Every time my generation asks for something — loan forgiveness, a down‑payment program that doesn’t feel like a joke, a grid that won’t black out during the next heat dome — we’re told the money isn’t there. The well is dry. Fiscal responsibility. Tough choices.
And then you wake up on a Thursday and learn that the State Department intends to shovel $12 million of your paycheck directly to two newly formed outfits in the United Kingdom, founded by the same Conservative parliamentarians who spend their free time calling Western democracy broken and demanding an end to mass migration. The grants aren’t competitive. They aren’t even hiding it. The documents call them “sole source” awards — code for “we’ve already picked our guys, and no one else gets a look.”
The bigger of the two is a group called 878, which takes its name from the year some Saxon king fought a Danish warlord. If that sounds like the sort of thing a bored aristocrat dreams up after his third port, it’s because 878’s founding directors are Jacob Rees‑Mogg, a former minister who made a career out of affectations lifted from the 19th century, and his special adviser Radomir Tylecote. The think tank — I am using that term loosely — was incorporated in the UK this March, and its website went live in early July. It now stands to receive $7 million in U.S. taxpayer funds for the “rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration.” Its website also mentions “warfighting” and “Judeo‑Christian culture,” which is a lot of heavy lifting for an organization that, as far as anyone can tell, hasn’t produced a single piece of research yet.
The other $5 million is earmarked for Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of an outfit founded by Conservative life peer Toby Young. The parent group likes to say it takes no government money and has no political agenda, but its campaigns read like a greatest‑hits collection of the “anti‑woke” grievance economy — from defending Nigel Farage to bemoaning “Soviet‑level censorship” of British social media. Young was quick to tell the Guardian that no formal application had been submitted and no grant had been awarded, which is technically true and completely beside the point: in a “sole source” process, the application is a formality. The decision to route the money to him was already made.
Lest you think it’s only $12 million, there’s a side dish: another $3 million for the Jobs Foundation, a tiny UK charity whose president is the former chief executive of the official pro‑Brexit campaign. It has fewer than ten employees and is now being “considered” for a grant to counter overregulation.
Yesterday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz already warned the U.S. against handing cash to MAGA‑aligned groups in Europe. He said he does not want American institutions interfering in German elections. What we’re seeing now is the receipt that his warning was too late — and that the interference machine is already running across the Channel.
The administration’s justification is a string of fog words: the money will “strengthen the transatlantic partnership,” advance “fundamental freedoms,” counter “supranational governance.” Strip the jargon and it means: we’re taking dollars from working Americans and handing them to British ideologues who want to fight culture wars overseas while telling their own citizens that they live under tyranny. One former U.S. official didn’t bother with euphemism — they called it “horrible stewardship of U.S. taxpayer money.” Another called the lack of procedure “outrageous and absurd.”
And that is what gets lost when we talk about this as a diplomatic story about the UK. This isn’t foreign policy. It’s a raid on the Treasury dressed up as a transatlantic partnership. Every one of those fifteen million dollars is money that won’t go toward childcare, toward Pell Grants, toward rural broadband, toward the things my generation is told we can’t afford. The people signing the checks are the same people who lecture us about self‑reliance while funneling no‑bid contracts to their ideological allies across the ocean.
Rees‑Mogg, Young, Tylecote, and their cohort are scheduled to speak this week at the inaugural UK edition of CPAC, the conservative jamboree that Liz Truss is hosting as part of her post‑premiership reinvention tour. The photo ops will be plentiful. The rhetoric about Western civilization will be thick. But the real story isn’t the conference — it’s the quiet pipeline of American cash that will keep flowing long after the cameras leave. That pipeline is paid for by a generation that got no say in the decision and will be handed the bill. If you’re looking for generational betrayal, this is it, with a Union Jack pinned to the receipt.