Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool us over and over again, shame on the media.
After years of trying to bend the political process to his will by dropping hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of conservative causes and the pockets of conservative candidates, and in the wake of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, Charles Koch, in a rare mid-November in-person interview, told Axios on HBO that he "screwed up by being partisan," rather than pursuing a more non-partisan course. Koch’s personal revelation, however, has not stopped his super PAC, Americans for Prosperity Action, from pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into electing Republicans in Georgia, where two Senate runoffs on January 5, will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
“Some of the politicians that we had helped get elected, I would see them on TV and they would be talking about policies that were antithetical against immigration, against immigration reform, against a more peaceful foreign policy. I was horrified,” Koch told Axios on HBO. “We had vetted them all and they all seemed aligned on our major issues and on empowering people,'” Koch said, “And then once they got elected – I didn't expect them to fully agree with us on everything, but to at least be champions on some of the major ones we were working on and that they said they were – and then do the opposite.”
Koch told Axios’ Mike Allen that he wants to elect people "who are going to be champions for ... policies that empower people so they can realize their potential and succeed by helping others succeed."
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker’sChief Washington Correspondent, and author Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, told MSNBC’sLawrence O’Donnell that Koch’s partisan regrets, were part of a cyclical “charm offensive.” “About every two years, the Koch’s rebrand themselves,” Mayer said. “They announce that they’re really not partisans, they’re just working for the public good. At this point, having heard this ever two years at least since 2014, I think you’d have to be an amnesiac to fall for it.”
Nevertheless, Mayer said, some of her colleagues in the press do just that. “it happens on a regular basis and then Charles Koch and his machine, which is a stunningly powerful political machine, with an incredible amount of money behind it, goes ahead and funds another generation of Republican candidates.”
Koch, 85, is chairman of Koch Industries, which Forbesmagazine recently declared had regained its No. 1 spot in its annual ranking of America’s largest private companies. According to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamurphy/2020/11/23/americas-largest-private-companies-2020-koch-industries-at-no-1-for-first-time-in-13-years/?sh=ddd9b64fa5f8), “Koch Industries’ revenues for the 2019 calendar year were an estimated $115 billion, up 4.5% from the prior year,” thereby grabbing the No. 1 spot from Cargill, the agribusiness giant.
Koch’s “greatest and most passionate interest is making sure that the U.S. government does nothing to ameliorate climate change because most of his money comes from fossil fuels,” Jane Mayer told MSNBC.
Koch’s new book is titled, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,was co-written with Brian Hooks, who has worked with Koch for 20 years, and is chairman and CEO of Stand Together, founded by Koch as a philanthropic umbrella. Hooks told Allen that Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) should be re-elected because "[W]e think that he can actually make a difference if he's returned to the Senate."
"Boy, did we screw up. What a mess!" Koch writes. "[P]artisan politics prevented us from achieving the thing that motivated us to get involved in politics in the first place — helping people by removing barriers." Koch admits: "I was slow to react to this fact, letting us head down the wrong road for the better part of a decade."
Spreading conservative libertarianism on college campuses
While Charles Koch is claiming that he head down the “wrong road,” his personal foundation “distributed $141.2 million in grants in 2019 to higher education, right-wing organizations, and other causes, an analysis of its latest IRS filing obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) shows,” David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy.
reported (https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/11/23/koch-funding-of-universities-topped-100-million-in-2019/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=595049bb-bb48-4601-8f14-b5665d8cb8d7).
Particularly noteworthy is the $100.8 million Koch’s Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) gave “to universities and colleges in the United States and abroad.” Koch’s favorite financial repository was once again George Mason University, which “topped all higher education recipients with $22.6 million in grants, $5 million of which went to the Institute for Humane Studies,” according to CMD. “Rounding out the top five recipients of Koch cash were Florida State University ($4.5 million), Arizona State University ($3.2 million), New York University ($3 million), and Rice University ($3 million).” As Jane Mayer reported in Dark Money, in 1976, Koch told a gathering of peers that they should “focus on ‘attracting youth’ because ‘this is the only group that is open to a radically different social philosophy.'”
Keenly aware of the power of conservative state-based think tanks and public policy institutes, CKF doled out “close to $2.5 million in grants to the State Policy Network (SPN), a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.”
In early November CMD’s Armiak reported (https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/11/11/82-of-koch-candidates-elected-to-office/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=595049bb-bb48-4601-8f14-b5665d8cb8d7) that “Charles Koch and his political network won at least 82 percent of the 439 candidates it invested in in the 2020 election cycle.” Americans for Prosperity‘s (AFP) CEO Emily Seidel told CNN, “The reality is we’ve been strengthening our capabilities to go bigger than ever before.” The group’s president Tim Phillips told CSPAN that AFP employs “hundreds of staffers” and has “thousands of volunteers.”
Not only did Koch money yield victories in the Senate and the House, but AFP’s money helped elect state senate and house candidates, attorneys general and judges, and Republican Jim Wright as head of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s top regulatory body that regulates the oil and gas industry, gas utilities, pipeline safety, safety in the liquefied petroleum gas industry and surface coal and uranium mining.