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February 11th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries
The shadowy escalations of Koch money and power in U.S. politics over the past four decades has far outpaced mainstream media’s ability to quantify it to the public. The media deludes itself that it is dealing with the problem by talking about the symptoms of corporate and billionaire money in political campaigns while ignoring the actual disease – the Party of Koch.
The rise of Trumpism is merely a symptom of the Party of Koch. The violent mob in the Capitol on January 6, attempting to overturn a duly conducted election, is merely a symptom of the Party of Koch. If Donald Trump is banned from ever again holding federal political office, and he should be, Congress still has done nothing to deal with the actual disease – the Party of Koch.
Charles Koch has been the Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries since 1967. According to Forbes, in 2020 he ranked as the 18th richest man in the world with a net worth of $38.2 billion. Charles Koch and the heirs of his late brother, David, who died in 2019, are the majority owners of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world with interests in fossil fuels, refineries, pipelines, coal, chemicals, consumer paper goods, proprietary trading in currencies, commodities and stocks as well as numerous other pursuits.
For the past forty years, Charles Koch has been involved in creating and funding a sprawling network of front groups that seek to shrink the federal government in order to gut it of its regulatory powers over corporations and kill off federal programs like the U.S. Postal Service, Social Security and Medicare because they are popular with, and have earned the respect of, the American people. Charles Koch also holds semi-annual strategy meetings with like-minded billionaires and millionaires to plan how to sway election outcomes to their favored candidates.
In 2014, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused the Koch brothers of trying “to fix every election in America to their liking.” That was the same year that Koch Industries launched its first ever nationwide marketing campaign – which since that time has enriched media outlets with millions of dollars in ads for its consumer paper products such as Dixie disposable paper plates, bowls and cups and its Northern Quilted and Angel Soft bath tissue.
While Charles Koch has tried to distance himself in the media from Donald Trump, he and Koch Industries were deeply incentivized to ensure that Donald Trump had another four years as President, because the Trump administration had been packed with Koch-friendly operatives.
A Koch nonprofit front group that played a major role in the 2016 presidential election was Freedom Partners. It shuttered in 2019. (Shuttering and reopening under a new name is standard operating practice by the Koch machine.) It was hard to decipher where Freedom Partners began and Koch Industries ended. In 2018, we perused its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.
Freedom Partners Action Fund, a related organization that pummeled Democrats in attack ads, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.
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