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Meet the Shadowy Global Network of Right-Wing Think Tanks [1]

['Amy Westervelt', 'Geoff Dembicki', 'Kate Aronoff', 'Alexander Zaitchik', 'Heather Souvaine Horn', 'Will Peischel']

Date: 2023-09-12

Given the IEA’s growing success in quickly pushing U.K. politics to the right, Fisher decided to take the show on the road. In 1970, he did a speaking tour in the U.S. with the Institute for Humane Studies—an organization funded by Charles and David Koch, early on in what would be a decades-long career in massively reshaping American politics for industry’s benefit. In those U.S. talks, Fisher encouraged American businessmen to fight back against the social movements of the 1960s. In 1974, Fisher traveled to Canada, co-founding his first think tank outside Britain: the Fraser Institute. The same year, the IEA loaned one of its leaders, Nigel Vinson, to rising conservative politician Margaret Thatcher to start a sister think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies in the U.K.

“The think tank method allowed corporations to say things that they couldn’t say themselves without appearing to be merely speaking to their own profit motives.”

Back in the U.K., Fisher co-founded the Adam Smith Institute, another IEA copycat, in 1977. In 1978, he returned to the United States, where he co-founded the Manhattan Institute in 1978 and the Pacific Research Institute in 1979, again with help from the Koch brothers and the extractive industry. By this point, his work with the IEA and the Centre for Policy Studies had succeeded in getting Margaret Thatcher elected. Famed “free market” economist Milton Friedman would later say that “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to Fisher than any other individual.”

Fisher wanted to connect all the IEA-style organizations he’d started into a network so that they could more easily work with each other, and asked Hayek for introductions to his “friends in Houston”—oil executives—for funding. The Atlas Network, which launched in 1981, initially only included the first dozen or so think tanks Fisher had helped to found himself, but quickly expanded to include hundreds of like-minded member organizations, including all the Koch-affiliated think tanks in the U.S. (The Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council—some of the most influential forces shaping U.S. conservative politics—have all been members at one point or another.)

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/175488/atlas-shadowy-global-network-right-wing-think-tanks

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