Kochs slip one past the The Kansas City Star‘s rookie publisher
On Wednesday, The Kansas City Star published an “As I See It” by Jeremy Cady, the Missouri director of Americans for Prosperity. Cady used the opportunity to encourage U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt to repeal Obamacare, rein in spending and stop enriching “special interests.”
The endblurb to Cady’s column describes Americans for Prosperity as a “right-leaning grassroots organization.” In fact, Americans for Prosperity was founded by David Koch, one of the richest men in the world, who, with his brother Charles, has pumped millions into climate-change denial and other right-wing causes. Allowing Americans for Prosperity to brand itself as “grassroots” is a little like calling Donald Trump a “civic-minded business executive.”
Americans for Prosperity came to prominence when it latched on to the nascent Tea Party movement. Earlier this year, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, who has reported extensively on the Koch brothers and their influence on American politics, described attending a summit in 2010, which served in part as a training session for local Tea Party activists.
The summit was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, which purported to be a nonpartisan grass-roots political-advocacy group devoted to the cause of small government, free markets, and liberty. It was in fact an organization that had been founded and heavily funded by the Kochs, whose early activism was entwined in fearmongering and racial intolerance.
Later in the piece, Kramer writes that the Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity gave out a Blogger of the Year award to a woman “whose work described Obama as the ‘cokehead-in-chief’ and as suffering from ‘demonic possession (aka schizophrenia, etc.).'”
In 2012, Americans for Prosperity spent $122 million to defeat President Obama and Democrats in Congress. The Kochs kept a distance from Trump during the 2016 campaign, focusing instead on U.S. Senate races. But even though the Kochs were cool to Trump, the president-elect’s choices reflect their influence on the Republican Party. U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, has close ties to the Kochs. Myron Ebell, who is heading the transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, is a climate-change skeptic.
Cady’s column appeared in the space where the Star used to run editorials written by the editorial board staff. No such staff exists, thanks to rookie publisher Tony Berg, who ran off what remained of the crew just in time for the election. Let’s hope the guest editorials from industry-funded activists and rape-victim blamers get a harder look when incoming editorial-board VP Colleen McCain Nelson arrives.
