Like Beer? You’ll love Koch.
by Tom Sullivan
Tapes and transcripts leaked recently from the Koch brothers’ annual summit meeting are filled with eye-popping details. For example, their efforts to market their free-market gospel to uninterested young people are as ham-fisted as Fox News Channel’s ill-fated 1/2 Hour News Hour. Joan Walsh writes:
“I have a big surprise for everyone here: Young people like beer,” joked Evan Feinberg of the Koch-funded Generation Opportunity. At least I think he was trying to make a joke. GenOpp is the group behind those “Creepy Uncle Sam” anti-Obamacare ads that backfired against the right. So understandably, Feinberg didn’t mention Creepy Uncle Sam, but bragged about GenOpp’s recent “Free the Brews” campaign, which used his generation’s interest in craft brewing to advance the Kochs’ deregulation agenda.
They hope to use phony interest in beer and food trucks to entice young people into trying Koch. Essentially, this is GenOpp’s recruitment pitch to twenty-somethings:
Do you like beer?
Hey, me too!
You know, we should get together and lower marginal tax rates.
Walsh calls Feinberg’s career “a case study in the way wingnut welfare creates a culture of dependency, or alternatively, the debilitating effects of affirmative action for white people.”
Jokes aside, this approach reminded me of … something. Oh, yeah. There are lots of sources on this, but this one will do:
To more effectively recruit new believers, cult members sometimes organize special events, a tactic which allows them to camouflage their true motives. They know that people are more likely to attend a networking mixer, a youth group or a charity fundraiser than they are to sign up for an information session on the interdimensional doomsday prophesy of Gur the Dragon of Death.
Except in this case the sessions were framed as a death match between the Kochs and the collectivists:
In his speech titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” Charles Koch echoed an op-ed he wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal in both his paranoia and self-pity. The billionaire oil industrialist, hosting some of the most powerful men in Washington, without irony claimed in his speech that he and his brother were “put squarely in front of the firing squad.” He later framed the path ahead for America as a binary choice between freedom and collectivism, a catchall term he used to describe liberalism, socialism, and fascism.
Audio and transcripts are here if this sort of thing from the Kochification Church is your cup of Kool-Aid.
.