Dossier mode

The far-right international isn't only operatives and conferences; it has an ideas-and-money backbone. Atlas Network is it: a U.S. hub that spawns and bankrolls local free-market think tanks, which then supply the intellectual cover and policy scripts for right-wing movements abroad.

The network's scale, lineage, and funding are FACT; specific claims that it steered a given country's politics are attributed to reporting, not asserted as our finding.

Atlas Network (legal name Atlas Economic Research Foundation), founded in 1981 by British entrepreneur Antony Fisher, partners with nearly 600 organizations across more than 100 countries and reported roughly $24 million in revenue in 2024. Described as 'a think tank that creates think tanks,' it provides the training, networking, and grants that stand up local free-market institutes around the world.

Wikipedia / ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (2024 figures)

The lineage and the money: Hayek's disciples and Koch-linked funding.

Fisher, influenced by F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, had already founded Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs and helped launch the Fraser Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Pacific Research Institute before creating Atlas to connect them all. Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman formally endorsed it. Its member web grew to include Koch-family-affiliated organizations, and it has received funding from American and European business to organize libertarian groups in the developing world — in 1981 helping economist Hernando de Soto found Peru's Institute for Liberty and Democracy.

The political footprint — documented as reporting, not asserted as proof.

Investigative reporting (The Intercept and others) has tied Atlas-affiliated think tanks to right-wing political movements abroad, including in Latin America — most prominently accounts linking Atlas-network groups to the Brazilian protest apparatus (e.g., the Free Brazil Movement) that helped drive the campaign against Dilma Rousseff. We grade the network's existence, scale, and funding as FACT and treat the specific causal claims — that Atlas 'engineered' a given country's politics — as attributed reporting, a serious thread to weigh rather than a proven finding.

How this page is graded.

• FACT: Atlas Network's founding (1981, Antony Fisher), its scale (~600 partners in 100+ countries; ~$24M revenue), its 'think tank that creates think tanks' model, its Hayek/Thatcher/Friedman endorsements, its Koch-affiliated membership, and its role standing up institutes abroad (e.g., ILD Peru).
• ATTRIBUTED / SOME SMOKE: specific claims that Atlas-affiliated groups drove a particular country's politics (e.g., Brazil) — serious reporting we cite, not a finding we assert.
• NOT claimed: that every Atlas partner is a political operation, or that funding proves control of any campaign.

Help us fill these lines.

• OpenA documented flow of funds from Atlas to specific foreign campaigns (vs. general grants to think tanks).
• OpenWhich Atlas partners are genuinely research bodies and which function as political operations — case by case.
• OpenThe overlap between Atlas-affiliated institutes and the CPAC/Bannon networks in specific countries.