Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowCLASSIC: A Long Shadow: Life and Times of David Koch
When philanthropist, business magnate and political activist David Koch passed away, the media scrambled to address his legacy - but what is that legacy, exactly? Join Ben and Matt as they explore the life of David Koch, and the bizarre, insidious ways the political engine he helped create still welds enormous influence on the U.S. after his demise.
Welcome back to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. Back in twenty nineteen, a real life character straight out of Atlas Shrugged passed away. You have doubtlessly heard of the Koch Brothers. You have probably heard of David Koke, who was a philanthropist, real life business tycoon and diplomatically put a political activist.
And do you guys.
Remember how it was similar to Luigi Mangione, The public discourse on social media was incredibly different from the establishment media's eulogies and the awards and analysis they heaped upon this guy.
Yeah, reminds me of the more recent one with Kissinger a it keet Rip that guy. Isn't it funny how somebody like this that is so influential on the planet people just don't know much about him. But you know, they can tell you much of the life story of you know, their favorite pop singer or something. And you know, I could do that with some of the Dave Matthews Band members, But I couldn't have told you much about this guy until we did this episode.
Yeah, what are you saying? You don't know all the backstory and bias of every member of the Dave Matthews Band. Past and present.
Matt, Oh no, no, I'm saying I do. I didn't know, mister Coke.
Okay, got it. However, you don't need to, mister Coke. Is like understanding physics. You don't need to understand physics to be affected by the principles of the reality in which we live and in a very real way. David Koch's legacy continues. He created or co created a political engine that still wields enormous influence on the United States today, up to and including recent elections. What do you say we jump right into this classic episode, from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt. Nola isn't here today, but he'll be back shortly.
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are you. You are here and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Thank you so much for tuning in, fellow conspiracy realists. Today's episode is a bit of a retrospective, but it involves a bit of the future as well. And this episode may be divisive to some of our listeners. We always hope our episodes are divisive. That means we're doing something right.
Yeah. Ultimately, this episode is the It's about the line between freedom and wealth. What that means is freedom, wealth is wealth? Freedom? What are we all struggling to do here with our jobs and trying to prosper? Like, what's the end goal?
So as we as we explore today's strange tale, as we dig through the rabbit hole, peel back layers of the figurative onion, we'd like to hear from you, as longtime listeners, know you do not have to wait till the end of the episode to let us know your thoughts. If the spirit so moves you, you can pause and call us directly.
We are one eight three three STDWITK, So keep that in mind.
And there may be some things that feel a little bit high level because we are exploring the life and times and the long shadow of a man named David Coke koc H. Who is David Coke? Great question? Here are the facts. David Hamilton Coke was born on May third, in Wichita, Kansas, in nineteen forty. His dad, fred Coke fred Sea Cooke, was a chemical engineer, and his paternal grandfather, a fellow named Harry Coke, was a Dutch immigrant. He was a newspaperman. He was one of the founding shareholders of a railway interest. Now David Hamilton Coke was the third of four sons. He had two older brothers, Charles Coke and Frederick Cooke, and then he had a fourth brother. This is an interesting story. He had a fourth brother named Bill. Bill is technically the youngest of the four Coke boys. He was born nineteen minutes after David. Yes, they're twins.
That's right. And then we just kind of continue following David's life as he attended Deerfield Academy. This is in Massachusetts. It's a prep school. It's a very nice place, has a very good reputation.
Right. Deerfield Academy is a gathering place for quite a few influential people, or the children of influential people who will go on to inherit their parents' position. People like King Abdullah the second All Hussein of Jordan. Well Rockefellers go there, and of course COOCHX go.
There, there you go. And another place that highly influential people go is where David ended up. Next, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and there he earned a bachelor's of Arts and Sciences. Then he went on to earn a Masters of Science.
In chemical engineering. Both of those he was He's a tall guy and was a tall guy, about six and a half feetal and he was known for being pretty good at basketball during his time. He averaged twenty one points per game over the course of three years. I'm throwing in this fact to humanize him a little bit. So now with that, yeah, he likes basketball and he was pretty good. Yeah, just him as a person. Let's talk about his career. Coke joined Coke Industries, the family business, working for his older brother Charles. David started out as a technical services manager and nine years later, nineteen seventy nine, he becomes the president of the company's engineering division and it's renamed Chemical Technology Group. All the while, ever since the death of the patriarch, fred Seacoke, there's been growing tension between the four brothers. This came to a head in June of nineteen eighty three when Frederick and Bill, the younger twin and the older brother when their shares of the company were bought out for one point one billion dollars. And this bitter feud has a lot of stuff going on, like they didn't speak for years after the conclusion of this stuff. The family felt betrayed by Bill, who essentially blew the whistle on some sketchy behavior by Coke Industries and Native American land.
And Bill is the youngest of the two twins David.
And Bill nineteen minutes younger, and all three of them attempted to blackmail their brother Frederick based on what they suspected about his sexual orientation.
