world”.

The GWPF – which Greenpeace UK said has “spent the last twenty years campaigning to preserve our addiction to fossil fuels” – has become increasingly prominent in recent years.

The group was forced to set up a new non-charitable organisation for its political lobbying in 2014 after the Charity Commission found its stance on climate change breached charity rules.

Labour MP Graham Stringer sits on its board of trustees, while two of Global Warming Policy Foundation’s staff recently became advisers to Tory MP Craig Mackinlay. Another trustee, Terence Mourdant, is a long-standing Tory donor who gave £25,000 to Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.

Steve Baker, who joined the GWPF last year and has called on Boris Johnson to resign over partygate, is a long time admirer of US libertarians. He has previously received expenses-paid trips to conferences organised by US conservative groups that have been accused of opposing environmental action.

‘Net Zero Watch’

In October last year, the UK government announced its strategy for reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

The same month, the GWPF’s campaigning arm – the similarly-named Global Warming Policy Forum – rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a name it continues to use alongside the original moniker.

In a statement announcing the change, Peiser claimed that in a “net zero future you will be poorer and colder” and “that a political backlash is long overdue” in response to the policy.

Net Zero Watch has repeatedly claimed that the cost of living crisis is the result of net-zero policies.In a report published in March, it said that renewable energy is responsible for the crisis and called for the government to reintroduce coal power plants and restart fracking.

Climate policy researchers said that the group is spreading “misinformation and propaganda” about net zero rather than providing analysis.

Net Zero Watch has found allies in Parliament among a group of 20 Tory MPs and Peers, who formed the Net Zero Scrutiny Group,  a cadre of backbench Conservative MPs modelled on the European Research Group that has emerged as a staunch critic of Boris Johnson’s net-zero plans.

Net Zero Scrutiny Group members include former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey; Robert Halfon, a former schools minister; and Tory peer Peter Lilley, who is a former trustee of the GWPF.

Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker, the MPs leading the group, are regularly quoted on press releases from Net Zero Watch and have repeated some of its lines on the economic cost of net zero word-for-word.

In February, Harry Wilkinson, currently head of policy at Net Zero Watch, and Ruth Lea, a former GWPF trustee, began working for Mackinlay as parliamentary advisers. Wilkinson has previously tweeted that “The ‘climate crisis’ is a religious belief, nothing to do with science.”

The GWPF shares its Tufton Street address with a number of anonymously funded think tanks who have become increasingly vocal in their opposition to climate change mitigation policies.

Earlier this year, Nigel Farage announced he was forming a new campaign for a referendum on net zero.

Farage’s financial backers include the private equity billionaire Jeremy Hosking who openDemocracy recently revealed has huge financial interests in fossil fuels.

The GWPF disputed that the Sarah Scaife Foundation has an interest in oil companies, telling openDemocracy: “The wealth that ultimately created the Scaife Foundation was created at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. It would be ludicrous to suggest that three generations on, it represents an oil company interest.”

Steve Baker MP said: "I understand the GWPF has already given a response to these allegations, which appear to be ridiculous.

It is an extraordinary fact that the same newspapers and commentators who would usually be the first to protest any kind of poverty are wasting the public's time with these attempts to distract from the real issues at hand. It would be better if the political world focused their attention on how our current energy strategy has driven up energy prices and contributed to the terrible cost-of-living crisis that so many are experiencing.”

omg covid delingpole zinc grift

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/08/10/how-uk-climate-science-deniers-turned-their-attention-coronavirus-covid-19

no pix twt

on  December 31, 2019 many of us were reflecting on the past year and thinking about what opportunities lay ahead. Few were paying close attention to early reports ofunexplained cases of pneumonia thousands of miles away in Wuhan, the large capital city of China’s Hubei Province.

But less than three months later, on March 23, Boris Johnson was ordering anational lockdown to try and stop that virus, by then known worldwide as COVID-19, from raging across the UK. This came 52 days after the chief medical officer of England hadconfirmed the nation’s first two cases.

The coronavirus crisis once again saw the UK divided — between those putting their trust in public health experts and their recommendations, and those quick to question the science on which the government claimed to base its decisions for controlling the pandemic. For those who have watched the decades-long efforts to slow climate action, this was a familiar phenomenon. And the coronavirus pandemic seemed to give fresh ammunition to some familiar faces.

A close look at commentary on both COVID-19 and climate change reveals significant crossover between unqualified voices casting doubt on experts recommending action.

Why?

“There’s nothing mysterious about this,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science, who studies the persistence of misinformation in society at the University of Bristol.

“I think COVID is just climate change on steroids in a particle accelerator,” he says. “The same forces are happening: You have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”

Find out more about the crossover between COVID and climate science denial in DeSmog's special series

'No need to panic’

Commentators with a history of casting doubt on established climate science first turned their attention to COVID in the days just after Chinese authorities ordered the 11 million residents of Wuhan, a city the size of London, intolockdown.

On January 24,Ross Clark, a columnist for The Spectator who has lamented“hysteria” around COVID-19, said there was “no need to panic about coronavirus” despitewarnings from leading epidemiologists about the potential spread of the outbreak.

On January 29, British economistRoger Bate similarlyargued on the website of theAmerican Enterprise Institute (AEI), a climate science denying free-market lobby group, that news reports around COVID-19 were unnecessarily sparking a major political reaction.

“A contagion will happen at some point, and it’s important we recognize it and react. Unless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous, this isn’t it,” he wrote[spectator pix]

the idea that governments and the media were overreacting to the coronavirus threat was echoed by libertarian online magazine:{Spiked:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:,which has takenfunding from notorious backers of climate science denial theKoch family, and hasincluded Bate and other AEI scholars among its contributors. It published an article as early as January 30 saying there was“mass hysteria in the newsrooms” around COVID.

By mid-February, the World Health Organization had declared that the threat of COVID-19 spreading across the world was“high” — yet a relaxed attitude continued to prevail among some commentators.

On February 19, centre-right blog ConservativeHome published an article by**Daniel Hannan**, a columnist and former Tory MEP,claiming that COVID-19 was unlikely to be as lethal as the common flu.

Hannan, a leading figure in the UK’s campaign to leave the EU, haslinks to various American lobby groups that have spread misinformation on climate change including theCato Institute and theHeritage Foundation. He encouraged ConservativeHome readers to “cheer up” and discouraged “panic” over the virus. That message was taken up by Clark in anotherSpectator article, arguing that “coronavirus hysteria” was “the latest phenomenon to fulfil our weird and growing appetite for doom"

[pix]

clark told DeSmog he stood by his analysis but acknowledged: “Clearly, COVID-19 took off more than I, or virtually anybody imagined it would at that stage.”

“There is a very broad range of opinions among virologists, epidemiologists and others who might be regarded as expert in this field,” he said, “so the idea that I am at odds with some mythical consensus of expert opinion is false.”

“I have been around long enough to know there is no such thing as scientific consensus on either issue [climate change or COVID], nor indeed on any matter where evidence is still emerging and open to wide interpretation,” he added.

Even after the World Health Organizationdeclared the contagion to be a pandemic in early March, commentators who have long cast doubt on warnings issued by climate scientists continued to deny that COVID-19 was a major threat.

