Anti-Koch Activist Lee Fang Hired by The Nation

The late Andrew Breitbart legendarily confronted anti-capitalist protesters in rollerblades and invited them to Applebee’s, the irony seemingly lost on those who followed him to the restaurant. 

“This is a protest against capitalism, against libertarianism, against the free market,” Breitbart said then, calling the conference attendees “good and decent people who create jobs.” 

One of strategists behind those protests was the left-wing blogger Lee Fang. And now the Free Beacon reports Fang has been hired by the far-left publication, The Nation, which in the past has been resoundingly criticized for its pro-Communist and anti-Semitic rhetoric. 

According to a Politico report, “Fang has met with representatives from Common Cause, Greenpeace, Public Citizen and the Service Employees International Union at SEIU headquarters to figure out” how to tear down the left’s perennial targets the Kochs. At those meetings, participants traded research, produced voluminous reports, created an e-mail listserv, organized, held conference calls, and strategized on how they could effectively take down and discredit the Koch Brothers. 

He has accused the Kochs of being “nefarious GOP puppet masters,” which even “some liberals” have rejected “as an overly simplistic” — let alone unfounded and baseless — “caricature.” 

Fang contributed to a website devoted and obsessed with bringing down the Koch brothers and worked with organizations like Center For American Progress, the liberal think tank started by Bill Clinton’s former Chief of Staff, and the Republic Report. Both organizations do not disclose their donors, which Fang did not find contradictory. He went so far as to say, “It’s fundamentally different when you have wealthy individuals that want to donate to a worthy cause, and the Koch brothers and some of their cohorts that are funding groups that are essentially just advancing their self interests and their lobbying interests.”

To Fang, far-left causes are “worthy,” while those promoting free markets and liberty are nefarious and must therefore disclose all of their funders. 

This mentality explains why in one of his first pieces for The Nation, Fang defended the mayors of Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco who initially warned Chick-fil-A not to expand into their cities. 

Fang wrote, “liberal defenders of Chick-Fil-A are quick to claim that an official ban would set a dangerous precedent that would amount to a chill on the First Amendment.” Fang was one of the few on the left radical enough to publicly defend these anti-First Amendment suggestions. 

Fang continued:

But what about corporations that unload their corporate coffers bribing politicians, funding dark money political campaigns, busting unions, or other efforts to discriminate against minority populations–Latino immigrants, Muslim Americans, etc. Isn’t the decision to ignore how corporate money is spent setting a dangerous precedent?

There are two things disturbingly wrong here. Fang assumes wrongly that corporations discriminate against minority populations when free enterprise helps lift up new immigrants more than any other system imaginable. Fang then equates the private views of a company’s owner and the charity his family — unrelated to the company — runs to a non-existing boogeyman that discriminates against minority populations and engages in nefarious political acts that seem more to describe the crony capitalistic habits of the Obama White House more than anything else. 

As the Free Beacon noted, even the liberal Salon writer Glenn Greenwald berated Fang, calling his stance “repellent” and saying “no impulse is more dangerous” than Fang’s to defend city officials who wanted to prevent restaurants from opening in their cities because they did not agree with the owner’s political views. 

The Free Beacon notes that Fang has also “accused the Koch brothers of ‘manipulating the oil market,'” a claim which was later debunked in numerous publications by a variety of energy experts. 

Fang has targeted RedState’s Erick Erickson in a hit piece that made numerous false assumptions about Erickson’s finances and lavish lifestyle.

Fang is motivated to tear down a capitalist system he sees as unfair, and he employs unsound tactics in his attempts to achieve his goal. And the left continues to lionize and embrace Fang, using him as a tool in their attempts to tear down and transform a free market system they believe is at the root of all of society’s evils.