![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaile I'd been wanting to have the politics book group read Jane Mayer's Dark Money since I first started the group, and we finally had a big enough gap between meetings that it made sense to read it, since it's almost 500 pages long. A lot of folks opted out of reading it. Some of the people that are reading it have been unable to finish it due to the sheer unrelenting awfulness of its subject matter. In short, the reaction to this book works pretty well as a microcosm for how we ended up in the sort of shit we're in, because it turns out that most normal human brains are actually incapable of dealing with how bad things can be, leaving not enough people to deal with them.
This is a constant theme within the book as well, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Anyway. The book's full title is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, and it is mostly about the Koch Brothers, but it is also about all their cartoon villain billionaire friends and the pieceashit grifter minions they dole out wingnut welfare to.
The first thing we learn about the Kochs is that they are deeply screwed-up people. Their nanny was a Nazi and their father was a John Birch Society conspiracy theorist who got rich building oil refineries for Stalin and Hitler. It is a mark of how much I already hate the Kochs even by page 34 that this information managed to lower my opinion of Stalin. In addition to being the second-most-genocidal leader of the 20th century, he gave Fred fuckin' Koch his first half-million dollars in the middle of the Great Depression. I hope Trotsky is torturing you with an ice pick forevermore in the afterlife, asshole. Fred Koch then built an oil refinery in Hamburg that the Nazis used to fuel their war machine, and he built some oil refineries in the U.S. that the government used to fuel the U.S. Air Force planes to bomb the Hamburg refinery, because being a war profiteering fossil fuel baron that sells to both sides is just the sort of person you need to be to wind up with kids like Charles and David Koch.
The Koch family's history of political organizing is an enlightening tour through the history of mid-twentieth-century racism, conspiracy theories, and culty ancap scams. The Kochs thought Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. (Is this because he built the interstate system? Which was actually the least Communist thing ever, because cars are consumerist and individualistic and lefties love mass transit, and also because it was for the purpose of easier movement of military trucks and tanks?) (Wait, some Communists love tanks. Thanks for the highways, Comrade Ike!) Charles Koch eventually decided the John Birch Society's conspiracy theories were a bit gauche and instead started taking "classes" at anarchocapitalist theorist Robert LeFevre's "Freedom School." He started recruiting all his friends whether they liked it or not, and successfully indoctrinated his younger brother David. David was actually only one of three other brothers; the other two Koch brothers are not quite as terrible, although still terrible. One of them seems almost not-terrible, like, useless but also mostly harmless, being mostly into restoring historic houses and art collecting and that sort of thing, so obviously the other brothers basically disowned him, accusing him of being gay (this is an accusation when you're a right-wing "libertarian") and cutting him out of the family business.
This is because the family business is being awful. Like, officially it's a fossil fuel refining business, which is pretty awful to start with, but they really do seem to be on an ongoing quest to top their humble beginnings of refining oil for genocidal dictators. The company repeatedly fell afoul of labor, workplace safety, and environmental regulations, fueling the brothers' belief that they are being unfairly persecuted by a socialist nanny state infringing upon their rights as superior humans to hemorrhage poisons into the air and blow up teenagers like Danielle Smalley and Jason Stone with leaking, corroded gas pipelines. They've also bought up a bunch of other companies that make ubiquitous cheap crap so that it's almost possible for an American citizen to not patronize them, and eventually they got into our lovely bloated financial services industry, probably since that's where all the money in the entire economy that they weren't personally sitting on already went.
After introducing us to the Kochs and their terrifying family history, Mayer dedicates a bunch of chapters to other important right-wing libertarian assbags who have used they money to buy politicians, fellowships, fake "grassroots" groups that put out agitprop, private detectives to harass their political opponents, and other shady shit. These cretins include Richard Mellon Scaife, the dude behind the Arkansas Project and the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that everyone laughed at Hillary Clinton for saying exists (Hillary Clinton's right-wing-conspiracy-identifying skills are pretty much inversely proportional to how helpful identifying them is, which is frustrating); John M. Olin, who spearheaded funding conservative research at otherwise respectable institutions to try to stop them from doing scary liberal things like care about black students and whose shady-ass foundation did shady-ass things like function as a bank for the CIA for almost a decade; and Lynde and Harry Bradley, whose Bradley Foundation continued to fund "research" by pseudointellectual cronies like Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a noxious bit of warmed-over eugenics theory, who is most recently back in the headlines for getting overenthusiastically protested by a bunch of students who are tired of rich assholes deliberately funding racists showing up at their homes to tell them they're genetically inferior (the headlines mostly focus on how illiberal and Bad For Academic Freedom it is for the students to object, not for outside rich assholes to be able to seed colleges with intellectually bankrupt pseudoscience). Later in the book we also meet such delightful humans as Art Pope, they guy who spearheaded North Carolina's transformation into a gerrymandered-to-death clusterfuck (we'd already read a bit about North Carolina's issues with being a gerrymandered clusterfuck in Give Us the Ballot and in the Moral Mondays chapter of Necessary Trouble), and Betsy DeVos, now lamentably our Secretary of Education because we're living in the worst timeline.
