Introduction: The Tea Party movement has garnered tremendous media attention, most of which has focused on superficiality–images of “the angry voter,” false or misleading statements about Obama, and the assumption that somehow “they” are responsible for the discomfort felt by the adherents to the Party.
What has not received much publicity until recently is the fact that what appears to be a broad-based, “populist”, “grass-roots” movement is actually driven in considerable measure by institutions financed by the very wealthy and dedicated to advancing the interests of that element of society. That advance is at the considerable expense of Tea Party adherents, many of whom will succumb to the outgrowths of the philosophy they have embraced.
Labeling Obama alternately “a Muslim” and/or “a Marxist” (failing to understand the contradiction), attacking him for raising taxes (85% of Americans are paying lower taxes under Obama) and for “trying to take away” their guns (he signed into law a bill allowing the carrying of loaded firearms on public park lands), the Tea Party rank and file are moving in the direction of “intensifying politics of free-market fundamentalism at the very historical moment that proves the failure of such an ideology.”
Epitomizing the political dualism embodied in the Tea Party movement is the political machine put together by the billionaire Koch brothers, David Koch in particular. (David Koch is pictured above, at right.) Son of one of the prime movers of the John Birch Society, David Koch was a driving force behind the genesis of the Libertarian Party in the early 1980’s, running for Vice-President in 1980 against Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
The formidable array of think tanks and NGO’s, journalists and political pundits who owe their careers to the brothers and their institutions, together constitute the machine termed “The Kochtopus.”
The foundation of the Kochs political philosophy–embodied in the political realities underlying the Tea Party–is one of “corporatism” or “the Corporate State” as Mussolini put it. Indeed, Birch Society kingpin Fred Koch openly admired Mussolini’s supposed “suppression” of the communists. (In fact, communism was already waning in Italy when Mussolini took over. See Miscellaneous Archive Show M42.)
In this context, one should never forget the inclusion of Nazis and fascists in the Republican Party at a fundamental level.
Indeed, Charles Koch has opined that America could be on the verge of “the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” The reference is, of course, to the New Deal. Many of this country’s top industrialists and financiers attempted to overthrow Roosevelt in 1934, hoping to set up a dictatorship like Mussolini’s. The Bush family appear to have been involved with the plotting of the ’34 coup.
This translation of Corporatism into a broad-based political movement is a manifestation of classical fascism. Even former close friends and associates of the Kochs admit that the brothers have confused “freedom” with what will maximize their corporate profits.
Program Highlights Include: The Koch brothers’ founding of the Mercatus Center–an archetypal Kochtopus element; the Mercatus Center’s profound influence on Bush (II) administration policy; the Koch brothers manipulation of environmental regulations; the effect of that manipulation on regulation of formaldehyde–a carcinogen produced by Koch Industries; David Koch’s role in financing cancer research–one of a number of roles that places him in a position of conflict of interest.
1. Despite their attempts at cultivating the image of patrons of the arts and benefactors to society, the Kochs are, in fact, at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. The brothers main commercial undertaking is Koch Industries, a conglomerate with major participation in the fossil-fuels and chemical industries, in particular.
. . . In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.
With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. . . .
“Covert Operations” by Jane Mayer; The New Yorker; 8/30/2010.
2. As major polluters and members of the ultra-rich, the Kochs stand to benfit from a frustration of the Obama political agenda.
. . . The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.” . . .
3. As indicated above, the brothers learned their political philosophy from their father Fred Koch, a seminal member of the John Birch Society.
. . . . In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”. . .
4. Disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, the Tea Party movement is deeply involved with the Kochtopus.
