Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Oil magnate T. Boone Pickens is not what you would call a liberal, or a tool of the democratic establishment. He is a conservative Texas Oil Baron. When he calls out Koch Industries for manipulating energy policy, its not like you’re hearing from Michael Moore. The video above is taken from a longer interview at Yahoo’s Daily Ticker.

The Kochs are, of course, among the richest people in the US, sons of a rabid right wing founding member of the  John Birch Society.

ThinkProgress:

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch have been dominant financiers for conservative front groups and nonprofits for nearly three decades. Their money has flowed to organizations dedicated to lobbying for corporate and upper income tax cuts, as well as to groups responsible for mobilizing Tea Party rallies against President Obama. But the Koch family’s association with fringe right-wing groups began a generation earlier with Fred Koch, the patriarch of the clan.
–

..the New American, the official mouthpiece of the John Birch Society, published a piece this morning celebrating Fred and the Koch family’s pivotal role in developing the group:

Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives, from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television — all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. […] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer. He spent a generous portion of his later years using his wealth and influence to fight the communism he abhorred. He was an early member of the The John Birch Society’s National Council, an advisory group to JBS founder Robert Welch. Koch supported a variety of freedom-related causes, all the while continuing to build the company today known as Koch Industries.

The Bircher ode to Koch glosses over Fred’s record of bigotry. In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a “mongrelization” of the races.

It’s important to keep in mind that the climate denial movement springs directly from the racist, red-baiting, retrograde troglodytes of the Joe McCarthy era. Below, the “grass roots” tea party group, Americans for Prosperity, gathers in its annual meeting to pay tribute to, and get marching orders from, David Koch himself.

Over recent years, those orders have been to increasingly disrupt America’s widely popular move to renewable energy, which is clearly seen as a threat (mongrelization of the energy system?) by the Kochs. This includes both quiet funding of online disinformation campaigns, and overt support of “think tank” organizations who develop and provide a pseudo-intellectual fig leaf for the “Obama is a Kenyan” crowd.

Below, see how a young tea party activists teaches aspiring internet trolls in how to disrupt and distort public discussion on the internet. Note how the young man is unable to see the difference between Tom Paine disseminating real ideas, and his techniques for “manipulating the medium”.  A primary example given is the manipulation of book recommendations and reviews on Amazon. “80 percent of the books I put a star on,” he brays tellingly,  “..I don’t read. That’s how it works!”

You can be sure that a good number of the abusive and ignorant comments on climate themed news articles come from exactly this kind of info activism, both paid and volunteer.

This is a tightly organized, well funded, top down, rigidly authoritarian movement, that has wrested control of one of our major political parties, and wields influence far beyond the tiny numbers of true believers, mainly because of the financial leverage of the Koch Brothers.

T. Boone gets it, its time the mainstream media woke up as well.