When The Telegraph Becomes a Distribution Channel
The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and the British media’s role in laundering authoritarianism.
If there were ever a publication that could reliably put itself on the completely wrong side of an issue, it’s The Telegraph - and their publication of what can only be called late-stage authoritarian apologia for the rapid descent of the United States into a country that’s likely making Margaret Atwood mutter “what the actual fuck” into her big glass of chardonnay as I type this.
Today is no different with their publication of a column by Simon Hankinson of the Heritage Foundation. Hankinson in his piece, presents arguments that sound like a sober lament about mob behaviour. A mostly passionless dissection of civic decay. A lecture about the apparent erosion of public decency.
Reading it, I could not help but notice just how measured and, weirdly in places, nostalgic it was.
And it was all 100% weapons-grade nonsense.
Before I get too deep into the vivisection of this piece of writing, I do have to make a nod to not only the author, but his affiliation to the Heritage Foundation. This particular think-tank is central to the events we’re now seeing play out in the United States being one of the central architects of Project 2025. Which is a plan that was set out for the wholesale restructuring of the American State, despite being initially disowned by Trump himself.
In its plan, we see a centralising of executive power, purging of the civil service, neutering of institutional checks and bringing independent bodies under direct political control - and looking at the past twelve months in the US, I can only say that they have been massively successful.
With that as context, Hankinson’s column today is not commentary or thought leading - it is in no uncertain terms, propaganda and preparation.
His opening gambit is the invocation of the Founding Father’s support of “mobocracy” that he uses to frame the current protests that have been happening over the past year as an ever present threat to good governance. He recasts Jefferson, Washington and the rest of their lot not as men who were deeply suspicious of concentrated power (for good reason), but as elites who were, above all, anxious to restrain the great unwashed.
What does not appear in his historical lesson though is the other half of their paradigm - their fear of standing armies, of professionalised force and, most importantly, governments turning violence inward on their own citizens. There is a reason that the US constitution is built around an elaborate system of checks and balances - power was planned to be slow, limited, awkward and difficult to concentrate.
Hankinson is also doing all of this in the context of actions that would make said founding fathers rather… uncomfortable. Under Trump 2.0 we’ve seen the National Guard deployed into Blue Cities, federal agents killing US citizens and migrants, immigrants being deported with no due process and free speech under open and constant assault by the White House all while the executive branch actively dismantles oversight mechanisms that are meant to reign in the worst abuses of powers.
His cherry-picking in this case is positively egregious.
With the scene set (we were warned), he then moves on to what I can only call an exercise in flattening. He writes about the various protests that have been seen in the US since 2020 - BLM, student encampments, Anti-ICE demonstrations, campus occupations - as an amorphous blob given the moniker of “the mob.”
Civil disobedience, violence, peaceful protest, vandalism - all collapsed into that single abstraction and treated as interchangeable symptoms of an apparent moral decay that’s running through society with a rather telling incuriousity of exactly why people might just be so incredibly pissed off.
The violence of the state? Rendered nearly weightless in his telling. Two people killed by federal immigration agents, Rene Nicole Goode and Alex Pretti, are described as “regrettable.” Possibly preventable, yes - but ultimately, the feeling from the Hankinson is that these were both incidental.
I find this asymmetry both fascinating and chilling - Hankinson frames disorder from below as an existential threat, while violence from above is barely touched on, and when it is, conveyed as being procedural. And perhaps that’s the point.
To add to the historical revisionism of the intent of the founding fathers, Hankinson also has a second go - this time at the civil rights movement. In his telling he reaches for a reliable tool in the authoritarian rhetorical toolkit, the outright sanitisation of the civil rights movement.
He compares todays protesters to Martin Luther King and his contemporaries and the message we get is that they fail to measure up to these giants. They don’t have the dignity nor the restraint of civil rights movements who are framed as terribly polite, well-dressed moral exemplars who took to the high ground without ever unduly inconveniencing anyone.
Which is not what happened. In any conceivable way or form.
The civil rights movement was foundationally disruptive, with protestors blocking roads, filling jails and very deliberately forcing crises that the government at the time simply could no longer ignore. It was, at times, widely condemned both by the state and white communities, and its leaders now scrubbed clean by Hankinson were under constant surveillance, harassed by authorities and branded extremists.
The civil rights movement in the US was successful precisely because they made the status quo impossible to maintain - a reality Hankinson conveniently erases.
After a deeply inaccurate comparison between rightful protest against segregation laws during the civil rights era and the current protests described as being against “enforcement of valid immigration laws” and much pearl clutching about a group of protestors, described as a “mob” entering the St Paul Church in Minneapolis earlier this month to protest the ICE agent there moonlighting as a pastor, Hankinson moves onto some not unexpected insinuation.
Sounding more and more like a MAGA acolyte now, we’re told about just how suspiciously well organised, well funded and coordinated the protests have been, with the implication being that the public anger on display can’t possibly be organic - it must be manipulated. If this feels familiar, that’s because it is - because it’s designed to delegitimise dissent while remaining completely incurious about the cause of the fury on display, and it’s something we’ve seen time and time again from Heritage and those within its ecosystem with fingers pointed most predictably at figures like George Soros and his Open Society Foundation and left-leaning funding conduits like ActBlue.
It is also, I will admit, a very interesting, and quite convenient argument posed by a fellow at a heavily funded organisation with a direct pipeline into executive power, but that might just be me.
By the time we get to the final section, all subtlety has disappeared altogether, and Hankinson moves into full culture-war mode.
He attributes acts of violence by individuals to “left-wing ideology”, “gender ideology” and mental instability, blending it all into an easily digestible slurry to be consumed by those who are desperate to not look up. The structural conditions created by the current administration are completely absent and the political rhetoric being espoused by Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem and all the other acolytes of MAGA is nowhere to be seen. There is no real acknowledgement that the actual leaders may just have had a hand in inflaming violence in a country acting as powder-keg at all.
I have read and analysed more Telegraph columns than is completely healthy (or safe for anyone’s mental health), but with this one, I can’t help but feel that the shift from right-wing aligned publication to full-on propaganda for the right mouthpiece is complete.
What Hankinson’s piece reveals most clearly is not an argument about civility or order - it’s a preview.
This is what the normalisation of authoritarianism looks like in real time: state violence reframed as regrettable procedure, protest recast as existential threat, and dissent pre-emptively delegitimised as manipulation.
The Heritage Foundation didn’t just help design the blueprint for dismantling American democracy - they’re now writing the user manual for how to sell it, with publications like The Telegraph proving themselves more than willing distributors of the rhetoric on display in Hankinson’s column.
This column today isn’t just used to explain violence after the fact, it prepares the ground for what follows by teaching the public which lives, protests and rights no longer count.
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Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation are absolutely essential reading. You don't have to read the whole thing to get a very clear sense of what they are about. Just go to their website and have a look around. They make the German Nazi party look positively disorganised in the detail of their planning. I somehow got myself on their mailing list and they have not backed off one iota.
Anyone still pretending that America is coming back from this anytime soon is deluded. It will get worse before it gets better, despite the amazing people in Minneapolis.
The Telegraph is a flashing red light warning us how easy it would be for the same thing to happen here. We have all the ingredients, minus the guns and religion
It used to be quite a respectable paper, back in the day...slanted conservative, but not lying. It became a propaganda rag after the Barclay twins bought it and has been that since.