Fdn for Economic Educ FEE

koch lockdown BS

i sorta forgot about this moldy oldy

AN 9 24

alternet-no lnx

Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

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In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.

As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37

Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.

The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.

Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:

“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.

“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38

Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.

Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.

Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:

“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39

The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”

For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”

“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40

This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.

If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.

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RNDOM UPDATE

GGL 9 24

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the lever CMD

earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release.

But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns.

Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.

The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked, even as the virus has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

The academy is the newest initiative designed to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.

That campaign’s most recent success came earlier this month when Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats joined together to pass a symbolic measure to repeal a Biden administration rule requiring large corporations to mandate vaccines or regular COVID tests for workers.

This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign originally started, and how it has continued to supplant public health experts and hijack the governmental response to the pandemic.

The War On Public Health

When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.

Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.

One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.

Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.

To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests.

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.

Tip Jar

“Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection”

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with COVID-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.

The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration’s website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.”

But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren’t verified.

AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly$1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network also pocketed nearly $3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.

In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER’s trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops.

Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch’s foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs.

IFrame Content

Bhattacharya, Gupta, and representatives of AIER did not respond to requests for comment. Kulldorff insisted that he has never received money from the Koch network.

“Koch-affiliated foundations funded pro-lockdown COVID research by Dr. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, but they have never funded me, either directly or indirectly,” said Kulldorff. “Lockdowns have generated huge profits for Koch and other big businesses while throwing children and the working class under the bus.”

“Access To The Very Highest Levers Of Government”

The Great Barrington Declaration and its natural immunity strategy were widely derided by scientists around the world. The strategy was condemned by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and its HIV Medicine Association while World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “unethical.” Thousands of medical professionals called on governments to disregard strategies that rely on natural infection.

“Never in the history of public health has anyone suggested infecting the entire population with a pathogen with which we have no long term experience as a strategy for managing a pandemic,” said epidemiologist and physician Robert Morris, who has advised several federal agencies.

Nevertheless, the declaration and its authors were embraced by a number of political leaders, since their arguments provided their laissez-faire approaches to the pandemic with scholarly validity.

This list included President Trump. Two months before the release of the Great Barrington Declaration, Trump welcomed the document’s authors to a White House meeting, even though the administration’s COVID-19 advisor, Deborah Birx, warned colleagues that the doctors were “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on-the-ground common sense experience.”

Trump’s COVID-19 adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, appeared to be one of several staff who supported the declaration’s strategy. While Atlas has denied urging the natural immunity approach, he publicly claimed that masks do not help curb the virus and called the idea of mandating vaccines for young people a “denial of science,” a claim that has been thoroughly disproved.

The president became enamored with herd immunity and the quick fix it promised for his reelection campaign. In mid-September 2020, Trump began trotting out the concepts that would soon be codified in the Great Barrington Declaration. He declared at an ABC News town hall, “And you’ll develop…a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen.”

Following Trump’s lead, a number of Republican-led states adopted hands-off pandemic strategies.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the resumption of most commerce in November 2020, including indoor dining, and barred localities from enforcing mask mandates and social distancing.

Declaration co-author Bhattacharya advised DeSantis on his approach and called the governor “extraordinary” for his handling of the pandemic. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation banning vaccine mandates statewide.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his state’s mask mandate and COVID business restrictions in March 2021. The next month, he declared Texas could be close to herd immunity. Recently, Abbott issued an executive order banning mask mandates, which a federal judge recently ruled unenforceable because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s central arguments also found support overseas. In September 2020, co-author Gupta met in London with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had been slow to impose lockdowns and implement testing after the coronavirus was first identified in his country. A month after this meeting, Johnson sent a series of texts echoing talking points from the declaration, including that the virus wasn’t a real risk to people under 60.

The London meeting was also attended by Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist for Sweden, a country that became well known for its rejection of lockdowns. In April 2020, Sweden’s public health director asserted, “There is no clear correlation between the lockdown measures taken in countries and the effect on the pandemic.”

“You have to hand it to the [authors of the] Great Barrington declaration: They have had extraordinary access to the very highest levers of government,” said Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University. “They have had a profound impact on policy-making. Time and time again, we’ve seen the [people behind the] Great Barrington Declaration get what they want.”

A Devastating Toll

Despite the Great Barrington Declaration’s claim that it was delineating “the most compassionate approach” to COVID-19, states and countries that embraced its anti-interventionist strategy have all experienced a COVID massacre.

At the time of the declaration’s publication, roughly 200,000 Americans had died from the virus. Since then, that number has quadrupled, the highest known number of any country.

Florida has become a COVID-19 hotspot, accounting for nearly one in five U.S. cases last summer. Virus numbers also surged in Texas, with the two states accounting for one third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths at the time.

Even with all those infections, herd immunity was never achieved. Last week, University of Texas researchers warned that the Omicron variant could lead to the largest surge to date in the state.

International efforts to reach natural herd immunity haven’t fared much better. A scathing report released in October by British lawmakers — many from Prime Minister Johnson’s own party — found that the country’s failure to respond to the virus quickly and aggressively was “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” and led to “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.”

And in Sweden, where roughly 11 out every 100 people had been diagnosed with the virus, COVID-19 fatalities stand at 1,476 deaths per million, many times that of its closest neighbors.

“We Are Intent On Not Letting Omicron Disrupt Work & School”

Despite the costs, right-wing messaging against public health measures continues.

At first glance, lockdowns may appear beneficial to some big businesses, especially those that were deemed essential businesses and boasted robust online marketplaces. But social epidemiologist Justin Feldman, of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, noted that “some regulations directly cost businesses money.”

Feldman explained that “paid quarantine and isolation means workers will be paid to stay home instead of working,” vaccine mandates could “make hiring difficult during a labor shortage,” and mask mandates “signal to the public that there is danger and they will then not patronize businesses.”

That’s likely why in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions. In May, DonorsTrust issued a press release claiming lockdowns hurt workers.

In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch family, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure. Oster’s work was cited by Gov. DeSantis when he signed an order last August allowing parents to defy school mask mandates.

And earlier this month, the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.

Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.

President Joe Biden hasn’t embraced herd immunity through infection the way Trump did, and he instituted a vaccine mandate for large companies that has faced court challenges and pushback from Republican and conservative Democratic lawmakers.

But Biden, whose COVID-19 response team is headed by former investment firm CEO and so-called “businessman’s businessman” Jeffrey Zients, has continued his predecessor’s push to keep the country open, even prematurely declaring “independence” from COVID-19 on Fourth of July last summer.

Earlier this month, Biden assured reporters that lockdowns would not be returning, despite the emergence of the Omicron variant and continued spread of Delta. According to a recent scientific simulation, an eight-week stay-at-home order in response to the new surge could save 300,000 lives.

Last Friday, the White House’s coronavirus response team put out a statement reaffirming its limited approach, a stance Biden reiterated in his remarks on Omicron on Tuesday: “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work & school for the vaccinated.”

The defeat of lockdowns is only part of big business’ takeover of the country’s COVID-19 response.

The country’s eviction moratorium was allowed to lapse after it faced multiple legal challenges funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation — at the same time as Charles Koch began making new investments in real estate. A subsequent moratorium put in place by the Biden administration was also struck down by the Supreme Court.

And while one of Biden’s first presidential promises was to clarify COVID-19 workplace safety standards, the resulting guidelines ended up limited to a small subsection of workers, following months of lobbying by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and other corporate interests have also pushed for a corporate liability shield to protect employers from COVID-19-related lawsuits and have also been fighting against ongoing efforts to release the vaccine intellectual property at the World Trade Organization to speed up global vaccination.