A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”
Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”
In April, 2009, Melissa Cohlmia, a company spokesperson, denied that the Kochs had direct links to the Tea Party, saying that Americans for Prosperity is “an independent organization and Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” Later, she issued a statement: “No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.” David Koch told New York, “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”
At the lectern in Austin, however, Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement, joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!” She explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channeled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”
Venable honored several Tea Party “citizen leaders” at the summit. The Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity gave its Blogger of the Year Award to a young woman named Sibyl West. On June 14th, West, writing on her site, described Obama as the “cokehead in chief.” In an online thread, West speculated that the President was exhibiting symptoms of “demonic possession (aka schizophrenia, etc.).” The summit featured several paid speakers, including Janine Turner, the actress best known for her role on the television series “Northern Exposure.” She declared, “They don’t want our children to know about their rights. They don’t want our children to know about a God!”
During a catered lunch, Venable introduced Ted Cruz, a former solicitor general of Texas, who told the crowd that Obama was “the most radical President ever to occupy the Oval Office,” and had hidden from voters a secret agenda—“the government taking over our economy and our lives.” Countering Obama, Cruz proclaimed, was “the epic fight of our generation!” As the crowd rose to its feet and cheered, he quoted the defiant words of a Texan at the Alamo: “Victory, or death!”
Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a Web site offering supporters “Tea Party Talking Points.” The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for “Taxpayer Tea Party Registration” and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a “Tea Party Finder” Web site, advertised as “a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina.”
5. Epitomizing the construct of the Kochs’ political apparatus is the Mercatus Center, established at a private university in Virginia. It has asserted tremendous influence on policy, particularly in the administration of George W. Bush, for whose election the Kochs worked very hard.
. . . In the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank. Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.”
The founder of the Mercatus Center is Richard Fink, formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. In addition, he is the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the president of the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, a director of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, and a director and co-founder, with David Koch, of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
Fink, with his many titles, has become the central nervous system of the Kochtopus. He appears to have supplanted Ed Crane, the head of the Cato Institute, as the brothers’ main political lieutenant. Though David remains on the board at Cato, Charles Koch has fallen out with Crane. Associates suggested to me that Crane had been insufficiently respectful of Charles’s management philosophy, which he distilled into a book called “The Science of Success,” and trademarked under the name Market-Based Management, or M.B.M. In the book, Charles recommends instilling a company’s corporate culture with the competitiveness of the marketplace. Koch describes M.B.M. as a “holistic system” containing “five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights and incentives.” A top Cato Institute official told me that Charles “thinks he’s a genius. He’s the emperor, and he’s convinced he’s wearing clothes.” Fink, by contrast, has been far more embracing of Charles’s ideas. (Fink, like the Kochs, declined to be interviewed.)
At a 1995 conference for philanthropists, Fink adopted the language of economics when speaking about the Mercatus Center’s purpose. He said that grant-makers should use think tanks and political-action groups to convert intellectual raw materials into policy “products.”
The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of,” and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested first by Mercatus scholars. Fink told the paper that the Kochs have “other means of fighting [their] battles,” and that the Mercatus Center does not actively promote the company’s private interests. But Thomas McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who specializes in environmental issues, told me that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” An environmental lawyer who has clashed with the Mercatus Center called it “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer explained the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.” . . .
6. David Koch has spent millions to fund cancer research. With his industrial concerns producing known carcinogens, such as formaldehyde, this constitutes a conflict of interest–a type of conflict that often results in resolutions that satisfy the major donors.
. . . And he became a patron of cancer research, focusing on prostate cancer. In addition to his gifts to Sloan-Kettering, he gave fifteen million dollars to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a hundred and twenty-five million to M.I.T. for cancer research, twenty million to Johns Hopkins University, and twenty-five million to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston. In response to his generosity, Sloan-Kettering gave Koch its Excellence in Corporate Leadership Award. In 2004, President Bush named him to the National Cancer Advisory Board, which guides the National Cancer Institute.
Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.
Scientists have long known that formaldehyde causes cancer in rats, and several major scientific studies have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer in human beings—including one published last year by the National Cancer Institute, on whose advisory board Koch sits. The study tracked twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the government. Corporations have resisted regulations on formaldehyde for decades, however, and Koch Industries has been a large funder of members of Congress who have stymied the E.P.A., requiring it to defer new regulations until more studies are completed.
