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Nafeez Ahmed tracks the export of populist demagoguery from America to Britain and urges a campaign to snuff out its dying embers
Days after the US election results projected a victory for Democrat Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon demanded that the President’s “second term” should kick off with the beheading of FBI director Christopher Wray and Government infectious-diseases expert Dr Anthony Fauci.
“I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you’re gone – time to stop playing games,” Bannon said on his podcast, War Room: Pandemic. The show was promptly banned from Twitter, and the offending episode was deleted by YouTube.
But earlier this year the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), Dr Alan Mendoza, was interviewed by Bannon on the same now-banned podcast, which Bannon co-hosts with former HJS campaigns director Raheem Kassam, Nigel Farage’s former chief of staff at UKIP. During the show, Mendoza listened dutifully to Trump’s former strategist opine about “the fourth turning”, the pseudoscientific theory whose authors wrote:
“In a Fourth Turning, the nation’s core will matter more than its diversity. Team, brand, and standard will be new catchwords. Anyone and anything not describable in those terms could be shunted aside – or worse… If you belong to a racial or ethnic minority, brace for a nativist backlash from an assertive (and possibly authoritarian) majority.”
Just days after Bannon’s beheading plea, even as Biden had been announced President-elect, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a White House press conference that there would be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.
Months earlier, in July, the HJS had hosted a diplomatic meeting in London between Pompeo, Boris Johnson and his Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. The closed-door meeting, organised by Mendoza, was to discuss a US and UK agreement to increase pressure on China.
Indeed, Mendoza’s direct connections with both Bannon and Pompeo raise questions about the HJS’ outsized influence on successive Conservative governments and their leading figures, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself. Throughout 2020, the HJS played a key role in shaping Johnson’s major policies on Brexit, China, as well as the restructuring of British diplomacy.
Since its founding, the HJS has branded itself as a centrist, cross-party think-tank specialising in international security issues and foreign affairs. Yet, in reality, as my four-part investigation for Byline Times revealed, it has operated as a secretive Conservative Party lobby group, while cultivating longstanding ties with far-right and white nationalist movements in the United States.
With its direct ties to outfits like Trump-supporting media outlet Breitbart and the Gatestone Institute, the HJS is perhaps better characterised as an ‘Alt-Right’ pressure group lurking within the Conservative spectrum. If you want to understand how and why the Conservative Party has lurched towards populist nationalism in recent years, look no further than the HJS as a transmission belt for this ideology.
Lobbying in London
Take the Government’s counter-extremism strategy, for example. From 2015 to 2017, the Home Office funded the HJS to produce a report on Islamist militancy. The Government has kept this report confidential, refusing to disclose it in the face of Freedom of Information requests, on the grounds that doing so might jeopardise national security. The following year, the HJS also had a staff member in the Home Office, working with then Home Secretary Sajid Javid.
In the same period, the HJS stepped up its work with its US ‘Alt-Right’ partners. Three months before the “Muslim ban” was announced as an official part of Donald Trump’s proposed policy agenda, HJS associate director Douglas Murray appeared to endorse Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s implementation of a Muslim ban as a solution to the ‘problem’ of growing Muslim populations in Europe.
Murray did this in conversation with notorious Obama Muslim ‘birther’ conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney. Gaffney would, three months later, be cited by the Trump campaign when it first launched endorsed a Muslim ban.
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In 2017, both Murray and his boss Mendoza spoke at the notorious Alt-Right gathering, hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Centre. Known as the Restoration Weekend, this annual event played an instrumental role in the rise of Trump. Bannon and the Mercer family – big funders of both Breitbart and Trump’s 2016 campaign – had convened at a Restoration Weekend in 2013, where they first decided to introduce an outsider candidate to challenge for the Republican presidential nomination.
Horowitz himself, who a week or so before the 2017 conference had complained about the “race war… against whites,” had also spent years mentoring Trump’s senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, a notorious nationalist in the White House who has pushed a virulently anti-immigration agenda.
The HJS was seemingly happy to contribute to this event, alongside ‘Proud Boys’ founder Gavin McInnes, and Britain’s Katie Hopkins. In his own speech at the 2017 event, Murray complained that too much ethnic “diversity” – including incoming “Indians” and “Sudanese” people – meant that Europe was in danger of becoming a “swamp” and a “larger version of Mogadishu”. Though they might “vim up the cuisine” a bit, this would be offset by “more gang-rape and beheading,” he claimed.
Such views did not appear repel the current UK Government. In fact, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove was a director and trustee of the HJS from January to June that year. During this period, the HJS even paid for Gove to visit Trump officials in the US.
I have repeatedly asked No 10, the Home Office, the Cabinet Office and the HJS itself about all this. No one wants to speak of it, perhaps because the relationship is far too revealing – and damning – to acknowledge.