The right-wing push against public health measures shows signs of success. Support for pandemic lockdown measures dropped significantly over nine months from the start of the pandemic. A Gallup poll from November 2020 found that a plurality of 49 percent of Americans said they would shelter in place in response to a serious outbreak, down from 67 percent in March. The decline was mostly due to a “sharp drop” among Republicans.

“A Shining City On A Hill”

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors continue to push herd immunity through COVID-19 infections. Gupta co-founded a U.K. nonprofit called Collateral Globaldedicated to exposing alleged negative impacts of COVID mitigation measures, which has Bhattacharya on staff.

Bhattacharya, meanwhile, published an op-ed last January claiming that vaccinating people in his native India was “unethical” because most had “natural immunity” and the risk of adverse reactions outweighed the benefits of inoculation. A month later, the country experienced its worst-ever surge.

All three co-authors are also now affiliated with the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit founded by former AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker in May 2021 to prevent “the recurrence of lockdowns.” Bhattacharya serves as the organization's senior scholar, Kulldorff is a senior scientific director, and Gupta is an author.

According to Yamey at Duke University, the institute has been actively promoting vaccine disinformation.

“Time and time again, they have peddled dreadful misinformation and disinformation about vaccines,” he said. “They are, for example, vehemently opposed to vaccinating children, even though we know that unvaccinated children are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized. They very sadly went on television to say that health workers don't need to be vaccinated because they falsely claimed vaccination has no effect on transmission.”

Now declaration co-authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, as well as former Trump advisor Scott Atlas have surfaced yet again, as the first three “fellows” at the new Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale, a private non-sectarian Christian school, has long been a factory for conservative thought. In 2016, during a Hillsdale commencement speech, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called it a “shining city on a hill.” Statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher adorn a section of its campus known as “Liberty Walk.” Hillsdale President Larry Arnn chaired Donald Trump’s reactionary 1776 Commission, which sought to craft American history curriculums around America’s strengths.

Hillsdale refuses to accept public funds so it can be free from government mandates. Instead, it accepts large sums from the foundations and donor conduits of right-wing corporate executives and their families. The Charles Koch Foundation has donated over $300,000 to Hillsdale since 2015, and DonorsTrust gave over $3.6 million since 2014, including $2.5 million in 2020. The school has also found generous benefactors in the DeVos family, known for their Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos’ parents, the Princes.

According to the academy’s recently launched website, the new academy will work “to educate policymakers and the general public about important discoveries and ideas that might otherwise be ignored by scientific journals and corporate media.” To do so, the academy plans to host scientific workshops and conferences, publish academic papers, and engage in “media and government outreach.”

But Feldman isn’t buying it.

“They have no interest in science,” he said. “They have been wrong about the pandemic time and time again. They use their stature as 'experts' to push for policies that are indifferent to ongoing mass death.”

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Two young men with links to Charles Koch-funded academic and political operations were recently outed as members of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

*This article was produced in collaboration with Right Wing Watch, a nonprofit reporting outlet covering right-wing extremism in America. Right Wing Watch’s reporting can be found atrightwingwatch.org.

At a 1976 libertarian conference funded by oil executive Charles Koch, conservative think-tanker Leonard Liggio presented a paper on the Nazis’ success at recruiting youth to their movement. Liggio urged the clandestine group of wealthy libertarians to embrace the Nazis’ approach as a way to strengthen their own movement to slash taxes and gut regulations.

Now, decades later, multiple young men who have been affiliated with Koch’s powerful political network have been exposed as members of a white nationalist group.

“Koch’s academic operations are intended to develop extreme anti-government ideas and actions in students by exposing them to the Austrian school of economics and its various offshoots,” Ralph Wilson, co-founder of the Corporate Genome Project and former research director of UnKoch My Campus, told Sludge/Right Wing Watch. “These ideologies make moral arguments for free markets using an overly individualistic notion of ‘freedom’ that has fed and capitalized on the anti-social impulses of frustrated youth for several generations, including white nationalists, paleo-conservatives, neo-confederates, and neo-Nazis.”

Identity Evropa, which recently rebranded as the American Identity Movement, is a white nationalist group in the United States whose members appeared at the Unite the Right 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and have, in other instances, been convicted of criminal activity pertaining to their ideology. The group, based near Washington, D.C., favors secrecy over visibility; it opts for unannounced banner-drops and flash rallies, and it emphasizes propaganda production over public presence. The group’s membership rolls and day-to-day operations were closely guarded before its chat logs were published by independent media nonprofit Unicorn Riot.

Since the chat logs were exposed, antifascist activists have worked to identify members of the organization using the internal discussions. One portion of the chat logs show Identity Evropa members discussing infiltrating local conservative clubs and offices with the hopes of attracting GOP supporters to their racist agenda. Other Identity Evropa-associated personalities have explicitly urged their followers to place themselves in local Republican offices.

The recently rebranded version of Identity Evropa is putting its posters up at colleges and universities across the nation.Twitter

In early March, the antifascist blog IdentifyEvropa determined that Derek Magill, who spoke at an event hosted by the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) in late 2017, is a member of Identity Evropa. Magill denied that the blog had correctly identified him, but its writers uncovered further evidence suggesting that their identification had been correct. Later that month, Unicorn Riot exposed Alex Witoslawski, the former regional field coordinator for the Koch-funded Leadership Institute, as a key Identity Evropa member. Witoslawski had hosted two media training sessions for Identity Evropa members and directed them to sign up for organizing training offered by a different conservative group, the Foundation for Applied Conservative Leadership.

Magill, a young self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose business appears to be defunct, spoke at an IHS entrepreneurship seminar in November 2017. The seminar was co-sponsored with the conservative John Templeton Foundation and Mississippi State University’s Institute for Market Studies, which the Charles Koch Foundation helped found in 2015 with a $365,000 commitment.

IHS told Right Wing Watch/Sludge that it “does not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”

“We work with thousands of people, and we do our best to evaluate each opportunity. Unfortunately, there’s no way to guarantee that a person’s public record is a perfect match for their private thoughts and behavior,” IHS wrote to Sludge/Right Wing Watch in a statement. “When we worked with Derek Magill, he was the director of marketing at Praxis, and we had no knowledge of racist comments, which represent the exact opposite of what we stand for and our values. We have not worked with Magill since 2017 and will not work with him in the future.”

Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, told Sludge/Right Wing Watch that she wasn’t at all surprised to see young men leaving Koch-funded groups for white nationalist organizations.

“For some time, folks have joined the white nationalist movement after first moving through political operations,” Beirich said. “It’s actually a pretty common pattern where folks become more and more conservative and finally make their way into full-on white nationalism. Given the times now, where anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views are common in the GOP and few in the party speak out against them or against Trump when he engages in xenophobia and racism, it actually makes sense to see young people being radicalized into white nationalism through these political activities.”

Charles Koch, currently on the IHS board of directors, has been a leader and key funder of IHS for decades. From 2013 to 2017, the Charles Koch Foundation gave nearly $20 million to IHS, according to tax records. The Charles Koch Institute gave over $275,000 to IHS, and Donors Trust, a dark-money vehicle favored by the Koch family, added nearly $1.1 million.

But IHS isn’t the only Koch-funded institution with connections to Magill. Before dropping out of the University of Michigan, Magill was president of the school’s chapter of the libertarian student group Young Americans for Liberty. He and his chapter were part of a lawsuit seeking reimbursement from the university for an event they hosted featuring an anti-affirmative action speaker. The group was represented by the anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.

The Charles Koch Foundation donated over $2.3 million to the Young Americans for Liberty Foundation from 2013 to 2017, representing a large portion of the group’s revenue. Donors Trust gave $1.3 million, and the Charles Koch Institute added nearly $75,000 during that time period.

