The Kochs’ father, Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries, the hugely profitable private oil-and-chemical company that his sons inherited, was one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the ultra-conservative group that accused political opponents of treason and was at its core segregationist. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating America’s public schools, in 1954, the Birchers launched a nationwide crusade to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 1960, Fred Koch wrote a self-published book describing welfare programs as a secret government plot to lure rural blacks into cities so that they could foment “a vicious race war.”
.. in 1968, Fred Koch also supported an unsuccessful effort to recruit Ezra Taft Benson, the former Secretary of Agriculture and a leader of the Mormon Church, and Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator, to run on a platform calling for the restoration of segregation. The Birchers’ radicalism was so extreme, and delusional, they claimed that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent.
.. Traditional town-hall meetings, at which local congressmen met with their constituents, were overtaken by angry mobs. Sean Noble, a Republican political operative who was on contract to the Kochs, later acknowledged, “We packed these town halls with people who were just screaming about this thing.” As he told National Review in 2014, “We knew we had to make that summer absolute hell.”
The Koch Brothers’ New Brand
In 2011, a blogger impersonating billionaire David Koch got through the switchboard at the Wisconsin State Capitol and was connected to Governor Scott Walker, who took time out from battling with the union protesters besieging Madison to truckle before what he thought was the great man.
Jane Mayer’s remarkable new book makes it abundantly clear that the Kochs, and the closely connected group of billionaires they’ve helped assemble, have spent thousands of times that much over the past few decades, and that in the process they’ve distorted American politics in devastating ways, impairing the chances that we’ll effectively respond to climate change, reducing voting rights in many states, paralyzing Congress, and radically ratcheting up inequality.
.. In this election cycle, for instance, the Kochs have publicly stated that they and their compatriots will spend $889 million, more than either the Republican or Democratic parties spent last time around. According to a recent analysis in Politico, their privatized political network is backed by a group of several hundred extremely rich fellow donors who often meet at off-the-record conclaves organized by the Kochs at desert resorts. It has at least 1,200 full-time staffers in 107 offices nationwide, or three and a half times as many as the Republican National Committee. They may be the most important unelected political figures in American history.
..Next, he turned to another autocrat with busy expansion plans, Adolf Hitler, traveling frequently to Germany where he “provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.” It turned into a crucial part of the Reich’s military might, “one of the few refineries in Germany” that could produce “the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes.” And it turned the elder Koch into an admirer of the regime, who as late as 1938 was writing in a letter to a friend that “I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.”
.. At first he worked through the Libertarian party, persuading David to be its vice-presidential candidate in 1980, apparently because he could self-fund his candidacy, avoiding campaign finance laws, but their poor showing—only one percent of the vote—convinced him they needed to work behind the scenes, supplying the “themes and words for the scripts,” as one colleague put it, for a revolution.
.. Several striking themes emerge.
One is that the various moguls were almost all angry at the government because it insisted on prosecuting their most egregious oversteps.
.. A second, and related, motif involves perhaps the greatest single issue of our time, climate change. “Coal, oil, and gas magnates formed the nucleus of the Koch donor network,” Mayer writes. “Guest lists for the [annual donor summits they organized at California desert resorts] read like a Who’s Who of America’s most successful and most conservative fossil fuel barons.” As a result, they had a strong vested interest in making sure that nothing was done about global warming.
.. After the ruling, Karl Rove, among others, quickly appreciated its meaning, telling a group of wealthy Dallas oilmen that “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now it’s time to get serious.”
Getting serious meant, among other things, funneling completely unprecedented amounts of money into the 2010 midterm elections—$200 million or more from “Republican-aligned independent groups.” All over the country absurd attack ads were going after incumbents—Congressman Bruce Braley of Iowa and Bob Etheridge of North Carolina were each accused of wanting to build a “mosque at Ground Zero.”
.. The most substantive part of this image-building has been a drive for criminal justice reform, in partnership with many progressive and minority leaders concerned about mass incarceration who advocate reform of sentencing. But late last fall the coalition began to falter, with many complaining that the Kochs were pushing changes to the criminal code that would make it even harder to prosecute corporate crimes—the very crimes that, as Mayer shows, most of the biggest players in their network have regularly engaged in.4
What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers
Ms. Mayer began to take the rumored investigation seriously when she heard from her New Yorker editor that she was going to be accused — falsely — of plagiarism, stealing the work of other writers. A dossier of her supposed plagiarism had been provided to reporters at The New York Post and The Daily Caller, but the smears collapsed when the writers who were the purported victims made statements saying that it was nonsense, and that there had been no plagiarism whatsoever.
.. “The firm, it appears, was Vigilant Resources International, whose founder and chairman, Howard Safir, had been New York City’s police commissioner under the former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,” she writes in “Dark Money.”
.. “As far as what we do, we don’t talk about clients, whether we have them or don’t have them. Even answering the question would violate the policy of our business.”
‘Hidden History’ Of Koch Brothers Traces Their Childhood And Political Rise
In January 2015, at a private conference in Palm Springs, Calif., the political network led by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch announced plans to spend $889 million in the 2016 elections. The organization consists almost entirely of groups that don’t register under the campaign finance laws and therefore don’t publicly identify their donors.
.. He was not a Nazi, and I certainly don’t suggest that in the book, but what he was was an American businessman looking for a good deal, and he was looking all over the world to see how he could make some money. Oddly, and what’s been known before, is before working under Hitler’s Third Reich, Fred Koch had worked for Stalin, where — under Stalin’s first five-year plan — Fred Koch helped build up the Russian, the Soviet oil refineries and really gave huge muscle to the oil industry in the Soviet Union.