One of the very first items on the menu here in the shebeen was the successful campaign of the Koch Brothers political operation to kill a proposed light-rail system in Nashville, Tennessee. I confess to having been surprised that the massive Koch political arm would be exercised against what seemed to be a relatively obscure local issue. After that, I lost track of the situation.

What I did not know is that Nashville tried again, and that the Koch apparatus roared back into town once more. This, as The New York Times reports, was not an isolated episode.

The Nashville strategy was part of a nationwide campaign. Since 2015, Americans for Prosperity has coordinated door-to-door anti-transit canvassing campaigns for at least seven local or state-level ballots, according to a review by The New York Times. In the majority, the Kochs were on the winning side.

Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-backed groups have also opposed more than two dozen other transit-related measures — including many states’ bids to raise gas taxes to fund transit or transportation infrastructure — by organizing phone banks, running advertising campaigns, staging public forums, issuing reports and writing opinion pieces in local publications. In Little Rock, Americans for Prosperity made more than 39,000 calls and knocked on nearly 5,000 doors to fight a proposed sales-tax increase worth $18 million to fund a bus and trolley network. In Utah, it handed out $50 gift cards at a grocery store, an amount it said represented what a proposed sales tax increase to fund transit would cost county residents per year.

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Mainly, the attacks on mass transit have been the usual Americans for Prosperity Eeek-Taxes! variety, but, this being the era of American politics that it is, there’s been a little racism and fear-mongering added to give the campaign swill some spice.

Public transit critics have long raised fears that rail projects are a conduit for crime, and Mr. O’Toole himself has made that argument: “Teenagers swarm onto San Francisco BART trains to rob passengers,” he warned in a blog post last year. But in Nashville, Mr. O’Toole made a different argument, namely that transit is for hipster millennials and would be a conduit for gentrification, forcing people to move further away to find affordable housing.

And, because this is the era of American politics ushered in by Justice Anthony Kennedy’s sojourn in Happy Gumdrop Land, the money behind these campaigns is both vast and anonymous.

Broadly speaking, Americans for Prosperity campaigns against big government, but many of its initiatives target public transit. In Indiana, it marshaled opposition to a 2017 Republican gas-tax plan meant to raise roughly a billion dollars to invest in local buses and other projects. In New Jersey, the group ran an ad against a proposed gas-tax increase

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In Nashville, Americans for Prosperity played a major role: organizing door-to-door canvassing teams using iPads running the i360 software. Those in-kind contributions can be difficult to measure. According to A.F.P.’s campaign finance disclosure, the group made only one contribution, of $4,744, to the campaign for “canvassing expenses.”

Instead, a local group, NoTax4Tracks, led the Nashville fund-raising. Nearly three-quarters of the $1.1 million it raised came from a single nonprofit, Nashville Smart Inc., which is not required to disclose donors. The rest of the contributions to NoTax4Tracks came from wealthy local donors, including a local auto dealer. Both NoTax4Tracks and Nashville Smart declined to fully disclose their funding.

Recently, it was reported that David Koch was stepping away from politics, probably for health reasons. But the brand is established, and the root systems are permanent now, and, thanks to the Supreme Court, nobody ever has to look seriously at where the noxious political underbrush that blooms so suddenly comes from.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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