The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) will hold its ARC Conference 2025 from 17-19 February 2025 at the ExCeL London where “the world’s leading thinkers, business leaders, policy makers, and culture formers” will gather to discuss the “vital work of re-laying the foundations of our civilisation”.
ARC fails to mention that many of these speakers connect to various free-market thinktanks and climate-denial groups such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation and the Edmund Burke Foundation. I have deliberately linked to these organisation’s websites so that readers can see how it appears that they are doing so much good for humanity with the use of phrases such as “strengthening the principles”, “improve the human condition” and “building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish.” ARC is no exception, as displayed in my opening paragraph.
What is ARC?
ARC describes itself as a “global movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take responsibility and work together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities, and nations”. The Guardian describes ARC as “a sort of quasi-thinktank” and the UK government’s companies register, Companies House, states ARC’s nature of business as “cultural education”. However ARC classifies itself, one can’t help but feel that this lack of clarity is deliberate, meant to confuse and keep us guessing.
What is clear is that ARC has significant connections to the Legatum Group (hereafter referred to as Legatum) and GB News through its founder, owner, and directors. The Legatum Group is a Dubai-based global investment firm that funds the UK-based thinktank Legatum Institute, described by Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics author Peter Geogehan as “arguably the most influential think tank in the country”. The Legatum Institute renamed itself the Prosperity Institute on 21 January 2025.
ARC’s advisory board includes names that may be familiar but I will also look at some of the board’s less familiar names. Many of these are members of prominent organisations and groups affiliated with fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch’s vast network of institutes, anti-woke and climate denial thinktanks and dark money distribution.
ARC founders and directors
Philippa Stroud is the co-founder and CEO of ARC and former CEO of the Legatum Institute. She also co-founded a network of influencers called Forum with her husband, David, who founded Christ Church London in 2004. Stroud is a Member of the House of Lords and Chair of the Low Pay Commission, an independent body advising the government on the national living and minimum wage.
Companies House currently lists Paul Marshall and Alan McCormick, one of the co-founders of Legatum, as the only two current active ARC directors. Marshall is a hedge fund manager and co-founder of global alternative investment manager Marshall Wace Asset Management. He is also the joint owner of GB News with Legatum under the holding company All Perspectives Limited. Marshall recently paid £100mn to become the owner of The Spectator magazine and owns the news and opinion website Unherd. A DeSmog article from October 2023 states that Marshall Wace held shares in 112 fossil fuel companies including Chevron, Shell, and Equinor, and has invested $2.2bn in fossil fuel firms.
McCormick is Chairman of GB News and co-founder of Legatum. He is also a director of All Perspectives Ltd, with Marshall and Chandler listed as persons with significant control, meaning they hold at least a quarter of shares or voting rights. McCormick has a personal history of posting articles promoting climate denial on X. GB News also has a history of attacking climate science.
Other persons with significant control
Companies House also lists Marshall, McCormick, Christopher Chandler, Richard Douglas and Mark Stoleson as persons with significant control at ARC. All except Marshall share a correspondence address at Legatum Plaza in the United Arab Emirates. McCormick, Chandler and Stoleson are listed as residents of the UAE.
Billionaire Christopher Chandler is the chair and founding partner of Legatum. In 1986, Chandler and his brother Richard formed the investment firm Sovereign Global, the fourth largest investor in Russian gas company Gazprom in 2002. Chandler also owns the Chandler Institute of Governance in Singapore which works “together with committed government leaders to strengthen the architecture, systems, processes and policies of government”. You can read how Sovereign Global made its fortune in this 2006 interview with Richard Chandler.
The two remaining persons with significant control are Douglas and Stoleson. Little information is available about both. Douglas resides in the Cayman Islands and, according to DeSmog, appears to be connected to Legatum’s investment fund. Mark Stoleson is the chief executive officer and a partner of Legatum.
The ARC advisory board
When researching an organisation like ARC, I look closely at the advisory board to see which organisations the lesser-known names work for or are affiliated with. ARC’s is no exception and features a long list of names associated with Legatum and groups with ties to climate denial, right-wing UK media and thinktanks in the US and UK. Picking out specific names is difficult as many names have connections worth highlighting. Below are names you may be familiar with.
