Here are my notes on the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer. She outlines a lot of the history of the Koch Brothers. This is a valuable book for understanding the astroturf The link contains footnotes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IrquiNhOaGZg81JBxQhlEqWz-DicTk5kB0AseeEs8cI/edi

The third largest refinery in the third reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch.”    Fred Koch wrote in a letter in 1938 that the only sound countries in the world were Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family’s early fortune.”    Fred Koch sometimes beat his boys with a branch.” Charles the second born emerged as the dominant son at a young age.

The Koch family hired a research historian – Clayton Coppin to compile a family history and then fired him. The younger brother, Bill hired him to do confidential research on the political spending of Charles.    Fred Koch saw several of his soviet acquaintances purged by Stalin which led to his hatred of communism.” 

Koch may have felt a sense of guilt about helping the Soviet Union become so powerful. He was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society.   Birchers wanted to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court. voted to desegregate public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education  Fred wrote, “The colored man looms large in the communist plan to take over America.”      

David Koch recalled that his father tried to indoctrinate the boys politically, too. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the Koch- funded libertarian magazine Reason and the author of Radicals for Capitalism, a 2007 history of the libertarian movement with which the Kochs cooperated. “It’s something I grew up with — a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”  

 The John Birch Society called JFK out and JFK denounced their crusades of suspicion and extremism.”  

Charles attended a school called the Freedom School that was led by a radical thinker named Robert LeFevre. The school had close ties to the John Birch Society.  Lefevre liked to say that the government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. Doherty the historian of the libertarian movement claimed LeFevre was the anarchist figure who won Charles’s heart and that the school was a inty world of people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake. Lefevre used to hold rallies where the crowd chanted in response to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s names, “Annihilate them!”     

The school taught a revisionist version of American history in which the robber barons were heroes, not villains, and the Gilded Age was the country’s golden era. Taxes were denigrated as a form of theft, the Progressive movement, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, in the school’s view were ruinous turns toward socialism. The weak and poor, the school taught, should be cared for by private charity, not government. The school had a revisionist position on the Civil War, too. It shouldn’t have been fought; instead the South should have been allowed to secede. Slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription, the school argued, because human beings should be allowed sell themselves into slavery if they wished. 

A group of Illinois teachers sent to a session at the school in 1959 by a local chamber of commerce returned so shocked that they notified the FBI and published a letter denouncing the school for advocating “no government, no police department, no fire department, no public schools, no health or zoning laws, not even national defense.” they noted that this of course is anarchy.” They also described the school as proposing that the Bill of rights be reduced to “just single one: the right to own property.” … Lefevre told the paper that black students, of which the school had none, might pose a problem because, the Times wrote, “some of his students are segregationists.”

Charles loved the school and tried to talk his brothers into attending. Fred had spent more time studying history and literature and he disparaged the curriculum as bilge.  One of the other faculty members was James J. Martin an anarchist historian who became well known for being a holocaust denier.”

 Richard Scaife was an heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune. This was a man who into his mid 30s had no real career or accomplishments. 

Lewis Powell who became supreme court justice wrote a battle plan detailing how conservatives needed to band together to ward off

Richard Scaife became one of the main donors of the Heritage foundation. In 23 years his total donations were around $93 million 

Hayek wrote of politicians being prisoners to conventional wisdom and believed they needed to influence politicians through a scholarly institute (think tank)  Him and his associates sought to mask it as an attempt to influence public policy.

Weyrich a pioneer in Heritage explained that businessmen hadn’t wanted to hurt their businesses, but think tanks provided them with a front.

Powell and others redefined existing political organizations such as Brookings and the New York Times as being equally biased on the liberal side.

“Enormously wealthy right-wing donors had transformed themselves from the ridiculed, self-serving, “economic royalists” of FDR’s day into the respected “other side” of a two-sided debate.”     “They introduced doubt into areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship, undermined genuinely unbiased experts, and gave politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose.”          “ In an effort to prove their intellectual integrity, all of the new think tanks would cite occasional instances where they parted positions with some of their donors.”

