American Monster — The Kochtopus
15th in a series about the network of US criminals accelerating global fascism
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“It’s astonishing, but we’ve enabled this billionaire class to develop — with so many right-wing billionaires who are totally hostile to democratic forms of rule. And they have the capacity to fund these innovations that will bring us down if we don’t stop them.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy In Chains, on RadPod Ep19.
“There is no more Republican party of the kind that once existed… what the Koch network people are banking on is that none of these Republicans will walk away from their elected office, knowing that they’re gonna face this buzzsaw — it’s like a pincher, there’s the donor money on the top and the aroused Fox News base on the bottom, and they will get squeezed if they step out of line — if they admit that climate change exists, if they say, ‘We need more taxes to do the things the American people need done.’ If they cooperate with Democrats in any way, they’re out. And that is the dynamic that frankly created nut cases like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, because they’ve gerrymandered to such a degree that you can only be replaced by somebody who is more far right on the spectrum. And the terrible, terrible thing is the moral failure for these Republican office holders who would not tell people what was happening.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy In Chains, on RadPod Ep19
American Monster — The Kochtopus
It’s always what you can’t see.
The operators in the shadows, the lackeys of billionaires, worse than two-bit hustlers because they had the option to not take the money. They do the most damage.
The monsters who I profile in this series had options. They could have taken their white male privilege and used it for good. Instead, they opted for the low-hanging fruit of easy dirty money.
To a lifelong fuck up like Donald Trump, being bailed out by the Russian mob maybe was the Bank of Last Resort, a ticket he had to punch. And sure, some of these characters came from bloodlines of charlatans and fraudsters so carrying on the family tradition of corruption and amorality likely came naturally.
But for most of them, these men of great privilege, they could have chosen a destiny that didn’t include the destruction of democratic governance in service to foreign enemy states.
And now, as they spit on the unhoused from their golden toilets, and try to convince their cults that showing empathy and kindness to those less privileged is somehow a bad thing, we see more clearly the ruse.
Their ‘weirdness’ cover for corruption.
I often quote-tweet the agitproppers on Twitter with:
“It reads better in the original Russian.”
I want to be sure things don’t get lost in translation — that the origin stories of their vast fuckery are clear. When Elon Musk and Mike Flynn try to gin up civil war, we no longer see a businessman and a general. We see two Putinist monsters out to destroy the post-World War Two liberal world order in service to a fascist mafia state and its various proxies.
Charles and David Koch
For American Monster No. 15 — The Kochtopus — I turn a spotlight on the opaque tentacles of the Koch family, which has obfuscated their greed and lust for unlimited power by funding oily think tanks. These think tanks are actually factories set up to manufacture psychological, political, media, astroturfing, academic, technological, judicial, and lawfare agents targeting democracy for their billionaire overlords.
“You talked about Koch and technology, and one of the things I know about Koch and technology is the Themis database,” High Fidelity — my co-host on RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, an investigative show on disinformation with our partner Jim Stewartson — said when we were interviewing Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains.
MacLean responded:
“Yeah, this is really scary. Look it up. It’s now called i360, they changed the name of it… and they harvested, they bought up all this information about people that’s available through social media, through purchasing history and anything else they can grab — they have something like 3,000 data points on 180 million Americans. And what that has meant for their political operations, and I know people and Tennessee and Nashville who swooped in from the outside and totally undermined a very popular public transport initiative, and they were able to do it because the operatives on the ground were equipped with these iPads that were loaded with this system. So talk about manipulation. If I want to get you to vote my way, I find whatever data I need, and I can use that data to manipulate you. What’s really scary and what I think needs to be pinned on the Republican party more is this system is so sophisticated it’s what the Republican party is now relying on.
“It’s astonishing, but we’ve enabled this billionaire class to develop with so many right-wing billionaires who are totally hostile to democratic forms of rule and they have the capacity to fund these innovations that will bring us down if we don’t stop them.”
“Humanity needs to wake up to the fact that there is a global class war occurring,” High Fidelity told Bette Dangerous. “Transnational oligarchs enabled by, and working with, organized crime and authoritarian governments are targeting our democracies. Their biggest advantages are their stolen, untaxed wealth, and their technological weaponry.”
