Jane Mayer’s new book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” has already revealed many previously unknown facts about the Koch brothers in particular. For instance, reporting in the book forms the bulk of her latest New Yorker essay, showing that the Kochs’ newfound interest in criminal justice reform is primarily a front to boost their P.R. and to gut health and safety laws. In addition, the book shows that family patriach Fred Koch’s fortune was cemented by lucrative deals with Stalin, and was forged by providing crucial support to the Nazi regime. But even these stunning results only touch the surface of the interesting facts, some new and some expounded, in Mayer’s new book.
The Nazi Connection
One of the earliest revelations from the book was the New York Times reporting that Fred Koch partnered with Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis to build an oil refinery that was “a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.” This is damning enough, but other passages from the book are equally jarring. For instance, in 1938, Fred wrote that,
“Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard….”
Mayer argues that he preferred their work ethic to the laziness and government dependence he believed was caused by the New Deal. Later, he hired a German nanny for his two sons who was “a fervent Nazi sympathizer who frequently touted Hitler’s virtues.” To round out his wrongheadedness, Fred claimed that, “the colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” expressed admiration of Mussolini and aided Stalin early in his career.
Ideological Indoctrination
One of the crucial parts of the Koch strategy is creating an intellectual infrastructure for their libertarian ideas. Mayer lays out the long history of the wealthy buying their way into universities, focusing on John M. Olin’s strategy of funding programs for “Law and Economics” at prestigious universities. Olin, who believed that Marxism and Keynesianism were essentially the same, and claimed that liberalism and socialism were “synonymous,” aimed to reshape the university. Rather than an explicitly conservative course, he preferred the law and economics program because it didn’t appear ideological, but noted that “Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects.” He said later, “Law and Economics is neutral, but it has the philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplined, it seems neutral, but it isn’t in fact.”
The Koch brothers are slightly less subtle, funding organizations like the Mercatus Center, which unabashedly support a plutocratic agenda. Mayer writes that George Pearson, an early Koch advisor, believed gifts to universities “didn’t guarantee enough ideological control.” He suggested that donors maintain control over hires. As of 2015, Mayer reports that the Kochs subsidized programs in 207 colleges and universities and were set to expand into 18 more. In some cases, such as West Virginia University and Florida State University, their foundations exert influence over hires. At Florida State, one student reported that the new introductory economics course included lessons that “sweatshop labor wasn’t bad,” and “climate change wasn’t caused by humans and isn’t a big issue.” A libertarian donor gave grants to 63 colleges to fund programs that were “required to teach his favorite philosopher, the celebrator of self-interest Ayn Rand.” In North Carolina, Art Pope funded think-tanks that pushed to cut public university budgets at the same time as he gave grants to support programs in “Western civilization and free-market economics.”
Even more disturbingly, the Koch brothers have recently been pushing their ideology into high schools. The curriculum teaches that,
“Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminator, and the government, rather than business caused the 2008 recession.”
Christina Wilkie and Joy Resmovits of Huffington Post report that the program, Young Entrepreneurs, which Charles and Elizabeth Koch founded in 1991, has expanded dramatically, with $1.45 million in assets in 2012. In 2012-2013, it was taught in 29 Kansas and Missouri schools, with plans to expand into 42.