Bull Carlson got sick working in Koch industries. He died of cancer at 51 and the industries denied that they were to blame. He had claimed he never heard of safety regulations. 

“Libertarianism is basically a corporate front masked as a philosophy.” – Thomas Frank 

The brothers falsified their benzene emissions documents by 1/149th 

Koch Industries violated the clean water act multiple times.

A corroded underground Koch gas pipeline lit a car on fire and killed two teenagers in August of 1996 in Dallas  An oil safety expert claimed it resulted from a failure to follow regulations. 

One former employee claimed that when he brought up concerns about the pipe to a boss, he was told paying damages from a lawsuit would be cheaper than making the repairs.   The brothers were forced to pay $296 million to Danny Smalley. 

The brothers also took oil from indian land.  They hired investigators to follow and dig up dirt on those who exposed or investigated them.

Some documents in the investigation went missing.  Employees testified of the Koch method in which they fudged the polluting numbers. Koch Industries settled Bill’s whistleblower suit for $25 million.  In 2010 the Koch’s company was still rated as one of the top ten air polluters in the U.S. One database showed that the brothers produced 950 million pounds of toxic waste.

Records indicate that the brothers donated $30 million to George Mason University in Virginia. 

The Kochs funded the Center for Free Enterprise at West Virginia University for $965,000. This foundation required the school to give it a say over the professors it funded, in violation of traditional standards of academic independence. The brothers had a financial interest in the small state’s coal. One professor, the funded Russell Sobel, wrote a book Unleashing Capitalism: Why Prosperity Stops at the West Virginia Border and How to Fix It,  in which he claimed mine safety and water regulations hurt workers. 

Tea party organizers read MLK, Ghandi, and Saul Alinsky to learn of nonviolent social change.

“Their political theory is nothing more than a rationalization for self-interest.” – Former Senator Dan Glickman

The Tea Party attempted to describe itself as nonpartisan, but a poll indicated that three quarters of its members identified as Republican, and the majority of the remainder didn’t believe the Republican party was conservative enough. 

Charles Koch believed in a revisionist history in which government interference in the economy was what had caused the last Great Depression. He blamed FDR and Herbert Hoover. He believed bankers, brokers, and businessmen had been falsely accused. He tried to push this view on his employees.   

Initially after James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies testified before a Senate Committee about the heat wave, President George H.W. Bush accepted it without dispute. 

Kert Davies the director of research at Greenpeace spent months trying to trace the funds flowing into a web of nonprofit organizations and talking heads all denying the the reality of global warming as if working from the same script. What he discovered was that from 2005 to 2008, a single source, the Kochs, poured almost 25 million into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reform.

A guy by the last name of Brulle identified the “largest bankrollers of climate change denial were foundations affiliated with the Koch and Scaife families, “both of whose fortunes derived partly from oil.”   DeVos family foundations also attended Koch donor summits.

Rather than funding the campaign directly, a growing number of private conservative foundations and donors had begun directing their contributions through an organization called DonorsTrust that in essence became a screen for the right-wing.”

Donors Trust was described by MotherJones as the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”           

Between 1999 and 2015, DonorsTrust redistributed some $750 million from the pooled contributions to myriad conservative causes under its own name. Ordinarily, under the law, in exchange for their tax breaks, private foundations such as the Charles G. Koch Foundation were required to publicly disclose the charitable groups to whom they made their grants.

Brulle noticed…  as criticism of those blocking reform increased around 2007, tens of millions of dollars of contributions from fossil fuel interests like Koch and ExxonMobil seemed to have disappeared from the public fight… Meanwhile a growing and commensurate amount of anonymous money anonymous money from DonorsTrust started funding the countermovement…..   Disclosures showed that Kochs’ foundation made sizeable gifts to donors trust.