Jordan Peterson is the “charismatic” spokesperson of ARC. Born in Canada, he is a clinical psychologist, author (the self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is his most well-known), influencer and yet another name who has repeatedly posted against climate change on X. Peterson has also posted videos promoting climate denial and criticism of gender being subjectively defined on his YouTube channel.
Danny Kruger is the Conservative MP for East Wiltshire, shadow minister (Work and Pensions) and a writer for the Daily Telegraph where he was formerly chief leader-writer. The Telegraph has a track record for printing articles promoting falsehoods about climate change.
Tony Abbott is a former Australian prime minister on the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s (GWPF) advisory board. I have provided additional information about Abbott in my previous article about the GWPF.
James Orr is the UK chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), an “institute” (thinktank) that promotes national conservatism and has links to both the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the latter described by Greenpeace as one of the many Koch Industries climate denial front groups. The EBF is also the group which runs NatCon conferences.
NatCon, DonorsTrust and Vivek Ramaswamy
The NatCon Conference – short for National Conservative – is held annually to promote the ideas of conservative ideology. Past guest speakers include Viktor Orban, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Names to appear at NatCon 2025 are: Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Kevin Roberts (president of the Heritage Foundation).
The chairman of the NatCon conferences is Christopher DeMuth. DeMuth is also a member of the Heritage Foundation, a former fellow at the Hudson Institute, and a member of AEI and the Federalist Society. These groups have received direct funding from a Koch-named organisation (the Charles Koch Foundation, the Charles Koch Institute, for example), from/through DonorsTrust, or both. DonorsTrust is an organisation that distributes funds to many conservative groups in the US which Exposed by CMD called “the preferred donor conduits of the Koch political network” and the “dark money ATM”.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a Republican Party member and venture capitalist listed as a founder in the Heritage Foundation’s Annual Report 2023. Ramaswamy has spoken about abolishing the FBI, ending US birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and suggesting the US should stop sending aid to Ukraine, among other things.
Legatum’s Koch connection
Charles Koch is the libertarian billionaire owner of Koch Industries, one of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the US, and the 25th richest person in the world according to Forbes in 2024. He financially supports or is associated with right-wing organisations, thinktanks and political groups in the US, and, unfortunately, some in the UK, which are too numerous to list here. There will be much more on Koch in future articles.
The Legatum Group owns the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit thinktank which has received funding from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation and has direct ties to the Koch network. The Legatum Institute Fund also received two donations of £77,000 in 2018 and 2019 from the Charles Koch Foundation. On the second page acknowledgements of a Legatum Institute document titled Economic Openness, it openly states: “We would like to thank the Charles Koch Foundation for their generosity in supporting our research in developing a new Global Index of Economic Openness.” (The Legatum Institute rebranded to Prosperity while writing this article and the downloadable version of this document is currently unavailable, but a search for the quote above still shows the result.)
Arthur Brooks is a former president of AEI and a former board member of Donors Capital Fund, a sister company to DonorsTrust, which shows its anti-government aims in its statement: “…to assist the donor-advised fund sponsor DonorsTrust by facilitating grant-making to non-profit organizations that seek to address society’s most pressing needs through civil society and private philanthropic initiatives, without increasing the size and scope of government.” Its website shows its affiliation with the State Policy Network and the Heritage Foundation) and has spoken at events by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC and the Atlas Network
ALEC is a powerful group where corporations pay state legislators to push through laws that benefit them. Its mission statement also shows a bias against government controls on capitalism by claiming ALEC as being: “America’s largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” Among ALEC’s biggest funders are – drum roll – the Koch family, the Koch-managed Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and other billionaire families.
Names on the current board of directors at Donors Capital Fund are: Lawson Bader, President & CEO at DonorsTrust; Tracie Sharp, President and CEO at State Policy Network and Brad Lips Chief Executive Officer at the Atlas Network.