Koch Industries became a major producer of the chemical in 2005, after it bought Georgia-Pacific, the paper and wood-products company, for twenty-one billion dollars. Georgia-Pacific manufactures formaldehyde in its chemical division, and uses it to produce various wood products, such as plywood and laminates. Its annual production capacity for formaldehyde is 2.2 billion pounds. Last December, Traylor Champion, Georgia-Pacific’s vice-president of environmental affairs, sent a formal letter of protest to federal health authorities. He wrote that the company “strongly disagrees” with the N.I.H. panel’s conclusion that formaldehyde should be treated as a known human carcinogen. David Koch did not recuse himself from the National Cancer Advisory Board, or divest himself of company stock, while his company was directly lobbying the government to keep formaldehyde on the market. (A board spokesperson said that the issue of formaldehyde had not come up.)
James Huff, an associate director at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, a division of the N.I.H., told me that it was “disgusting” for Koch to be serving on the National Cancer Advisory Board: “It’s just not good for public health. Vested interests should not be on the board.” He went on, “Those boards are very important. They’re very influential as to whether N.C.I. goes into formaldehyde or not. Billions of dollars are involved in formaldehyde.” . . .
7. When citizens have become sickened by pollutants produced by the Koch brothers and their ilk, they will have less chance of receiving adequate treatment if the Kochtopus has its way. The brothers have been implacable opponents of health care reform.
. . . Americans for Prosperity also created an offshoot, Patients United Now, which organized what Phillips has estimated to be more than three hundred rallies against health-care reform. At one rally, an effigy of a Democratic congressman was hung; at another, protesters unfurled a banner depicting corpses from Dachau. The group also helped organize the “Kill the Bill” protests outside the Capitol, in March, where Democratic supporters of health-care reform alleged that they were spat on and cursed at. Phillips was a featured speaker.
Americans for Prosperity has held at least eighty events targeting cap-and-trade legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air pollution that they create. Speakers for the group claimed, with exaggeration, that even back-yard barbecues and kitchen stoves would be taxed. The group was also involved in the attacks on Obama’s “green jobs” czar, Van Jones, and waged a crusade against international climate talks. Casting his group as a champion of ordinary workers who would be hurt by environmentalists, Phillips went to Copenhagen last year and staged a protest outside the United Nations conference on climate change, declaring, “We’re a grassroots organization. . . . I think it’s unfortunate when wealthy children of wealthy families . . . want to send unemployment rates in the United States up to twenty per cent.”
Grover Norquist, who holds a weekly meeting for conservative leaders in Washington, including representatives from Americans for Prosperity, told me that last summer’s raucous rallies were pivotal in undermining Obama’s agenda. The Republican leadership in Congress, he said, “couldn’t have done it without August, when people went out on the streets. It discouraged deal-makers”—Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said. “When Obama was strong, the Chamber of Commerce said, ‘We can work with the Obama Administration.’ But that changed when thousands of people went into the street and ‘terrorized’ congressmen. August is what changed it. Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough.”
As the first anniversary of Obama’s election approached, David Koch came to the Washington area to attend a triumphant Americans for Prosperity gathering. Obama’s poll numbers were falling fast. Not a single Republican senator was working with the Administration on health care, or much else. Pundits were writing about Obama’s political ineptitude, and Tea Party groups were accusing the President of initiating “a government takeover.” In a speech, Koch said, “Days like today bring to reality the vision of our board of directors when we started this organization, five years ago.” He went on, “We envisioned a mass movement, a state-based one, but national in scope, of hundreds of thousands of American citizens from all walks of life standing up and fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history. . . . Thankfully, the stirrings from California to Virginia, and from Texas to Michigan, show that more and more of our fellow-citizens are beginning to see the same truths as we do.”
While Koch didn’t explicitly embrace the Tea Party movement that day, more recently he has come close to doing so, praising it for demonstrating the “powerful visceral hostility in the body politic against the massive increase in government power, the massive efforts to socialize this country.” Charles Koch, in a newsletter sent to his seventy thousand employees, compared the Obama Administration to the regime of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. The Kochs’ sense of imperilment is somewhat puzzling. Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist. . . .
