liam fox
=<div>2x</div><div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Header for Nigel Farage’s dozens of Breitbart essays (Source)]</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 <b>Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). </b>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.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 <b>Jeff Sessions</b></span><b>, </b>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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Throughout the previous year, a <b>UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge</b> was garnering a lot of press for all the wrong reasons. Fronted by then-<b>Defence Secretary Liam Fox,</b> 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.”</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 <b>Fox for schmoozy jaunts to meet with D.C. defence contractors</b>.</span> 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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 <b>ALEC</b> — 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.”</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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. A<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">n 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.”</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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</span>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">” In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Managing the D.C. operations for the Project was <b>Gordon Cohen Strategies LLC, co-founded by Lee Cohen,</b> 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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director for<b> Herman 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.</b></span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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 <b>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.</b> 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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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,</span> 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 <b>Carter Page and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak</b>, and is said to have previously recommended that Page embark on his Congressionally-investigated trip to Moscow<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">. 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.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio]</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>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</b>. 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 <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>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,</b> so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 153);"> 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.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>A large chunk of the money for that tactical assault was provided by Robert Mercer,</b> 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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>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</b>. Even so, it’s easy to imagine DeMint, <b>Liam Fox</b>, 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.</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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’s<b> Laura Ingraham,</b> a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.</span></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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.”</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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 <b>allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.</b></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">PSYOPS GOES MAINSTREAM</div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">desmog 1219</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><div class="views-field views-field-body" style="font-size: 14px; overflow: inherit; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif"><div class="field-content"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;">The european Parliament has declared a climate emergency. And it did so without the help of many of the <span class="caps" style="font-size: 0.9em;">UK</span>’s pro-Brexit <span class="caps" style="font-size: 0.9em;">MEP</span>s.</p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;">A <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/votes.html?tab=votes" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(51, 153, 204);">resolution</a> declaring the emergency and calling on all global actors to “urgently take the concrete action needed in order to fight and contain this threat before it is too late” <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PV-9-2019-11-28-RCV_FR.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(51, 153, 204);">passed</a> with 429 votes for, 225 votes against, and 19 abstentions on November 28.</p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;">Six of the 225 votes against were from the <span class="caps" style="font-size: 0.9em;">UK</span>’s Brexit Party <span class="caps" style="font-size: 0.9em;">MEP</span>s. 21 of the party’s <span class="caps" style="font-size: 0.9em;">MEP</span>s, including party leader Nigel Farage, didn’t show for the vote, however.</p></div></div><div class="views-field views-field-disqus-comment-count" style="float: left; margin-right: 15px; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><span class="field-content" /></div><div class="views-field views-field-view-node" style="text-align: right; text-transform: uppercase; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><span class="field-content"><a href="https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/12/05/these-pro-brexit-meps-didn-t-want-european-parliament-declare-climate-emergency" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">READ MORE</a></span></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div>=
<table class="table" id="entity-connections-table" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); width: 646px; max-width: 100%; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 0.5em; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: " helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><thead style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th id="connected-entity-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: bottom; border-top: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid lightgrey !important; font-size: larger; width: 193px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recipient</font></th><th id="connection-stat-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: bottom; border-top: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid lightgrey !important; font-size: larger;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Total</font></th><th id="connecting-entity-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; text-align: left; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: bottom; border-top: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid lightgrey !important; font-size: larger;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donors</font></th></tr></thead><tbody style="box-sizing: border-box;"><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><a href="https://littlesis.org/org/228848-Vote_Leave" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vote Leave</font></a></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$146,000</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/53770-David_Davis" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Davis</font></a></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$14,637</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/55402-Liam_Fox" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Liam Fox</font></a></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$13,303</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/67986-Boris_Johnson" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boris Johnson</font></a></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$7,213</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/163547-Theresa_May" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Theresa May</font></a></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$1,752</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><a href="https://littlesis.org/org/52794-Conservative_Party" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative Party</font></a></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$0</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr><tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><td class="connected-entity-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); width: 193px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://littlesis.org/org/228846-Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;">Global Warming Policy Foundation</a>
