Tearing the mask(s) off the Koch machine, one by one. A review of FREE SPEECH AND KOCH MONEY: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola

Imagine a lower-temperature, slow-motion, widely distributed Reichstag fire. That’s what the Koch network is inflicting on the American public, hoping to keep us hypnotized by imaginary threats and therefore blind to an ongoing takeover of all levels of our society.

This excellent new book looks behind the headlines at how the “plutocratic libertarians” of the Koch network have piled up the fuel, scattered the sparks, fanned the flames, and then sounded the (false) alarm in their very own media about a non-existent left-wing threat to free speech on our campuses. The authors argue that we should stop debating abstractions and start paying attention to where the money is coming from and what it’s buying—in this case, the speaker-provocateurs, the student groups who invite them onto campus, the stables of lawyers who come galloping to the rescue of the invented victims, and the media that distort and misreport the whole pre-packaged, put-up job.

In under 200 pages, the reader learns about the ideological and institutional frameworks within which these arsonists are operating; about their methods, personnel, interconnections, and financing (so far as these can be discovered); and about their goal of replacing our complex, multimodal democracy with a world where wealth rules unchecked and “freedom” means money is free to trample on you and you are free to be trampled on. What Pinochet did with guns, prisons, and torturers, the Koch network hopes to achieve by stealth and incrementalism, and their stage-managed attack on the autonomy and independence of our educational institutions is a key front in their war on actually-existing American society. (It’s far from the only front in this war, but that’s another story.)

From the 1970s on, Charles Koch has viewed the corruption and control of our universities as the very basis of his and his network’s campaign to impose plutocratic libertarianism on the rest of us. If Koch is right—and I believe he is, at least in this regard—then it behooves us to understand what the “campus culture war” is really about. Koch Money and Free Speech: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War provides just that badly-needed understanding and is therefore a valuable addition to the growing shelf (at last!) of deeply-researched and well-written books about the Koch network and its relentless efforts to redefine “freedom” and transform the human world—for the worse. (And don’t miss the tips for anti-Koch activists in Appendix 2!)

----Patrick Diehl, Ph.D. (UC Berkeley, 1974) and community activist (Tucson, AZ, home of the University of Arizona’s Koch-backed and Kochite  “Center for the Philosophy of Freedom”)