Fascinating profile of Charles and David Koch in The Weekly Standard:
A few years ago Richard Fink told Charles and David [Koch] to prepare for the worst. The brothers were raising their political profile, Fink said, and that would come at a cost. There would be a lot of name-calling. Their opponents would impugn their beliefs, characters, and business. Charles understood what Fink was talking about. “I believed that when we were considered effective we would be attacked,” he said. Before Obama’s election, those who were aware of the Kochs’ political activities tended to assume they were tilting at Austrian windmills. The Kochs had an exotic philosophy, but few took them very seriously.
Not anymore. During the fight over health care and cap and trade in 2009 and 2010, liberals went looking for baddies against whom to mobilize public opinion. The Kochs’ wealth and political involvement made them an obvious choice. Reflecting on the ferocity of the onslaught that ensued, Charles told me, “I didn’t anticipate the hatred, the advocacy of violence.” He must not have been paying attention.
Back in 2005, when Republicans controlled the federal government, liberals had asked themselves, Where do we go from here? They’d long studied what they called the “counter-establishment,” the array of conservative foundations, think tanks, and media. These institutions, liberals concluded, had pushed America to the right. What the left required was the mirror image of the Olin and Bradley foundations, the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, The Weekly Standard and National Review, talk radio and Fox News Channel. The left needed to build a “counter-counter-establishment,” a “vast left-wing conspiracy” to combat the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that had impeached Bill Clinton and elected George W. Bush.
Since most of America’s preeminent intellectual and media organizations already tilted left, the activists could focus on energizing the grassroots. A rich liberal could fund talk radio–Air America. Moveon.org became the leader of the antiwar movement. MSNBC transitioned from CNN-lite to Fox News for Democrats. The Brookings Institution may have been the most famous think tank in America, but it lacked Heritage’s political pull. The new Center for American Progress would have a separate entity–the Center for American Progress Action Fund–devoted to turning its ideas into law.
This institution-building coincided with the rise of the blogosphere. Over the last decade the left took to the Internet like conservatives at a gun show: They felt right at home. By 2006 the progressive bloggers (the term “liberal” had too many negative connotations) had become a powerful force. They called themselves the Netroots, organized conferences, pooled resources, and played a key role in forcing Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic party. The Internet served as a virtual community for liberals who’d lacked a sense of belonging. The web’s immediacy allowed writers to connect, comment, propose, report, fact-check, and update in real time. No utterance from a Republican, no matter how banal, went unexamined.
By the time the Tea Party was getting started in 2009, the left-wing counter-counter-establishment was a juggernaut, investing vast energy in destroying the reputations of its favorite targets: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh. Inside this Death Star were legions of twenty-something writers, most of them fresh out of college, tapping furiously at their keyboards, discoursing on the subtleties of macroeconomics and the depravity of American conservatives. An hour or so spent on Google was research enough to write a blog post that would be read by producers for Keith Olbermann and editors at the New York Times. Seemingly random accumulations of fact would be presented breathlessly in purple prose: Look at what the bastards are doing now! In a matter of hours attacks that originated in the bowels of the Center for American Progress Action Fund would traverse heaven’s ladder and reach White House speechwriters.
What happened to the Kochs was a classic example. A young researcher at the Center for American Progress noticed that some Tea Party rallies had been organized by Americans for Prosperity. On April 9, 2009, he wrote up his discovery and posted it on a Center for American Progress Action Fund blog under the headline “Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping to Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests.” Here was the definitive proof, he wrote, that the yokels in tricornes were only pawns of moneyed interests. A little googling revealed that Charles and David Koch had been active in politics for decades, that they’d given money to all sorts of conservative causes, that they operated–this was almost too good to be true–an energy company that had had run-ins with the EPA. Sound the alarm! Rachel Maddow is on line one!
Other sharks caught whiff of the chum. In March 2010 the environmentalists at Greenpeace released a report titled “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine.” Its authors contained their fury long enough to conclude, “Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition.” In the liberal mind, Koch had displaced ExxonMobil on the Top Ten Enemies of Gaia list.
Koch addiction became a left-wing pandemic.
Read the whole thing here.