Magill’s connections to Koch-backed organizations don’t stop here. From 2016 to 2018, Magill wrote six articles for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a conservative, free-market think tank, and he claims to have spoken there as well. FEE is a “strategic partner” of Young Americans for Liberty. From 2013 to 2017, FEE received close to $260,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, more than $60,000 from the Charles Koch Institute, $440,000 from Donors Trust, and $5.2 million from its sister fund, Donors Capital Fund. Magill’s author page on FEE’s website was taken down in the past week.

People carrying Identity Evropa flags march in front of clergy as they arrive at Emancipation Park during the August 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.Anthony Crider

FEE is also heavily funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which donated over $1.8 million in 2017 to fund a millennial outreach program intended “to dislodge collectivism from its ‘high ground’ position among the rising generation.” Koch ally Liggio attended FEE seminars as a young man in the 1950s and went on to lead the Templeton Foundation’s Religious Freedom Project.

Months after Magill’s stint with FEE appears to have ended, he was logged into Identity Evropa’s chatroom where he posted photos of mugs sold by fascist podcasts he claimed were spotted on his employee’s desk, expressed his relief that his parents were “woke” on the “Jewish Question” conspiracy theory, announced that he was invited to “sit on the board of directors of a very important academic organization,” and signaled his intention to register for Identity Evropa’s annual conference.

According to the antifascists who identified Magill’s connection to Identity Evropa, Magill “offers to pay legal costs and invest in the business ventures of [Identity Evropa] members as well as financially support [Identity Evropa] as a whole.”

Antifascist activists identified Magill by cross-referencing details from his personal life he shared with other Identity Evropa members with publicly available information online. When Magill contested the allegations, activists identified police records of Magill’s meeting with a detective regarding a check fraud complaint that occurred the day before he recounted the incident with Identity Evropa members.

The other Identity Evropa member linked to the Koch network, Witoslawski, also has connections to multiple operations. According to his LinkedIn page, Witoslawski was a regional field coordinator with the Koch-funded Leadership Institute from January 2016 to August 2017. According to Unicorn Riot, Witoslawski taught members of the white nationalist group about how to deflect questions about the organization that would reflect poorly on it, and in April 2018, he walked them through a communications strategy called “Leesburg Grid,” which is taught to conservative activists at Leadership Institute training sessions. He gave an additional seminar to Identity Evropa later that June.

The Leadership Institute operates the website Campus Reform, a site that publishes stories about what it views as bias against conservative university students. In 2014, Campus Reform covered the University of Michigan affirmative action story, quoting Magill extensively.

Since 2013, the Leadership Institute has received $118,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, $44,000 from the Charles Koch Institute, $715,000 from Donors Capital Fund, and $220,000 from Donors Trust, according to federal tax records.

Before his stint at the Leadership Institute, Witoslawski spent six months as the Illinois state chair of Young Americans for Liberty.

In 2015, Witoslawski worked for a Michigan ballot measure committee, Concerned Taxpayers of America, and before that, he spent three years at Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit founded by former libertarian Congressman Ron Paul. His profile page on the group’s website includes a photo of Witoslawski with Paul’s son, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Witoslawki claims to have taken online courses at the Mises Academy, which is run by Austrian economics think tank Mises Institute. The institute, named after Austrian free-market economist Ludwig von Mises, is another beneficiary of the Koch network and has numerous ties to Koch-funded academics, some of whom have been associated with the neo-Confederate League of the South. Liggio sat in on Ludwig von Mises’ seminars at Georgetown University and New York University in the 1950s. Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who published a racist newsletter in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a member of the Mises Institute board.

“The Mises Institute has spent decades legitimizing pro-corporate and white nationalist scholarship while radicalizing young scholars in the U.S. and abroad,” said Wilson, who has extensively researched the institute.

Witoslawski has volunteered himself as a public face for other far-right activists seeking to “infiltrate the mainstream,” and he has lent his Leadership Institute training to white nationalist YouTube audiences, blogs, and podcasts looking to advance their causes in the United States. Identity Evropa leader Patrick Casey invited Witoslawski to walk through the basics of grassroots organizing with the organization’s members, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported last year.

Witoslawski has also authored pieces published on Fash the Nation, a fascist podcast’s blog, including one that criticized conservative commentator Jordan Peterson for not recognizing “the problem with Jewish influence on society.”

“Jews are a foreign elite in Western society—an elite who earned their status through graft and ethnic nepotism, and who use their power to the detriment of the host countries in which they live in,” Witoslawski wrote in his March 24, 2018, column.

In apost taking issue with Jewish conservative media star Ben Shapiro, Witoslawski claimed that “culture is intrinsically linked with ethnicity, and for that reason alone, if we really are interested in conserving America’s traditions and heritage, we must preserve our country’s White heritage.”

Sludge/Right Wing Watch reached out to the Leadership Institute for comment on this story via a contact form listed on its website and Witoslawski via Facebook Messenger, but received no response.

Other GOP megadonors in the Koch network have also helped fund the organizations linked to Magill and Witoslawski. From 2013 to 2017, shipping supplies magnate Richard Uhlein, the fourth-biggest federal political donor of 2018 and a patron of Koch-backed political groups, gave $1 million each to the Leadership Institute and IHS through his family foundation. The family foundation of discount store magnate Art Pope, an IHS board member who co-founded the political nonprofit Americans for Prosperity with Charles and David Koch, gave over $1.6 million to IHS and $40,000 to FEE. The foundation of the parents of Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, gave $50,000 to the Leadership Institute from mid-2013 through mid-2018. DeVos’s in-laws have also attended Koch donor conferences.

“There is no question that the far right political world is radicalizing people into white nationalism and growing its ranks,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Beirich said. “Some of the GOP’s current positions on immigration are no different than those of white nationalists, so we shouldn’t be surprised. We even saw last week that a synagogue attacker followed this pathway, through conservative politics to Ben Shapiro and on to pure hatred. Unfortunately, this is becoming a more well worn path these days.”

What is a 15-minute city?

In a nutshell, the concept of the 15-minute city is that life’s necessities such as schools and grocery stores should be just a short walk or bike ride away. According to Carlos Moreno, an urban planning professor who helped lay out the plan in Paris, cities should be “designed so that we can live, work and thrive in them without having to constantly commute elsewhere.” The goal is to foster healthier habits and stronger social relationships between neighbors by prioritizing green space, accessibility, and safety for human bodies, bikes, and public transportation, rather than cars.

The City of Oxford is implementing a separate strategy, Local Plan 2040, to help achieve these goals. But that’s not what has drawn so much attention in the media.

The traffic plan approved by the Oxford County Council which triggered backlash is meant to reduce commuting time and greenhouse gas emissions from excess traffic. According to a fact check from the Associated Press: “Oxfordshire has approved a plan to put ‘traffic filters’ on some main roads, restricting drivers’ access during daytime hours and freeing up space for buses, cyclists and pedestrians. But car owners can apply for daylong permits to bypass the new rules, and many other vehicles are exempt. All parts of the county will remain accessible by car, officials said.”

Right-wing opposition to the 15-minute city has been firmly rooted in COVID conspiracy theories

Despite what is actually happening in Oxford, right-wing influencers have painted the plan as a thin veneer for controlling every aspect of residents’ movement with the goal of preventing them from owning cars or leaving town at all. According to DeSmog, in 2022 in England, COVID-19 conspiracy theorist David Fleming, along with figures tied to climate denial think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation, created a group to oppose the plan and spread false claims via leaflets to Oxford residents. One founding signatory was Del Bigtree, a U.S. filmmaker and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine group.

The seeds for the conspiracy theory to take root in the U.S. were planted back in April 2020. Frequent Fox News guest and climate change denierSteve Milloy warned of an impending “climate lockdown”and the idea proliferated, with figures like Laura Ingraham and Alex Jones claiming in 2021 that COVID-19 lockdowns were conditioning the public for even more stringent mandates in the name of climate change.

