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by Elihu » Fri Feb 14, 2025 9:54 pm
by DrEvil » Sat Feb 15, 2025 12:21 am
by Grizzly » Sat Feb 15, 2025 11:54 pm
by Elihu » Sat Jun 28, 2025 12:06 pm
by Elvis » Mon Dec 01, 2025 5:44 pm
A passage I came across in the research for Democracy in Chains haunts
me in thinking about today’s radical-right-wing disinformation ecosys-
tem: “It may be possible for ‘irrationally held’ views to in fact support
good policies,” particularly if those backing the policies were to leverage
insights from “cognitive science and perhaps evolutionary biology.” This
was written at a time when researchers in both disciplines were becoming
aware of the biases set off by perceived threats to the survival of one’s
affiliative group. As that media ecosystem was taking shape, the radical
right embraced the behavioral manipulation of listener identity.1
The author was Professor Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of
Economics at George Mason University and the partner with Charles Koch
for over two decades now in the academic base camp of Koch’s political
project, housed at GMU’s Mercatus Center. Cowen ventured the suggestion
in a paper called “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?” that was commis-
sioned by Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies to guide its “Social Change
Project.” The “good policies” in question, “unpopular” though they were,
would help eradicate the “restrictions on liberty” characteristic of twentieth-
century democracies. The paper itself was a transnational survey that laid the
conceptual groundwork for the “big bang” we have seen in US political life
since, with accelerating force after the 2010 midterm elections.
Cowen found that “the freest countries [defining freedom as economic
liberty] have not generally been democratic” – with Chile under General
Pinochet as “the most successful” case in point. Through structural
“reforms” locked in by constitutional revision, Chile starkly reduced
“rent-seeking through government favors” (i.e., the ability of citizens to
get from government what they could not get as individuals from the
market). Indeed, Cowen pointed out, of the very few success stories to
date, “in no case were reforms brought on by popular demand for market-
oriented ideas.”
More challenging still, the libertarian cause had run up
against a persistent problem: it wanted a radical transformation that
“find[s] little or no support” in the electorate. How might the change
agents get around this problem? Experience showed that “public toler-
ation is more important than deep public involvement,” so a situation in
which many felt “some form of radical change was necessary” might just
prove sufficient, particularly if “traditional democratic constraints were
to some extent attenuated.”
It is eerie how well the Trump era conforms to this scenario. Ill-
informed backers of the president believe so deeply that norm-shattering
radical change is needed that they are willing to accept policies that large
majorities have consistently opposed, but that the Koch network is secur-
ing under the Trump administration. Without access to the private records
of Tyler Cowen or Charles Koch and their associates, I cannot state with
certainty that Cowen was suggesting that the libertarian cause apply the
findings of cognitive researchers on how tribal instincts, stress responses,
and the like are hardwired in human beings, such that manipulating these
vulnerabilities could gain “toleration” for policies that voters who were
thinking rationally and without undue stress might be expected to oppose.
But I do find this an evocative hypothesis that future scholars and journal-
ists might explore.
Because one thing is abundantly clear from the available evidence:
operations funded by Koch and his wealthy allies through organizations
such as Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and Donors Trust have
relied on disinformation and manipulation to advance their agenda of
radical transformation, leveraging the specter of a supposedly threatening
“liberal elite” and strategic racism (what Ian Haney López calls “dog
whistle politics”) to compensate for lack of persuasive evidence by inciting
clannish responses.2 Indeed, after witnessing several years of the Tea Party
doing precisely that, a Cato Institute publication boasted of libertarians’
role in encouraging the cause and exulted that Tea Party activism was
pushing the GOP to become “functionally libertarian.”3
In this chapter, I examine one key source of the disinformation now rife
in American public life: the network of extreme right donors, allied
organizations, and academic grantees convened over decades by Charles
Koch. I argue that the architects of this network’s project of radical
transformation of our governing institutions and legal system have
adopted deceit precisely because they understand that the hard-core liber-
tarian agenda is extremely unpopular, and therefore requires stealth
tactics to succeed. As Koch himself said to an audience of grantees in
launching the audacious project: “Since we are greatly outnumbered, the
failure to use our superior technology ensures failure.”4
Even in an era of surging inequality and wealth concentration in the top
0.01 percent, the Koch fortune stands out: if the wealth of the multi-
billionaire brothers Charles and the now-deceased David Koch were held
by a single individual, that individual would be the wealthiest on the
planet.5 More arresting, though, are the political ambitions of Charles
Koch to transform American governance though the step-by-step impos-
ition of a radical libertarian agenda that is taking aim at a century’s worth
of public policy in domains from education to regulation, social insurance,
and taxation. We know the sheer scale and audacity of the Koch net-
work’s operations and how they have used “dark money” to distort public
debate and democratic governance alike, from the groundbreaking and
revelatory investigative journalism of Jane Mayer, in particular.