“In 2005 Dr. James Barker, former head of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said, “There’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know — except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”

“As late as 2003, over 75 percent of Republicans supported strict environmental regulations, according to polls.”

Marc Morano went after climate scientists. He had a reputation as a professional
“Pitbull” He worked for conservative new outlets that were funded by the Scaife, Bradley, and Olin foundations.   He described James Hansen as a wannabe Unabomber and Mann as a charlatan.  Of the scapegoating he said, “We had a lot of fun with it.” Morano claimed that Mann was part of what he called the “climate con”  a lavishly funded climate machine that is lobbying for laws and uses every bit of data or news study to proclaim “it’s worse than we thought”  

Morano’s background was in political science, from George Mason University, not climate science. He joked, “I’m not a scientist, but I play one on t.v.”

The Bush Energy Act contained $6 billion in oil and gas subsidies and $9 billion in coal subsidies. The Kochs routinely cast themselves as libertarians who deplored government taxes, regulations, and subsidies, but records show they took full advantage of the special tax credits and subsidies available to the oil, ethanol, and pipeline business…. Their companies benefited from nearly $100 million in government contracts in the decade after 2000.

“Before long, public opinion polls, showed that concern about climate change among all but hard-core liberals had collapsed… Just before the election, John McCain the Republican presidential candidate reiterated that the climate problem was real. He also said that green jobs would lead the way to economic recovery.”   

Americans for Prosperity came out with an ad about a wealthy man named Carlton who is an eco-hypocrite. He inherited money, attended fancy schools, and talks with his rich friends about saving the planet. He wants Congress to spend billions on programs for global warming and green energy, even if it causes massive unemployment, higher energy bills, and digs people deeper into recession.               This ad is especially funny considering the Kochs did inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and attended fancy schools.     They attempted with this ad, to convince the public,  that climate change action was a big threat to ordinary Americans’ pocket books, when in reality it was a far greater threat to their own. 

The Kochs themselves said little about their views on climate change, but in one interview David Koch suggested that if real, it would prove a boon.  “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food.” (indicating the ice melting will free up more land)   Freedom Works, AFP and other funded tea party groups succeeded to channel populist anger into the climate fight.  At tea party rallies they warned that backyard barbecues, churches, and lawn mowers were about to be shut down because of new, stricter interpretations of the Clean Air Act. 

Tom Perrielo a freshman Dem. congressman from Charlottesville Virginia, who favored the cap-and-trade bill received a lot of angry faxes from “voters” many claiming to represent local chapters of NAACP and American Association of University Women. Under official letterheads they argued cap and trade would raise electric bills hurting poor people.   When the Congressman’s staff tried reaching out to these angry constituents, they learned the letters were forgeries.

At a town hall, Perrielo was heckled and called a traitor. Later one of the disruptive members of the audience admitted that he had been put up to it by the Virginia director of Americans for Prosperity. Glenn Beck claimed cap and trade was about redistributing wealth and water rationing.

Obama was addressing a joint session of Congress in Sept. 2009 talking about health care and a Republican Congressman from South Carolina shouted “You lie!” The United States had previously declined to join other developed nations in agreeing to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Emails were hacked at East Anglia website and thousands of internal emails were uploaded detailing the private communications of scientists.

If edited and taken out of context, their exchanges could be made to appear to suggest a willingness to falsify data. The scandal was called climategate.  Cato scholars promoted the story a lot. New York Times and Washington Post started reporting on it, which gave it mainstream credence.  Tim Phillips jumped on the bandwagon describing it to conservative bloggers as a crucial tipping point.   In time, seven independent inquiries exonerated the climate scientists, finding nothing in the emails to discredit their work or the larger consensus on global warming…. Mann’s detractors jumped to the conclusion that these words proved his research was just a “trick” to fool the public and that he had deliberately hidden an actual decline in twentieth century temperatures in order to fake evidence of global warming