15-minute city fearmongering comes to the US

The ideas driving the 15-minute city are not new. New urbanism and public transit enthusiasts have been gaining traction on social media as Gen Zers and millennials lament their childhood confinement to suburbs that felt unnavigable and isolating. For years, but especially post-pandemic, cities across the globe have prioritized walkability and mixed-use development.

Right-wing media are working hard to maintain the status quo in part through elaborate conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities or anything seemingly related. Right-wing media figures including Australian anti-lockdown campaigner Bernie Spofforth, Turning Point USA contributor Drew Hernandez, and Swedish climate change denier Peter Imanuelsen have insisted they are being spearheaded by The World Economic Forum. In truth, theWEF has mixed things to say about the concept.

Right-wing culture warrior James Lindsay, said in a March 7 segment on One America News’ Morning News with Stephanie Myers that 15-minute cities are a means of “more social control.” He went on to say that they would lead to “new kinds of car non-ownership subscription borrowed models, kind of like Uber, but with no owner. All these things going, so that you don't have freedom of movement” before falsely claiming that in Oxford, “you can only leave your zone so many days a year” and “absolutely no vehicle that emits any kind of ah, you know, I guess CO2 or whatever was allowed to drive during certain hours.”

In the same segment, host Stephanie Myers again suggested that residents of 15-minute cities would be allocated 100 passes per year permitting them to leave their designated zones. In reality, Oxford drivers will always be able to get wherever they want using alternate routes, as only some roads will have traffic filters. Both Myers and Lindsay are misleadingly referencing the fact that local residents will have to apply for 100 day-long permits per year, where they can use any road at any time of the day free of charge.

On an April 6 segment of OAN’s Tipping Point with Kara McKinney, Jeffrey Tucker, former editorial director for the Koch-funded Foundation for Economic Education, blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for 15-minute cities. Tucker said Fauci, who served as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and was a lead member of the White House COVID-19 Task Force under Trump, wanted people “imprisoned in our local communities and condemned to forage and eat bugs” and that he and the ruling oligarchy would insist on “no football games, no concerts, no amusement parks, certainly no church. They want us doomed to a kind of a pre-medieval existence with them in charge.”

In the interview, Tucker also used the familiar trope of Democrats supposedly being soft on crime, but he claimed it was intentional. “They really want to dismantle our cities. There’s no better way to do that than through crime,” he said. And the fact that cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco are “collapsing in a miasma of blood and weed” would supposedly give them an excuse, he said.

Climate change denier Marc Moranospoke about 15-minute cities on an April 10 segment of OAN’s In Focus. Morano told OAN contributor Alison Steinberg that 15-minute cities are “conjuring up a little place called … East Germany, where you literally had to apply to the government in order to go from place to place. … All of this again is so that we will stay at home. That's actually the goal. They loved COVID lockdowns.” Steinberg asked of “radical leftists”: “Do you think they really realize — hey, you're not going to be able to drive to go get your little soy crackers that you like eating every night while you’re watching and playing your video games?”

In an April 11 segment of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle,Laura Ingraham spoke with U.K. professor Norman Fenton, who claimed 15-minute cities are “absolutely catastrophic” and that “the idea is essentially to stop you — yeah, it’s to stop you going out of the zone, stop you traveling wherever you want. … But in practice, people will have to go out of the zone to get to work, to take their kids to school and stuff like that.”

Fenton is a memberof HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team), described by The Daily Dot as “a group of prominent proponents of an anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown, anti-mask strategy.” He has inaccurately suggested that the spike in second-wave COVID-19 deaths in 2021 may have been caused by vaccines.

Before turning his attention to 15-minute cities, Fenton also railed against the UK government's net-zero emissions target, misleadingly conflating it with a report on absolute zero emissions, which is not a current policy goal. He suggests that the government might prohibit airplane travel and shipping in the U.K. by 2050. This is not happening.

Online, one American anti-vaccine group seems particularly concerned about Oxford. Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vax group, promoted a video of a young girl making a speech at a protest in Oxford calling 15-minute cities a “dystopian reality” on Telegram and on Twitter. One article on the group’s news site gives credence to the idea that 15-minute cities could in fact lead to “climate lockdowns.” The group also promoted a February protest against 15-minute cities in Oxford. Kennedy recently announced his bid for the presidency.

Infowarspromoted a video that compares a hen house to a 15-minute city because “it’s a spot-on illustration of how they view the people as vassals, or serfs – who only exist to produce eggs to be harvested.” The Telegram channel for the anti-vax group The Truth About Cancer wrote that 15-minute cities are proof that “we are under attack” from the “globalist ghouls.”

For online conspiracy theory networks, anti-15-minute city propaganda has been a gateway to climate change denial

On social media, an infamous COVID-19 conspiracy theory network has also signaled a shift to climate change denial, with the 15-minute city as a catalyst.

A channel that has been promoted by White Rose, an international disinformation group that operates on a network of Telegram channels, is among those promoting conspiracy theories about the 15-minute city, in addition to climate change denial.

The channel, Wide Awake Media, has 26k subscribers on its Telegram channel and has recently been gaining traction on Twitter. It has occasionally featured posts about climate change but started posting more often on the topic in January 2023 when the topic of 15-minute cities was becoming popular in right-wing media. This topic has provoked violent responses suggesting that leaders who support green policies should be killed.

On March 31, Wide Awake noted on both Twitter and Telegram that it had turned its attention to climate change, calling it a scam and comparing it to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[twit]

members of White Rose, which made headlines for distributing anti-vax stickers, posters, and leaflets, have also discussed the group’s shift to 15-minute cities. The group has repeatedly promoted Wide Awake, which primarily sells merchandise promoting conspiracy theories, in its channel.

The continued popularity of 15-minute city conspiracy theories proves that climate change denial is the perfect place for anti-vax and anti-mask enthusiasm to thrive as COVID-19 becomes less prominent in the news cycle but their need to prove they are “wide awake” persists. We have also seen that it can be easily adapted for U.S. audiences with their specific villains, such as Fauci, and framed as an affront to American values, such as our obsession with cars.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/excerpt-from-naomi-oreskes-the-big-myth/

excerpt:

this is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of “the magic of the marketplace.”

Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Soros popularized the name we find most apt: market fundamentalism. It’s a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs — whether economic or otherwise — is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat “The Market” as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they “distort” the market and prevent it from doing its “magic.” In the late 20th century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the 20th century.

Classical liberal economists — including Adam Smith — recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early 20th century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased — and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former — any compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?

Market fundamentalism is not just the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. It is the belief in the primacy of economic freedom not just to generate wealth but as a bulwark of political freedom. And it is the belief that markets exist outside of politics and culture, so that it can be logical to speak of leaving them “alone.”

We are all familiar with the idea that, as Soros has summarized, “the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” That’s the core argument Adam Smith made in 1776 and contented capitalists have accepted ever since. Market fundamentalists, however, depart from Smith by insisting there is no “common good,” merely the sum of all the individual private goods. For this reason, they reject government’s claims to represent “the people”: there are only people — individuals — who represent themselves, and they do this most effectively not through their governments, even democratically elected ones, but through free choices in free markets.

Milton Friedman, America’s most famous market fundamentalist, went so far as to argue that voting was not democratic, because it could too easily be distorted by special interests and because in any case most voters were ignorant. But rather than consider how special interests might be mitigated or how voters could be better informed, he maintained that true freedom was not expressed in the voting booth. “The economic market provides a greater degree of freedom than the political market,” Friedman said in South Africa in 1976, as he encouraged the citizens of that country not to fuss over apartheid, but to preserve and expand their market-based economy.