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</font><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><div class="views-field views-field-body" style="overflow: inherit;"><div class="field-content"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The top four incumbent politicians to have taken donations are all Conservative <span class="caps">MP</span>s, with former International Trade Secretary <a href="https://desmog.co.uk/liam-fox" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Liam Fox</a> receiving the most. Two other Tory <span class="caps">MP</span>s, three Labour <span class="caps">MP</span>s and the leader of Plaid Cymru, Adam Price, are joint fourth, and another Tory <span class="caps">MP</span> is also in the top 10.</font></p></div></div><div class="views-field views-field-disqus-comment-count" style="float: left; margin-right: 15px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="field-content" /></font></div><div class="views-field views-field-view-node" style="text-align: right; text-transform: uppercase;"><span class="field-content"><a href="https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/12/06/revealed-brexit-party-and-conservatives-have-received-8m-aviation-industry" style="outline: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">READ MO</font></a></span></div></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">WEREN’T THE FIRST TEA PARTIERS ANGRY AT THE BRITS..?</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b>Bannon became interested in United Kingdom politics in the early 2010s, seeing it as fertile ground for ideological manipulation. </b>He began making friends with far right bloggers and politicians, particularly those tied in with<b> Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> 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.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b>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</b>. 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 <b>populist </b>messaging with a focus on local elections to increase growth.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">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<b> Farage to a number of movers & shakers, including the staff of <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Jeff Sessions, </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">the then-senator from Alabama</span> who is now US Attorney General. This was certainly not the first connection between UK eurosceptics and US nativists, however.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b>Throughout the previous year, a UK political activist ‘pressure group’ called Atlantic Bridge<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 <b>stated goal was to protect the 80's holdover concept of the US & UK’s military and cultural ‘special relationship’ from “the European integrationists </b>who would like to pull Britain away from its relationship with the United States.”</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Louise Mensch (#TrumpRussia false idol, Tory ex-MP, and current News Corp employee) defending Liam Fox and a Brexit]</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">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 <b>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</b>. 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.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">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 <b>American Legislative Exchange Council — better known as ALEC — set up a stateside nonprofit called the Atlantic Bridge Project, i</b>n 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.”</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Atlantic Bridge’s Liam Fox thanking ALEC 2008]</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.”</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">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.”<b> In 2015, Bray married Wells Griffith, who became the battleground states director for Trump’s presidential campaign.</b></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">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.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Within a few days of Liam Fox’s 2011 resignation, J.D. Gordon took a job as communications director for Herman Cain’s 2012 presidential campaign, in which Tea Partier <b>Cain promised to reduce corporate taxes and install the Shell Oil CEO as head of the EPA</b>. 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.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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 <b>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.</b> 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.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">J.D. Gordon</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> 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. G</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ordon 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 </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Ukraine,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> and that Trump directly ordered him to do so.</span></b></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">(L to R) Lee, Johnson, Toomey, DeMint, Rubio</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b>Atlantic Bridge’s leading light in the US Congress was South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">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.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Senator DeMint followed up that legislation a few months later with his <b>first published article/op-ed on Breitbart News, dated 6 May 2010. Breitbart repeatedly showered him with glowing coverage</b>, so he went on to publish another article there on 27 Jul 2012, in which he<b> endorsed Tea Party candidate Ted Cruz</b> for Senate and lauded the aforementioned Club for Growth’s monetary “air and ground support” for Cruz’s campaign.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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, <b>Club for Growth rated Paul, Johnson, Lee and DeMint as 4 of the only 5 Senators to vote ‘correctly’ 100% of the time,</b> with Lee and Demint tying for the Heritage Foundation’s top honor at 99% approval.</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">“Breitbart Embassy” in DC, 2012 (Source)]</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b>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.</b> 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.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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’s <b>Laura Ingraham, a reporter from Rolling Stone, Jeff Sessions, and Sessions’ then-top aide Stephen Miller.</b></span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Steve Bannon had been partially living at the <b>Embassy </b>since at least 2011, when Breitbart staff and writers were first encouraged to work & sleep there, though it was initially <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.”</span></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">
</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">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<b> allegedly Steve Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest US$15m in big data research funds with the British defence contractor SCL Group.</b></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></td><td class="connection-stat-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">$0</font></td><td class="connecting-entities-cell" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 8px; line-height: 1.42857; vertical-align: top; border-top: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221);"><a href="https://littlesis.org/person/46761-Michael_Hintze" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 136); text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Hintze</font></a></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div>