David Brock is founder of Media Matters for America and chairman of American Bridge.

Other than shaking his hand at various conservative galas around Washington, I sat down for an audience with Richard Mellon-Scaife, a big financial supporter of my anti-Clinton work at The American Spectator, where I was the lead investigative reporter, just once. One morning in 1994, I was summoned to the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown to meet my benefactor for lunch. When I arrived, Scaife was accompanied by two long-time aides with whom I was already pretty well acquainted.

Given what I knew was Scaife’s great influence in the conservative movement, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was certainly more than what actually transpired. Here I was, finally, meeting The Man. The Wizard of conservative Oz. My sugardaddy. Scaife appeared—ruddy-faced, congenial enough, but quite reticent. His aides did all the talking and seemed to me to be running the show.


Despite his legendary low profile, quiet demeanor and apparent hands-off style, Scaife, who died last week at the age of 82, certainly had vast sway in shaping the modern conservative movement. Long before the era of SuperPACs enabled big money to shape our political system, he did this, first, by using his banking fortune to move politics far to the right by heavily funding activist think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (where I also once worked) and, later, to upend the presidency in the Clinton era, by bankrolling several scandal-mongering publications, including the Spectator, the Western Journalism Center, NewsMax and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. They were part of a then-nascent right-wing media echo chamber—the forerunners to the Drudge Report and the Fox News Channel.

Whatever else one can say about him, Scaife was generous with his largesse. I have vivid recollections of the “Dear Mr. Scaife” letters that Spectator staffers would send off to Pittsburgh requesting six-figure sums for anti-Clinton research. The checks typically arrived promptly, no questions asked.

Human motivation is a complex thing and hard to discern in others, but over the years I surmised that the through-line in Scaife’s philanthropy was a dedication to a radical libertarian vision for American society, combined with an outsider, anti-Establishment temperament—more than a little strange for someone whose middle name was Mellon and had inherited a good part of that fortune. It had little if anything to do per se with the Clintons (whom he later befriended and supported, following my own path).

If Scaife’s bent sounds familiar, it should, for it could be said that the man was ahead of his time: Today’s Tea Party, as reflected in the radical GOP caucus of the House and its crop of 2014 Senate candidates, exhibits the same Scaife-like beliefs and qualities. Mission accomplished.

Later in the 1990s, when I had second thoughts about what I was involved in, what astonished me was that the existence of Scaife’s vast, relentless and systematically funded enterprise, and its fueling of a doctrinaire, Manichean right-wing movement willing to do just about anything to establish its political hegemony—including impeaching a president on partisan, made-up claims—was largely unknown to Democrats and liberals and the mainstream press corps, who seemed to think that the Republican Party was a normal political party that simply held contrary beliefs. Thus the incredulity that met then-First Lady Hillary Clinton when she rightly denounced “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” It was if she alone understood what Democrats were up against.

Twenty years later, Scaife’s obituaries in the leading papers reported the anti-Clinton schemes he supported as a well-established fact.

Today, the Scaife legacy is being carried on by the billionaire Koch brothers, who, similarly, are trying to influence, if not take outright control of, the Republican Party through the very same means—by buying their way in and funneling cash to radical insurgents. The main difference from the Scaife era is that the Koch operations are even vaster—more politically focused, better funded, increasingly sophisticated and with an army of grassroots anti-government zealots at their disposal.

I’ve recently spent time trying to motivate Democratic donors and activists to oppose the Kochs in the kind of concerted way that didn’t happen in the 1990s, when no opposition was ever mounted against Scaife’s activities. My SuperPAC, American Bridge, recently launched a project, RealKochFacts, to educate the public about the threat posed by the Kochs’ self-serving political agenda.

And yet what I’m finding is a new generation of Democrats and liberals, seemingly shocked by the evidence all around them—in Congress, campaigns and the 24-7 blare of Fox News—as if there’s no history to this. Much of the mainstream media, which all too often still reports as if the power of the right wing is a figment of liberal imagination, doesn’t help.

I hope it won’t take another 20 years for folks to come out of denial.