“The trick referred to was just a technique Mann had devised in order to provide a backup data set…  Other than that the “Climategate” scandal was, in other words, not one. It took no time, nevertheless for the hacked emails so spur a witch hunt. Within days, Inhofe and other Republicans in Congress who were recipients of Koch campaign donations demanded an investigation into Mann. They sent threatening letters to Penn State where he was a tenured professor. Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a graduate of the George Mason School of Law, would also subpoena Mann’s former employer, University of Virginia, demanding all records relating to his decade-old academic research, regardless of libertarians’ professed concerns about government intrusion. A self-described former CIA officer contracted colleagues in Mann’s department offering a $10,000 reward to any who would provide dirt on him.

The Landmark Legal Foundation brought a lawsuit against Mann. The president Mark Levin was funded by the Kochs and other family fortunes. Americans for Prosperity hired Levin to promote it on his nationally syndicated talk radio show. This copied the deal that FreedomWorks had with Glenn Beck… Levin was ticked about the reporter leaking the deal. He was wild and once told a female caller, “I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the Hell out of here!” .. Levin accused environmentalists of inventing global warming in order to justify a tyrannical government takeover.”….

Commonwealth foundation for Public Policy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania waged a campaign to get Mann fired and successfully lobbied Republican allies in the legislature to threaten to withold Penn State’s funding until the university took appropriate action against Mann…. The think tank organized an anti-Mann campus protest… Death threats began appearing Mann’s in-box. 

“Mann says, “The disaffected, the people who have trouble putting dinner on the table, were being misled into believing that action on climate change meant that ‘They want to take away your freedom and probably your guns, too.’… Two investigations one done by Penn State and another one by the inspector general of the National Science Foundation, essentially highest scientific body in the United States, exonerated Mann.

Lindsey Graham was in favor of cap and trade. He was a cosponsor with Democrat John Kerry and Independent Joe Lieberman. He stated, “I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution” are not a good thing… He warned Democrats that they needed to move fast, before Fox News caught wind of the process. As he feared, in April 2010, Fox news attacked him for backing a “gas tax” A tea party activist held a press conference in his home state called him gay… 

Within days of the drubbing, Graham withdrew from the process.

In Jan of 2010 the court announced in a 5-4 decision, the Citizens United case. The court held that as long as businesses and unions didn’t just hand their money to the candidates, but instead gave it to outside groups that were supporting or opposing the candidates and were technically independent of the campaigns, they could spend unlimited amounts to promote whatever candidates they chose. This ruling paved the way for a similar decision in appeals court for a case called SpeechNow which overturned limits on how much individuals could give to outside groups too. Before this it was capped at 5k per year. A lot of the money flooding the elections was from secretive nonprofits. Polls showed large majorities of the American public both Republicans and Democrats favored strict spending limits. 

Some of the main lawyers pushing for Citizens United were trained in Koch centers.

The Kochs paid a private reporter to try and dig up dirt and smear Jane Mayer. She was warned by fellow reporters. 

No grassroots Tea Party supporters encountered by study’s authors argued for privatizing social security. Entitlement programs aiding the middle class were in fact so popular with most Americans that they were virtually sacrosanct.

“Bush slashed taxes on unearned income, most of which went to the rich. Taxes on dividends, for instance were reduced dramatically from 39.6 percent to 15 percent. Taxes on capital gains, the overwhelming bulk of which were reaped by the wealthy, fell from 20 percent to 15 percent. As a result, many of the richest Americans were taxed at lower rates than middle- and working-class wage earners.” ……       60 percent of the wealthiest 400 declared 60%  income derived from capital gains

The first peacetime income tax in 1894 was a result of William Jennings Bryan’s populist movement and only applied to richest 85,000 Americans out of a pop. of 65 million, or top .1%…   Charles Koch argued

In his 2010 book No Apology Romney wrote, “I believe that climate change is occuring – the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.” 