The donor network funds an infrastructure of literally hundreds of
organizations. It includes dozens of ostensibly separate national bodies
such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American
Legislative Exchange Council, and the Federalist Society, as well as over
150 state-level organizations whose work is aligned through the State
Policy Network. The organizing enterprises include Americans for
Prosperity, Concerned Veterans for America, the LIBRE Initiative, and
Generation Opportunity; and includes centers at colleges and universities –
with George Mason University as the flagship enterprise, but with faculty at
over 300 campuses now receiving funding. We know also, from the superb
scholarly research of Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, that,
in its engagement of the political process, this network is well-resourced and
determined enough to rival and sometimes surpass the Republican Party
and, indeed, has influenced that party in order to further its agenda nation-
ally and in the majority of state governments.6
So, too, the exhaustive research of UnKoch My Campus, picked up by
numerous leading newspapers and online media outlets, has shown how
universities have become a central nexus of this project. Koch-funded
campus centers supply vital resources: a long-sought talent pipeline; intel-
lectual legitimacy for the organizational affiliates of the Koch infrastruc-
ture; and defensive capacity when the network is criticized. In addition,
UnKoch My Campus has shown how Koch investment leads to violations
of academic integrity, including donor-influenced faculty appointments
and student research topic selection; secrecy in place of transparency; and,
in the case of George Mason University, administrators who have misin-
formed faculty and students to protect the donor.7
When speaking of the Koch network, then, I am referring to this
exceedingly well-endowed and interconnected set of hundreds of oper-
ations and a growing stable of academic grantees. What my research adds
to our understanding is its exposure of the core ideas guiding these efforts
and how those ideas, in turn, explain the reliance on radical rules change
(including change to the Constitution) being secured without alerting the
public to the real endgame.
To be clear, efforts at honest persuasion are legitimate in a democratic
society that relies on broad input and open debate to arrive at the best
understanding and solutions. And Koch network grantees often engage in
reasoned efforts to change minds. But Koch network operations also, at
the end of the day, rely on disinformation where persuasion has failed.
And that corrosive practice is my focus here. They are not, of course, the
only source of calculated misinformation today. We know that Donald
Trump, for one, has lied habitually while president. Less often noticed,
because his are so audacious, is that disinformation has become a core tool
of much of the contemporary American right. Trump is the strange fruit of
this enterprise, but not the sower of the seed.8 For that, we can look back
at least to southern segregationist editors and spokespeople, who devel-
oped the trope of the not-to-be-trusted “liberal media” to combat honest
reportage on the civil rights struggle.9
Still, such precedents and analogous practices notwithstanding, there
has been nothing in our history as ambitious, elaborate and calculated as
the Koch network. And as it is the piece of the puzzle I know best, my
focus here will be on its role in bringing us to the current crisis. In the
remainder of this chapter, I discuss a few key episodes in the evolution of
the tactic of enlisting disinformation to secure adoption of otherwise
unsalable policies and changes in the legal system. The advantage of
such a historical narrative is that it allows us to pinpoint key moments
when Koch allies (and Charles Koch himself) came to understand that
honest persuasion and organizing would not get them where they wanted
to go.
