If you have not read Duke Professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, you should. I reviewed it for the New York Review of Books here. It describes in great detail how the Koch brothers created an academic foundation for their extremist libertarian views. In this paper, MacLean goes into new detail about the workings of the Koch network and its efforts to undermine democracy. The Koch network knows that it does not have popular support so it has developed ways to “work around” the will of the majority. Currently, its major project is to block any effort to confront climate change.
The paper is titled “Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy.” The essay appears in a publication called The Disinformation Age, published by Cambridge University Press.
Thanks to “Unkoch My Campus” for bringing this paper to a large audience.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane I would call this paper “deep background,” truly balanced, and a necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the complex history of some of the seemingly strange problems we find ourselves in now. The scary thing is to realize how generational, pervasive, and insidious the situation is.
The ironic thing is how exposure of Koch’s methods and their neo-liberal intentions also shows WHY those who are “behind” the big and dark-money movements should be curbed; and more generally, why unregulated capitalism is capitalism gone berserk.
I appreciate being apprised. CBK
Catherine, I recommend you read McClean’s book “Democracy in Chains.” (2017) She examines the Koch’s relentless campaign to privatize education, shut down unions, mislead about the science of climate change, cripple the EPA, destroy the careers of scientists, and change the US constitution. The Kochs Libertarianism is a religion to them and their followers. McLean’s book provides a very pointed critique as to how much damage this “religion” has done to us, to the economy, & to society. I liked the book’s detailed history because you can a) see the religion at work and b) get some airing out of the issues that are involved. I don’t know how we will recover from them.
jcgrim Thank you for the suggestion. I also looked up Democracy in Chains on C-SPAN’s BOOKTV and, sure enough, there is McLean talking about her book. Here’s the link: https://www.c-span.org/video/?430379-2/democracy-chains CBK
Catherine, thank you! I have my penciled in notes all over margins in that book. It will be fun (well, fun in a nerd way) to watch that video and check back on my notes
Thank you so much for sharing MacLean’s paper and thanks also to UnKoch My Campus for making it broadly accessible.
Thank you for this important article. Charles Koch recently had the nerve to apologize for Donald Trump. Trump’s whole agenda was a love letter to a lot of what the Koch Network represents: disinformation, privatization, stealth tactics, destruction of the common good, rollback of environmental protections and undermining democracy.
As someone that represents the ‘nonproductive segment’ of the population, I think along with millions of Americans, it is time for billionaires to pay their fair share. Billionaires have been underpaying for the labor of their employees while they have been pumping up the value of their stock to further enrich themselves. The Koch brothers did not drill their own oil wells and make their own paper towels and cups. It was their ‘nonproducive employees that did the labor, whose own contribution was undervalued to make the Koch Network so wealthy, that made the Koch products. The obscenely wealthy Kochs are responsible for much of the toxic Republican paralysis and gridlock in Congress.
retired teacher Yes to all of that, especially their employees; but more:
I don’t get Koch’s et al inability to understand the ESSENTIAL complementary relationship between (1) the infrastructure of a country and culture, now worldwide . . . and (2) the neo-liberalism that they push along with their short-term ideas of “success.”
And by “infrastructure” I mean to include the qualified (aka public) education of our children who will “people” the coming generations. Do they think their bank accounts are going to keep them alive and in power? If Charles Koch, for instance, doesn’t like Trump, he should take a look in the mirror for once. CBK
The Koch network peddles its own brand of bootstrap elitism while they rig the economy against the working class. They do not want to invest in the education of what they consider a permanent under class.
“If Charles Koch, for instance, doesn’t like Trump, he should take a look in the mirror for once.” Amen, sister.
Trump and his posse are some of the most toxic results of the Koch’s institution building: they carefully nurture the careers of kooks like James O’Keefe (Project Veritas), Steven Miller,. The institution building is even worse (in my view) than the political donations.
Their nurturing of evil talent will be with us a long time.
O’Keefe & Miller would have been quickly sidelined at many (most?) workplaces for their nastiness and inability to get along with others. Trying to get a job in most places is pretty competitive.
Plenty of smart people apply, and you don’t have to settle for some guy who creates feuds. But wing nuts don’t really have to compete in the same way.
Hence the intense efforts to dismantle and discredit expertise of any kind. People with credentials are their enemies. Trump surrounds himself with these people. Hitler surrounded himself with these types, as does Putin, Orban, Duterte, et al..)
Interesting article. Thanks for posting.
There are reprehensible people in D.C. destroying the lives of the 99% in order to advantage Wall Street but, few could rival Jerome Powell in terms of impact. Congresswoman Katie Porter took on Powell and Mnuchin this week during hearings. While Powell has been Fed. Reserve Chair, wealth inequality has reached levels not seen in the U.S. since the 1920’s. Porter’s questioning this week related to a Trump admin. economic plan that she said is illegal and will be reversed next year.
Jerome Powell was appointed to the Fed. Reserve Board and made Chair by billionaire devotees, Obama and trump respectively.
AEI’s Andy Smarick wrote in a National Affairs article in 2011 advocating for Catholic schools that teach disadvantaged students the skills of hard work, determination and personal discipline. (Not surprisingly, Smarick praised the Cristo Rey network which received money from Gates and Walton heirs. The school model’s design includes a feature where poor students may work for businesses 20% of the educational week in low level jobs and get no pay.)
While Powell guarantees that the asset-owning class gets rich, AEI, the ruling class’ champion, doesn’t want the golden goose of cheap labor to wake up to how they are being ripped-off. Better to make the declining middle class and poor believe national policy and theft of their assets are not the reasons that they are losing out. Make the poor believe it’s their lack of “determination”, instead.