The Atlas Network is a powerful global web of libertarian thinktanks and other groups funded by billionaires, including the Kochs. ARC advisory board member Magatte Wade is also part of the Atlas Network. Its mission statement describes its aims: “Atlas Network increases global prosperity by strengthening a network of independent partner organizations that promote individual freedom and are committed to identifying and removing barriers to human flourishing.”
Partners of State Policy Network include DonorsTrust, AEI, ALEC, the Atlas Network, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). If I am bombarding the reader with the names of so many organisations, it is to indicate a) how many exist (I have barely scratched the surface here) and b) how they are all interlinked. Yet again, all have ties to the Koch network.
The Heartland Institute, Mike Johnson and Mike Lee
What they have in common, as the IEA states, is “the dissemination of free-market thinking”. The IEA is one of several pro-Brexit and thinktanks based at London’s 55 Tufton Street and acts like an embassy for the various American agencies listed above. Among the economists on its list is Patrick Minford, the Cardiff Professor who was the main spokesperson for Brexit Central.
Michael Shellenberger, a leading, campaigner for climate change denialism has recorded a podcast for the Heartland Institute, one of the groups on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 advisory board. It also opened a new branch in London at the end of 2024 where Nigel Farage was the special guest of honour.
Mike Johnson is a former member of the Council for National Policy (CNP),a former attorney for the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and was interviewed by Peterson before ARC’s inception. Johnson received $467,090 from the oil and gas industry in the 2024 election cycle. The CNP has received funding from DonorsTrust, Heritage Foundation and Koch Family Foundations. ADF received $517,000 in funding in 2022 through Koch’s own Stand Together Trust.
Mike Lee is the US Republican Senator for Utah has attended several Koch Donor Summits in 2016, 2017 and 2019 and has close affiliation with the Koch brothers. Lee is one of 22 Republicans who tried to convince Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement in 2017 while receiving $231,520 in funding from oil and gas companies in the previous three election cycles.
Rebeccah Heinrichs is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, which in 2015 had received just under $8mn in funding from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. Rick Geddes is a Non-Resident Scholar at the AEI.
The Hoover Institution, PraxisNation and Peter Thiel
Also on the ARC advisory board are several members of the Hoover Institution, a thinktank based at Stanford University: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Barry Strauss, Niall Ferguson, and Victor Davis Hanson are all members. The Hoover Institution received over $2mn through DonorsTrust, which affiliates with many Koch organisations and contributes millions of dollars to climate denial and right-wing groups.
The final name is Riva Melissa Tez. Tez is currently working on building ‘a city’ with PraxisNation. Their websites reveal these are linked bases worldwide for tech and cryptocurrency. One of the investors of Praxis is venture capital firm Pronomos Capital (£), backed by multi-billionaire and Palantir owner Peter Thiel. This is not the first time Thiel has been associated with building a charter city beyond the reach of national government legislation and tax. The neo-colonialist nature of this project is revealed by PraxisNation founder Dryden Brown who, in November 2024, tweeted: “I went to Greenland to try to buy it.”
Notably, Trump recently commented he would not rule out using military force to seize control of Greenland which is rich in critical minerals and has strategic value to the US. It is worth noting that Thiel and Trump’s vice president JD Vance have worked together, personally and financially for many years.
ARC’s true intentions
The ARC Conference in 2023 was held in Greenwich, London, and described as “the most depressing show on Earth”. Speakers at ARC Conference 2025 include: Jordan Peterson, Arthur Brooks, Tony Abbott, Lord Frost (former member of the board of trustees at the Global Warming Policy Foundation) and Philippa Stroud. With additional speakers to be announced closer to the event, it’s difficult to see how ARC 2025 will not be more of the same.
ARC has numerous connections to thinktanks that promote climate denial, dark money conduits, Koch-affiliated organisations and even hate groups which should be of concern to all of us. These organisations may seem honourable on the surface with their claims of rebuilding a secure America, restoring family values, and bringing flourishing prosperity, but look deeper within and their ties to fossil fuel billionaires and corporations intent on changing laws for their benefit reveal the true intentions.
