Kochsuckers

Conservatives didn’t have a policy problem, Brooks assured the audience: free-market economics still offered the best solutions for America. Republicans just needed different packaging for their message. “In other words, if you want to be seen as a moral, compassionate person, talk about fairness and helping the vulnerable,” Brooks said. “You want to win? Start fighting for people! . . . Lead with vulnerable people. Lead with fairness!” He added, “Telling stories matters. By telling stories, we can soften people.”…

The planning for the Kochs’ political makeover took place in private, but in June, 2014, a leak from one of their twice-yearly donor summits provided a glimpse of their thinking. Lauren Windsor, a liberal blogger who hosts an online news program called “The Undercurrent,” obtained audio recordings of the secret gathering, which was held at a resort near Laguna Beach, California. Soon afterward, she began posting them.

In one session, entitled “The Long-Term Strategy: Engaging the Middle Third,” Richard Fink, who was introduced to the donors as the Kochs’ ”grand strategist,” offered a summary of the new plan. Fink, who has a Ph.D. in economics from New York University, has been the Kochs’ closest political adviser since the eighties. He was an executive vice-president and a director on the board of Koch Industries, and also a board member of Americans for Prosperity. After the losses of 2012, Fink explained, he had surveyed twenty years of research into the political opinions of moderates, including a hundred and seventy thousand surveys conducted in the United States and abroad. His conclusion, he told the donors, was that if conservatives wanted to win over Americans they needed to change their pitch.

In a ballroom overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Fink began, “We got our clocks cleaned in 2012.” The demographic challenge, he said, was formidable. The United States was essentially divided into three parts. The Kochs, he said, had already “been very successful in mobilizing” the first third, which comprised conservatives and libertarians who shared their political vision. Another third, he said, would never support them: these were “the collectivists.” (In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the John Birch Society used this term to conflate liberals and Communists.) Fink continued, “The battle for the future of the country is who can win the hearts and minds of that middle third. . . . Whoever can mobilize a majority of that thirty per cent will determine the direction of the country.”…

Fink, thinking that he was only among friends, confided that the critics weren’t entirely wrong. “What do people like you say? I grew up with pretty much very little, O.K.? And I worked my butt off to get what I have.” When he saw impoverished people “on the street,” he admitted, his gut reaction was: “Get off your ass and work hard, like we did!”

Unfortunately, he continued, voters in the middle third had a different reaction when they saw the poor. They felt “guilty about it.” Rather than just being concerned with expanding “opportunity” for themselves, he said, this group was also concerned with expanding “opportunity for other people.” For these voters, the government-slashing agenda of the Kochs was a stumbling block. Fink acknowledged, “We want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, O.K.? Yeah, and cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes. There’s truth in that.” But to the “middle third” these positions seemed motivated not by ideological principle but by greed.,,

But Fink had a solution. “This is going to sound a little strange,” he acknowledged. “So you’ll have to bear with me.” The Koch network, he said, needed to present its free-market ideology as an apolitical and altruistic reform movement to enhance the quality of life—as “a movement for well-being.” The network should make the case that free markets forged a path to happiness, whereas big government led to tyranny, Fascism, and even Nazism. Arguing that an increase in the minimum wage would cause higher unemployment, Fink told his audience that unemployment in Germany during the nineteen-twenties had led to the rise “of the Third Reich.”…

Jane Meyer: the greatest threat I've received for journalism didn't come from the government, but the Koch brothers. pic.twitter.com/KQZ7UTRVKE

— sean (@SeanMcElwee) January 15, 2016

Politico, on Thursday:

America Rising PAC, the GOP opposition network founded by Matt Rhoades and Joe Pounder, has set its sights on Jane Mayer, shopping around accusations that she has ideological bias…

In the book, Mayer explores the Kochs’ history including that Charles and David Koch’s father, Fred, helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler. Koch Industries has not denied the fact but has said that within context the refinery was years before Germany invaded Poland and that many U.S. companies were working in Germany during the period and that “when it became clear that Hitler’s government was a tyrannical regime, Mr. Koch ceased doing business there.”…

“This book was written by Jane Mayer, a biased author with connections to Clinton-world who not surprisingly makes countless disingenuous attacks against conservatives. It’s important the public views Mayer’s book for what it really is: a liberal hatchet job to advance a partisan agenda,” America Rising PAC spokesperson Amelia Chassé said…