Housekeeping Note: Comments 1–50 available here.
Well, they did it: The Koch brothers pumped $650 million into Meredith Corporation’s buyout of Time Inc, the publisher of Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly.
But we are assured not to worry about Koch editorial meddling because the Kochs “will not have a seat on the Meredith board and will have no influence on Meredith’s editorial or managerial operations,” according to Merideth. Instead, we are told that the Kochs are purely interested in this venture from an investment standpoint. And that’s a rather remarkable claim from an investment standpoint if true since, as the article notes at the end, the final price Merideth and Koch paid for Time Inc included a 46 percent premium on top above price Time Inc. shares cost when this buyout proposal was first announced. Yep, the Kochs are buying big media for the investment potential and that alone. And they’re so optimistic about the profit potential of this merger that they were happy to pay a 46 percent premium for the purchase (and definitely didn’t buy it to influence the content of these publications *wink*):
“John Fahey, Time chairman, said the sale was in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, noting the price represented a 46% premium to the closing price of shares on 15 November, the day prior to media reports about the deal”
A 46 percent premium for a media company that specializes in magazines. As media industry observers not, it’s a rather odd investment from a profit-maximization standpoint. And it’s a rather incredulous pledge that Kochs won’t exert sway over content given the history of people like Rupert Murdoch make, and breaking, that same pledge and the history of the Kochs themselves going after journalists:
And yet Merideth assures us that the Kochs will have no sway over the content and they are just really confident that this merger will “unlock significant value”:
“KED’s non-controlling, preferred equity investment underscores a strong belief in Meredith’s strength as a business operator, its strategies and its ability to unlock significant value from the Time acquisition.”
What sort of significant value will Merideth and the Kochs manage to unlock from this acquisition? That remains to be seen, although given the statements from Merideth about how they plan to “aggressively pay down” debt by 2020, the unlocked value is presumably going to involve laying off a bunch of journalists.
On the plus side, at least now whenever Donald Trump isn’t made Time’s “Man of the Year” it’s probably going to start some sort of oligarch war between Trump and the Kochs due to Trump’s hurt feelings. So that should be kind of fun to watch.
One of the grimly interesting things to watch as oligarchs like Charles Koch lurch closer and closer to grave with each passing year is whether or not they eventually try to pull an end-of-life better-late-than-never mea culpa for being such abhorrent jerks over the course of their lives. You shouldn’t expect such a mea culpa, but it’s not unheard of. So when Charles Koch — who has now out-lived his younger brother David — gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal last November where he expressed regret over the divisiveness and partisanship is billions of dollars financed over the decades, culminating in the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump, it looked for a moment like we might be on the verge of seeing Charles Koch transition to the ‘cleaning up all my bad karma’ phase of the oligarch’s lifecycle. Of course, these words were a little hard to swallow all things considered, especially given the fact that the chief non-profit vehicle used by the Koch mega-donor network, Donors Trust, had just been used by someone in 2019 to anonymously donate $1.5 million to the white nationalist VDare organization for the purchase of a historic castle near DC. But the interview nonetheless signaled that was could be seeing a new, final public image campaign by Charles to leave a less odious legacy. That’s all part of the context of the following report in the Nation by Jasmine Banks of Unkoch My Campus, whose organization just released a report on the institutional organizing behind the nationwide surge in right-wing hysterics over “Critical Race Theory” being taught in US public schools. And as their report found it was Koch financed institutions, network behind it. As Unkoch My Campus found after reviewing the published materials of 28 conservative think tanks and political organizations with known ties to the Koch network from June 2020 to June 2021, it was only in February of this year — after Trump’s multiple attempts to reverse the election results ultimate failed — that the relative trickle of articles on the topic turned into a torrent. It was like someone flipped a switch and suddenly CRT was the topic on the Right. Oh, and it turns out the Koch network’s ultimate solution for dealing with the perils of Critical Race Theory is mass school privatizations. Surprise! So when Charles Koch gave that interview last fall lamenting the division he cause over the course of his lifetime, keep in mind that interview was published a few months before the Koch network unleashed a nationwide ‘Critical Race Theory’ gaslighting campaign:
“The common story about this surge of action is that this is a new “Tea Party” moment—a genuine uprising by grassroots Americans who are furious about CRT and demanding action from their state legislatures. But that story ignores the clear influence of a carefully built campaign by the network of radical free-market capitalist think tanks and action groups supported by billionaire businessman Charles Koch and his late brother David.”
