Tory defector Suella Braverman speaks with Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage(Image: Getty Images)
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s latest high-profile recruit, Suella Braverman, had a trip paid for by The Heritage Foundation — a supporter of the controversial US immigration agency ICE
Reform defector Suella Braverman has been bankrolled by a think-tank backing the US immigration agency behind a deadly shooting.
The ex-Home Secretary became the latest high-profile Tory to join Nigel Farage‘s party this week. But we can reveal she accepted a freebie trip worth more than £9,000 from The Heritage Foundation — a supporter of controversial ICE in the wake of a mum being killed. In recent weeks, the award-winning poet’s death and that of an ICU nurse at the hands of another US agency have sparked outrage. In an interview on Tuesday, Donald Trump said his administration was “going to de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota. “Bottom line, it was terrible. Both of them were terrible,” the US president said.
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Hope Not Hate’s Director of Research, Joe Mulhall, added: “Sadly, it is no surprise that Suella Braverman has accepted funds from the Heritage Foundation. Her own increasingly radical politics, which have seen her defect to Reform UK, align well with much of the output of this infamous US think-tank. Braverman was the Home Secretary who described asylum seekers arriving in the UK by boat as an ‘invasion’, adopting and normalising the language of the far right. She’s now in Reform, a party that has called for ‘mass deportations,’ a plan that if enacted would require something akin to a British version of ICE.”
Braverman, who represents Fareham and Waterlooville in Hampshire, accepted flights, accommodation and airport transfers valued at £9,358.71 from The Heritage Foundation in January last year, her register of interests shows. During the visit, she delivered the annual Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture. In a tweet promoting her speech, she echoed Trump’s rhetoric, writing: “Too many people are coming into our country who do not abide by our laws, sign up to our values or respect our culture. In fact, too many wish to do us harm. We have all had enough. It’s time to Make Britain Great Again.”
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Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, December 2025. Credit: Nigel Farage / X
The leader of Reform, a pro-oil party, received lavish hospitality from Abu Dhabi.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage received freebies worth £10,000 from the Abu Dhabi government, new records show.
Farage’s latest register of interests shows that he accepted flights and accommodation to attend the Abu Dhabi Formula 1 Grand Prix in December, paid for by the regime that runs the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This included a front-row “paddock” pass to the event worth £4,500.
The records show that Farage also attended “meetings” during his visit.
The Reform leader has previously mocked Prime Minister Keir Starmer for receiving gifts from donors.
Reform campaigns for the UK to dramatically expand its fossil fuel production, scrap its clean energy policies, and dismantle its climate targets.
The UAE is an autocratic monarchy and petrostate. Roughly 30 percent of the country’s GDP is directly based on its oil and gas output.
Reform received 92 percent of its donations between the 2019 and 2024 UK elections from polluting sources and climate science deniers, while its treasurer Nick Candy has claimed the party is actively raising money from oil executives.
Senior party figures have also praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” agenda, which has seen his administration recently capture Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and pledge that the U.S. oil industry will “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country”.
Farage denies basic climate science, claiming it’s “absolutely nuts” for carbon dioxide to be considered a pollutant. The party is being advised by the Heartland Institute, a U.S.-based pro-Trump climate denial group. Farage helped to launch Heartland’s UK-EU branch in December last year.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has said “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”
The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide pollution “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
Key individuals in Reform have also heaped praise on the UAE in recent months.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has said he travels to the UAE “every six to eight weeks” to visit his partner, Telegraph columnist Isabel Oakeshott, who moved to Dubai in January 2025.
Tice has praised the UAE for its sense of national pride, work ethic, law and order, integration of migrants, and energy sector, while stating that the UK is “decadent” and “going bust”.
In an article last January for the website Arabian Gulf Business Insight, Candy praised the UAE’s crime prevention and “robust law enforcement”, adding: “Coupled with a high standard of living, excellent healthcare and top-tier schools, the UAE offers a lifestyle that few other locations can match.”
Candy also lauded “the wisdom and visionary nature of the UAE’s leadership”, writing that “the quality of government officials is mind-blowing”. By contrast, he said that Western countries are ruled by “second-tier individuals” who “allow political agendas to get in the way of what is best for the country”.
The UAE does not hold popular elections, and there are no political parties. Critics of the government are often jailed, while migrant workers face “widespread abuses” according to Human Rights Watch, including wage theft and passport confiscation.
The country also discriminates against women and its penal code allows the authorities to arrest people for campaigns promoting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Keir Starmer refuses to be outcnuted by Nigel Farage’s chasing the racist bigot vote.
President Donald Trump and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Vice President and Deputy Prime Minister, shake hands on October 13, 2025 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. (Photo by Suzanne Plunkett, Pool / Getty Images)
According to the Journal’s sources, lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Documents reviewed by the Journal showed that the buyers in the deal agreed to “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities,” while “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the Witkoff family.