I should note at the outset that while the archives to which I had access
did not include significant materials on Koch investments in media, celeb-
rity sources of disinformation have been significant draws at Koch sem-
inars, including Rush Limbaugh, John Stossel, and Glenn Beck.10 I hope
others will explore those connections. As the ever-strategic Grover
Norquist has made clear, that which contributors to this volume bemoan
is cause for celebration to Koch network participants like himself.
Exulting over the declining viewership of the once “Big Three” stations,
Norquist conflates “breaking through the establishment media” with
“conservatives rising,” and celebrates “cutting out the middlemen” – the
gatekeepers of old. He notes that the huge profits and listenership of those
such as Limbaugh and Beck ensures that “the new media will have a stake
in electing congressmen, senators, and presidents” that side with the
coalition that legalized their output. Aligning incentives to achieve the
desired, if unpopular, outcomes is key to Koch strategy.11
Repackaging social security privatization as “reform”
Because the Koch project now sails under the false flag of “conservatism”
so it can reach large numbers of voters, it is worth remembering that years
ago Charles Koch and his grantees were more honest. They proclaimed
themselves root-and-branch radicals, albeit radicals of the right, who
spurned conservatives, and particularly disdained the kind of cold war
and religious right conservatives on whom the project now relies for votes.
Back then, Koch’s favored thinker was Murray Rothbard, the grantee
who suggested that his patron read Lenin to appreciate the necessity of
cultivating a revolutionary “cadre.” Koch did, and the Cato Institute
became their joint project to launch the effort in the 1970s. After all,
they sought revolutionary change: a world in which liberty was preserved
by the total absence of government coercion in any form. No one could
have mistaken Cato libertarianism with conservatism at time of the
Institute’s founding. Indeed, Rothbard instructed readers of the first pub-
lication of the newly established think tank that the latter label should be
“despised,” because “conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien
régime of the preindustrial era,” and thus at odds with the wholly free
capitalism that libertarians sought. “In its contemporary American
form,” Rothbard explained, conservatism “embodied the death throes
of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town white
Anglo-Saxon America.”12
In a demonstration of the extremism of their position, Cato’s first
leader, Edward Crane, never forgave Barry Goldwater, the Republican
presidential nominee whose views proved too far right for the electorate,
for “[running] away from the issue of privatizing Social Security.” Charles
Koch funded his brother David to run against Ronald Reagan in 1980, as
the candidate of a Libertarian Party that called for an end to government
coercion in any form, including minimum wages, child labor laws, tax-
ation, and prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution. In the view
of the hardy cadre of libertarians Koch built up in the 1970s and 1980s,
the whole “establishment” had to be overthrown, its conservative wing as
much as its liberal one. The future, said Crane, belonged to the only “truly
radical vision”: “repudiating state power altogether.” The libertarians
proudly proclaimed themselves “the party of revolution.”13
What led the Koch cause to discard this initial, uncompromising can-
dor? As near as I can tell, it was something that often sets off social
movements: “the threatened loss of new possibility.”14 The program of
neoliberal transformation pushed through after the 1973 coup in Chile by
the Pinochet government thrilled advocates of economic liberty; their
vision was no long utopian, but now instantiated in a modern nation.
Thus invigorated, they then watched in despair as the new US President
Ronald Reagan, who talked their talk, backed away in his very first year in
office from carrying out the draconian program urged by his libertarian
Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman. Why?
Because the president realized how unpopular it would make him. The
much-ballyhooed Reagan Revolution, Stockman concluded, could not
succeed in “the world of democratic fact.” The coincidence of these
contrasting experiences – success in a controlled environment and failure
in the wider democracy – led the Koch cause to turn, more and more
frequently in the ensuing decades, to stealth strategies reliant on
misinformation.15
The year after the Pinochet regime crafted a new “Constitution of
Liberty” to embed neoliberalism in the lasting rules of national govern-
ance, Charles Koch moved the Cato Institute from San Francisco to
Washington, DC, in a display of his new interest in policy relevance.
