In Completely Out of Touch news, the Koch Brothers hosted a retreat for Republican Presidential candidates this weekend where, in addition to making the candidates dance for donations to their campaigns, they hosted an All-Male Panel about activism where they compared their efforts toward Republican leadership to struggles for civil rights. Because clearly, nothing says oppressed quite like older, wealthy white men who support misogynist, transphobic, and homophobic policies.
But hey, at least there was one black participant in the panel:
All-male panel at retreat where Kochs compare their work to Susan B Anthony and MLK http://t.co/zmRogIQab6 pic.twitter.com/xCU8J3tbKT
— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) August 3, 2015
According to The Washington Post, Charles Koch had this to say about both his family and his party’s mission:
Look at the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement. All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.
Which ones, I wonder? Apparently, a big focus of the weekend was on how devoted the Koch brothers are to helping the poor. Well, they’d better be, considering that the policies their candidates support, not to mention the corporations from which they get their donations, work to keep them poor. Because corporations are people, too, didn’t cha know. Thanks, Citizens United! Â I guess they just really want to keep poor people around…so they can help them?
Oh, and apparently the lone female Republican Presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina, formerly a Hewlett-Packard CEO, is the only Republican woman they know, because they couldn’t find any other knowledgeable women to have sit on the panel alongside their one black participant. Whatever happened to Mitt Romney’s binders of women? QUICK! SOMEONE CONSULT THE BINDERS!
The panel also focused on “the plight of the disenfranchised.” Fiorina had this to say about the Koch Brothers’ fundraising network and why she attended the retreat:
These are people who care deeply about our nation. The foundation that the Koch brothers have built has invested in the power of ideas. They’ve invested in the power of ground games. They’ve invested in the power of lifting people up.
That’s kinda hard to believe, considering that the Republicans they support were responsible for gutting the Voting Rights Act, which is the thing that Martin Luther King Jr. fought so hard for to ensure that states allowed people to vote regardless of race, by removing Section 5, which required that states have to run all their new voting laws by the federal government first, to ensure that they’re up to snuff. Chief Justice John Roberts said that “our country has changed” – meaning that we’re all past racism and so we don’t need all these blanket protections anymore. Well, clearly he was wrong, because pretty much the second the Voting Rights Act was changed, eight states instituted new voting laws that disenfranchised a bunch of people – namely, people of color who would likely vote Democrat. So, lifting people up involves taking away their voice in the political process?
What’s more, while there’s a female Republican candidate in Fiorina, and a Latino candidate in Marco Rubio, the current Republican front-runner is apparently Donald freaking Trump, which goes to show how ready Republican voters are to fight for change and the disenfranchised. I guess having a reality show and owning hotels has its privileges?
And that’s really what this is all about. Privilege. Specifically white privilege, male privilege, and good ol’ fashioned class privilege. The Koch Brothers may be working really hard to fix their public image and make themselves over into teddy bears who really care about people. But the fact of the matter is, they put their enormous funds behind candidates who take people’s rights away and actively work to keep poor people in their place.
The American people know hypocrisy when they see it. I hope.
(via Jezebel; Image via DonkeyHotey on Flickr)
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