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Unfortunately, the Kochs are no friends of borders or national sovereignty, and Republicans’ failure to enact any restrictionist measures when they owned both the House and Senate in 2016-18 is due in part to the power of Koch money.
Tucker Carlson discussed the influential Koch brothers earlier this summer, noting that “the border is more porous than ever. . . you can thank the Kochs for that.”
On Wednesday, Tucker returned to the Koch topic, interviewing Christopher Leonard, author of the new book Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America:
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: For years, brothers, Charles and David Koch have been the two single most important donors on the American right. They’ve reshaped the Republican Party, according to their personal ideology. They made the party far more libertarian, much more pro-immigration, and more pro-Big Tech.
Even if the Republican Party has evolved and elected Donald Trump, the Koch brothers remain tremendously influential, more than you may understand. And if you’re frustrated, watching the party ignore what its own voters want, it is part of the reason.
Well, there is a new book out that takes a very close look at the Koch business and political empire. Chris Leonard is the author of it. It’s called “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” We just spoke with him. Here’s what he said.
CARLSON: So for my perspective — my interest is the political activities of the Kochs who by the way, I can say, since I know them, are very nice people, personally.
CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: Absolutely. Absolutely.
CARLSON: But there’s a misconception in Washington that they’re conservative. Tell me what you discovered about their ideology after writing this book. Are they conservatives?
LEONARD: Well, you know, I think you’ve gotten it exactly right, in the sense that they’re not traditional conservatives, as you might think of that today.
Charles Koch is an engineer and you’re right, he is a really nice guy, I interviewed him for this book, I’ve been around the people who have worked for him for decades. Charles Koch believes he’s found the blueprint for how to organize society.
He is very libertarian. In his view, the best way to structure a society is just a free market exchange system. That’s it. And I call it a blueprint, intentionally. You can’t argue with a blueprint. If you mess up something in a blueprint, the building will collapse. You can’t argue with physics.
And I think Charles Koch sees his political ideology in that way. He believes that the only way you can structure society is as a market. And when the government intervenes, it ultimately does more harm than good in his view. It causes more problems than it solves.
CARLSON: So our viewers can assess what they think of their views. I do bet that most of our viewers disagree with them on immigration. They’ve been strong advocates, I would say for opening the borders. How powerful are they — the Koch brothers and Charles Koch — particularly within the Republican Party, would you say?
LEONARD: Extremely powerful. You nailed it at the beginning. Charles Koch has been patiently executing a political project since the mid-1970s, and that is to make America more libertarian and his goal in that, his primary goal has been to reshape the Republican Party.
And particularly since the 2000s, you’ve seen the Koch network writ large, which is a multifaceted machine that includes a grassroots group of people called Americans for Prosperity. It includes one of the largest corporate lobbying shops in the United States. It includes a constellation of think tanks here in Washington.
All of these resources have been put to bear to shift the Republican Party more toward what Charles Koch would call a classical liberal ideology, totally libertarian, basically moving the federal government back to the size it was in 1776.
CARLSON: So you’ve seen from the various Koch organizations, some of which you just listed recently, this line that we really don’t have anything to fear from Big Tech, that Republicans are being hysterical conservatives. This show for example, being hysterical about Google or Facebook, just calm down, everything is totally fine.
Why would they — which is obviously a lie — but why would they be telling us that?
LEONARD: So this is all part of the bigger picture in my view, and we have to go back to when Trump won the election and surprised the entire political landscape of America.
Donald Trump and what this administration is doing is essentially unacceptable to the Koch network, if you will, because Donald Trump has proven that his administration is willing to intervene in the markets to get a beneficial outcomes for the people who voted for him. That’s how I would put it. So Trump is willing to use tariffs.
Trump is willing to tear apart trade deals. And that impulse needs to be kept in check if you’re part of the Koch political machine. So if you start talking about regulating any company, if you start talking about regulating these tech companies, the Koch network is going to try to push you back off that as aggressively as they can.
CARLSON: Which you described in this book, which I would recommend to our viewers, are people who care more about ideas than outcomes, who really are ideologues in the classic sense of that term, and you know, maybe that’s appealing to people, and we will let viewers make up their own minds.
But this is an interesting book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Thank you very much, Chris.
Even though the Kochs are identified in the public mind with Republicans, the brothers floated the idea in early June that they might support Democrat candidates in the future. In addition, they said around the same time they were “thankful” that the Democrat House voted unanimously for a Dreamer amnesty.
So the Kochs are far from being Republican or conservative stalwarts. On several important issues, such as immigration, drugs, tax cuts, free speech and crime, the Kochs lean left. They certainly should not be considered friends of law and borders.
The Kochs run on a rather different track, as Tucker Carlson explained.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Charles and David Koch are two of the richest men in the world. Each one of them is worth tens of billions of dollars. Some of their money is inherited; much of it they made themselves.
But to their credit, the Koch’s who have never been content merely to get richer, they are engaged intellectuals. They have a sincere desire to change the world.