Mail on Sunday columnistPeter Hitchensclaimed that Britain was infected by a “bad case of madness,” arguing that restrictions were bein and “unreason.”

The language was familiar: Hitchens has previouslyrejected science showing human activity is responsible for global warming, and labeled measures to tackle climate change such as environmental taxes asa “sort of madness.”

For Lewandowsky, this “hysteria” narrative is part of a wider phenomenon of undermining expertise across the board, from Brexit, to climate change, and now COVID-19.

Lewandowsky points out that this also extends to many on the fringes of the political debate, such as controversial commentatorKatie Hopkins, who had over a million Twitter followers before the platform banned her, and has said the public were being“played” by the government for being asked to wear face masks. OrBrexit Party leaderNigel Farage, who described a police visit to his home as “lunacy” after he apparently broke lockdown rules.

Both have also cast doubt on the reality an of climate change.

“They’re quite explicit about saying that one person’s fact is another person’s lie, because that then enables them to avoid accountability,” Lewandowsky argues.

Miracle cures and conspiracy theories

These commentators’ contributions to the debate haven’t been without consequence. Some have spread conspiracy theories that have had real-world impact, while others have admitted to ignoring official safety guidelines, putting the public at risk of catching the disease.

ColumnistJames Delingpolewrote in a March 28article for the Spectator Australia titled ‘Wu Flu Notes’ that he had gone about his daily business despite having symptoms that align with coronavirus and that it was possible he had “infected lots of graduates.”

Some days later, Delingpole posted a tweet claiming a “high-powered zinc formula” had helped him recover from the illness without the need to go into intensive care – despite little being known about whether any such formula can be a cure for the virus.

He went on to write, “what I’d like more than anything is for this stuff to be available on the open market for everyone. But to mass produce it my friend needs ££££. If I crowdfunded it who’d be interested?” He concluded his request by asking for “potential big money backers."

[twt]

delingpole’s zinc promotion was comparable to comments made by US conspiracy theoristAlex Jones, who, a few weeks prior, hadreceived a cease-and-desist letter from a top New York attorney based on claims he had marketed and sold fraudulent COVID-19 treatments on his conspiracy website. US President Donald Trump was also widely criticised for suggesting that disinfectant taken internally could be a treatment for the virus.

Theories about miracle cures can take hold partly as a result of personal politics, Lewandowsky argues. Under lockdown, “you’re asked to stay at home and to look after other people by not doing what you’d like to do, and that is very challenging if you’re a believer in personal freedom and autonomy,” he says.

The same can be said of the motivations for spreading misinformation on climate change: “A lot of climate denial is very high-pitched, frenetic, emotional, angry, toxic – and that’s all triggered because people’s identity is at stake.”

The desire to reach for conspiracy theories may also stem from a need to feel that individuals still retain some control, says Evita March, a senior lecturer of psychology at Federation University Australia. “Conspiracy theories offer the believer some comfort in that there is still behavioural predictability,” she says.

And there were plenty of conspiracy theories flying around, pushed by long-time climate science deniers.

Piers Corbyn, brother of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, was quick to promote the idea that coronavirus was thefault of politically liberal billionaires, and that it was related to the**Chinese-developed 5G mobile network**.

The latter conspiracy, alsopromoted by Infowars’ Jones, had significant real-world consequences. Over the Easter weekend it wasreported that 20 phone masts had been subject to arson attacks. According to Mobile UK, the trade association for four mobile network operators, an estimated 50 masts had beentargeted by April 15

[bbc pix]

david Lawrence, a researcher at campaign group Hope Not Hate, told DeSmog that theories around 5G have existed for a number of years, so “the stage was already set.” ”When the global COVID-19 outbreak occurred, there was both a susceptibility to be exploited and a ready-made explanation to hand,” he said.

“In some ways this is similar to climate change,” said Lawrence, “in that people who work in industries that would be negatively affected by efforts to reduce carbon emissions might be more likely to find reasons to reject the scientific consensus.”

Such conspiracy theories become popular — whether in relation to climate change or COVID-19 —  because they are a means of “simplifying and attributing blame,” particularly during a time when “people feel that they have lost control over their lives,” says Lewandowsky.

“Some will seek comfort in the idea that there are bad people out there causing the pandemic because, for some, knowing there are bad people responsible for terrible things is more comforting than to assume that these things are uncontrollable,” he says. “It allows people to direct anger at someone.”

Distrusting modellers

Many commentators directed their fire at a familiar foe — scientific models.

On April 1, the same day the United Nations announced thepostponement of the annual UN climate change conference, two prominent UK climate science deniersargued in The Wall Street Journal that the pandemic had “dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modelling to predict the future.”

Benny Peiser andAndrew Montford, the Director and Deputy Director of the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group the**Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)**,  criticised policymakers for using academic research that was subject to a “lack of quality control.” “In normal times this doesn’t matter much, but it’s different when studies find their way into the policy world,” they wrote.

They did not mention that the GWPF’s own approach to ‘peer-review’, which undercover reporters in 2015 showed operated on the basis of sending reports to its members of its own advisory council. The model has been described by UK charity Sense About Science, whose Advisory Council included GWPF advisor Matt Ridley, as “a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”

Eight days later, Breitbart’s Delingpole similarly criticised scientific modelling,dismissing research from the University of Washington forecasting more than150,000 deaths from the disease across the US as “operating in the realms of purest fantasy.” Whether on climate change or the pandemic, “we have no idea whether or not we can trust” scientific experts and their modelling, Delingpole argued[pix BB]

clark takes a similar view, telling DeSmog: “on both COVID-19 and climate change there are a lot of people who seem to favour the results of modelling over real-world observation.” Those who want action “will latch on to any model” that suits their ends, he claimed, and will “decide that is 'the science', that it is fact, beyond all challenge.”

Anarticle in Spiked likewise argued in April that “worst-case scenario thinking” and “doomsday forecasts” from models had clouded political judgement, referencing the obesity crisis, swine flu, and climate change.

This process of regularly casting doubt on models represents the “weaponisation of the scientific method,” says Imran Ahmed, founder of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. “Those sorts of sly tactics that have been used by these groups have amounted to an entire culture of how they spread information, spread ideas, and build audiences for their groups.”

“It’s expressed through philosophical strands which are anti-expert, faux-populist and conspiracies” and can include the “incel movement, climate denial, vaccine denial, identity-based hate,” he argues.

“As new facts emerge and as the understanding of the scientific movement changes,” says Ahmed, “these actors look back at previous consensuses and say, ‘see, they were lying back then.’”

Attacking environmentalists

As well as attacking coronavirus experts on their response recommendations, many commentators who oppose climate action also attacked those looking further ahead by putting forward proposals to ensure recovery plans were consistent with governments’ environmental pledges.

For months, commentators who regularly question the veracity of mainstream climate science denounced environmental activists for supposedly distracting the world with climate change amid the threat of pandemics.

On March 12, Telegraph columnistSherelle Jacobsargued that university funding should be redirected away from climate change research and towards “the scientifically uncontested problem of pandemics.” The day after, when the UK was effectively put under a national lockdown, Dutch climate science denial groupCLINTEL published anopen letter titled “Fight virus not carbon.”