A Silicon Valley technologist, HiFi explained that “the trail of their digital malevolence and psychological manipulations has been flashing like a neon warning light for years — Trinidad/Tobago elections and Cambridge Analytica; Brexit and Cambridge Analytica; Trump, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, and the suppression of Black voters in 2016; the Russian military hacked DNC emails, Pizzagate, Wikileaks, Qanon and the MAGA cult; Project Birmingham; the 2020 Delhi Riots; the attempted autogolpe by Trump on January 6th, 2021; the half-hearted attempted coup of Bolsonaro in Brazil; the race riots currently happening in the UK; Elon Musk’s fraudulent theft of unregistered voter data in US swing states.
“How many more pieces of evidence does the public require? Dr. Emma Briant literally drew a map for us at propagandamachine.tech. People need to open their eyes and realize the weirdness of the last decade is intentional, a program of cognitive warfare designed to break the will of democratic peoples, destroy the working class and return us to serfdom, burning the planet to a cinder while humanity pays for the privilege of ingesting corporate pollution and poisons, and installing the transnational oligarchs as our unchallenged, all powerful monarchy in perpetuity.”
What unites these monsters is their eagerness to disrupt our shared reality.
Like many members of this series, the Kochs were born into privilege. And like many members of this series, the Brothers Koch — Charles and David, now deceased— had a father, Fred, who cozied up to authoritarians and their cash to build their toxic empire. Although Fred had four sons, this report focuses on Charles and David, born in 1935 and 1940, respectively.
During a time when Charles and David were busy purchasing American political power, investigative reporter Jane Mayer released her book, Dark Money, which exposed Fred Koch’s business relationship with Nazi Germany and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
With the release of her book in 2016, Mayer details how the Koch boys were instilled with Koch Family Values — anti-government and anti-taxation — a desire to never let democracy and the regulations imposed in a civil society get in the way of their capitalistic greed. They even had a Nazi governess.
Any number of bios on the four Koch boys reads very Lord of the Flies, with their father a self-proclaimed skinflint who was as spare with affection as he was with a dime. One report in Mother Jones noted that a relative described Fred as the “kind of father…who taught his boys to swim by throwing them into the pool and walking away.”
A virulent anti-communist, Fred Koch built refineries for Stalin, who you might recall by my Bloodlands reporting, never saw any downside to murdering and starving millions of people during his reign.
Fred also helped build one of the largest refineries in the Third Reich with his Nazi-sympathizer business partner William Rhodes Davis. The Hamburg refinery was personally approved by Adolf Hitler. As Mayer reported, in 1938, Fred Koch said “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.”
Charmed, I’m sure.
He added: “When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925, you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government etc. with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”
Certainly, his sons have spent decades trying to destroy the New Deal — created when people were literally starving in the streets.
Apples, Meet Tree
Fred Koch helped create the ultra right extremist, conspiracy farming group, the John Birch Society, while son Charles raised money for it. Charles would later fund Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School, cementing his starring role as a democratic wrecking ball.
It’s important to note these things from out of the past have tentacles still reaching in to asphyxiate us in the present.
“For a deeper understanding of the networks that led to January 6, it’s worth reading these comprehensive FBI primary source files on the ‘I Am’ movment and on Robert LeFevre’s ‘Freedom School,’” wrote investigative journalist and co-founder of Tedx MidAtlantic Dave Troy on Twitter. “LeFevre helped lead the ‘I Am’ movement and was indicted in 1940 for his role.”
“Koch Industries was connected to both movements and provided substantial funding to LeFevre… (the files) on the Freedom School provide background on the early days of American ‘libertarianism.’ And there are 750+ pages on the so-called ‘Mighty I Am’ movement, which was truly the QAnon of its day and see as a major threat to the war effort.”
As Troy documented, you can draw a straight line between I Am, the Freedom School, the John Birch Society, the Council for National Policy and the underpinnings of January 6. As he noted, the letters from concerned citizens to the FBI about LeFevre read like concerned reports about QAnon.
The tentacles deepen as does our understanding of the impacts.
Among these Brothers Grim lowlights is the funding of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has worked to reverse New Deal gains; and Americans for Prosperity, which funded the Tea Party Operation.
As Rolling Stone reported a decade ago:
Koch Industries is not entirely opaque. The company’s troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.
Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch’s pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers.
The volume of Koch Industries’ toxic output is staggering. According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute, only three companies rank among the top 30 polluters of America’s air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries. Thanks in part to its 2005 purchase of paper-mill giant Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries dumps more pollutants into the nation’s waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. The company ranks 13th in the nation for toxic air pollution. Koch’s climate pollution, meanwhile, outpaces oil giants including Valero, Chevron and Shell. Across its businesses, Koch generates 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year.