Wow.
Yeah, so the money changed the family dynamics anyway, without going too far into the Shakespearean tension between the siblings, long story short, by twenty ten, David and Charles Coke controlled the company. Each of them owned forty two percent of Coke Industries.
Wow, that's really high. That's a high number in something as high stakes as Coke Industries. And then on June fifth, twenty eighteen, We're jumping quite a bit ahead here, but David Coke announced he was going to retire from that from his position within the company, but he was He would end up staying on a little bit as like kind of a from twenty eighteen well into twenty nineteen as kind of a ceremonial position within the company, but he was officially stepping down due to health concerns because he had cancer.
That's correct, Yes, David Coke was diagnosed with prostate cancer way back in nineteen ninety two. Like anyone who is diagnosed with something as terrible as prostate cancer, he definitely has the motivation to pursue every possible avenue of treatment. Unlike many people diagnosed with prostate cancer, he also has the means to pursue these treatments. He goes through chemotherapy, he goes through radiation treatments, he gets surgery. This all fails to completely eliminate the cancer, and it keeps returning. And so it comes to pass that, after a long battle with prostate cancer, David Coke passes away in New York on Southampton, New York, on August twenty third of twenty nineteen. He's seventy nine years old, and according to the official statements of his loved ones his relatives in the press, there is no definitive cause of death that was cited yet, but you know, most people are reasonably assuming or speculating that this was somehow related to his ongoing cancer battle. Sure, at this level of wealth, the Coke estate, just David Coke's part of it can function in many ways as though the person who helmed it is still very very much alive. The institutions and systems that David Coke helped create didn't pass away when he passed away. But what sort of systems did he create? How much money are we talking? Let's take a break for a word from our sponsor, and assuming that Coke Industries doesn't buy us in the next few minutes, let's continue to explore this story.
And we're back. And we are also now owned by Coke Industries.
Who are also owned by Illumination Global Unlimited.
So we're straight. Everything's fine, We're.
Back in the family. But what is Coke Industries? This is how we This is the best way for us to answer the questions about wealth. Here's the gist. The thing we call Coke Industries today began way back in nineteen forty as the Wood River Oil and Refining Company. This was co founded by Fred C. Coke in nineteen sixty seven in honor of Fred Coke, it was renamed Coke Industries. Since then, that's been the shorthand way to refer to this enormous conglomerate. And when we say enormous conglomerate, we're talking about a disquieting number of things.
Yeah. Yeah. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Coke Industries is what you would call a private conglomerate. They've got all kinds of different things, companies that they control, and everything from petroleum and chemicals, the productions of that and the distribution of those chemicals through pipelines. There's some ranching going involved. There's some chemical chemical tech occurring here. There's all kinds of commodity training, minerals, how do you get them, where do you find them? What do you do with those minerals? Capital markets and fibers are in everything you guys, financial services, you got paper, the pulp that you need to build the paper, as well as business development, which is interesting in its own right because that's how you get a lot of the other companies to become or come to fruition right exactly.
Today, Coke Industries is the second largest private company in the United States. What's number one, you may ask. It's a company called Cargill, which we can save for a different episode. Coke Industries has an annual revenue of one hundred and ten billion dollars and it has around one hundred and twenty thousand employees. So two things about those numbers. That one ten billion dollars indicates a growth trend, because in twenty sixteen it was one hundred billion, so they went up by ten bill And those one hundred and twenty employees, those that number may not factor in contractors, freelancers, so on. So depending on how we define employee, that number could be a little bit higher. It's also active in sixty countries, which means that it is probably selling something to you. You have almost certainly bought or used a product created by Coke Industries, because in short, they sell a ton of stuff.
Oh, you've certainly encountered them. I remember ages ago when we were doing this show, we did a check up to see what Coke Industries owned, and we listened off some things, including things like if you're just walking through a grocery store, let's say, if you're in the United States or maybe in another country, you may see things like quilted, Northern, or soft and gentle or brawny, maybe angel soft, mm sparkle to any of those catch your ear because it's probably a paper product that you use to clean something or wipe your hands up on. There's a lot of this. Mardi Gras, another one Dixie as in cups from Dixie.
They also own Georgia Pacific, which is the largest manufacturer of plywood and corrugated boxes and containers in the US. They produce all sorts of textiles and plastics to the world's largest producer of lycra. They produce stain Masters, solar max all a polyshield, oxy Clear. They make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt, fracking chemicals, ethylene.
I'd just like to point out here that they own a lot of the raw materials that end up becoming a lot of the other products. That's kind of what Coke Industries does here when you're talking about, you know, getting crude oil to then process for a whole bunch of different kinds of textiles and plastics, right or you're talking about Georgia Pacific getting all the wood that you need to create all of the other paper products and other things like that. It's it's smart business, I guess, like essentially controlling controlling the processes which you need to make an end thing, right, the products of production. Yeah, owning, owning the means of production. They own the means of production. Yes, got it. But yeah, you can really see it illustrated here.