Greenpeace,The Climate Group, and many other environmental organisations believe that the government should include environmental policies in coronavirus economic recovery measures to “build back better,” particularly as the country seeks to position itself as a climate leader ahead of hosting the UN climate talks in November 2021.

Some commentators spun this argument to imply that the environmental movement was happy that the virus has spread.

On March 22, former Top Gear presenterJeremy Clarksonclaimed in the Sunday Times that “greens just can’t stop smiling” because COVID-19 was “their idea of a wet dream.” Spiked contributor Ross Clark echoed this position in a response to DeSmog’s questions, saying that “there is a strand of opinion on the left which wants these crises — climate change and COVID — to be as big as possible because they see it as a way of undermining capitalism, and other aspects of our lives, and reforming society in their own dream vision.”

On March 25, a couple of days after Clarkson’s polemic appeared, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill similarly argued that the pandemic was “a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in.”

“The truth is that if the COVID-19 crisis has shown us anything, it is how awful it would be to live in the kind of world greens dream about. Right now, courtesy of a horrible new virus, our societies look not dissimilar to the kind of societies Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, green parties and others have long been agitating for,” he wrote.

[pix] o’Neill reiterated this position when contacted by DeSmog, saying both the “green movement” and the reaction to COVID represented “privileged Westerners taking political decisions and actions” to the detriment of some of society’s most vulnerable. “Progressives should be questioning the impact of the reaction to COVID-19 on working people and poor people,” he said.

In June, 57 charitieswrote to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking him to put the creation of jobs in low-carbon sectors at the forefront of his economic recovery plans. They also asked the government to cancel the debts of developing countries struggling with both the impacts of the pandemic and the climate crisis.

Delingpole later wrote in acolumn for Breitbart saying environmentalists were celebrating the lockdown as a blueprint for a “new world order.” The GWPF took this argument one step further,publishing an image of a crying woman with the text, “net zero, like lockdown but permanent” — a reference to the UK government’s plans to slash the country’s emissions.

As these pieces were appearing, a Twitter account claiming to represent the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the East Midlandsposted an image of an XR-branded sticker on a lamppost with the words, “corona is the cure, humans are the disease.”

Official XR accounts were quick to condemn the tweet andsaid that they were not affiliated with the newly created account, which has since been deleted. But various outlets and commentators used the tweet to condemn the protest group.

Gaia Fawkes, the environmental section of political blog Guido Fawkes,suggested the post showed that XR was “in favour of extinction,” though it acknowledged coordinators of the organisation had “distanced themselves” from the supposed splinter group. A spokesperson for the site told DeSmog it stood by its reporting despite well-publicised doubts over the authenticity of the East Midlands organisation, stating it was “unaware of any publicly available list of ‘official’ [XR] groups at the time.”

The GWPF likewise claimed the Twitter account’s “anti-human sentiment” was “widely shared” among environmentalists,rejecting claims that the East Midlands account was fake.

Author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot suggests that while it is predominantly money that is behind climate science denial or tobacco industry lobbying, “with COVID-19, the motive definitely varies,” but the outcome is essentially the same.

“There are a lot of very well-paid people who are very professional and they’re using the expertise that they’ve gathered in other areas of dispute about scientific facts and the policies arising from them, and applying those directly to the pandemic,” he argues.

“Take their power seriously, but don’t take any of their arguments at face value,” Monbiot concludes. “It’s not worth trying to deconstruct the nonsense they come out with.”

Political impact

Unlike in theEU referendum or Trump’s presidential campaign, pushing anti-expert rhetoric may no longer be a winning strategy in the wake of COVID-19. Polling shows that despite worry about the pandemic and its impacts, the public still wants governments totackle climate change. And politicians attaching themselves to the anti-science bandwagon are now struggling in the polls.

For the Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s Ahmed, attacking the concept of expertise around COVID-19 is “the first truly great strategic mistake by those who espouse this radical world view.”

The US and UK are two of the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, and both have leaders “who have been denying evidence and fact,” says Lewandowsky. “Johnson and Trump are creating a situation in which the very thought that we could establish a common truth is under attack,” he says. Both are regularly backed by commentators who also openly question the concept of expertise, whether on climate change or coronavirus.

But these positions have begun to hurt both leaders. Johnson has plummeted from a position of public popularity prior to the UK’s lockdown to anegative approval rating almost four months later. And the gap between the majority of Americans who disapprove of Trump’s leadership and those keeping faith with the president now sits ataround 15 percent, numbers that could see him lose November’s election.

That may reflect a wider shift in the public mindset, Lewandowsky argues: “My hope is that the COVID crisis has kind of given us a reset here, and there’s some evidence that people are beginning to say that we do need experts and data.”

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textfire

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SCL had worked on some elections, in a few war zones, and for the Pentagon over the years, with perhaps their most notable appearance being in 2004 Ukraine at the time of the Orange Revolution (allegedly on behalf of the vested interests of British intelligence, according to one untrustworthy source,as previously noted by TEXTIFIRE).

SCL carries a Secret clearance as a ‘List X’ contractor for the British Ministry of Defence and had always portrayed themselves as experts in the field of behavioral dynamics and psychological warfare, but had no known background in the algorithmic data processing with which they are now associated.

So why would an ill-equipped foreign defense contractor like SCL be called upon by the Mercers to do big data research? The answer again appears to lie somewhere in the weeds near Steve Bannon.

Header for Nigel Farage’s dozens of Breitbart essays (Source)]

WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?

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Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation. He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly those tied in with Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).A hard right party commonly disparaged as fascist, UKIP sought to restore what it saw as true conservatism. Bannon was greatly invested in the USA Tea Party ‘movement’ at the time, as evidenced by his movie productions and speaking engagements, so he viewed UKIP as a natural comrade in arms.

:{

}:

UKIP had been stagnating as a political force while known as a single platform party, focused almost entirely on immigration crackdown and demand for UK’s exit from the European Union. Co-founder Farage had returned to lead the party for a 2nd time in November 2010 — later in the same week as the first Tea Party Republicans were elected in the US midterms — after failing in his bid to become House of Commons Speaker earlier that year, and began to incorporate a wider variety of populist messaging with a focus on local elections to increase growth.

Soon after Bannon took over Breitbart in the summer of 2012, he brought Farage to the USA for a grand tour of New York and Washington, D.C. During this trip, Bannon introduced Farage to a number of movers & shakers, including the staff of Jeff Sessions,the then-senator from Alabama who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.

Throughout the previous year, a UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge was garnering a lot of press for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-Defence Secretary Liam Fox, after being founded in 1997 by Fox and Reagan BFF/ex-UK-PM Margaret Thatcher, its stated goal was to protect the 80's holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special relationship’ from “the European integrationists who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States.”

Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]

Atlantic Bridge fell into the sea in late 2011, after extensive investigations found Fox had been implementing a “shadow foreign policy” by internationally courting a variety of corporate lobbyists and military contractors via the dark money donated to Bridge as a falsely-labeled charity. Fox then resigned his Cabinet position, taking a few others down with him.

