THE "AMERICA FIRST" ADMINISTRATION JUST GAVE U.S. TAX DOLLARS TO THESE POSH RIGHT-WING BRITISH TWITS

There might not be any federal dollars left for the rural hospital near you, but the U.S. government has $12 million available for these posh prats:

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, the Guardian can reveal.

The intended grants, revealed in US government documents, are part of a package of support for European groups viewed favourably by the Trump administration....

The documents reviewed by the Guardian set out details of the grants for the first time. They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American think tank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”....

The group appears to have been incorporated in the UK in March this year. 878’s website went live in early July, and says that its registration as a US nonprofit is “pending”. It takes its name from the year King Alfred the Great of the Saxons defeated the “Great Heathen Army”, led by a Danish warlord.

(Everyone in the global conservative movement really is a twelve-year-old boy.)

The state department has also set aside $5m for Free Speech Union International, citing its work “promoting free speech and countering digital overregulation across the UK, Europe, and Australia”.

The group is an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by the Conservative life peer Toby Young, and acts as an umbrella organisation for international sibling groups with similar goals.

One of the co-founders of 878 is Jacob Rees-Mogg (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, son of William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg, who was an editor of The Times of London and later a vice chairman of the BBC's board of governors). The younger Rees-Mogg has been a Leader of the House of Commons and a cabinet minister under Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He's also worked in finance, and his net worth was estimated at perhaps as much as £150 million in 2018. He doesn't need our money.

Toby Young is a prominent writer and editor who failed to become a journalistic superstar in America (back when there were such things) and parlayed this relative failure into a memoir called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which was a success in Britain. He was later a guest judge on Top Chef, an experience that inspired some of his most infantile and offensive tweets, which came to light in 2018 when he briefly served on a British government education board.

Young called these tweets "politically incorrect," a term he seems to use as an all-purpose cultural get-out-of-jail-free card. Other "incorrect" opinions include his views on working-class students at Oxford:

It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate ... Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.

And on inclusivity:

Inclusive. It’s one of those ghastly, politically correct words that have survived the demise of New Labour. Schools have got to be ‘inclusive’ these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. If [then education secretary, Michael] Gove is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.

And the former Top Chef judge believes schoolteachers have it easy:

Teachers complain a lot about how tough their job is. But, you know, the day begins in most schools at nine o’clock, ends at 3.30pm. They have six weeks’ holiday during the summer, two weeks’ holiday at Easter and at Christmas. Yes, they don’t just work when they’re at school, but even so, compared to a lot of other jobs, it’s not that tough.

Young (also a baron) has also been a spreader of COVID misinformation.

The mission statement of Rees-Mogg's 878 Institute is about what you'd expect from a grantee favored by the Trump/Vance/Miller/Rubio administration:

Our name – from the pivotal year of 878 AD – conveys the urgency of our own era. Britain and its closest allies are facing peril. But through the rediscovery of our ancient culture, making the right choices, and finding the will to face down our philosophical and military adversaries, our civilisation will survive and thrive.

Now more than ever, it is incumbent on us all to rediscover and nurture the roots of our shared English-speaking civilisation in order to defend it.

At 878, we are renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission. Future leaders in Britain and America will need to appreciate the deepest roots of our political life and our freedoms. Working with scholars in Israel and other closely allied nations, we are rejuvenating knowledge of the origins of our constitutional tradition. We build friendships with our closest civilisational allies to restore both the fabric of our countries and the resolve of our future leadership.

Young and Rees-Mogg are climate change denialists.

The two men are members of the Conservative Party, not one of the British parties further to the right. But these grants, along with other actions of the Trump administration -- see, for instance, Secretary of State Rubio's global anti-Antifa summit -- make clear that the Republican Party is not "America First" but rather "Global White People First," with "white people" defined as right-wing white Americans, Brits, Israelis, South Africans, and anyone else who might conceivably get a far-right party into power (AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, and so on), or is part of a fascist party in exile (Viktor Orban's Fidesz).

The American press needs to be more forthright about what the GOP is becoming. It's not a personality cult that will collapse when Trump is out of the picture. The leaders waiting in the wings may be uncharismatic, but they're young, tireless, and well funded, and they'll be able to tap into Fox News and the rest of the GOP's well-established propaganda apparatus as they try to go global with this movement. The Republican Party isn't going anywhere.