Do Me A Favor And Put It In Context

Do yourself a favor and read Jane Mayer's full report. She has found the taproot. https://t.co/1t7SL9c3FG via @CharlesPPierce

— Esquire (@esquire) August 3, 2021

I'm old enough to remember when the Koch Brothers were going to buy up America and dominate the political system with their "dark money" and we were all done for. I'm also old enough to remember Jane Mayer wrote extensively about how that was doomed to happen. No slight on Ms. Mayer or her work; I'm a great admirer.  Then again I like Michael Wolf's work on Trump, but he is to this day bamboozled by Rupert Murdoch into thinking Murdoch has no personal connection, and no control, over FoxNews or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, even long after Roger Ailes is dead and buried and Murdoch's children, per Wolf, all want the network to go in another direction.

Just because they are good reporters doesn't mean they are wise.

The Koch Brothers didn't fail at their efforts because Jane Mayer exposed them in "The New Yorker" (which you know few Americans ever read; more fool them).  I'm not sure they failed even because David died (may he rest in peace).  I think their reach just exceeded their grasp and they found out, like the Hunt brothers who tried to corner the world silver market and wound up almost broke themselves*, that they simply didn't have that much power and money.  Call it the "bad guy taking over the world" syndrome.  In comic books the bad guys always have the unlimited power needed to bring the world to heel (and it's always fantastically simple, too).  In real life that fantasy shows up as Timothy McVeigh or Dylann Roof or the clowns at the Capitol, expecting their act of rage will spark the "race war" or the Q storm or whatever apocalyptic, world ending/changing event they are counting on.  Except the world isn't that simple.

What changed after America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aside from ending the war in Japan?  Godzilla movies?  I'm not being flippant, I'm serious.  We had the cold war, and the nuclear stare down I grew up with ("Duck and cover" still means something to me, and it's associated entirely with elementary school).  But the USSR collapsed into Russia and nobody (thanks be!) has used a nuke as a weapon since we did, and here we are.  The last real "world changing" event was the Industrial Revolution, and we seem hell-bent on using that to render this planet uninhabitable; for us, anyway.  Short of that, what event has ever interrupted the entire world, much less this country?  Even the IR didn't do it all at once.

The last one I can think of is Pearl Harbor, and memory tells us the entire country banded together after that; except they didn't.  Not as fractious as Vietnam, but still not everybody holding hands singing "kumbayah."  That's the memories of the children of those years, our parents and grandparents. That ain't necessarily the whole history of the war years and after.  Indeed, the winter of our discontent began as early as the '50's, with the civil rights movement and the coincidental rise of the national security state (J Edgar may those two seem less of a coincidence).  But a single event that snapped the country into agreement?  Not even the death of JFK, or MLK, or the first human footprint on the moon, did that.

So what made anything they could do make the Koch brothers think they were going to?  Because money talks?  I assume some of the lawyers who presented the 60 cases on behalf of Donald Trump to overturn the election got paid.  The money didn't mean a thing to the courts.  In Arizona, several million dollars seem to have gone "poof!" on a Quixotic pursuit to find what turned out to not even be a windmill.  Maybe the end of the Koch Brothers' efforts could be said to have been Donald Trump.  How'd that investment work out for them?  Trump is damaged goods whose political star power is fading rapidly.  By this time next year, a mere 18 months after he lost the election, no one will be talking about "audits" and Trump rallies (will he get out of the cow pasture by then?).  We'll have new concerns, and Trump will figure as someone facing criminal charges, possibly from several states and maybe even the DOJ.

The Koch Brothers leave behind the dominance of the GOP in several states, but the way DeSantis and Abbott and all of Tennessee (and part of the AZ Senate) is going, that may not last much longer. Word coms now that Gov. Hutchinson is calling the Arkansas legislature back into special session to rescind the law he championed banning masks at public schools.   Kind of hard to get people to vote for you when you defend their right to be stupid and get infected with a disease that will probably kill them and you refuse to protect their school children (who have no say, as many parents are figuring out).  Abbott and DeSantis haven't figured that out yet, but they may have to anyway.  Killing people's kids for an idea ("Freedom!") doesn't tend to have broad appeal.  And the people giving Trump money are getting even less return on their investment.  Trump is plowing it into his properties; he's propping up his real estate investments with money from the rubes, which will probably end up in more criminal charges for fraud.  Fraud tends to have a very short shelf life, indeed, and it doesn't usually remake political parties into political powerhouses.

The Koch Brothers tried to corner the political market in America, and they found out it was bigger than they were.  They had effects they didn't intend, but they eventually withdrew because it wasn't going as they envisioned.  The people giving Trump money, the big money donors, not the small guppies fool enough to let him empty their bank accounts, think they are buying the levers of power.  Through a man who, in four years, couldn't accomplish what Joe Biden will accomplish before his first Thanksgiving in office.  Yeah; forgive me if I don't see their investment working out any better than it did in Arizona; or in getting Trump re-elected.

*you have to be at least this old to get that one.  Punks!