One of those affected was yet another powerful hedge fund manager, ex-Goldman Sachs trader, climate-change denier & funder, and longtime Tory/Conservative donor named Michael Hintze who provided the majority of those donations and lent his private jet to Fox for schmoozy jaunts to meet with D.C. defence contractors. With a strong interest in geopolitical wargames, a habit of supporting Defence Secretaries, and a predilection for hiring senior military officials at his powerful firm Convertible & Quantitative Strategies, it’s small wonder Hintze sought to establish a Western security superhighway before the Bridge collapsed.

Back in 2007, however, Atlantic Bridge was still in its prime, and it gained even more power when a giant among US political activist groups began an official partnership with it. The American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, in order to “foster positive relationships between conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, so they may further the ideals exemplified by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.”

Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]

ALEC’s decades-old modus operandi is to write complete versions of new legislation, which invariably benefits only its powerful corporate members, to be passed off to complicit politicians and introduced in Congress as original products. An official ALEC newsletter from Dec 2007 bragged of the Bridge Project’s new plans to enact “a series of events aimed at conservative leaders from the field of politics, media, business, and academia — exposing them to innovative conservative thinking from the U.S. and Great Britain and helping them forge new transatlantic relationships.”

Catherine Bray is pictured in the newsletter as the Director of International Relations for Atlantic Bridge; she had previously worked for prominent UKIP member & climate change denier Roger Helmer and subsequently worked for Tory Daniel Hannan, “the man who brought you Brexit.” In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen, Atlantic Bridge’s Washington DC Director, and J.D. Gordon, a retired Pentagon spokesman and well-traveled defense lobbyist. Lee Cohen is now an ardent Trump supporter, publishing an IJR essay in November 2016 predicting Trump and new UK PM Theresa May will be the new Reagan & Thatcher.

Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director forHerman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier Cain promised to reduce corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA. Cain began briefly leading Obama in the polls at that time and was the most reported-on GOP candidate in 2011, but quit the race less than 2 months later after sexual misconduct charges arose.

Gordon was slightly controversial when he originally joined up as one of Cain’s foreign policy advisers, as he had recently left a fellowship position at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank (or perhaps hate group) devoted to advancing founder and former Reagan official Frank Gaffney’s pet cause of extreme Islamophobia. Cain’s campaign also absorbed the staff of Gordon’s own embryonic thinktank, the Center for Security and Democracy, which included a former Heritage Foundation manager.

J.D. Gordon is most recently known for his work as a key foreign policy adviser to Cain clone Donald Trump, who counted Herman among his early campaign rally speakers/surrogates, and about whom Gordon wrote a pro-Trump Breitbart article in April 2016. Gordon was also Jeff Sessions’ deputy, allegedly traveled to Budapest six times during the campaign, participated in the infamous July 2016 Republican National Convention meeting — hosted by the Heritage Foundation — involving co-adviser Carter Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and is said to have previously recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow. Gordon also claims he personally asked to water down the RNC platform with noncommittal language omitting lethal weapons support for Ukraine, and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.

(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio]

Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, then frequently cited as one of the farthest-right sitting Senators. An ardent tax reformer, Family member, and anti-immigration crusader, he was on board with the Tea Party from its inception in early 2009, setting the stage with the establishment of his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC in 2008. The Fund attacked Republicans for being too ‘moderate’ and then gave millions to the successful 2010 Senate campaigns of such first-time Tea Party candidates as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey. Also in 2010, DeMint introduced the first bill intended to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few months later with his first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage, so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he endorsed Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.

A large chunk of the money for that tactical assault was provided by Robert Mercer, with other miniature morsels of Mercer Money going to DeMint, Toomey, and Rubio at various times. Unsurprisingly, Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time, with Lee and Demint tying for the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.

“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]

DeMint resigned from the Senate less than two months after the 2012 election in order to become president of Heritage — a thinktank which shares an enormous number of historical, practical, and membership commonalities with ALEC — by which time Atlantic Bridge had been dead [in the UK] for over a year. Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, Liam Fox, J.D. Gordon, and/or any of the other Atlantic Bridge ambassadors still managed to make their way to any one of the legendary parties thrown at the “Breitbart Embassy”, a four-story townhouse rented (?) by Breitbart near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

As for the gregarious and cigar-chomping heavy drinker Nigel Farage, we don’t have to imagine anything. He was treated as the guest of honor at a Breitbart Embassy dinner & cocktail party in September 2014, where the stars of the new right rubbed shoulders with journalists from across the media spectrum. Other guests that night included LifeZette’sLaura Ingraham, a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.

Steve Bannon had been partially living at the Embassy since at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially expected to serve as a means to rub shoulders with the movers & shakers of the DC political elite. “Andrew [Breitbart] said that if you didn’t have a place within spitting distance of the Capitol, no one would come,” Bannon told The Washington Post at an Embassy blowout schmooze-and-boozefest CPAC rager in 2014. “He loved to throw big parties.”

But regardless of the precise circumstances by which Bannon became enmeshed with the UK’s conservative elite prior to mid-2012, engrossing as the detailed story may be, his friendship with UKIP & Brexit’s Farage tells us all we need to know. As such, we should be unsurprised to learn it was allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.

PSYOPS GOES MAINSTREAM

...

British political parties and individual politicians have received more than £9 million worth of donations from the aviation industry, with the vast majority going to the Brexit Party and the Conservatives, DeSmog can reveal.

The top four incumbent politicians to have taken donations are all Conservative MPs, with former International Trade Secretary Liam Fox receiving the most. Two other Tory MPs, three Labour MPs and the leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price, are joint fourth, and another Tory MP is also in the top 10.

READ MO

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Ukip and The Brexit Party - United Kingdom

Ukip has for long attracted climate science deniers into its ranks. And earlier this year, Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage, who has a history of spreading misinformation about climate change, launched The Brexit Party to contest the European elections.

As DeSmog previously reported, the Brexit Party includes a number of opponents to measures to tackle climate change. including Ann Widdecombe, one of five MPs to oppose the Climate Change Act in the UK. Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who advocated investments in the Canadian tar sands and sister of climate science denying Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is also a marquee candidate. She joins chairman of Turning Point UK George Farmer and Welsh MEP Nathan Gill, both of whom have questioned mainstream climate science and the need for action..

In the meantime, Ukip’s candidates are continuing the party’s climate science denial tradition.

Ukip MEPs were among a small band of right-wing members to vote against the ratification by the European Parliament of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The party’s current manifesto calls for the country’s 2008 Climate Change Act to be scrapped, and promotes measures to rejuvenate the UK’s coal industry.

Ukip leader Gerard Batten, also a candidate, has defended Ukip’s policy, suggesting there was no need for “a man-made climate change policy”. Candidate Alan Graves Senior likewise confirmed the party’s policy tweeting: “It is not a case of denying climate change it is more that we do not accept it is all man-made”.

And Ukip MEP **Stuart Agnew** previously described global warming as “a scam” and used a series of cold winters to justify his belief that global warming is not happening.

Other candidates in the elections, including Paul Oakley, Richard Braine, and Richard Elvin have also touted climate science denial.

==

These pro-climate positions are far from the norm, however, among Europe’s populists. The majority of the parties either outright deny the science on climate change, or else ignore the issue. TheAlternative for Germany partyand the UKIndependence Party are both openly sceptical about the proven connection between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures.