For Koch, this license to pollute amounts to a perverse, hidden subsidy. The cost is borne by communities in cities like Port Arthur, Texas, where a Koch-owned facility produces as much as 2 billion pounds of petrochemicals every year. In March, Koch signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice requiring it to spend more than $40 million to bring this plant into compliance with the Clean Air Act.
The toxic history of Koch Industries is not limited to physical pollution. It also extends to the company’s business practices, which have been the target of numerous federal investigations, resulting in several indictments and convictions, as well as a whole host of fines and penalties.
Industrial Climate Denial Complex
You can see why they spend their billions trying to remove environmental regulations that are designed to protect us from poisonous air and water, because Koch Industries is a vast polluter.
I’m sure there were all kinds of impressive innovations Koch Industries can lay claim to but they denigrated all of that when they decided to secretly fund the Industrial Climate Denial Complex.
As Greenpeace documented: Koch Family Foundations spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science from 1997 - 2018.
The Koch clan is part of a consortium of fossil fuel magnates who spend approximately one billion dollars every year to interfere with the public’s understanding of global warming by making climate change denial the word of God.
As the civilized world was mourning the overturning of Roe, those headlines obfuscated another Supreme Court decision, one that dealt a deathblow to our environmental rights — the restriction of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. This long-funded game by the Kochs was a boon to fossil fuel magnates, and had a deep impact on the US government’s ability to meaningfully address the global warming crisis.
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote on June 24, 2022:
“Today, the Court strips the EPA of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time. Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
Neither can I.
Despite alleging to be pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage, that hasn’t stopped Charles Koch from funding the Catholic Mafia, which “is responsible for putting points on the board,” according to veteran newsman Tom Carter, who has spent more than a decade trying to get the New York Times and other prominent media outlets to warn of dangers of right-wing lobbyist Leonard Leo. Leo managed to get six extreme jurists on the Supreme Court, and the latest horror is the June decision that blocked the EPA’s ability to reduce air pollution from power plants.
And that is just one front of the Koch’s war on us. There are many.
People hear the name Koch and they picture some sort of variation of Dallas — the ‘80s TV show. But Koch Industries is headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, and rather than produce vast amounts of fossil fuel, they traffic and package it into stuff. All that single use stuff that is clogging the world. Which is why whenever a state like California tries to ban, say, plastic bags, some dark money group pays to gum up the works on reality.
Like pushermen, they don’t want us to unhook from the petroleum craze.
“One word… plastics… it’s a great future… think about it.”—The Graduate
It may be good for Koch Industries, but it’s not good for the planet, or us, and it doesn’t have to be our future.
We can expose their every move — like the time when California did ban plastic bags and the Koch Brothers funded the front group that tried stop us.
They are into paper — you probably wipe your arse with their TP. They are into pulp, glass, chemicals, agricultural products, commodities trading. Their vast wealth is largely due to fossil fuels, refineries, petrochemical plants, and infinite stretches of oil and gas pipelines.
All that wealth pays for their biggest commodity — political power.
My primary goal with the American Monster series is to expose and defang these anti-democratic operatives.
We can reverse Citizens United, which allowed the Koch Brothers and Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel to attempt to purchase democracy.
We can impeach the criminals on the Supreme Court, who gave us Citizens United. “Five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision,” Thom Hartmann told me for a report in Byline Supplement.
Who were the primary funders of Citizens United? The Koch Brothers.
The 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened a Pandora’s Box of malign political influence toward wealthy donors, corporations, and opaque foreign influence on US elections. The decision, which allows unlimited funds to be spent on elections, has had a negative impact on democracy and ushered in a new era of vast political corruption.
In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the decision, which gave corporations personhood, was like giving “Tokyo Rose during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”
Weirdos like Mike Johnson are hatched in Koch Laboratories, paid to create creepy laws that deny climate science and intrude on people’s sexuality.
The reason Koch can operate in the shadows is the brothers have been great at reputation washing their cash through philanthropic endeavors.
Filmmaker Ken Burns had to walk back a photo taken of him, Clarence Thomas, and David Koch, who helped fund his Vietnam documentary for PBS. ProPublica posted the photo after reporting on Thomas’ ties to the Koch financial and fundraising network. Thomas attended Koch fundraising events, which should be a conflict of interest, you know, as a Supreme Court jurist. But ever since the Supremes made the purchase of political power by oligarchs legal, maybe not. And just look at that ROI — endless pollution for all robber barons!
