I was cautioned to surrender This I could not do
There is a puff piece about Charles Koch in the Wall Street Journal in which he claims that the inflammation of partisan politics enormous amounts of his money had helped fuel was a mere youthful indiscrection of his 60s and 70s but he now realizes the error of his ways:
Four days before this year’s presidential election, Charles Koch—the voluble Kansas billionaire who has spent a fortune injecting his particular brand of prairie libertarianism into the American political debate—pauses at the other end of the line when asked if he will vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
“That’s a very divisive question, because however I answer, that’s going to upset a bunch of people,” he says. “That’s why there’s a secret ballot.”
Mr. Koch, whom Forbes calls the 15th-wealthiest man in the U.S., says he isn’t interested in more division. At age 85, he says, he is turning his attention to building bridges across partisan divides to find answers to sprawling social problems such as poverty, addiction, recidivism, gang violence and homelessness. His critics are skeptical, noting that his fierce Republican partisanship over the years blew up a lot of bridges.
[…]
After President Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and the tea party (which pushed to slash federal spending) emerged, Mr. Koch threw his weight behind the new movement and its candidates. “We did not create the tea party. We shared their concern about unsustainable government spending, and we supported some tea-party groups on that issue,” Mr. Koch wrote in an email. “But it seems to me the tea party was largely unsuccessful long-term, given that we’re coming off a Republican administration with the largest government spending in history.”
Mr. Koch said he has since come to regret his partisanship, which he says badly deepened divisions. “Boy, did we screw up!” he writes in his new book. “What a mess!”
Oopsie!
But if scroll down to the third last paragraph:
Still, his political spending remains almost entirely partisan. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Seems pretty partisan to me. But maybe Koch has matured a lot over the last week…
Charles Koch’s machine is pouring cash into David Perdue’s Georgia Runoff https://t.co/0tNCsxBxMk— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) November 12, 2020
Hey, unify this!
In fairness, who knows what kind of wild-eyed radicalism could be produced by a Senate with Joe Manchin as the median vote? What choices does he have, really.