==

Do not adjust your wireless, the BBC really did just ask 'is climate change real?'.

Last week we reported how a local radio station decided the middle of a heatwave was a good time to discuss the reality of anthropogenic global warming. While it had a few segments from scientists making clear that yes, really, climate change really really is real and really really is happening and yes this really is kind of what it looks like, the producers also invited on a climate science denier. Cos, y'know, balance.

Up stepped Philip Foster, a retired reverend, writer and a supporter of the UK Independence Party (Ukip).

He is a vice chairman of the cross-party Eurosceptic group Campaign for an Independent Britain.

Foster completed an undergraduate degree in Natural Science at the University of Cambridge before teaching secondary and sixth-form schoolchildren in Nigeria. He trained as a Christian minister and served for 30 years before retiring.

It was an increasingly rare appearance for Foster, who was last spootted at the Paris climate conference, where he teamed up with climate science denier and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher Christopher Monckton to organise a few climate science denier events.

Read more about Foster's (mis)deeds in his full profile in our Disinformation Database.

==

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/06/roger-stone-nigel-farage-donald-trump-russia-fbi/

Last week, the Guardian published a report revealing a new and odd twist in the Trump-Russia scandal: Nigel Farage, the British politician who led the Brexit movement in Great Britain, is a “person of interest” in the FBI investigation of interactions between Trump associates and the Russian government. The newspaper reported that Farage was under FBI scrutiny because he had relationships with both the Trump camp and WikiLeaks, which disseminated Democratic emails swiped by Russian hackers in an effort to help Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Farage dismissed the story as “hysteria”and said he had not been contacted by the FBI. But Farage did meet with Trump during the campaign. And a source close to the Trump camp tells Mother Jones that a Trump-Farage meeting was set up by Roger Stone, the veteran political dirty-trickster and long-time Trump adviser who has come under investigation in the Trump-Russia inquiry.

That source is Stone himself.

In the months since the election, Stone has drawn the attention of investigators and reporters because he made statements during the campaign that implied he possessed inside information about WikiLeaks’ plans to release material stolen in the hack-and-leak covert operation mounted by Putin’s regime to subvert the 2016 campaign and assist Trump. In early August—after WikiLeaks had disseminated Democratic Party emails hacked by Russian intelligence—Stone said at a Republican event in Florida, “I actually have communicated with [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.” On October 2, he tweeted, “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” (This was five days before WikiLeaks released the emails of Clinton campaign CEO John Podesta, which were stolen by Russian hackers.) That month, Stone claimed he had “a back-channel communication” with Assange through “a good mutual friend.” During the campaign, Stone also communicated with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that posted hacked Democratic emails, and Stone publicly insisted Guccifer 2.0 was not connected to the Russians.

Stone’s prescient statements about WikiLeaks’ anti-Clinton dumps and his claim of a connection with Assange naturally have raised questions about his role in the Trump-Russia scandal. And the Guardianreport on Farage partly focused on the Brit’s ties to Stone. The story raised the possibility that Farage might have been Stone’s contact with WikiLeaks.

After the Guardian article was published, Mother Jones asked Stone if Farage was Stone’s “mutual friend” who had been his go-between with Assange. Stone replied, “Dined with him once in Cleveland [during the GOP convention in July]. Got him a meeting with the candidate. Never spoke to him again.”

So did Stone hook up Farage and Trump? The two politicians had a much-noticed rendezvous when Farage, then the leader of the UK Independence Party, appeared with Trump at a campaign rally in Mississippi in late August and declared, “If I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me.” It was a moment when the conservative anti-European populism of England merged with Trump’s anti-establishment American Firstism. Farage spoke of pro-Brexit voters supporting the referendum to withdraw Great Britain from the European Union so “they could take back control of their country, take back control of their borders, and get back their pride and self-respect.” Farage urged the American people to “stand up against the establishment.”

A book written by a Farage associate and published in October reported that Farage’s partnership with Trump came about because the British politician, while attending the GOP convention, had a chance encounter at 4:30 a.m. in his hotel bar with an aide to Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican. The aide suggested Farage visit Mississippi and subsequently sent him a formal invitation. A month later, Farage flew to Mississippi, just when Trump was scheduled to speak at a Republican fundraiser and a campaign rally. Farage had dinner with Bryant and regaled him and other guests with Brexit stories. Bryant suggested Farage speak at the Trump rally the following night—after speaking at the GOP fundraiser. On a radio show the next morning, Farage announced he was in Mississippi to show his support for Trump. Steven Bannon, who had recently been named Trump’s chief strategist, called Farage to check what Farage intended to say at the Republican dinner and the Trump rally. Hours later, Farage met Trump for the first time, according to this account, in a holding room at the Republican fundraiser. Trump strode across the room and gave the British politician a bear hug.

This account makes no mention of Stone. I asked Stone how his assertion that he had set up a meeting between Farage and Trump squared with this report. He replied, “I suggested candidate [Trump] meet Farage immediately after the convention. Certain [Farage] asked others to secure a meeting. Don’t recall when it happened only that it did.” It’s unclear whether the meeting Stone says he brokered was the same as the Mississippi get-together.

Stone added, “You report so much bullshit why do you care about the facts?”

The facts here are intriguing. If the FBI is indeed examining Farage for his ties to Assange and the Trump crew, Stone’s interactions with Farage—and whether or not Stone really did connect him with Trump—could be relevant. The brash and brassy Stone, who relishes publicity and mud-slinging and who has written a book claiming LBJ killed JFK, has been an enticing target for Democrats and investigators pursuing the various threads of the Russia-Trump scandal. With the Farage connection, the plot thickens.

Farage did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did the White House.

UPDATE: A spokesman for Farage says, “Nigel met Roger Stone in a restaurant in Cleveland during the RNC purely by chance. They subsequently met each other in a hotel in Washington during Trump’s inauguration, again without planning and by chance. He did not organise any meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Farage.”

==

ExxonMobil’s former CEO is Rex Tillerson, who was until recently the US Secretary of State. He was appointed by Donald Trump, who Cambridge Analytica were influential in getting elected.

Big Coal

Cambridge Analytica also has ties to the world’s biggest coal company, Peabody Energy.

The link there is through Christian Patrick Teroerde, who was a director of SCL Elections - a subsidiary of Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group.

Teroerde is also a director of Hanson Asset Management, which bought a major stake in Peabody in the 1990s, when it was the world’s largest coal company.

Peabody filed for bankruptcy in 2016 as coal prices crashed. Since Donald Trump got elected, Peabody has bounced back, big time.

Brexit and Climate Science Denial

Hanson Asset Management also links to DeSmog UK’s previous map that tied Cambridge Analytica to Brexit and climate science denial.

The company was built on the wealth of Lord James Hanson, who was a big Euro-sceptic. He founded the anti-EU campaign group Business for Sterling, whose Head of Research was Dominic Cummins.

Cummins went on to be the campaign director for the official Brexit campaign group, Vote Leave. One of the whistleblowers in the Guardian claimed Cambridge Analytica was working for Vote Leave via a youth campaign organisation called BeLeave and the company’s Canadian spin-off, Aggregate IQ.

