'These people were very, very extreme and I think very dangerous,' David Koch said of protestors. Kochs lash out at 'dangerous' critics

In lengthy interviews with a conservative magazine, the billionaire Koch brothers mounted an aggressive defense of their business and political interests, describing their liberal critics as “very, very extreme” and “very dangerous” and President Barack Obama as a “radical” with “Marxist” ideas whose success is owed largely to his “silver tongue.”

Obama is “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation … and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had,” David Koch is quoted saying in a story posted late Friday on the website of the Weekly Standard.


In a grudging reference to Obama’s rhetorical skills, he added: “It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.”

David’s brother Charles Koch said of Obama: “I’m not saying he’s a Marxist, but he’s internalized some Marxist models — that is, that business tends to be successful by exploiting its customers and workers.”

The Weekly Standard story comes after months of intensifying scrutiny of the Kochs’ funding of conservative causes, including the fights to limit carbon emissions and block last year’s Democratic healthcare overhaul, as well as this year’s showdown with public employee unions in Wisconsin.

The Kochs’ new notoriety as targets of the left was capped by the wide coverage of a prank in which a liberal blogger posing as David Koch recorded a 20-minute telephone call about the labor standoff with Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

The prank, carried out by the editor of a Buffalo website, was “identity theft” and “extremely dishonest,” charged David Koch in the Standard piece, in which he confessed to being “really bothered” that the media coverage of the call focused more on him “rather than the guy who impersonated me! And I was criticized as someone who’s got a death grip on the governor and his policies. And that I control him — I mean, that’s insane!”

Koch also called out the liberal protestors who held a raucous rally outside a January summit of major conservative donors in Rancho Mirage, Calif., organized by Koch Industries, the brothers’ privately held oil, chemical and consumer products company.

“These people were very, very extreme,” David Koch said of the protestors, “and I think very dangerous.”

The criticism of the brothers’ political efforts proves their impact, asserted Charles Koch, who said “I believed that when we were considered effective we would be attacked.”

In the last few months, liberals have increasingly focused on the Kochs as personifications of the corrosive influence of big money in politics, and have charged them with serving as sponsors of the anti-establishment tea party movement in order to push policies intended to boost their profits.

The Kochs have remained mostly mum throughout the attacks, occasionally granting interviews to – or writing op-eds for – conservative media outlets that have accorded them mostly uncritical forums in which to push back against intensifying media scrutiny.

The 8,400-word Weekly Standard story, accompanied by an illustration of an angry and deranged-looking mob preparing to burn the brothers at the stake, marks the Kochs’ most direct and robust response yet. It was written by Matthew Continetti, the Standard’s opinion editor and the recipient of a 2008 fellowship from a foundation that has received at least $165,000 from Charles G. Koch Foundation since 2002.

Continetti posited in a 2009 book that the “elite media tried to bring down” former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a star in the conservative grassroots. And in his piece on the Kochs, for which he was granted unprecedented access to the brothers and their top lieutenants, he accuses “liberals in the media” of creating an innuendo-laden and misleading narrative that caricatures the Kochs as evil puppeteers behind a range of ills.

“They ascribed every bad thing under the sun to the brothers and their checkbooks,” Continetti wrote. “Pollution, the Tea Party, global warming denial—the Kochs were responsible.”

Continetti cites David Koch’s extensive philanthropy, including multimillion-dollar gifts to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And Continetti writes approvingly of Koch Industries’ success since Charles Koch took it over from the brothers’ father in the late 1960s.

Continetti quotes Charles Koch discussing his study of free-market economics and a top Koch Industries official calling Koch “a teacher” and explaining “He’s trying to get people to understand there are principles in life, like in engineering.”

And, inventorying the breadth of Koch’s business interests, Continetti seems to take some glee in asserting that a Koch-owned company makes the “presidential coffee cup” aboard Air Force One.

Charles and David Koch are worth a reported $21.5 billion each, and for decades, they’ve been generous donors to academic institutions and public policy think tanks – some of which they founded – that promote small government and free-market conservatism. But in recent years they have increasingly focused their giving on more activist groups, and, perhaps more significantly, they have used their influence to help guide millions more in contributions from other major conservative benefactors, primarily through twice-a-year donor summits like the one in Rancho Mirage this year.

Continetti writes that the Kochs lean more libertarian than Republican, and are motivated in their political giving by small-government ideology, rather than partisan considerations. And he challenges the liberal argument that the brothers give to politicians and groups pushing policies that will pad their pockets.

“If I wanted to enhance my riches,” David Koch asked Continetti, “why do I give away almost all my money?”

The Kochs also take a swipe at former President George W. Bush in the piece, with David Koch singling out his decision to invade Iraq as misguided.

“Boy, that’s cost a lot of money, and it’s taken so many American lives,” said David Koch. “I question whether that was the right thing to do. In hindsight, that looks like it was not a good policy.”

And Charles Koch asserted that Bush’s fiscally reckless stewardship that created a popular backlash, asserting “What he did led to the current administration.”

Some of the tea party movement’s early rallies and town hall protests opposing the expansive agenda pushed by Obama and his Democratic congressional allies were facilitated by the Kochs’ primary political vehicle, a non-profit group called Americans for Prosperity.

But Charles Koch rejected the accusation that he and his brother have had a major hand in shaping or advancing the movement.

“I see these people on TV, and they’re interviewed, and it’s obvious no one’s pulling their strings,” Charles Koch said of tea party activists. “The way it’s grown, the passion and the intensity, was beyond what I had anticipated.”