The Swell Guys who drove us from Freedom to Freedumb
As America marks its 700,000th death from the pandemic to date, and continues to suffer one of the highest Covid death rates among first-world countries, the defiant Darwinists of the MAGA movement are stepping-up to confront the real culprits behind this plague: the nation’s weary city council and school board members. A quick glance at the internet reveals a virtual parade of videos featuring crimson-faced “patriots” hijacking public meetings. Following a grab-bag of references to the Bible, murmurs of revolution and endless amounts of their own Facebook ‘research’ comes the inevitable big finish: a word-jumble of the Constitutional “rights” they believe are being stripped when forced to wear a cotton mask in public or comply with an employer’s vaccine requirement. Echoing their idiocy, far-right governors and congressmen scramble onto cable news to sternly declare that they too “will not comply” with the supposed mask and vaccine tyranny threatening their ‘liberty.’
Ironically, the vast majority of these Ivermectin-addled asshats hail from the same political movement which has spent decades basking in America’s victory over Fascism in World War II. Imagine the likely response of these Libertarian zombies to the federally-imposed regulations invoked to support that four-year war effort: mandatory black-outs; the rationing of gas, food and clothing; mass military conscription; and, for the 16 million Americans in uniform, multiple mandatory vaccinations…
It’s virtually impossible to envision this country being able to rally together to accomplish great things in this era. With half the country drunk on this clueless, history-defying vision of limitless personal rights unhindered by any concern for the common good, even modest goals like fixing crumbling bridges or protecting clean air and water are out of reach. But we didn’t just arrive at this bizarre place by accident. While basic self-involvement and the disappearance of civics from the classroom have helped bring about this implosion, there’s clear evidence that dynamite was placed on the support columns of American culture, and clear fingerprints left on the detonator.
In the early 1970s, in the course of parlaying their inherited multimillion-dollar corporation into a hundred-billion-dollar juggernaut, Charles and David Koch came to the realization that mega-billionaire status would be far easier to achieve without pesky federal regulations or tax obligations slowing them down. Disciples of fringe ultra-Libertarian Robert LeFavre, the Kochs completely rejected the idea that the government could force companies to protect the public from dangerous chemicals and pollution, or tax the billions they earned. After all, refining oil and transporting natural gas without the hassle of shielding the water table from toxic chemicals or inspecting their gas pipelines to prevent explosion was far more profitable than being sidetracked by the petty costs of safeguarding the community.
The hitch in that grand vision was the fact that the early ‘70s were still a time when the majority of conservatives valued the common good to some degree, even when it weighed against the bottom line. What to do? Well, for the Koch boys, it meant changing the very way millions of Americans looked at the government and its right to ask anything of anyone. Charles himself outlined his views in a 1978 article in The Libertarian Review, sneering, ““We have accepted the fallacious concept that the corporation has a broad ‘social responsibility’ beyond its duty to its shareholders.” Koch goes on to mock the Advertising Council for advocating on behalf of, “ ‘the promotion of fair economic competition and the protection of public health and safety.’ What simple‐minded nonsense!” But penning opinion columns was small ball, and the Kochs were swinging for the fences.
Over the next few decades, they pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into creating generations of ultra-libertarian pundits and academics to (preach) their world view of endless personal rights and no public obligations until it began sounding like common sense. They achieved this by funding countless right-wing think tanks (see: The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, The CATO Institute and many more) and entire college departments at places such as George Mason University, Utah State, Florida State University and others.
The Kochs were so hellbent on driving their government-free vision into the mainstream that they found a way to openly aid 1980 libertarian candidate for President Edward Clark with unlimited funding: they placed David Koch on the ticket as vice-president, allowing him to self-fund to the tune of millions of dollars. Although the Clark/Koch ticket failed to reach the White House, the Kochs could scarcely have been more pleased with the man who did.
As a fiercely political spokesman for General Electric in the 1950s and early ‘60s, Ronald Reagan had crusaded against the prospect of Medicare, equating it with Communism and the collapse of America. Using charm and fear in equal measure, President Reagan perfected an anti-government pitch that virtually mirrored the Kochs’. And when Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Rush Limbaugh and hundreds of replicas sprung up on talk-radio coast-to-coast, beating the drum for the Kochs’ vision of every (white, wealthy) man as a self-created island, obliged to no one.
As luck would have it, just as their libertarian assault on right-wing thinking was hitting its stride, Rupert Murdoch hired Republican media czar Roger Ailes to create a 24-hour news outlet tasked with injecting right-wing ideas into the mainstream. In Fox News, the Koch academics and pundits suddenly had a massive platform from which to preach. What’s more, their talking points and outlook soon became the prayer book from which the increasingly-indignant Fox Hosts preached each night, joining their talk radio allies in round-the-clock bombardment of extreme libertarianism.
Naturally, the primary sponsors and benefactors of this propaganda were & are the plutocrats who can afford to insulate themselves from the tearing of social fabric they fund. But for every oil company CEO, ten-thousand Joe Six-Packs nod along with the idea that selfishness is enlightened, and any effort on behalf of the public good equals Communism. And just as the Kochs envisioned themselves as entitled to every right they could possibly imagine, so too do the millions of mini-me libertarians who have been spoon fed the destructive far-right doctrine by Fox, Talk Radio, Ron Paul and a thousand other goggle-eyed disciples.
So as you watch the far-right shock troops lay siege to your local school board and holler of revolution, just remember that this insanity didn’t spring up organically – It was seeded and carefully grown so that a few ultra-rich industrialists could zero out their tax burden and turn the country into the Love Canal, all in the name of Freedumb.