It's difficult to get across without reading the book just to what extent all of the billionaires who fund the Kochtopus come off as not only dreadful political actors, but also as grossly nasty and un-self-aware people. While they are mostly driven by pure greed and clearly view all non-billionaires as lesser lifeforms akin to some type of moderately useful bugs, it turns out that many of these libertarian Ubermenschen are also pretty racist. They also are very invested in the idea that they are Private Citizens and therefore there is nothing shady about them secretly spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fake a political movement and completely thwart American democracy (the one thing the Kochs have failed to do thus far is make anyone actually like their political agenda). They get extremely butthurt whenever journalists dare do things like follow the No. 1 rule of journalism and start to follow the money. Then the Kochs hire private detectives to dig through their trash, a thing they also do to lawyers when, say, their employees' families sue them for wrongful deaths and stuff.
Where are the Democrats in all of this? Well, the Kochs may have dedicated themselves to only taking over the Republican party and thought that Obama was a radical Kenyan Muslim socialist (I wish) (#Ellison2020), but the rules the business class have gotten rewritten for their own benefit over the decades have certainly put the loyal opposition in a position of being dependent upon the goodwill of their perennially butthurt donor class, who just don't understand why the little people are mad at them just because the gambled the world economy away? It wasn't our fault, man, and we won't do it again, we don't need any adult supervision, stop being mean. An ongoing theme over the course of several decades is that the Democrats are never quite prepared for what's coming next and every new batch of fresh-faced young Democrats who come in thinking they're going to fix things ends up being shocked and just how much opposition they run into. Which, like, I can see how it's frustrating, but it's not surprising; this is why "Is our Democrats learning?" has been a joke on the netroots for like fifteen years now. But more than the candidates themselves, the good info here is about the donors and the strategists, so that the reader knows that, for example, while Neera Tanden is currently on some of the crankier economically progressive folks' shit list, she was in support of more progressive policies than smug garbage fire advisors like David Plouffe, who was more concerned with appearing centrist than with actual good policy and referred to more liberal people in the party as "bedwetters" whenever they had the goddamn sense to be worried that not enacting desperately needed Keynesian policies might negatively affect the party's electoral fortunes (turns out the bedwetters were right and the Democrats continue to be the Mozarts of losing). But as gratifying as it may be to read that, for example, Hillary Clinton was so upset by the "sequester" budget that she had to leave the room when it was unveiled, the fact remains that the Democrats on the whole have gotten caught napping way too many times in a row and have been woefully ineffective as a loyal opposition. We read about this in more depth in Give Us the Ballot; it pops up again here because initiatives like Citizens United, REDMAP, and the suit where the Supreme Court vacated the Voting Rights Act were all funded by various tentacles of the Kochtopus.
Perhaps the Democratic Party candidates and behind-the-scenes folks had the same problem that my reading group did: In addition to just only being able to take so much, they tend toward a liberal worldview that's rooted in the idea that people are fundamentally good and capable of rational thought. As a result, the horrors of actual reality don't integrate easily into their minds. Perhaps it's time for the Dems to invest in some crankier people, not even necessarily as a move further left policy-wise, but just so they can stop hope-and-faith-in-the-American-people-ing their way out of being able to even see what they're up against. Maybe the election of Trump, which took pieces of human garbage like Betsy Devos out of the shadows and into the spotlight, will finally help it sink in that the Republican party has, in fact, been fully taken over by a cancerous tentacly parasite that cannot be reasoned with, has no sense of the greater good, and will not stop until it has destroyed all of society so Charles Koch (or possibly his ghost, propped up by money) can sit upon the ashes and proclaim himself God-emperor of Kochland, at least until climate change kills us all.
...Oh, man, I didn't even get to talk about the climate change stuff. You all know that rich fossil fuel barons have Astroturfed the entire climate change denial movement, right? This is a thing that everyone knows is a fact and is not really up for interpretation or debate, it's just what happened? Good. Because that's what happened. And so far we've let it.
God help us all.