THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And the Evil Koch Brothers learned that lesson back in the days of Jimmy Carter and St Ronnie, both of whom they despise. The New York Times today takes a stab at showing how they have planned for their ascendency for a long time. They got their money from dad who made his fortune working with Joe Stalin, only to turn on him with the zeal of a late convert when he returned to the US. At first the boys thought they could just buy their way into the game.

Politics was a dangerous game for those in business, Charles Koch argued in a 1974 speech to libertarian thinkers and business leaders in Dallas. Subsidies and special treatment demanded by corporations had helped turn Americans against free enterprise. Business had colluded with the Nixon administration to design price controls and other “socialistic measures.”

The most effective response was not political action, Mr. Koch argued, but investment in pro-capitalist research and educational programs.

“The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today,” he said, according to a copy of his speech in a Libertarian Party archive at the University of Virginia, one of thousands of documents reviewed by The New York Times for this article. The Times was alerted to the archive by American Bridge, a liberal political organization that has been critical of the Kochs...

The Supreme Court handed the Kochs an important weapon in a 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo. The court opened two loopholes in a two-year-old campaign finance law that had placed tight controls on what candidates, parties, and private individuals could spend on campaigns: A candidate could spend an unlimited amount of his or her money running for office, and an individual was free to spend an unlimited amount of money promoting candidates so long as the spending was not coordinated with them.

The next three years witnessed the birth of the Koch political apparatus. Charles Koch sought to recruit like-minded businessmen who would invest in the libertarian cause, an embryonic version of the Koch-supervised donor club that poured $400 million into the 2012 campaign.

The early days did not always go as planned. When David ran for VP to self finance his campaign, he found that it was a harder row to hoe than he thought. And he committed that worst of sins for inherited money,

“Charles was horrified that David had actually had to spend capital instead of just some of the interest on some of his money,” said Ms. Pillsbury-Foster, who became a critic of the brothers’ involvement in the libertarian movement.

Sadly he survived that indecency and with the benefit of corporate welfare and ignored regulations, went on to become. with his brother Charles, the evil financial viziers of those who wish to destroy the US, much as Osama bin Laden was for the Taliban against Russia.