Having seen the Chilean junta’s success in imposing retirement pension
privatization (and ending employer contributions), the Cato Institute
made social security privatization its top policy goal. It invited James
McGill Buchanan, a founder of “public choice” political economy and
a deeply committed libertarian who had just relocated his operation to
George Mason University, to advise on how it could be done. To make
a long story short: not with honest persuasion.
As Cato’s advisor on the Chilean constitution and an adjunct scholar,
Buchanan launched the project with a lengthy 1983 article in the Cato
Journal. He labeled the existing system a “Ponzi scheme,” a framing that
as one critic pointed out, implied that the program was “fundamentally
fraudulent,” indeed, “totally and fundamentally wrong.” But Buchanan’s
main concern was the politics of social security: first, to explain why
“support for the system [was] so universal” that it was treated as “sacro-
sanct,” and any questioning of it “political suicide” – as the Reagan
administration had just learned the hard way. The answer was straight-
forward: the majority of voters wanted the system to continue as it was.
“There is no widespread support for basic structural reform, among any
membership group” in the American polity, he noted, the italics his own:
“among the old or the young, the black, the brown, or the white, the
female or the male, the rich or the poor, the Frost Belt or the Sunbelt.”16
The near-universal popularity of social security meant that any attempt to
fight it on honest philosophical grounds was doomed.
Buchanan therefore suggested a more circuitous and sequential
approach that obscured the truth. “Those who seek to undermine the
existing structure,” he advised, must alter beneficiaries’ understanding of
social security’s viability, because that would “make abandonment of the
system look more attractive.” His counsel grew more cunning as it con-
tinued. “When short-run ‘reforms’ are needed,” he recommended, “those
who seek to undermine the support of the system (over the longer term)
would to do well to propose increases in the retirement age and increases
in payroll taxes.” In other words, to make social security less well-liked,
recipients had to pay more and work longer to retire. Another shrewd
move would be to tax high earners at higher rates than others in order to
sully the image of the program as an insurance contract. Making the
wealthy pay more in the near term could also lead more of them to oppose
the program. Taken together, such a “patchwork pattern of ‘reforms’”
(the quotation marks around “reform” his own, to communicate the
message that reform was not the true endgame) could pare off, one after
another, groups that currently supported social security. Better still, the
member groups of a once unified coalition that protected it might be
induced by such changes to fight one another. When that happened, the
broad phalanx that had upheld the system for a half century might finally
fracture.17 The follow-up plan by two staff members at the Heritage
Foundation was aptly titled “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy.”18
The Machiavellian advice Buchanan gave to his allies in Cato’s orbit
pointed to a larger truth: that the goal was never to ensure social security’s
long-term viability, as elected officials advised by the libertarian cadre
would portray it to the wider public, but rather to defeat its inner essence.
Historical Roots of Disinformation
What the libertarian right depicted as “reform” was but a camouflaged
step toward the destruction of the social insurance system, which
depended on large pools of contributor-beneficiaries to balance actuarial
risks. The libertarian thinkers and operatives acknowledged among them-
selves that privatization – wherever it was applied – was a strategy to
weaken the collective organizational capacity of the people and discour-
age individual citizens’ tendency to look to government for solutions to
their common problems. Along the way, privatization would also enrich
the corporations that took over the former functions of government, and
that, too, would alter power relations in ways that advanced the libertar-
ian revolution.19
As the political scientist Jeffrey Henig noted, in the second half of the
1980s, privatization “moved from an intellectual fringe to become
a centerpiece in contemporary public policy debates.” Buchanan’s so-
called Virginia school of political economy (a subset of the broader field
of public choice economics), helped effect “the intellectual de-legitimation
of the welfare state” that prepared the way for such privatization and,
with it, in the words of one enthusiast, advanced “the goal of fundamen-
tally and irreversibly changing” the very nature of modern politics. Where
the external advocacy focused on questions of cost, competition, and
efficiency, the internal think tank discussions always involved long-term
calculation about how best to alter the structure and incentives of political
life in order to radically shrink what members of the public might decide
to do collectively.20 Privatization was thus a key element of the crab walk
to the final, albeit gradual, revolution – the ends-justify-the-means way of
thinking that allowed for the use of disingenuous claims....
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