A manufactured crisis designed to bring about the privatization of schools. That’s the kind of ‘leadership’ we can clearly continue to expect from Charles Koch during his final years. Sure, he’ll give the mea culpas too. It’ll just be the gaslighting kind of mea culpa. And really, what choice do you have when you’re an anarchic oligarch who set out to conquer the world near the end of your life? You exactly can’t be honest with the public you set out to conquer. Of course you’re going to gaslight. Just as you have all along. Whipping up a fake reverse racism crisis that happens to help you capture the public school system is exactly what we should have expected from Charles Koch in his 80s. For Charles, it’s going to be gaslighting to the grave:
But let’s also not fall under the delusion that Charles Koch’s interest in whipping up panic of Critical Race Theory is purely driven by crass political considerations or interests in school privatizations. As the following piece reminds us, the Kochs have been at the forefront of opposing civil rights in America for decades. And while it’s long been known that Charles’s dad Fred was involved with John Birch Society from its very inception, it’s hadn’t always been appreciated just how deeply committed a John Bircher Charles was at the time. From 1961–1968 he wasn’t just a member but an avid promoter and fund-raiser for the group. His home town of Wichita was even hailed as the “pilot” town for the group’s ambitions. It was only in 1968, after years of the worst kind of anti-civil rights gaslighting by the group, that Charles resigned from the group. Why? Because the John Birch Society supported the war in Vietnam and Charles opposed the war...purely based on financial costs and the risks that taxes would be hiked and price controls imposed to pay for the war. That was where he broke with the John Birch Society. So when we find Charles’s network creating a Critical Race Theory national hoax in 2021, it’s important to keep in mind he’s operating from a playbook he and his father helped to write almost six decades ago:
“Many commentators have noted that the father of the controversial Koch Brothers, Fred Koch, was a leader of the John Birch Society from its founding in 1958 until his death in 1967. But, in fact, Charles Koch followed his father’s footsteps into the John Birch Society for years in Wichita, Kansas, a hub city for the organization in that decade of tremendous societal unrest as civil rights activists challenged racial segregation.”
It wasn’t just daddy Fred. Charles was an avid John Bircher activist from 1961 until his resignation in 1968. Fomenting against civil rights was a core message of the group the entire time. And as we saw, when Charles did finally leave in 1968, it wasn’t in opposition to the John Birch Society’s anti-civil rights platform. The group simply wasn’t anarchic and anti-government enough for Charles Koch:
The Kochs were so integral to the John Birch Society’s operations that Fred attended the initial meeting where the formation of the group was announced and joined the Executive Committee. Wichita was even considered a “pilot” town for the group’s ambitions. The Kochs were like the living embodiment of what the group stood for:
The gaslighting was on full display in 1963, when the group claimed black protestors attacked by police dogs had actually carefully orchestrated the entire scene. It wouldn’t be another five years before Charles left the group:
And when Charles finally left the group in 1968, it had absolutely nothing to do with the ongoing opposition to civil rights. Charles opposed the Vietnam War...on the basis of financial cost of the war alone. This was his breaking point: having to pay the financial costs of war:
So the next time you hear about the latest example of someone on Fox News making another bad-faithed claim about ‘Cultural Marxism’ being taught in US schools and children being taught to hate white people, don’t forget that some of the wealthiest people on in the US were behind the John Birch Society’s anti-civil rights campaign in the 1960s and their unrepentant children went on to build the contemporary Republican Party and conservative movement. History is echoing at us. Or cynically gaslighting us, as the case may be.