Vote Leave was supported by two members of the Conservative party with climate science denial links: North Shropshire MPOwen Paterson and hereditary peer Matt Ridley. Both are well-known allies of the the UK’s most prominent climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Electoral Commission is currently investigating the unofficial Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, which Cambridge Analytica is also thought to have worked with, though the company denies this.

Leave.EU was bankrolled by climate science denier Arron Banks and was fronted by another climate science denier, former UKIP-leader Nigel Farage. Both were famously photographed in a golden elevator with Donald Trump.

Both Vote Leave and Leave.EU also have ties to the party currently propping up the government, the Democratic Unionist Party, through another Brexit campaign group - Grassroots Out. DUP MP and climate science denier Sammy Wilson was a key player in Grassroots Out.

Here’s an interactive map of how it all fits together:

https://www.desmog.uk/nigel-farage

Background

Until recently, Nigel Farage was the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which Farage helped found. He has previously cast doubt on the scientific consensus surrounding hunan-caused climate change.

UKIP’s primary goal was to seek the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Following Britain’s successful EU referendum in June 2016 Farage stepped down as party leader saying his “political ambition has been achieved”. During the Brexit campaign, Farage was a leading member of the unofficial pro-Brexit groups Leave.EU and Grassroots Out.

Since then Farage has toured the US and Europe visiting like minded conservative groups and appearing as a commentator on Fox News.

Stance on Climate Change

Farage and his UKIP party have long engaged with climate science denial. In December 2014, just as scientists announced that 2014 was on course to be the hottest year on record, Farage told an audience at a voter engagement event that he had “no idea”whether he believed in climate change. “Be careful of the scientific consensus,” he said.

UKIP’s most recent party manifestos for the 2015 and 2017 elections have both pledged to undo green initiatives. In 2015 it stated “the Climate Change Act is doing untold damage. UKIP will repeal it.” It also argued that “coal must be part of the solution” for cheap energy security and that it’s “times to get fracking”. These themes were repeated in 2017 when the party manifesto called again for the UK Climate Change Act to be repealed while pledging to “withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and the EU Emissions Trading scheme”.

Key Quotes

November 2015

In an interview with Spiked online:

“I haven’t got a clue whether climate change is being driven by carbon-dioxide emissions.”

“I think wind energy is the biggest collective economic insanity I’ve seen in my entire life. I’ve never seen anything more stupid, more illogical, or more irrational.”

June 2013

In an interview with Edie:

“I am not saying that man is having no influence on the climate, although as the years go by it looks increasingly unlikely. To be told that the science is settled [on global warming] is hard to accept. Where I grew up, our back wall joined onto Down House where Charles Darwin wrote [On the Origin of Species] and 150 years on, the science isn't settled over Darwin and I can tell you science is never settled.”

“It's odd to focus on carbon dioxide. I'm an environmentalist; I'm against carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide and toxins in our rivers. Yes, I'm all for pollution controls but to obsess with carbon dioxide, which as I understand it, is a perfectly natural occurring phenomenon, strikes me as strange.”

September 2013

Speaking in the European Parliament:

“We may have made one of the biggest and most stupid collective mistakes in history by getting so worried about global warming.”

Key Deeds

November 2016

Nigel Farage claimed the distinction of being Donald Trump’s first meeting with a foreign politician after winning the USpresidential race. A photo taken on 12 November shows the two men standing in front of Trump’s golden elevator in New York City alongside millionaire UKIP and Brexit-backer Arron Banks, Breitbart UK editor Raheem Kassam, unofficial Brexit campaign group Leave.EU pollster Gerry Gunster, and Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU.

July 2016

Farage attended the Republican National Convention during the 2016 election race where Donald Trump successfully ran for President of the United States. His goal was to spread the “Brexit gospel” as Politico reported at the time. “I think there are a lot of Republican strategists who are looking very closely at what we did and how we did it,” Farage told POLITICO, adding “All I can do is to come and tell my story.”

July 2015

Farage delivered a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. where he made the case for the US to support Brexit. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative “free enterprise” group with a history of promoting climate science denial.

Related Posts

• Web of Power: Cambridge Analytica and the Climate Science Denial Network Lobbying for Brexit and Trump
• Brexit, One Year On: Green Tape, Fossil Fuels, and Climate Science Deniers
• Mapped: The Brexiteer Climate Science Denial Network Beneath the Tory-DUP Coalition Pact
• UK Climate Deniers Take Anti-Science Message to Trump Administration at CPAC 2017
• Brexit-Backer and Trump Ally Arron Banks Brings Breitbart, Drudge Report-Inspired News Site to the UK

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fbi-detains-london-based-trump-defender-subpoenas-him-mueller-probe

Ted Malloch, a London-based American academic and close ally of UK Independence Party co-founder Nigel Farage, was detained on Wednesday by the FBI at a Boston, MA airport and issued a subpoena to testify as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

As the Guardian reports, Malloch—a contributor for the and self-described “defender of Trump”—said he was detained at Boston’s Logan airport upon arrival from London. Notably, Malloch told the Gateway Pundit he was detained in Cleveland, OH.

In a statement, Malloch said he was asked about his relationship to longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, as well as any possible ties to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He told the Guardian the federal agent who detained him “seemed to know everything about me.”

Malloch is described as close to Farage, a staunch Trump supporter who is in turn an ally of former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Farage was at the forefront of the UK Brexit push, which whistleblower Christopher Wylie claims was aided by the Bannon-headed data firm Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica is under scrutiny in the United States for its role in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is reportedly examining the Trump campaigns ties to the firm.

Malloch told investigators he only met with Stone three times, and that he’s never visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has lived in asylum for six years.

In his statement to the Guardian, Malloch claims he was “unfazed and very dubious about why [investigators] thought I knew anything.” The agents confiscated his phone for a “full assessment” and may have read a portion of his not-yet-published book alleging a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump, the Guardian reports.

“I did … find it objectionable to treat me the way they had, as I was entering my home country, where I am a citizen,” Malloch said. “They did not need to use such tactics or intimidation.”

“I was a U.S. patriot and would do anything and everything to assist the government and I had no information that I believed was relevant,” he added"

guard uk no links (many)

gXardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

 Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Carole Cadwalladr

Sunday 26 February 2017

This article is the subject of a legal complaint on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited.

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.

It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl;a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.

A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about howGoogle’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website,Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

It sounds creepy, I say.

“It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us.He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist,found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn’t know where Kogan’s data came from. “The evidence was contrary. I reported it.” An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. “But then Kogan said he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone,Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’sSCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image, says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week thatSCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.

But then there’s increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops”.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave.Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian.Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it

“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

Yet another details the power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE news!!!!”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did.Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors,Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.”

Play VideoPlay

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as “very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.”

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. “We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.”

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box in finance”.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.”

The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

“It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

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UKIP MEP Has More Links To Trump’s Administration Than Theresa May Does

Roger Helmer, a climate change denier you’ve probably never heard of, has more contacts with the future US government than the prime minister does.

posted on Nov. 15, 2016, at 9:33 a.m.

Marie Le Conte

BuzzFeed News Reporter

A UKIP MEP you’ve probably never heard of may be the British politician with some of the closest ties to the future Trump administration.

