magiadoreal

In 2010, two of the Koch brothers, Charles of Wichita, Kan., and David of New York, rather suddenly became the top-of-mind conservatives for American liberals. That was partly because at that moment the Democratic Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, so there wasn’t a dominant conservative politician to focus on; partly because of a wave of news media attention, notably an influential story on the Kochs’ political activities by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker; and partly because of the rise of the Tea Party movement, of which the Koch political apparatus was a primary backer. The conservative victories in the Congres­sional elections that fall looked like conclusive proof of the Kochs’ power. The very first television ads the Obama re-election campaign ran in 2012 were attacks on the Kochs, not on the Republican Party. Daniel Schulman, a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones magazine , undertook “Sons of Wichita” during that ...