   When he was campaigning in June of 2011, Romney repeated this view and emphasized that it was important for us to reduce emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that they may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming you are seeing.” Then in late October at a rally in New Hampshire he changed he claimed to be a climate skeptic.. He stated,

 “ My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet, and and the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars trying to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us. 

Later he mocked Obama, claiming, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans. And to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.

Romney changing his stance on climate change was around the same time he attended an Americans For Prosperity Summit (Koch company)  David Koch embraced Romney and threw a $75,000 per couple fund raiser for him.

 Romney claimed that he liked being able to fire people. When he released his tax returns it revealed that he paid a tax rate of 14 percent on 21.7 million dollars 

In a meeting with John Boehner and Obama concerning Obamacare, Obama asked Boehner, “John what happened?” Boehner responded, “I got overrun”

Boehner singled out the people responsible for the meltdown. Self-serving, extreme pressure groups, he said were “misleading their followers and pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be.” 

Arthur Brooks in 2013 at a conservative political action conference explained that only a third of the public believed that Republicans cared about everyday people. He explained that if conservatives wanted to win, they had to improve their image. 

Richard Fink who worked for the Kochs came up with a grand strategy. He divided the country into three parts and said the battle was for the middle third. He argued that the Koch network needed to persuade moderate, undecided voters that the intent of economic libertarians was virtuous.

Charles Koch explained once in an interview with Wichita Business Journal that the poor have been condemned to a lifetime of dependency and hopelessness. He explained, “we want them to have hope that they can advance on their own merits, rather than the hope that somebody gives them something.”  During this interview, Charles ironically explained how his son Chase became the president of Koch Fertilizer and how he did it on his own.

Fink explained that the Kochs should form and publicize unlikely partnerships with unlikely allies. This would counteract critics who claimed they were negative or devisive.”

The Kochs claimed to support criminal justice reform, but they supported Scott Walker whose record on criminal justice belied the Koch’s professed concern.”

“A 2015 report by one of the nonprofits connected Art Pope explained, private academic centers within colleges and universities were ideal devices by which rich conservatives could replace the faculty’s views with their own..: John Allison the former Cato Institute chairman oversaw grants to 63 colleges when running the BB&T bank. They were all required to teach his favorite philosopher… Ayn Rand”… At Florida State University one undergrad student complained that in an intro Econ course the Professor was teaching Keynes was bad. Their economics textbook was co-written by Russell Sobel, a former recipient of Koch funding at West Virginia University, who had taught that safety regulations hurt coal miners. The textbook had been given an F by an environmental group, and their textbook claimed climate change wasn’t caused by humans, and wasn’t a  big issue. The Kochs said they providing “fresh” college thinking.””

The Kochs directed millions of dollars into teaching high school students, through a non-profit Charles called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. Topeka school system was pressed, and signed an agreement with the organization. It taught that FDR didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession.

At a June donor summit, Stowers emphasized to the donors that this education investment would create a valuable “talent pipeline” that would influence millions of minds… The Kochs described their activities to the IRS as non-political.

The Charles Koch Institute hosted its inaugural well-being forum at the Newsroom in Washington. Displayed by his byline was a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. There was no mention of King’s vision of well-being that included unions…. Arthur Brooks claimed that unhappiness had a strong link to economic envy, such as the kind of thinking that pushes for higher taxes on the rich.

Charles claimed that they were saving the country and if someone was going to do it, it might as well be them.

Charles Koch tried to write an op-ed in which he claimed he was only involved in politics reluctantly for the last ten years. That idea is ridiculous when one looks at all of his political spending before that decade.

The Kochs built their own election system similar to that of the RNC. Katie Walsh the chief of staff of the RNC claimed that the Kochs had all but usurped the Republican party.

Americans for Prosperity had 550 people working in 2014 in Florida.

Mark Mckinnon a political strategist that worked for both Republicans and Democrats claimed that we have reached a point where megadonors are tipping the scale. Mckinnon called it an oligarchy.