By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 22, 2016
Jane Mayer of The
New Yorker has a new book out: Dark
Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical
Right. It’s mostly about those old devils, the Koch brothers.
Charles and David Koch are billionaires. They own a very
big company. They also are very prominent philanthropists, giving hundreds of
millions to cancer research, concert halls, and other worthy causes. But what
makes them hated and feared by progressives such as Mayer is their political
work. They help fund some organizations and foundations, some purely
educational, some partisan.
To listen to the Left, they are the closest thing we have
to real-world James Bond villains. So what is their agenda? Is it to retreat to
their orbiting harems, populated with fertile females, as they wipe out
humanity below so that they can return to repopulate the planet? Or is to dupe
the Russians and Americans into a nuclear squabble so that the Kochs can rule
the ashes?
Well, here’s Mayer’s explanation of their dark and
sinister ambitions.
“What people need to understand is the Kochs have been
playing a very long game,” she told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “And it’s not just
about elections. It started four decades ago with a plan to change how America
thinks and votes. So while some elections they win and some elections they
lose, what they’re aiming at is changing the conversation in the country.”
Dear God, it’s worse than I thought! They want to change
the conversation! They want to persuade Americans to vote differently! The
horror, the horror.
You might be forgiven for thinking that this is pretty
much exactly what democracy is about. But no. For you see, only Hollywood,
college professors and administrators, the ACLU, People for the American Way,
the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Emily’s List, the Ford Foundation, Black
Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org, the NAACP, the Union of Concerned
Scientists, Greenpeace, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Steven
Spielberg and, of course, publications such as the New York Times, The New
Republic, The Nation and Mayer’s
own The New Yorker are allowed to try
to change conversations and argue for people to vote differently.
Ah, but those voices are open and honest — and
progressive! — about it, while the Kochs are secretive, sinister denizens of
the stygian underworld of “dark money” and the “radical right.”
Except for the fact that the Kochs have been out in the
open for nearly a half-century. David Koch ran for vice president on the
Libertarian ticket in 1980, which you might argue is a brilliant way to hide in
plain sight, given how little attention the Libertarian Party gets.
Which brings me to that term “the radical right.” When
racist idiots do idiotically racist things, we’re told that’s the radical Right
in action. When Christian conservatives say Christian things, we’re told that’s
the radical Right in action. When Donald Trump says he wants to ban Muslims
from entering the country or build a giant wall, that earns him the
radical-right label. When Ted Cruz says he wants to carpet-bomb the Islamic
State, he . . . well, you get the point.
I have myriad problems with those usages of “radical
right,” but let’s just stipulate for the sake of argument that this is the
correct term in such circumstances. How, then, are the Kochs members of the
radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration
policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign
policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling
so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park
at gunpoint.
They are members of the radical Right for the simple
reason that they don’t like big government and spend money to make that case.
Full disclosure: I’ve given paid speeches to some Koch-backed groups, despite
the fact that I have my disagreements with the Kochs. They haven’t changed my
mind, and I haven’t changed theirs. But the conversation continues.
And that’s their great sin. Liberals are constantly
talking about how we need an “honest conversation” about race or guns or this
or that. But what they invariably mean is, they want everyone who disagrees to
shut up. (That’s why they hate Fox News, too.)
The best working definition of “right wing” today has
almost nothing to do with the ideological content of what right-wingers say or
do. A right-winger is someone who disagrees with the liberal narrative, has the
temerity to say so, and dares to actually try to change the conversation.
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