Though Nigel Farage’s aides claimed that when Donald Trump becomes president, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, will “run ideas” through the interim UKIP leader before contacting Theresa May, there’s another UKIP member who is also well connected.

Former Tory Roger Helmer, who joined UKIP in 2014 and has been an MEP since 1999, has staunchly conservative views on social issues and climate change that have brought him close to certain GOP figures.

Roger Helmer ? @RogerHelmerMEP

With Newt Gingrich at the ALEC Conference in Dallas, Texas.

3:10 AM - 1 Aug 2014

2 2 Retweets   4 4 likes

Helmer is also close to the Heritage Foundation, an “aggressively conservative” think tank that was influential under the Reagan administration and is now effectively running Trump’s transition team.

This allowed him to meet not only people from the organisation, some of whom are now working with the president-elect on his future cabinet, but also Republican senators and governors who may well end up running the US come January.

Helmer confirmed to BuzzFeed News that he had in fact met a number of key people linked to Trump, but added: “I wouldn’t say I was in day-to-day contact with any of these people.”

1. Sam Brownback

A former senator and current governor of Kansas, Brownback is on the conservative wing of the Republican party.

He met Helmer in Washington, DC, in May 2008, where the two took part in a seminar on US policy towards the UK and the EU, organised by the Heritage Foundation.

Brownback was named as one of the potential candidates to be agriculture secretary in Trump’s cabinet.

2. Rick Perry

After spending 15 years as governor of Texas, Perry tried – and failed – to get the Republican nomination in 2012 and 2016.

He was pictured with Roger Helmer in Dallas in August 2014 at a conference organised by ALEC, a powerful conservative think tank.

Perry campaigned for Trump in the run-up to the election and was contacted by the president-elect’s transition team on 9 November.

No other details are yet known, but it is rumoured he was offered a role in the Trump administration.

3. Jim DeMint

A former figurehead of the tea party movement, DeMint resigned from his post as South Carolina senator in 2013 to become president of the Heritage Foundation.

He met the UKIP MEP in 2008, and the two of them had a meeting to talk about “defence issues”, according to Helmer’s blog.

Though it hasn’t been suggested that DeMint will get a job in Trump’s cabinet, the Heritage Foundation remains very close to Trump and is expected to have a strong influence on policy and appointments.

4. Newt Gingrich

A major figure on the GOP’s right wing, Gingrich is the former speaker of the House of Representatives, and was considered as a potential running mate for Trump before he picked Mike Pence.

Gingrich met Helmer in 2014 at a breakfast during the ALEC conference mentioned above, and they were pictured together here.

A senior ally of Trump’s, Gingrich is expected to become either secretary of state or secretary of health and human services in 2017.

5. Becky Norton Dunlop

Another conservative linked to the Heritage Foundation, Dunlop started her political career in the White House under Reagan.

She has met Helmer several times, including at the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe in November 2016 and the Jerusalem Leaders’ Summit a year earlier.

She is currently working in Trump’s transition team as deputy to Ed Feulner, who is understood to be assembling lists of recommendations for appointments in the next cabinet.

6. Jon Kyl

Now a lobbyist for an international law firm, Kyl was a senator in Arizona for 18 years, and was ranked in 2007 as the fourth-most conservative senator in the US.

He met Helmer in 2008 when they both addressed a reception at the Margaret Thatcher Centre in Washington, DC, which is also part of the Heritage Foundation.

Kyl may be on the verge of joining politics again, as he is one of the potential picks for defence secretary in Trump’s government.

Read Next: Liam Fox Has A Whole Bunch Of Links To People Close To Donald Trump

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Thursday afternoon, 10 Downing Street confirmed that Theresa May had spoken to Donald Trump on the phone, and that both parties were keen to see the special relationship going “from strength to strength”.

While the election of Trump on Wednesday had shocked the world, it also worried the British government: As an outsider, Trump had not spent years or decades cultivating political links with foreign parties.

James Forsyth ? @JGForsyth

How does Theresa May's government deal with a Trump administration? Number 10, privately, admit they don’t know him or his people

8:53 PM - 8 Nov 2016 · North West, England

The Conservative party had also been distancing itself from its US counterpart, the Republican party, under Cameron, who was uncomfortable with the most right-wing corners of the GOP.

One minister, however, has spent a lot of his time in Westminster making contacts with Republican politicians, and is therefore now in a very privileged position in the cabinet.

In fact, minister for international tradeLiam Fox nearly saw his career collapse in part due to these connections. In 2007, Fox set up the Atlantic Bridge, an “educational charity” aiming to promote Atlanticism, which believes that the UK and the US should closely cooperate on political, economic, and defence issues.

Several Tory MPs and Republican senators were part of the advisory panel, and the group of conservative politicians often attended events and conferences with one another on each side of the pond.

The Atlantic Bridge came under investigation in 2010 by the Charity Commission, the UK’s charity regulator, which ruled that the Atlantic Bridge’s independence from party politics wasn’t clear enough. The report led to the charity being dissolved a year later.

Fox had to resign from the cabinet in 2011 after it was revealed that his aide Adam Werrity, who had been working on the Atlantic Bridge, had attended official defence meetings despite not being employed by the government.

Now Fox is back in the cabinet, the contacts he made through the charity, mostly with then obscure or controversial figures, will soon become useful.

His other links to the new mainstream of the GOP come from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank once influential in the Reagan administration that is now coming back to the centre stage.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the “aggressively conservative” organisation has “dozens of current staff members and alumni working on Mr. Trump’s transition”, and Fox’s former special adviser at the Ministry of Defence, Luke Coffey, is one of its directors.

But Coffey is only the tip of the iceberg: Research by BuzzFeed News shown below found that Liam Fox has high-level connections with a number of the political figures who will shape America for the next four years – or more.

Here are six of the most important.

1. Jim Talent

A former senator from Missouri, Talent has always been on the right wing of the Republican party. He helped run Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

He met Liam Fox while working for Romney in August 2012, with Fox boasting at the time that he’d been able to “feed ideas” into the Republican campaign.

Talent was named by several outlets, including BuzzFeed News, as one of the politicians being considered by Trump as defence or commerce secretary.

2. Rudy Giuliani

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was one of Trump’s biggest supporters during the presidential campaign and is now widely regarded as being part of his inner circle.

In 2007, he gave a lecture at an Atlantic Bridge event in London attended by a group of Tory donors and MPs, after being invited by Liam Fox himself.

Giuliani is rumoured to be one of the main candidates for attorney general in Trump’s administration.

3. Mike Huckabee

Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas until 2007, and a Fox news talkshow host between 2008 and 2015. He ran in the 2015 Republican primaries, then eventually dropped out and backed Trump.

In November 2014, the register of members’ interests shows Fox was paid by the Maxcel Company to be in Dallas for a “Huckabee group meeting”, attended by Huckabee himself.

The former governor is now being touted as the future secretary of commerce.

4. Jim DeMint

Once a major figure in the Tea Party movement, DeMint resigned from the Senate in 2013 to become president of the Heritage Foundation.

He was on the advisory council of the Atlantic Bridge for several years, and has kept in touch with the UK politician since. In March earlier this year, Fox told a room of Conservative members he’d recently had lunch with DeMint.