In one of those classic reputation washing oligarch puffpieces in the Wall Street Journal, Charles Koch said he had misgivings about stuffing Republican coffers with cash for his ROI on destroying democracy — bashing health care, climate science, regulations, social services, and gifting billionaires tax breaks. But that didn’t stop him from continuing to rage against the regulation machine. As I have already evidenced, the Koch Brothers spent decades paying to interfere with our understanding of global warming. And the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity group drove a $1 billion cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while also pushing for businesses to remain open as COVID caused a million deaths in America.
Sheltering in place was bad for the fossil fuel industry, and the pushback was well funded.
If we learned any lesson during COVID, it’s that big government is helpful during a global pandemic — literally, lives were saved in the US due to government support and intervention. And universal health care in the form of quickly developed and readily available free vaccines proved critical.
Everything in the US is fixable if we work to save our democracy from the greedy hearts of these American monsters.
I am heartened by President Biden’s movement to take on Supreme Court corruption and reforms, and I am heartened by the fact that reporting I’m doing in the American Monster series and in Byline Supplement seems to be breaking through, forcing mainstream reporters to help expose this network of US criminals accelerating global fascism.
We were attacked in 2016.
The attacks are ongoing, and well funded.
Although one influential Koch remains and at 88, Charles is currently ranked as the 23rd richest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index — estimated net worth: $64.9 billion — it’s worth taking the time to eulogize his brother, David.
In many ways, David is the Ayn Randian father to the Thiels and Musks of the world — the embodiment of “greed is good” libertarian tripe. During his 1980 vice presidential campaign on the Libertarian ticket, he stumped to abolish social security, medicare, welfare assistance, and the EPA.
His policies mirror what we’re facing today — oligarchs who’d like to bring back feudalism.
As I have written many times on these pages, these oligarchs — both foreign and domestic — know global warming is real, and they’re snatching up all earth’s resources while burying us in culture wars with the hope that we’ll be too distracted fighting each other and coughing up polluted air to notice.
As Koch’s companies were vastly polluting earth, David went about funding climate denialism, thieving from the earth on a planet that’s crying out for help.
But with their network of weapon’s grade lie factories, they could spew out their own alternative reality, paying suits to abuse facts for the end goal of ridding the US of those pesky regulations. The CATO Institute, American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, all served the end goal of relieving citizens of democratic governance to create the Fourth Reich as evidenced in Project 2025.
Their influence on American politics gave us trash politicians on the state and local levels, who work hard to abolish government and its institutions while drawing salaries and lifetime medical care from said government.
I would even blame The Kochtopus for helping create a thirst for Trump — not only in their support of the weirdo, but in their funding of the Tea Party, which paved the way for a faux populist monster.
And despite a bit of moaning about Trump and his cruel policies, that hasn’t stopped The Kochtopus from spending $55 million on Trump in 2024 through lobbyist Leonard Leo and their various networks. And really, what’s $55 million when Trump can save Koch billions on taxes and did save them $1.4 billion under Trump 1.0.
So sure, they’ll throw a few bucks at museums and public television — and MIT will take money from the Russian mob AND The Kochtopus — but those acts of tax write-off ‘benevolence’ barely mask how much they’ve harmed humanity.
Global warming is real, and more people would be aware of that fact if The Kochtopus hadn’t paid to interfere with our understanding of this hard truth.
The year David Koch died — 2019 — the Sumatran rhino went extinct, as did the Chinese paddlefish, the Indochinese tiger, the Spix macaw, and the Splendid poison frog.
I wrote a thread that year titled Zero Days to Waste, where I warned what Trump’s administration was doing to the planet, and how he stacked his regime with climate science deniers funded into office by the Koch network.
"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," Stephen Hawking
I’d like to think we are not the next species to go extinct. I prefer to think we can snuff out the greed of the oligarchs by putting leaders in office who care about the rule of the law, the health and welfare of the people, and who don’t bow down to the living Koch.
As a good capitalist and Fred’s son, the remaining Koch of this tale saw no reason to disentangle himself from Putin’s fascist regime.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, committing war crime after crime, Koch Industries decided to stay and continue to do business in the mafia state.
But after some bad publicity, Koch reversed course, saying they were looking for an “exit strategy.” In June 2022, they sold their interest in two glass manufacturing businesses.
Now, if only they’d sell their interest in American democracy — back to the people from whom they stole it.
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Between Koch brothers and the Murdochs (and a few others), we're fighting against the historic generational wealth oligarch faction. It's a fight we must win.