Friedman’s argument works when we are talking about the freedom to buy, say, shoes of any type. But it fails when we consider the larger picture, including deceptive advertising, aggressive and misleading PR campaigns, and what economists call “external costs”: costs that are invisible to or misunderstood by the shoe buyers, or that accrue to people who didn’t buy those shoes at all. Pollution is an external cost. What happens when the shoe manufacturer dumps toxic chemicals behind the plant and hides that fact from its workers, investors, and customers? Friedman downplayed the problem by giving it the friendly label of “neighborhood effects,” and claimed that any remedy would almost always be worse than the disease, because of the loss of freedoms or compromises to property rights typically associated with government regulations. In some cases, he may have been right. Regulations do compromise someone’s freedom in order to protect the freedom (and welfare) of others. When it comes to pollution, the “freedom” of factories to dump toxic wastes has been rightly rejected. When it comes to climate change, the “freedom” of corporations to sell oil, gas, and coal jeopardizes the rest of us. This creates a fundamental dilemma for the fundamentalists. But rather than rethink their arguments, market fundamentalists protect their worldview by denying that climate change is real or asserting that somehow “The Market” will fix it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Friedman held that capitalism and freedom are two indivisible sides of the same coin, but this “indivisibility thesis” predates him by decades. In the early 20th century, it was promoted in the United States by a group of industrialists working under the umbrella of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). NAM and its allies used the thesis to argue against political reforms that today we take for granted, such as laws limiting child labor, establishing workers’ compensation, and creating the federal income tax. In the 1930s, they aligned themselves with the electricity industry and used the thesis to argue against the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other elements of the New Deal. Mostly they lost these fights, in part because the thesis suffered a fatal flaw: it wasn’t true. Electricity was a case in point. Markets had failed to bring electricity to millions of Americans who wanted it, but the government had succeeded, and rural Americans were better off economically and no less free. Indeed, they were arguably freer than before, because they now had electrical appliances that reduced manual labor and electric lights to lengthen the usable day.

Because the indivisibility thesis had so little foundation in fact, American business leaders needed to find other ways to shore it up. One way was propaganda. In the 1920s, the National Electric Light Association (NELA) launched a massive campaign that included, among other things, the hiring of academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula to promote pro- market, antigovernment perspectives in emerging business schools and economics programs across the country. They also recruited experts to “prove” that private electricity was cheaper than public electricity, even when the available facts showed otherwise. In the 1930s, NAM reprised the effort, with a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince Americans that business and industry were working just fine, and that the real causes of the Great Depression were unionized labor’s unreasonable demands, coupled with the government’s excessive interference in business affairs and federal taxation that starved industry of the monies it needed to expand productive capacity. Well into the 1940s, NAM produced books, pamphlets, radio programs, lecture series, and documentary and feature films (and later television programs) designed to influence what newspapers had to say about the economy and American life, what teachers taught in the classroom, and, above all, what the American people believed.

Another strategy was to recruit sympathetic intellectuals to help give the myth credibility. For this, American businessmen relied on imports: the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, leaders of the Austrian school of economics. In the 1940s, a group linked to NAM paid for Mises and Hayek to come to America, arranged for them to be hired at New York University and the University of Chicago, respectively, and worked assiduously to promote the economists’ ideas, both in business circles and among the American people generally. This included publishing a dumbed-down version of Hayek’s famous book “The Road to Serfdom” in Reader’s Digest and a cartoon version of it in Look magazine. In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan would encounter that Reader’s Digest version; decades later “The Road to Serfdom” would be promoted by right-wing radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and touted by influential Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and House leader Paul Ryan.

Businessmen helped create America’s first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), established in 1946 by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce manager Leonard Read to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology. They also funded the Hayek-aligned Mont Pelerin Society, a cadre of mostly European economists, cultural commentators, and political theorists promoting a renewed commitment to free-market principles under the aegis of what became known as neoliberalism. And they would help Milton Friedman write his most influential book, “Capitalism and Freedom” — essentially a restatement of the indivisibility thesis — which would dramatically reshape the American cultural conversation in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1988, Reagan would award Friedman both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Few of Friedman’s readers knew that the book’s success was not the product of open competition in the marketplace of ideas: “Capitalism and Freedom” had been financed and nurtured by American businessmen, and it was the most public part of a much larger project. Reader’s Digest notwithstanding, the people who had brought Hayek to America had quickly concluded that his approach was too intellectual and too European to break through to the public.

Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reagan was an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screen career was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation (GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show “General Electric Theater,” where each week his voice and face reached into tens of millions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism and free enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country on behalf of GE — visiting factories, making speeches at schools, and doing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence — promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion and antigovernment vision.

Reagan’s mentor in this work was GE executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, whose antiunion tactics were so extreme they earned a name: Boulwarism. (They would also earn GE several indictments for federal labor law violations.) And while Reagan helped GE promote the ideology of free markets and free choice, the company conspired to rig electricity markets (an offense for which it would be successfully prosecuted in the 1960s). Boulware’s influence transformed Reagan’s politics. He went into GE a New Deal Democrat and came out an antigovernment conservative Republican. GE transformed Reagan’s political fortunes as well; he emerged from his time there with powerful backers in corporate America who helped him launch his career in elected office.

Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, and the success of American market fundamentalism was ultimately a triumph of public relations: its advocates built a myth and persuaded Americans of its truth. By the 1970s, what had begun as a self-interested defense of business prerogatives — one that was factually dubious and characteristically supported by gross distortions and misrepresentations of history — had been transmogrified into a seemingly intellectually robust body of thought.

Meanwhile, a network of libertarian think tanks, heavily funded by industries selling dangerous products including tobacco and fossil fuels, had been established to promote these views in schools, in universities, and in American life writ large. Among other things, these think tanks distributed free of charge millions of copies of Hayek’s and Friedman’s (and Ayn Rand’s) books. Meanwhile, progressive foundations mostly focused on specific issues — like saving whales or expanding access to education — not realizing that a larger ideological battle was under way. The myth spread, influencing American presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, most recently, Donald Trump.

Americans in the early 20th century were largely suspicious of “Big Business” and saw the government as their ally. By the later decades of the century, this had flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” and believed it made more sense to count on the “magic of the marketplace” to solve problems than to engage government. Many Americans saw government as dead weight, taxation as unfair or even a form of theft. That they accepted these claims is proof of this story’s importance: propaganda and persuasion had worked. The people involved in this project were intellectually diverse and geographically dispersed, but they were also in important (and sometimes startling) ways interconnected. Theirs was not a conspiracy, but it was a network of people who knew each other, supported each other morally and financially, and used this mutual support to promote a singular myth.

More snark than sedition?

parcbench:

Gun Owners of America is hardly the only eyebrow-raising friend listed on Liberty Central's Web site -- just the most extreme. Also nestled amid the group of 32 largely establishment outfits such as the Hudson Institute and the National Taxpayers Union, is Concerned Women for America, which has been on an anti-gay tear for the last two decades, and ParcBench.com, which currently features a post alleging thatPresident Barack Obama committed treason when he presided over a session of the U.N. Security Council last fall --and that his administration won't prosecute violations of voting laws committed when white people are the victims.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/koch-network-alums-are-going-full-on-white-nationalist/

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At a 1976 libertarian conference funded by oil executive Charles Koch, conservative think-tanker Leonard Liggio presented a paper on the Nazis’ success at recruiting youth to their movement. Liggio urged the clandestine group of wealthy libertarians to embrace the Nazis’ approach as a way to strengthen their own movement to slash taxes and gut regulations.

Now, decades later, multiple young men who have been affiliated with Koch’s powerful political network have been exposed as members of a white nationalist group.