Though DeMint is not rumoured to be getting a job soon, the Heritage Foundation has been close to Trump for several months and is expected to have a strong influence on policy and appointments.

5. John Bolton

An under secretary of state in both the Reagan and Bush administrations, Bolton was also a controversial appointment as US ambassador to the UN in 2005.

He met Fox at the Bahrain International Symposium in 2013, which was criticised internationally as a conference aiming to get Western politicians on the side of the Bahraini government as it struggled to repress internal protests from its people, with campaigners alleging human rights abuses.

Bolton has been tipped to be the new secretary of state when Trump gets in the White House, and has already declared his desire to serve.

6. Jim Inhofe

Famous for repeatedly claiming climate change is a “hoax”, Inhofe is a senator and chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

He was part of the US advisory council of Atlantic Bridge, and though he has publicly ruled out getting a post in Trump’s administration, he told his local paper:

“I got a phone call on the 5th of October and it was Trump. … I am now in a position where I am giving him some advice on national defense”.

Liam Fox Has A Whole Bunch Of Links To People Close To Donald ...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/marieleconte/donald-trump-**liam**-**fox**

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1.

:{Nov 12, 2016 - In 2007, :{Fox:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: set up the :{Atlantic Bridge:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, an “educational charity” aiming to ... of the GOP come from the :{Heritage:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Foundation, a conservative think tank ... and :{Fox's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: former special adviser at the Ministry of Defence, :{Luke Coffey:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Liam Fox's Atlantic Bridge linked top Tories and Tea Party activists ...

https://www.theguardian.com › Politics › Liam Fox and Adam Werritty links

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1.

:{Oct 15, 2011 - :{Liam Fox's Atlantic Bridge:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: linked top Tories and Tea Party activists .... event, as did the powerful neocon thinktank the :{Heritage:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Foundation. .... when he appointed a former US army captain, :{Luke Coffey:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, as his special adviser.:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

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During his first trip to the United States, less than two weeks after being appointed **International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox took the opportunity to meet with the climate science denying neoconservative think tank, the**

Heritage Foundation.

The details of Fox’s post-Brexit three-day tour of America in July have only just been released to DeSmog UK under a freedom of information request.  They show Fox also met with White House representatives, pro-business lobby group theUS Chamber of Commerce, and some of its corporate members.

The documents reveal a close relationship between Fox and the Heritage Foundation, as well as the desire for a bilateral trade deal between the two countries. They also suggest concerns over the current “political discourse” in the US could hinder the deal, however.

An attendees list shows that Fox addressed 16 Heritage Foundation staff, including the think tank’s president Jim DeMint, and executive vice president, Bret Bernhardt, over lunch “to explain the formation of the Department and UK priorities on trade and our EU renegotiation”, according to the meeting notes.

Heritage Foundation Ties

The Heritage Foundation has campaigned for Brexit over the past few years and hosted climate denying Brexit campaigners Nigel Farage and Owen Paterson during the lead up to the June vote.

Fox’s relationship with the think tank dates back to his time as UK Defence Secretary.

During that time and up until 2011,Fox was the founder and UK chairman of Atlantic Bridge – a think tank that brought together right-wing libertarians from both sides of the pond. Among the group’s membership was Jim DeMint, a former Tea Partier and the Heritage Foundation’s current president. Fox’sformer special advisor, Luke Coffey, now works at the think tank.

Upon hearing that Liam Fox was appointed as the UK’s International Trade Secretary on July 14, climate sceptic UKIP MEPRoger Helmertweeted: “Liam Fox has good contacts in the USA. It’s quite possible that the UK will have a US free trade deal before the EU does.”

Negotiating a unique trade deal between the UK and US remains a top priority for Brexit Britain. But the path forward is not clear. Last month the EU conceded that the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will not be passed during Obama’s final months as president.

International mega-trade deals like TTIP are all about reducing “barriers to trade” – in other words, “harmonising” regulations between all parties which raises concerns that there will be a race to the bottom, with important regulations related to health and the environment watered down.

Among the criticisms of TTIP is that it is disconnected from the urgency of climate change and the Paris Agreement, and that it will allow for lax regulations, loopholes, and an easier flow of trade in fossil fuels, particularly shale gas from the US.

Recently in Britain, US climate denying think tanks the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Heartland Institutespoke at the Conservative Party Conference and called for greater coordination between Britain and America. The CEI also have a voice on the international stage, with representatives currently attending the Marrakech climate conference.

Donald Trump has also named the director of CEI's Center for Energy and Environment, the climate science denying Myron Ebell, the as the man in charge of theUS Environmental Protection Agency's transition under the president-elect.

Trade Talk

Among the other topics discussed in the Heritage Foundation meeting in July were “foreign and defence policy, the challenges posed by ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] to UK defence industry collaboration and appetite to push for improvements to operation of the UK-US defence cooperation treaty.”

Concerns about EU food standards were also raised during the lunch meeting. Specifically, the issue of chlorine-washed chicken currently banned in Europe due to health concerns was raised, with participants arguing that the long-standing restriction “is without scientific basis”.

In a follow up letter on 23 August, Fox wrote to DeMint: “[Redacted]. I look forward to working with you as the new UKgovernment develops its trade policy priorities, including in high value areas that we discussed such as defence.” (The Department for International Trade operates theDefence and Security Organisation which helps British security and defence industries export their products).

In responding to a request for comment on the relationship between Fox and the Heritage Foundation, a spokesperson for the Department for International Trade said: “We will work with our trade and business partners to do everything we can to help UK businesses grow and take advantage of trade inward and outbound investment as well as the global appetite for British goods and services.”

“The Heritage Foundation is a think tank that focuses on the principles of free trade amongst others,” they explained. “Ministers meet with a variety of stakeholders and the International Trade Secretary and other UK government Ministers including the Prime Minister has spoken at length about the UK as a champion of global free trade.”

In other meetings held between Fox and trade lawyers, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the US Trade Representative, ambassador Mike Froman, concerns were raised over the future prospects of bilateral trade deals.

Notes from a roundtable with US trade experts show former US ambassador to the EU, Stuart Eizenstat, “noted Trump’s suggestion of withdrawal from the WTO as an especially bad omen. He lamented the current US political discourse on trade.

“A bilateral UK-US deal was politically attractive, but he questioned USTR [US Trade Representative] negotiating bandwidth.”

http://www.desmog.uk/2016/11/14/revealed-liam-fox-s-post-brexit-us-trade-talks-business-groups-and-neocon-think-tank-heritage-foundation

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UKIP brexit nigel farage

Roger Helmer MEP has organised a special screening of the highly-acclaimed film Climate Hustle. He said: "The film takes apart the case for 'catastrophic global warming' and exposes the lies, exaggerations and misinterpretations which underlie the new religion of 'warmism'."

http://www.ukip.org/roger_helmer_mep_to_host_screening_of_climate_hustle

http://www.ukip.org/roger_helmer_mep_to_host_screening_of_climate_hustle

Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about “beatniks” and sexually transmitted diseases that upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere,” says Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, “Steve’s probably nearby with some matches.” Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the townhouse.

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