Media Targets Center-right Donors: Koch Brothers

Recently the organized left has been focusing its ire on a new group of center-right donors: the Koch brothers. The British Guardian ran a story with a nice picture of a Greenpeace blimp with a nice stencil of the brothers with the words in red: dirty money. Protesters swarmed a retreat to decry their “corporate greed.”

It seems as though the left has figured out whom to personalize for their political failures of late. They have picked a target, personalized it and are now busy polarizing it. Political targets are nothing new, but the emphasis on demonizing right-wing donors is a tactic unique to the left but disgusting when the media willingly toes that line and uncritically pushes that underlying message.

A month ago we were getting lectures from the media and elites to ‘tone down’ the rhetoric that targets individuals, and now we’re being sold the line that everything anti-progressive is funded by two billionaire brothers. Amazing that they think a few million dollars could so easily derail the tens of billions spent on global warming research, currently $4 billion a year from the feds.

The theory’s beauty is its simplistic analysis: Center-right donors only give money to fulfill their financial interests. There are no issues on the right, only business interests to pursue. Right-wing politics in their minds is just a disingenuous ploy to further corporate interests.

Thomas Franks wrote a book on this simple thesis several years ago by saying “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” arguing that the masses were fooled into voting for the right because of social issues, when left-wing economic issues were their real interests.

Franks, and the left, suffer from the inability to look critically at themselves. Never do they question whether Soros’ funding of left-wing groups helps line his currency trading pockets, whether the Rockefellers promote population control in order to maximize their patent returns, Tom Daschle was a healthcare lobbyist and married to a lobbyist and yet there was no conflict of interest in being suggested to head HHS, Al Gore and friends no doubt have entirely charitable purposes when they push false, misleading and distorted bad science in order to set up an unprofitable industry.

When it’s a real conflict of interest, when Goldman Sachs alumni are running the monetary policy of the nation in order to steal from the nation writ large, that’s less relevant. Koch has a libertarian economic philosophy that promotes less government rules, regulation and oversight. If Koch has a hidden agenda and wants something from the government, he’s doing it incredibly wrong. It’s those who are taking something that ought to be suspect, not the one who is arguing for more economic freedom for everyone.

But that’s to admit and assume that every donation is motivated solely by only material concerns. What about the underlying actions, the ‘dirty money’ in politics? It’s silly to constantly decry money in politics when one considers that the biggest political expense is always media and advertising.

Groups spend money to buy commercials to broadcast a 30 second message. They spend money to send out mail. They’re pushing information to people. The protesters and leftists are never honest in admitting that they want to restrict information, they want the media to control the public’s perception. Money in politics is used to reach people with ideas, and the forces of ignorance want to keep people like the Koch brothers legally bound not to promote those ideas. Pushing out and legally bullying dissidents is the natural position one would take if your ideological brethren controlled the information and the airwaves.

The influence in politics, the agenda we talk so often about, is really just a method of reaching the people with information to make more informed voting. The method of controlling smaller competitors is called “rent-seeking” and is a great way to keep a monopoly.

The media does this and calls it “investigative journalism.”

They targeted center-right donors the Koch brothers last August in the New York Times and then in the New Yorker in order to harass and defame them away from continuing to donate. They target those giving money because they want to defund the right, and scare away similar donors. Richard Scaife was the center-right donor target of choice for the left in the 90s. Other center-right donors have similarly come under scrutiny for their political involvements, for giving a non-profit a relatively trivial amount of money to communicate with the public.

For this they receive negative press, recent protests, and examinations into their deepest motives and attempts to connect every donation they’ve made into some wild vast right wing conspiracy.

Even the LA Times, not exactly a bastion of free enterprise, noted that the protests against the Koch brothers seems a bit hypocritical, one-sided and out of place.

But even they couldn’t resist saying that the Koch brothers are still pushing their own financial self-interest in politics, not that, you know, they actually believe it.

There’s no perspective, no sanity. Going after donors is more interesting than discussing the policies. It’s easier than pointing out that those in politics who can pay their own way are a bit hypocritical when they say they’re the party of the little guy.

The New York Times is even going after the family who gave us Chick-Fil-A and makes donations they dislike.

Unable to comprehend the tea party, perhaps feeling guilty for having so poorly covered the underlying financial and budgetary topics that has led to the current depression, they instead follow their moronic journalistic reflex to “follow the money” and try and malign the millions of tea party activists by implying that they’re just marionettes held by the Koch brothers to line their pockets.

It shows just how bad journalism is that this is what they resort to, that they’re incapable of sanely describing and detailing diverse views and then attacking the source and not the idea, when they face a political force they don’t understand. It’s even more ridiculous when they so clearly take one side in their news judgment and never do ten minutes of research and apply the same critical eye to their leftist friends.