Critics, including the former president Theodore Roosevelt, assailed the idea, declaring, “No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.”

funneling millions of dollars into educational indoctrination, with free-market curricula and even video games promoting his ideology pitched to prospects as young as grade school.

Koch operatives also purposefully sabotaged the democratic process by planting screaming protesters in town hall meetings at which congressmen met with constituents that year.

a group of activists who aimed to do all they could to nullify the results of the recent election.

Enormously wealthy right-wing donors had transformed themselves from the ridiculed, self-serving “economic royalists” of FDR’s day into the respected “other side” of a two-sided debate.

vulture fund

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of eleven original members of the John Birch Society, the archconservative group best known for spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories about secret Communist plots to subvert America.

“With political victory, the ideological conflicts that have swirled about this nation for half a century now show clear signs of breaking into naked ideological warfare in which the very foundations of our republic are threatened and that we had better take heed.”

Excitement was so feverish that the Democratic political consultant James Carville was predicting a long-term political realignment in which the Democrats “will remain in power for the next forty years.”