Weeks after green lighting the investment into the Trump crypto venture, Tahnoon met directly with President Donald Trump and Witkoff in the White House, where he reportedly expressed interest in working with the US on AI-related technology.
Two months after this, the Journal noted, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”
Tahnoon in the past had tried to get US officials to give the UAE access to the chips, but was rebuffed on concerns that the cutting-edge technology could be passed along to top US geopolitical rival China, wrote the Journal.
Many observers expressed shock at the Journal’s report, with some critics saying that it showed Trump and his associates were engaging in a criminal bribery scheme.
“This was a bribe,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, in a social media post. “UAE royals gave the Trump family $500 million, and Trump, in his presidential capacity, gave them access to tightly guarded American AI chips. The most powerful person on the planet, also happens to be the most shamelessly corrupt.”
Jesse Eisinger, reporter and editor at ProPublica, argued that the Abu Dhabi investment into the Trump cypto firm “should rank among the greatest US scandals ever.”
Democratic strategist David Axelrod also said that the scope of the Trump crypto investment scandal was historic in nature.
“In any other time or presidency, this story… would be an earthquake of a scandal,” he wrote. “The size, scope and implications of it are unprecedented and mind-boggling.”
Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” struggled to wrap his head around the scale of corruption on display.
“How do you add up the cost of corruption this massive?” he wondered. “It’s not just that Trump is selling advanced AI tech to the highest bidder, national security be damned. Its that he’s tapped that doofus Steve Witkoff as an international emissary so his son Zach Witkoff can mop up bribes.”
Former Rep. Tom Malinkowski (D-NJ) warned the Trump and his associates that they could wind up paying a severe price for their deal with the UAE.
“If a future administration finds that such payments to the Trump family were acts of corruption,” he wrote, “these people could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, and the assets in the US could potentially be frozen.”
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As millions around the world, fresh off watching real-time footage of federal law enforcement murdering Renee Good, saw federal agents murder Alex Pretti, CBS viewers got a headline (1/24/26): “Person Dead After Shooting in Minneapolis Involving Federal Immigration Agents.”
You can check your calendar; it is 2026. And yet corporate media still think we’ll fall for that passive voice business, wherein law enforcement are…there…and people just kinda die.
Or we get—as CBS (1/27/26) offered elsewhere—“videos of the incident appear to contradict officials’ claims.”
‘No hate, no fear’
“Every time this country has had a debate on the sustainability and expansion of our democracy,” Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates told Workday (1/23/26), “workers have settled that debate—and I’m looking for workers to do the same thing this time.”
It’s not clear whether corporate media know they’re writing themselves a resignation letter, but they are. Fortunately, there are other outlets ready to step up and speak up.
You can read Hammer & Hope (Fall/24) for an interview with Doran Schrantz, a longtime organizer of Minnesota’s faith-based communities on “How a Decade of Multiracial, Interfaith Organizing in Minnesota Undergirds the Resistance.” Schrantz explains:
We built a strategy together around how we understand what it means to unequivocally be East African and Muslim. Or rural with a rural perspective. No one’s asking you to change any of those things. We are explicitly posing the question about how we can publicly demonstrate, over and over again, the critical importance of multiracial democratic power. We center this question partially to model, but partially to protect our movements from being distracted and divided by identitarian or weaponized racialized attacks.
You can read Sarah Lazare writing for Workday Magazine (1/23/26) and In These Times (1/23/26) about Minnesota’s January 23 strike and shutdown. Tens of thousands marched through downtown Minneapolis shouting, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”
That action crucially involved workers and unions. A union leader from SEIU Local 26, which represents more than 8,000 of Minnesota’s janitors, window cleaners and property service workers told Lazare they’ve “lost over 20 members to these abductions by federal agents, often without warning, often without due process.”
You can read Katya Schwenk at the Lever (8/28/25), who details how ICE has been allowed to swallow more and more resources based on a broad authority that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security to reshuffle funds with little oversight.
The latest is DHS draining money from FEMA, tasked with disaster relief but lately wielded as a political cudgel, as when Trump floated the idea that he would deny relief to states that allowed consumers to ban Israeli products. Once an independent agency, FEMA was subsumed into DHS in 2003 as part of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 reorganization.
Congress has repeatedly given DHS authority to move money around in a way not afforded to all departments, who have to trouble with things like approval from lawmakers.
Switching names not changing course
“What is motivating all of the reporting on Trump’s ‘pivot’?” Popular Information (1/28/26) asked. “Trump softened his rhetoric, calling Pretti’s death ‘very unfortunate’ and ‘very sad.’”