“Koch’s academic operations are intended to develop extreme anti-government ideas and actions in students by exposing them to the Austrian school of economics and its various offshoots,” Ralph Wilson, co-founder of the Corporate Genome Project and former research director of UnKoch My Campus, told Sludge/Right Wing Watch. “These ideologies make moral arguments for free markets using an overly individualistic notion of ‘freedom’ that has fed and capitalized on the anti-social impulses of frustrated youth for several generations, including white nationalists, paleo-conservatives, neo-confederates, and neo-Nazis.”

Identity Evropa, which recently rebranded as the American Identity Movement, is a white nationalist group in the United States whose members appeared at the Unite the Right 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and have, in other instances, been convicted of criminal activity pertaining to their ideology. The group, based near Washington, D.C., favors secrecy over visibility; it opts for unannounced banner-drops and flash rallies, and it emphasizes propaganda production over public presence. The group’s membership rolls and day-to-day operations were closely guarded before its chat logs were published by independent media nonprofit Unicorn Riot.

Since the chat logs were exposed, antifascist activists have worked to identify members of the organization using the internal discussions. One portion of the chat logs show Identity Evropa members discussing infiltrating local conservative clubs and offices with the hopes of attracting GOP supporters to their racist agenda. Other Identity Evropa-associated personalities have explicitly urgedtheir followers to place themselves in local Republican offices.

In early March, the antifascist blog IdentifyEvropa determined that Derek Magill, who spoke at an event hosted by the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) in late 2017, is a member of Identity Evropa. Magill denied that the blog had correctly identified him, but its writers uncovered further evidence suggesting that their identification had been correct. Later that month, Unicorn Riot exposed Alex Witoslawski, the former regional field coordinator for the Koch-funded Leadership Institute, as a key Identity Evropa member. Witoslawski had hosted two media training sessions for Identity Evropa members and directed them to sign up for organizing training offered by a different conservative group, the Foundation for Applied Conservative Leadership.

Magill, a young self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose business appears to be defunct, spoke at an IHS entrepreneurship seminar in November 2017. The seminar was co-sponsored with the conservative John Templeton Foundation and Mississippi State University’s Institute for Market Studies, which the Charles Koch Foundation helped found in 2015 with a $365,000 commitment.

IHS told Right Wing Watch/Sludge that it “does not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”

But IHS isn’t the only Koch-funded institution with connections to Magill. Before dropping out of the University of Michigan, Magill was president of the school’s chapter of the libertarian student group **Young Americans for Liberty**. He and his chapter were part of a lawsuit seeking reimbursement from the university for an event they hosted featuring an anti-affirmative action speaker. The group was represented by the anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.

Magill’s connections to Koch-backed organizations don’t stop here. From 2016 to 2018, Magill wrote six articles for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a conservative, free-market think tank, and he claims to have spoken there as well. FEE is a “strategic partner” of Young Americans for Liberty. From 2013 to 2017, FEE received close to $260,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, more than $60,000 from the Charles Koch Institute, $440,000 from Donors Trust, and $5.2 million from its sister fund, Donors Capital Fund. Magill’s author page on FEE’s website was taken down in the past week.

FEE is also heavily funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which donated over $1.8 million in 2017 to fund a millennial outreach program intended “to dislodge collectivism from its ‘high ground’ position among the rising generation.” Koch ally Liggio attended FEE seminars as a young man in the 1950s and went on to lead the Templeton Foundation’s Religious Freedom Project.

The other Identity Evropa member linked to the Koch network, Witoslawski, also has connections to multiple operations. According to his LinkedIn page,Witoslawski was a regional field coordinator with the Koch-funded Leadership Institute from January 2016 to August 2017. According to Unicorn Riot, Witoslawski taught members of the white nationalist group about how to deflect questions about the organization that would reflect poorly on it, and in April 2018, he walked them through a communications strategy called “Leesburg Grid,” which is taught to conservative activists at Leadership Institute training sessions. He gave an additional seminar to Identity Evropa later that June.

[unicorn r slides? vid?]

Leadership Institute operates the website Campus Reform, a site that publishes stories about what it views as bias against conservative university students. In 2014, Campus Reform covered the University of Michigan affirmative action story, quoting Magill extensively.

Before his stint at the Leadership Institute, Witoslawski spent six months as the Illinois state chair of Young Americans for Liberty.

In 2015, Witoslawski worked for a Michigan ballot measure committee, Concerned Taxpayers of America, and before that, he spent three years at Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit founded by former libertarian Congressman Ron Paul. His profile page on the group’s website includes a photo of Witoslawski with Paul’s son, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Witoslawki claims to have taken online courses at the Mises Academy, which is run by Austrian economics think tank Mises Institute. The institute, named after Austrian free-market economist Ludwig von Mises, is another beneficiary of the Koch network and has numerous ties to Koch-funded academics, some of whom have been associated with the neo-Confederate League of the South. Liggio sat in on Ludwig von Mises’ seminars at Georgetown University and New York University in the 1950s. Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who published a racist newsletter in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a member of the Mises Institute board.

“The Mises Institute has spent decades legitimizing pro-corporate and white nationalist scholarship while radicalizing young scholars in the U.S. and abroad,” said Wilson, who has extensively researched the institute.

Witoslawski has also authored pieces published on Fash the Nation, a fascist podcast’s blog, including one that criticized conservative commentator Jordan Peterson for not recognizing “the problem with Jewish influence on society.”

Sludge/Right Wing Watch reached out to the Leadership Institute for comment on this story via a contact form listed on its website and Witoslawski via Facebook Messenger, but received no response.

Tags: Alt-Right money in politics white nationalism Foundation for Economic Education Identity Evropa Institute for Humane Studies Leadership Institute Young Americans for Liberty

lee fang atlas

Meanwhile, in the U.S., another free-market ideologue, Leonard Read, was entertaining similar notions after leading the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Los Angeles branch into bruising battles with organized labor. To counter the growth of the welfare state, a more elaborate response would be necessary to share popular debates around the direction of society, without the visible link to corporate interests.

Fisher was propelled forward by a fateful visit to Read’s newly formed nonprofit, the Foundation for Economic Education, in New York, which was founded to help sponsor and promote the ideas of free-market intellectuals. There, libertarian economist F.A. Harper, at the time working at FEE, advised Fisher on methods for creating his own nonprofit in the U.K.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/foundation-for-economic-education?trk=prof-following-company-logo

6/15

Founded in 1946, the Foundation for Economic Education is America's oldest "free enterprise" research and educational institute, headquartered first in Irvington, New York and now Atlanta, Georgia.

Website

http://FEE.org

Industry

Think Tanks

Type

Nonprofit

Headquarters

185 Peninsula Cir Atlanta, GA 30263 United States

Company Size

11-50 employees

Founded

1946

Recent Updates

Foundation for Economic Education Private property is a powerful incentive to conserve resources—you lose if you squander what’s yours.

Cliché #2 -- Because We're Running Out of Resources, Government Must Manage Them

fee.org

It is simplistic to assume that people will blindly use up what sustains them without regard to the incentive structures they face; if they have incentives to conserve, they will do so.

Comment Share

3 months ago

Foundation for Economic Education When it comes to preserving the environment, centrally-planned solutions are actually worse than market solutions.

Why Socialism Causes Pollution

fee.org

The Soviet Union, like all socialist countries, suffered from a massive "tragedy of the commons."

Comment Share

3 months ago

Foundation for Economic Education We have grown accustomed to a series of episodic upheavals that are a consequence of a centrally planned education system.

How the Education System Destroys Social Networks

fee.org

We have grown accustomed to a series of episodic upheavals that are a consequence of a centrally planned education system. It’s cruel and unnatural, yet we now rarely question it.

Like (2)

Comment Share

3 months ago

Chad Bedlington and Michael Bakse

Foundation for Economic Education "Dumb" networks are actually better at adapting to innovation than "smart" networks are.

