Courtesy of Pam Martens
Riverside County Sheriff Officers Guard the Entrance to a Rancho Mirage, California Luxury Resort Where the Koch Brothers Held their January 2011 Political Strategy Confab. Photo Courtesy of Michael Cline, ClineFoto.com
Since 2010 we have been investigating and reporting on activities of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political funding network to subvert democracy in the United States.
In 2011 we broke the news that Charles Koch had entertained sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at Koch’s private club in California. Thomas would later rule in favor of the Citizens United decision which opened the spigots to unlimited corporate money in U.S. political campaigns. In the same article we reported that while the Citizens United case was pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Justice, created a nonprofit Tea Party advocacy group, Liberty Central, Inc., with a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field, acting as her General Counsel and a former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, serving on her board at inception. The nonprofit received over $500,000 from anonymous sources in a short period of time.
In 2010 we broke the news that a nonprofit with Koch footprints all over it had secretly funded a $17 million campaign to keep fear of Muslims alive in the weeks prior to the 2008 presidential election by pumping out 28 million DVDs of a race-baiting movie that was distributed through more than 100 newspapers and a direct mail campaign to swing-voter states.
As our “Related Articles” listed below indicate, we have been a thorn in the side of the Koch network for the past eight years. During the presidential campaign of 2016 we started to receive loud, threatening, pounding knocks on our front door, despite the fact that we had a doorbell. There was a very prominent sign at the entrance to our community making it clear that solicitations were not allowed, thus, we didn’t answer the door. When we would later leave the house, we would find a brochure from Americans for Prosperity stuck in the side of the door. (See our report The Koch Empire and Americans for Prosperity to understand the insidious relationship or watch this video to see David Koch stand at the podium of an Americans for Prosperity convention.)
An article today at Bloomberg/BusinessWeek reminded us of those threatening knocks on our door. Reporter John McCormick writes that Americans for Prosperity team members are using “the i360 voter database the Koch network built” which allows them to tap on their smartphone and “pull up a detailed map of each neighborhood, showing addresses, names, and ages of voters.” The group is using that sophisticated technology in a door-to-door campaign to turn out Republican voters in the midterms.
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