You can read Popular Information (1/28/26), which warns of media disinformation around a supposed Trump “pivot” on ICE actions in Minnesota. For instance, AP (1/27/26) reports that Trump has “shifted toward a more conciliatory approach,” that this is an “about face.” The New York Times (1/26/26) ran a headline declaring “Trump Changes Course in Minnesota.” Except that switching names at the top—Homan for Bovino, or anyone for Noem—is actually not proof that the violent crackdown in Minneapolis won’t continue indefinitely.
Popular Information also breaks down, for those interested, the weak corporate response to citizens’ murder by the state. Conspicuously silent after Renee Good’s killing, large companies in Minnesota evidently felt moved to address the issue after Alex Pretti. The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce released a letter on behalf of more than 60 CEOs based in the state that consisted of 215 words that said next to nothing.
“With yesterday’s tragic news, we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” the CEOs wrote, with no thoughts on how tensions could be deescalated or what a real solution would look like.
Popular Information contacted all 68 companies that signed the letter, asking: “Do you condemn the killing of two Minnesotans by federal officers?” All either declined to comment or to respond at all.
‘Not our first rodeo’
“They [constitutional observers] are the ones keeping watch,” Immigrant Defense Network’s Edwin Torres Desantiago told Sahan (1/28/26). “They’re the ones that are making sure our constitution is upheld.”You can read, at the Guardian (1/20/26), Alyssa Oursler’s notes on just how grassroots networks in the Twin Cities, with things like community watch and mutual aid, are building on work honed in the 2020 protests in response to George Floyd’s state sanctioned murder. As Oursler quotes one rapid response organizer, “This is not our first rodeo.”
Another aid worker is cited: “We’ve always had to do it ourselves. We have whistles and we have organizing. That’s all we have against people with huge trucks and guns.”
And you can stay in touch with reporting from Minnesotan journalists, like those at Sahan Journal, a nonprofit digital newsroom focused on the state’s immigrants and communities of color, offering reports along the lines of “Bravery in the Face of Fear: Immigrant Defense Network Goes Statewide With Constitutional Observer Training” (1/28/26).
There have been creditable Big Media reports on Minneapolis, but just as events have shown us the need for a disruptive new way forward in politics, they’ve shown up the failures of so-called legacy media to confront the moment, and the value of citizen journalism that doesn’t pretend to come from nowhere, but instead centers the people at the sharp end of the policies crafted by the forces to whom corporate media give pride of place.
Support your local and independent journalists, is what I’m trying to say.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the right claimed that the big social media companies weren’t just skewed to the left in terms of moderation, but that they were actually acting in the direct interests of the Democratic administration (House Judiciary Committee, 5/1/24).
When right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X, the right believed that he’d show the world that the popular site was a tool of the Democratic agenda (New Yorker, 1/11/23). The move increased Musk’s profile as a conservative crusader against social progress and economic populism before his brief stint as President Donald Trump’s federal jobs hatchet man in 2025 (Roosevelt Institute, 5/29/25).
Before a forced sale by its Beijing-based parent company, TikTok was attacked by both Democrats and Republicans because of its ownership, with both sides claiming that this not only gave the Chinese government the ability to spy on Americans, but also to skew political discourse away from Washington’s interests (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 5/8/24, 1/3/25).
At Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg quickly tried to distance his company from the notion that it acted in tandem with the Biden administration. Politico (8/26/24) reported:
Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was “wrong,” and he plans to push back if it happens again.
Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan (Joe Rogan Experience, 1/10/25) that the Biden administration had been “calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take down things that are true.” He asserted that Meta, and especially Facebook, “had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea” (Axios, 1/10/25).
Meta ‘in bed with the regime’
ICE List founder Dominick Skinner (Daily Beast, 1/27/26): “I don’t believe that it’s somehow an accident that a company so deeply ingrained in this regime is suddenly blocking a website that actively fights against it.”
If you took these claims at face value, you would expect that we would have a more neutral and less government-controlled social media in 2026. Instead, we have a social media oligarchy that is now working directly in the interests of the Trump administration’s national police state.
X converted from a free-wheeling social media site into a 24-hour online MAGA rally (Guardian, 1/4/25; NBC News, 2/16/25) a long time ago. But there are new developments involving other platforms. All of Meta’s social media sites—Facebook, Instagram and Threads—are blocking access to ICE List, a website that lists names of Homeland Security agents (Wired, 1/27/26).
Politico (1/27/26) reported that the website’s founder, Dominick Skinner, “questioned Meta’s policy against posting links to websites that contained people’s personal information.” Politico said he added “that Meta’s platforms had no issues with posting people-finder websites such as White Pages that shared individuals’ phone numbers and family members.”
I believe that Mark Zuckerberg is in bed with the regime. He was sitting behind Trump at the inauguration. His algorithms have worked to shape people into right-wing followers.