Decentralization: Why Dumb Networks Are Better

at.FEE.org

“Dumb” networks are the smart choice for innovation and freedom.

Comment Share

3 months ago

Foundation for Economic Education A quick survey of the history of government regulation demonstrates how bureaucratic “solutions” often cause more problems than they solve.

Internet at the Speed of Government

fee.org

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission launched a historic power grab over the Internet, euphemistically known as “net neutrality,” based on a Great Depression-era law to regulate public utilities.

milloy

fang: b/c real reporters laid off, ez to grab for cred; eg Mackinac created mich Transparenct Cter [fe] then hired local nbc kathy hoekstra eg on film tax credit for m moore 209, also FEE

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Economic_Education

Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is a "non-political, non-profit, tax-exempt educational foundation and accepts no taxpayer money. FEE is supported solely by contributions from private individuals, foundations, and businesses and by the sales of its publications," its website states.^[1]

FEE was the first modern think tank established in the United States specifically to promote, research and promulgate free market and libertarian ideas. It continues to do so through its monthly magazine, The Freeman, as well as through pamphlets, lectures, and academic sponsorship. It also publishes reprints of classic libertarian texts, and arranges seminars for American public figures.

History

FEE was founded in 1946 by Leonard Read, general manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, for whom "the free-enterprise philosophy had already become almost a religion".^[2] FEE's initial officers included Read as president, Henry Hazlitt as vice-president, and B.F. Goodrich chairman David Goodrich as chairman.

Many libertarians have credited Read's effort as one of the bases for the international post-War libertarian movement. For instance, Friedrich Hayek was apparently inspired partly by FEE when he formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.

Staff and officers

Current staff

As of 2011 the following were listed as staff: ^[3]

Lawrence Reed, President, since 2008
Carl Oberg, Executive Director
Linda Newton, Director of Human Resource & Finance
Sheldon Richman, Editor, The Freeman & TheFreemanOnline.org
Michael Nolan, Managing Editor, The Freeman & TheFreemanOnline.org
Tsvetelin Tsonevski, Director of Academic Affairs
Anna Cuthrell, Director of Programs
Chuck Grimmett, Director of Web Media

Former officers

Richard B. Ebeling, President

Select Faculty Members

As of 2011 the following were listed as faculty: ^[4]

Doug Bandow
Brad Birzer
Peter Boettke
Brian Brenberg
Bill Butos
Anthony Carilli
Christopher Coyne
Paul Cwik
Bob Ewing
Burt Folsom
Roger Garrison
Mark Hendrickson
Steven Horwitz
Israel Kirzner
Peter Leeson
Edward J. López
Robert McNamara
Matthew Mitchell
Isaac Morehouse
Ivan Pongracic
Benjamin Powell
Jeff Proctor
Lawrence W. Reed
Gregory Rehmke
Mario Rizzo
Bruce Rottman
Frederic Sautet
Frank Stephenson
Nikolai Wenzel
Lawrence White

Initial officers

David M. Goodrich, Chairman (also Chairman of the B.F. Goodrich Company)
Leonard Read, President
Henry Hazlitt, Vice President
Fred R. Fairchild, Secretary; Professor of economics at Yale University
Claude Robinson, Treasurer; President of the Opinion Research Institute

Other

Mark Skousen, President 2001-2002

Initial staff

Herb Cornuelle, Assistant to the President
W.M. Curtiss, Executive Secretary
F. A. Harper, Economist
Orval Watts, Editorial Director
A.D. Williams, Jr., Director of Public Relations

Trustees

Current

The following are currently serving as trustees as of 2007).^[5]

Initial

Harold Luhnow, president of William Volker & Company
A.C. Mattei, president of Honolulu Oil Corporation
William A. Paton of the University of Michigan
Charles White, president of the Republic Steel Corporation
Leo Wolman, professor of economics at Columbia
Donaldson Brown, former vice-president of General Motors
Jasper Crane, former vice president of Du Pont
B.E. Hutchinson, chairman of the finance committee of Chrysler Corporation
Bill Matthews, publisher of the Arizona Star
W.C. Mullendore, president of the Southern California Edison Company

Contact information

Foundation for Economic Education

30 South Broadway

Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533

Toll free: 800 960-4FEE

Phone: 914 591-7230

Website: http://www.fee.org/

Resources

References

External articles

Henry Hazlitt, The Early History of FEE, The Freeman, Foundation for Economic Education, March, 1984, Vol. 34, No. 3.

wiki

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is an American nonprofit educational organization which promotes the principles of laissez-faire economics, private property, and limited government.^[5] FEE says its mission is "to inspire, educate and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical and legal principles of a free society." According to Gary North, formerly FEE director of seminars and a current Ludwig von Mises Institute scholar, FEE is the"granddaddy of all libertarian organizations."^[6]

According to its website, "FEE is constantly focused on providing high school and college students with the inspiration, education, and networking they need to become effective advocates for liberty and the free-market system." ^[3][7] FEE publications include The Freeman (a monthly magazine) and various pamphlets and libertarian texts.^[8]

FEE is headquartered in Irvington, New York with a satellite office in Atlanta.^[9]

[hide]

History[

Founding vice-president Henry Hazlitt

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F_A_%22Baldy%22_Harper.jpg)

[](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F_A_%22Baldy%22_Harper.jpg "Enlarge")

F. A. "Baldy" Harper notable lecturer at FEE

Founding[edit]

FEE was founded in 1946 to promote free-market economics, with financial backing provided by the William Volker Fund.^[10][11] The founding documents of FEE said: "The job of economic education must be undertaken now while those who appreciate the value of liberty are still in a position to support it."^[12]

In its first years, FEE opposed the Marshall Plan, Social Security, and Minimum Wages, among other American social and economic policies. In its programs, FEE supported the advocacy of its free-market views with evocations of Christian morality alongside economic efficiency. Referencing the influence of religion on the economic policy proposals of FEE, board member Jasper Crane stated, "we are going to be beaten if we rely entirely on the argument of dollars and cents."^[11]

People[

The initial officers^[13] of FEE were Leonard E. Read as president,^[17] Henry Hazlitt as vice-president, and chairman David Goodrich of B. F. Goodrich. Other trustees on the FEE board have included wealthy industrialist Jasper Crane of duPont, H. W. Luhnow of William Volker & Co., and Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society.^[5][18][19] Read served as president from 1946 until his death in 1983.^[20] Perry E. Gresham followed his friend Read as president in 1983.^[20] The presidency of FEE^[21] from 1983 to 1984 was held by John Sparks Sr., from 1984 to 1985 by Bob Love, from 1985 to 1988 by a series of acting presidents, then from 1988 to 1992 by Bruce Evans. After retiring from Grove City College where he taught economics, Hans Sennholz served as president from 1992 to 1997.^[22] Before serving as Chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, Donald J. Boudreaux served as president from 1997 to 2001.^[23] Economist, investment analyst, professor and author Mark Skousen served as president from 2001 to 2002.^[24] Author and professor Richard Ebeling served as president from 2003 to 2008.^[25] Economist, author, and professor Lawrence W. Reed became the current president in 2008.^[9]

In one FEE publication, founding president Leonard E. Read compared the threat of the U.S. government's economic interventions to the enslavement of black Africans in the United States:^[26] He wrote,

There would be no tigers in zoos if they remained as ferocious as when first captured...There never would have been any Negro slavery in the United States had the Negroes remained as intractable as when first taken from their African habitat. But, like the tigers, most of them soon lost consciousness of a freedom greater than the enslavement into which they were plunged. They became accustomed to their lot and, for the most part, accepted it.

