It was crucial to the success of the Tea Party movement, the ousting of Democrats from Congress, and the staffing of Trump’s transition team. It has pulled “the Republican party to the far right on economic, tax and regulatory issues”. And they appear to have been remarkably successful.Īs researchers at Harvard and Columbia universities have found, Americans for Prosperity alone now rivals the Republican party in terms of size, staffing and organisational capacity. They have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a network of academic departments, thinktanks, journals and movements. But for the most part they funded existing organisations that met their criteria. To these ends the Kochs set up bodies in all three categories themselves, such as the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Cato Institute and the “citizens’ group” Americans for Prosperity.

Then “citizen activist” groups would “press for the implementation of policy change”. Thinktanks would transform them into “a more practical or usable form”. Universities would produce “the intellectual raw materials”. The Kochs’ chief political lieutenant, Richard Fink, developed what he called a three-stage model of social change. Until now, there has been no evidence that Charles and David Koch have directly funded organisations based in the UK Company Town, a film released last year, tells the story of local people’s long fight against pollution from a huge paper mill owned by the Koch brothers. In 1999, a jury found that Koch Industries had knowingly used a corroded pipeline to carry butane, which caused an explosion in which two people died. Koch Industries paid massive fines for oil spills, illegal benzene emissions and ammonia pollution.

Over the years, she notes, “the company developed a stunning record of corporate malfeasance”. “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.” As Jane Mayer records in her book Dark Money, the Kochs’ ideology – lower taxes and looser regulations – and their business interests “dovetailed so seamlessly it was difficult to distinguish one from the other”. In a rare public statement, in an essay published in 1978, Charles Koch explained his objective.

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