“Meta donated to the Trump Ballroom,” he pointed out—which is also true of other tech firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google (Fortune, 10/26/25).
TikTok now free to censor?
“We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we engage, and the most important ones are social media,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told pro-Israel influencers last September (Al Jazeera, 1/29/26). “The most important purchase that is going on right now is…TikTok.”
The TikTok deal is now final, with its Chinese former parent company, ByteDance, holding about a fifth of the network, with a major bulk controlled by tech giant Oracle, Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX (Reuters, 1/23/26). The sale was celebrated as a win against Chinese infiltration into the US media market, but the Washington Post editorial board (1/23/26) believed this wasn’t good enough:
ByteDance will maintain ownership of TikTok’s coveted algorithm and license it to the spinoff. The announcement emphasizes that the algorithm’s recommendations will be stored in Oracle’s US cloud system but also that the two companies will retain “global product interoperability,” with ByteDance maintaining control over e-commerce and marketing. That sounds like much less of a breakup than Congress intended.
FAIR (3/14/24, 9/27/24, 1/3/25) has long been skeptical of the US government move to force the sale of TikTok, as it was often based on dubious claims about data mining, and awash with McCarthyist fearmongering. Worse, Oracle’s co-founder is Larry Ellison, another right-wing tech billionaire (FAIR.org, 9/19/25; All Things Considered, 10/6/25), making the TikTok sale eerily reminiscent of the Musk takeover of Twitter.
Right after the deal was finalized, “users were raising concerns that the company is ‘censoring’ videos, including ones critical of President Donald Trump, ICE or mentions of Jeffrey Epstein,” AP (1/27/26) reported. “The complaints were enough for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce…that he is launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”
It reportedly wasn’t just censorship about ICE and Epstein. “Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from TikTok,” Al Jazeera (1/29/26) said, “days after the social media platform was acquired by new investors in the United States.”
Cripple social media to crush protests
Apple pulled an ICE alert app from its online store as “defamatory, discriminatory or mean-spirited content.” CNN (10/3/25) noted: “Apple and its CEO Tim Cook have in recent months sought to strengthen the company’s relationship with the White House, amid policy changes from Trump that could threaten its business.”
Wealthy capitalists buy social media companies for the same reason they buy newspapers and radio stations: They want to use media to sway the political discussion toward policies that meet their economic and political interests. Musk taking over Twitter isn’t much different from Amazon titan Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post and turning its opinion section into a right-wing propaganda machine (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; New Republic, 11/3/25; Press Watch, 12/12/25; FAIR.org, 1/22/25, 1/28/25) and putting its news operation on life support (The Hill, 1/27/26).
But given growing street resistance to the state terror perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in cities around the US, these reports about social media blackouts are alarming, reminiscent of reports out of Turkey (Reuters, 9/8/25) and Iran (New York Times, 1/25/26).
With Zuckerberg, Musk and Ellison all showing their allegiance to the administration in various ways, this is all just more evidence that regime-adjacent social media are working in the interests of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. And this has been brewing for some time. A few months ago, CNN (10/3/25) reported, Apple “removed ICEBlock and similar apps that allow people to alert others nearby about sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area,” after receiving “a request from the US Department of Justice.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (11/20/25) sued the DoJ and Department of Homeland Security over this and similar instances of platforms removing “apps that document immigration enforcement activities in communities throughout the country.”
‘A really troubling thing‘
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (1/27/26) commended the news social media platform UpScrolled “for pledging to protect the free flow of ideas on its platform, including both support for and opposition to the Israeli government’s human rights abuses.”
In an interview with FAIR, EFF senior counsel David Greene said there are several problems at play. One is that
there’s still a great deal of concentration in the direct-publishing social media space, so any decision that gets made by Meta or YouTube or TikTok is going to affect a ton of people who use their services to get their information.
But there is also tremendous pressure by the government to keep immigration enforcement, and all the expanded policing around mass deportations, in the shadows by keeping agents’ identities anonymous. “That’s a really, really troubling thing,” he said.
Greene also stressed that “if Meta or TikTok are doing this just to curry favor with the administration, or because they ideologically agree with it, that’s not illegal; they have a First Amendment right to curate their sites.”
Illegal, no, but still a critical problem. We aren’t looking at a totalitarian form of speech control, where the state and ruling party directly control various forms of media. Rather, we have a clan of oligarchs aligning themselves with authoritarian government goals because they benefit from being close to the regime.
While many activists have shown dismay at these developments, others have said the challenges inspire hope. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (1/27/26) said in a statement that “young people censored on TikTok have no intention of giving up their activism,” as they have “have repeatedly shown that they will not allow politicians, corporations or colleges to censor their speech.”
FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