The tiger and the Negro are in no way singular in this respect. We note on every hand this same easy and willing accommodation to the status quo, regardless of how onerous it may be. Americans who only a few years ago screamed like wounded apes at some intervention by government today may give that very same intervention their approval. Indeed, you can hear them exclaim, "How could we possibly do without it!"

Significance[

**Murray Rothbard** credited FEE with creating a "crucial open center" for a libertarian movement. During his extended graduate studies at Columbia University, Rothbard was influenced by FEE co-founder Baldy Harper and his opposition to government.^[27] Friedrich Hayek saw FEE as part of the inspiration for the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.^[28] FEE provided a financial subsidy to the Mont Pelerin Society.^[29] Early in the Mount Pelerin Society's history, Hayek did not like having so many members from FEE.^[30]

Location[

FEE briefly occupied two rooms on the 30th floor of the Equitable Building in Manhattan at the time of its founding.^[31] It moved to its longtime location^[32] in Irvington, New York shortly after its founding.^[33] Recently, FEE opened an office in downtown Atlanta and moved its operations there.^[9] It is currently seeking to sell its former headquarters building to an assisted living facility which plans a controversial high-density redevelopment of the site.^[34][35][36]

Programs[

The FEE describes its mission as to "inspire, educate and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical and legal principles of a free society."^[3] FEE offers a variety of programs for high school, college, and graduate students. Since 1946 FEE has also sponsored public lectures by various thinkers, including Ludwig von Mises,^[37] F.A. Hayek,^[38] Henry Hazlitt,^[39] Milton Friedman,^[40] James Buchanan,^[40] Vernon Smith,^[41] Walter Williams,^[42] F.A. "Baldy" Harper,^[43] and William F. Buckley Jr..^[44]

Publications[

In 1945 du Pont executive Jasper Crane, along with Alfred Kohlberg, started a capital campaign for the organization.^[45] After contributions from J. Howard Pew, Inland Steel,Quaker Oats, and Sears enough funding was available for FEE to start publishing The Freeman in 1950.^[46] ^[47] FEE publishes books, articles, and pamphlets both on paper and digitally that the foundation considers classic works on liberty.^[48] These include the notable publications I, Pencil: My Family Tree by Read,^[49] The Law by Bastiat,^[50]Anything That's Peaceful by Read,^[51] *Planned Chaos* by Mises,^[52] Industry-Wide Bargaining by Wolman,^[53] Up from Poverty: Reflections on the Ills of Public Assistance by Sennholz,^[54] and The Virtue of Liberty by Machan.^[55]

According to Hazlitt, the greatest influence on his writing in economics was the work of Ludwig von Mises, and he is credited with introducing the ideas of the Austrian School of economics to the English-speaking layman. In 1938, for example, he reviewed the recently published English translation of Mises’s influential treatise Socialism for The New York Times, declaring it "a classic" and “the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned."^[14] After the Jewish economist's emigration to the United States from Nazi-dominated Europe in 1940, Hazlitt arranged for Mises to contribute editorials to The New York Times, and helped to secure for Mises a teaching position at New York University. Along with the efforts of his friends, Max Eastman and John Chamberlain, Hazlitt also helped introduce F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to the American reading public. His 1944 review in The New York Times caused Reader's Digest, where Eastman served as roving editor, to publish one of its trademark condensations, bringing the future Nobel laureate's work to a vast audience.^[15]

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Unlike many other writers of his generation from the political right, Hazlitt never experienced a period when he was a socialist or communist, or a significant change in his classical liberal political views. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education, which also acquired his large personal library in the 1980s. Established by Leonard Read in 1946, FEE is considered to be the first "think tank" for free market ideas. He was also one of the original members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.^[16]

With John Chamberlain (and Suzanne La Follette as managing editor), Hazlitt served as editor of the early free market publication The Freeman from 1950 to 1952, and as sole editor-in-chief from 1952 to 1953, and its contributors during his tenure there included Hayek, Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, as well as the writers James Burnham, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, John T. Flynn,Frank Meyer, Raymond Moley, Morrie Ryskind and George Sokolsky.^[17]

Prior to his becoming editor,The Freeman had supported Senator Joseph McCarthy in his conflict with President Harry Truman on the issue of communism, "undiscriminatingly" according to some critics, but upon becoming editor, Hazlitt changed the magazine's policy to one of support for President Truman.^[18]

The Freeman is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., which from the start included many of the same contributing editors.^[19] Hazlitt himself was on the masthead of National Review, either as a Contributing Editor or, later, as Contributor, from its inception in 1955 until his death in 1993. There were differences between the journals: The Freeman under Hazlitt was more secular and presented a wider range of foreign policy opinion than the later National Review.^[18]

Even prior to her success with The Fountainhead, the novelist Ayn Rand was a friend of both Hazlitt and his wife, Frances, and it was Hazlitt who introduced Rand to Mises, bringing together the two figures who would become most associated with the defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism.^[20] The two became admirers of Hazlitt and of one another.^[21]

Hazlitt became well known both through his articles and by frequently debating prominent politicians on the radio, including: Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and U.S. Senators Paul Douglas and Hubert H. Humphrey, the future Vice President.^[5] In the early 1950s, he also occasionally appeared on the New York television current events program Longines Chronoscope, interviewing figures such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., along with coeditor William Bradford Huie.^[22] At the invitation of philosopher Sidney Hook, he was also a participating member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s.^[23]

When he finally left Newsweek in 1966, the magazine replaced Hazlitt with three university professors: "free-market monetarist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, middle-of-the-roader Henry Wallich of Yale, and Keynesian Paul A. Samuelson of M.I.T."^[5] His last published scholarly article appeared in the first volume of The Review of Austrian Economics (now, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics) in 1987.

fdr wrecked ecn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burton_W._Folsom,_Jr.

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2008/09/30/3047/global-warming-heated-denials

Making denials global

In May, the Competitive Enterprise Institute held its annual fundraising dinner at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill. Tickets costed anywhere from $250 to $2,500 a plate, depending on the level of sponsorship. The event raised about $400,000, said CEI’s Kazman. The keynote speaker was none other thanVáclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic.

Klaus has been a prominent denier and was also a featured speaker at the Heartland Institute’s conference earlier this year.

A longtime friend of the CEI, Klaus founded his own think tank in 1998, the Center for Economics and Politics, in Prague. His Center has published a book in Czech on global warming featuring the work of prominent deniers, as well as a Czech-language translation of “Global Climate Change: Facts Instead of Myths,” by the National Center for Policy Analysis. The think tank describes itself as pro-market, with a mission of formulating and promoting policies based on “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, and Trans-Atlantic relationship.”

While the group doesn’t disclose its funding sources, saying that it relies on private support, The Cato Institute and The Foundation for Economic Education are featured partners on their website.

Reaching out to international groups to spread climate change skepticism will only increase, said Davies of Greenpeace. At the Heartland Institute’s conference, a number of the event’s co-sponsors were from abroad, including think tanks in India, China, Australia, Europe, and Canada.

Fdn for Economic Educ FEE

The War On Public Health

“Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection”

“Access To The Very Highest Levers Of Government”

A Devastating Toll

“We Are Intent On Not Letting Omicron Disrupt Work & School”

“A Shining City On A Hill”

Read more from Sludge:

What is a 15-minute city?

Right-wing opposition to the 15-minute city has been firmly rooted in COVID conspiracy theories

15-minute city fearmongering comes to the US

For online conspiracy theory networks, anti-15-minute city propaganda has been a gateway to climate change denial

History

Staff and officers

Current staff

Former officers

Select Faculty Members

Initial officers

Other

Initial staff

Trustees

Current

Initial

Contact information

Resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

External articles

Contents

History[

Founding[edit]

People[

Significance[

Location[

Programs[

Publications[

Making denials global

Attachments