While working as a lawyer for the financial sector, Powell founded a consortium of 16 D.C. parochial schools. Powell also was on the board of a D.C. charter school. He was a visiting scholar at the BiPartisan Policy Center where John Arnold and Bill Gates fund education discussions.
Powell attended a Jesuit university-prep school and graduated from Georgetown law. His grandfather was Dean of the College of Law at Catholic University of America. CUA’s law college was named after Christopher Columbus, the personification of colonialism’s evil.
Using Linda’s methodology of innuendo, we should check with every person in jail in the United States to see how many of them came up under the public education system. CBK
They’re everywhere now. I like to listen to “Marketplace” on NPR. The experts interviewed on the program are often drawn from the Mercatus Institute at George Mason University, which I understand is basically a subsidiary of Koch Industries.
UnKochMyCampus is working very hard to wrest the George Mason
PUBLIC university from the claws of Koch and, its law school from the Federalist Society’s hooks.
If there was any intellectual integrity in the so-called libertarian cause then one would think that a vigorous public education system would be crucial to an informed citizenry that could throw off the shackles of government. But alas, Libertarians like Charles Koch have no integrity and believe that only their like should be free to do as they please.
One of the reasons why the billionaire funding of disinformation is so disturbing and significant (and one of the reasons why the disease of Trumpism is so unresponsive to treatment) is a basic fact about how the brain operates. It does a lot of inductive reasoning, generalizing from specific experiences, but the primary modus operandi is not induction but ABDUCTION. Jon Awbry, who posts often here, could speak eloquently and at length about this, for he is a logician and an expert on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term abductive reasoning. So, what is abduction? Well, it’s reasoning that responds to external inputs, such as observations, with a plausible or possible explanation for it. Flashing light up ahead. Maybe there’s been an auto accident. No, it’s a festival attendee wearing a light-up beanie bought at a concession. Well, fill people’s heads with a lot of connected nonsense from, say, QAnon or a Gates-funded “think tank” where thinking tanks, and that nonsense becomes what people fall back upon to explain new phenomena that are encountered. I used the term “explain,” which suggests a conscious process, but the brain does an ENORMOUS amount of automatic, below-the-level-of-consciousness abductive reasoning. After all, it isn’t colors that are hitting our retinas; it’s different wavelengths of light. It isn’t sounds hitting our eardrums; it’s air striking with varying pressure/force. If someone has been trained to respond to anything that contradicts his or her worldview with an automatic abduction–well, that’s fake news, then he or she will be immune to rational discussion and dialogue. He or she is a member of a cult–the Trump cult or the Neoliberal cult or Aelph/Aum Shinrikyo or Marconics or The Family or whatever. The billionaires buy a lot of PR to create a lot of background for people to rely upon to make automatic abductions. Medicare for all–Socialism. Socialism–bad.
The classic example of abductive reasoning is this: You wake in the morning and see that the driveway is wet. You think, “Oh, it must have rained last night.” That’s because the model of the world you have in your head tells you, without your having to think about it, that it’s having rained is the usual reason for the driveway being wet. But, of course, you can be wrong. It could be that reveling teenagers had a supersoaker fight on your drive while you were sleeping. LOL. The purpose of propaganda is to harness this automaticity of the brain, to create a default model, leading to knee-jerk inferences, that serve the purposes of the propagandist, in the case of the Kochs, to take the heat off fossil fuels.
Oops. its, not it’s, in the third sentence, above.
This is why I have ZERO interest in trying to talk sense into Trumpers, even though there are so many of them. People who could STILL vote for this man after the freak show clown car farce of the past 4 years are not reachable. They are cult members and have been completely propagandized, and they are immune to reason. That’s why we must concentrate not on trying to reach the Trumpies but on reaching and teaching their children.
Thanks for the explanation Bob. Very interesting. I wonder if there’s an historical component (or ahistorical actually) as well the automatic abductive responses you explain so well. The U.S., having been established during the Age of Enlightenment, is based on rationalism and suspicion of concentrated power. Trumpers violate both of these tacit agreements. Believing our elections are rigged with no evidence or any such Q’anon derangements paired with a desire for authoritarian fascism undermine the most basic historical facts of the nation’s formation. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to state Trump’s base is, at least by this measure, profoundly un-American.
I deeply appreciate all educational gurus in this blog for this particular discussion of intentional misleading all ambitious, greedy and lusty but clever people from poor to rich and from naive to malice.
My sincere input is from my parents’ training me from a very young age. This is regarding body, mind and spirit. From all of my siblings, I am the only one follow their words seriously and disciplined.
In the past 60+years, I have practiced to observe my body’s basic need in eating, drinking, and exercising. I have learned to control and to differentiate between the need and the demand in my own material body through fasting from 8 hours up to 24 hours.
When it comes to the mind, I need to remind myself to be cautious in trusting people regardless their background of culture, knowledge, and experience. I must observe people’s actions that speak louder than reputation within family, relatives, friends, neighborhood including close or stranger regarding integrity, honesty and kindness.
Finally, in spirit, the generosity in doing all common goods to society without self-profit.
In short, in general speaking, we are human being with emotion and far from perfect due to naivety in religion plus greed, lust and anger at all stages of age. Yes, mistakes can happen whether they are intentional or accidental. Only if people are trained to learn from their own mistakes to avoid and not to repeat others’ mistakes in the future within their own unit of family. Gradually, the world will be a better place for everyone. Back2basic