So for years, the brothers had been the single most important funders of Republican politics in Washington, in the country.
Koch network of donors spends hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle. Virtually every major conservative nonprofit in Washington takes Koch money, often a lot of it.
Koch organizations train political organizers and candidates; many Republican lawmakers owe their careers to the Koch’s and are happy to say so.
For people whose main business is making fertilizer and paper towels, the Kochs have been remarkably effective in American politics. And not surprisingly, the left hates them for it.
Both the Koch brothers and their families, who by the way, are very nice people, have been grotesquely and repeatedly maligned by the media. This, in turn has convinced many conservatives that the Kochs must be on their side.
Anyone who has been slandered by the New York Times has got to be doing something right. That’s the idea. It’s not a bad standard. But in this case, in the case of the Kochs, conservatives might want to pause and rethink the relationship.
As it turns out, the Kochs don’t have much in common with conservatives. They are in fact totally opposed to most conservative policy goals. The Kochs are libertarian ideologues. They’re passionate and inflexible about what they believe.
America First — the Kochs finds the very notion of that absurd, if not fascist.
And economic policy that seeks to strengthen families — the Kochs denounce that as quote, “crony capitalism” or picking winners and losers. They think it’s immoral, and they’ll tell you so.
Controlling our borders — the Kochs consider that racist. A few years ago, in fact, Bernie Sanders noted that the Koch brothers are far to the left of him on immigration, open borders quote, “That’s a Koch brothers’ proposal,” Bernie Sanders said, and he was right.
But in fact, it’s more than a proposal. It’s in effect what we have now in this country — open borders, and that’s thanks in part to the Kochs. The overwhelming majority of Republicans want to secure border and less immigration. That’s why they voted for Donald Trump.
Two and a half years later, though the border is more porous than ever. A tide of humanity is flooding in illegally. Republicans in Congress have done almost nothing to help with the situation. Why? Well, you can thank the Kochs for that.
In 2018, Koch-backed organizations, the Freedom Network and Americans for Prosperity, pressured Republicans in Congress to use their limited post-election lame duck session to pass an amnesty for the so-called DREAMers.
Going into this election, the 2020 race, amnesty remains the Koch’s top legislative priority. So if you’re wondering why the Republican Party often seems completely out of sync with its own voters, this is why and it’s not just on immigration.
The Koch network has also successfully pushed Republicans to join the left in going soft on crime. The Kochs aggressively backed the First Step Act, which is currently allowing drug traffickers to leave prison early. They support the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act that would cut required penalties for heroin and cocaine traffickers in half.
Now, keep in mind, they’re doing all of this in the middle of the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. The Kochs don’t even bother to argue that these so called reforms would help any law abiding American in any way. They just believe it’s the right thing, the libertarian thing to do, so they’re pushing for it.
On economics, meanwhile, you won’t be surprised to learn that the Kochs hold views that bear no resemblance at all to what most Republican voters believe. The Kochs have pushed for cuts to Social Security and Medicare for example; a vast majority of Americans are opposed to that. Most Republicans are opposed to that, like almost everyone else, by the way, Republicans want lower drug prices.
Drugs are expensive and getting more so and yet, the Kochs are working to kill a bill introduced by Senators Josh Hawley and Rick Scott that will prevent drug companies from charging Americans more than they charge the people of Canada or France. That seems like a fair idea to most people. The Kochs are preventing it from happening.
Then the Koch’s helped draft the 2017 tax cut. That turned out to be a far better deal for corporate America than it was for the American middle class. A majority of Republicans support capping interest rates on credit cards and payday loans. The Kochs think that idea is ridiculous. In fact, some years ago and David Koch ran for Vice President as a libertarian, abolishing all usury laws was part of his platform.
Now, there’s nothing surprising about any of this or illegitimate, it’s what many rich liberals believe. It’s just not what most Republicans believe. And that’s a problem, given that the Kochs are the single most powerful figures in the Republican Party.
The Kochs don’t seem interested in hearing you complain about that or anything else actually. Remarkably, they have now joined the left-wing campaign against free speech in America.
Next month, the Charles Koch Institute will hold a summit with the Anti-Defamation League and executives from major tech companies including Pinterest, Airbnb, Patreon, and Mozilla. The stated purpose of the meeting is to formulate quote, “Best practices on the fight against hate and extremism online,” end quote, but you know exactly what that really means. It means censorship of your views.
For the left, fighting extremism always entails crushing normal conservatives. That’s why Pinterest has censored Live Action. It’s why Patreon banned Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s why Mozilla drove out Brendan Eich for the crime of donating to the wrong political campaign.
Big Tech has become a far greater threat to your freedom than the Federal government. The Kochs don’t care about that. Nothing Google does violates libertarian orthodoxy. More to the point, the Kochs don’t care about Republican voters or what happens to them. Okay, that’s fine. No law requiring them to care. But then, why are they running the Republican Party? That’s a question Republicans should start asking themselves.