And it's no secret that after a certain threshold of scale, whether we're talking whether we're talking fame, infamy, or just finance, right after this certain threshold, any entity becomes inherently controversial. So it's it's true, right, It follows logically that coke industries has had a troubled legal history congressional investigations, DOJ consent decrease, civil lawsuits, felony convictions, and so on. One of the biggest controversies that's getting a lot of attention now, especially from politicians on the left side of US politics, will be the active role that coke industries plays in pollution and climate change denial.
Yeah.
Again, like you said, Matt, what's good for business versus what's bad for business?
Yeah? Absolutely, And in the end, there are so many profits to protect for the people that run this massive industry, or it's not even industry. They conglomerate. There's so many moving parts you have to or you're at least incentivized to deregulate as much as you possibly can and do what you have to do to make sure that those profits go up by three percent each year. But they've had, you know, as part of their legal troubles in the past. If you go back to nineteen eighty eight, you get a really interesting look into a specific thing that they were accused of doing and then found out that they were doing where they were apparently stealing oil from Native American reservations within the United States.
Yeah. Yeah, This comes from an excellent book called Cokeland by an author named Christopher Leonard, in which he traces the twist and turns of this nefarious tale. So, as you said, this stuff hits the fan in nineteen eighty eight in November, and it's the result of an investigation that was launched in October of nineteen eighty seven by the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. They were inspired by a series of articles in the paper of the Arizona Republic that said, hey, big Oil is stealing oil from Native Americans who own these various oil wells. Here's how the scam worked. Companies would pick up crude oil from the wells and they would take it to the quote unquote marketplace. But when they did this, they falsified their receipts, their invoices to make it look like they had a picked up less oil than they actually did. So they were getting a viig they were skimming off the top or b that the oil was of a lower quality than it actually was, therefore worth less on the marketplace. Therefore we're paying less.
Well, look at that and throughout this whole controversy because it was a controversy for the Cokes and for coke industries. This is when David really becomes and the Coke brothers I guess as a whole or as a duo. It gets them enmeshed within the politics. The like forward facing politics.
Right, this is a big stage for them.
Yeah.
So the company later admits in court that it collects about ten million dollars worth of crude oil each year without paying for it over the course of this scam. And this is just one illustration of what big businesses do. It's important to say that coke industry is by no means unique in this sort of thing. And that's why countries and state actors have legislative mechanisms in place that are, in theory meant to prevent these kind of shenanigans. But despite the ongoing controversies, this family business made David Coke an even wealthier man. And we have some we have some stats about his about his his position in financial society. At the time of his passing.
Yes, according to Forbes, he was number eleven on the list of wealthiest men on the planet. He had a total asset amount of forty two point two billion dollars, again according to Forbes, and he had an estimated net worth of fifty point five billion dollars.
And let's pause here for a second, Matt, because that is a huge number. We're throwing a lot of huge numbers out here, and that makes it very easy number to glide over without fully understanding or grocking it. There's a guy named Sam Parr writing for a website called The Hustle, and he did a great walkthrough. I've combined a couple of different things here to make it to help us imagine just one billion dollars in my head. All right, let's start with a one hundred dollars bill. Pretty cool, right, Imagine it's a crisp new one straight from the Men's Love It. Now, stack one hundred of those together. This makes us stack about an inch high. That's ten thousand dollars. And when you look at it, it's just a stack. It's not that impressive. If you add enough stacks together, you'll get a million dollars. Also, weirdly enough, not as impressive as it may seem in film, because when you stack it that way, when you add it up that way, it's not enough to fill up an average briefcase. I mean like a carry on for a plane. It's still a lot of money, and a billion is much different. A billion gets us into the the realm of imaginary scenarios.
Right.
So let's say you save one hundred dollars a day. That's awesome, great job doing that. It will take you ten million days round a little over twenty seven thousand years to save up one billion dollars. Wow.
And well, also if you try and visualize I remember seeing videos with this before where you try and visualize what a billion dollars looks like. So if you were going to do that, if you're going to look at it, it would be a four square mile area, or what would be the equivalent of two thousand, five hundred and fifty five acres of just money.
Yeah if you put if you took that billion and made it one dollar bills, right, yeah, yeaheah yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you would also have more money than several entire countries. You would be you know, you would have more than their GDP for instance.
Yeah. Oh, and by let's talk about what you can buy with a billion bucks.
Okay, yeah, with just one billion dollars per the AJAC, you can buy six point seven f thirty five a Fighter Jets. Oh yeah, you can also if you bargain a little bit. Getting into sports.
Oh yeah, you can get an NFL team for a billion bucks. Oh for sure, you can almost almost. By let's say I don't know, a palace.
Yeah, Buckingham Palace is just one point four billion dollars. After all, these are all crazy things to buy, right, So that's a billion dollars. David Coke as an individual, as one guy, directly controlled enough wealth to do this fifty times over.
Yeah, and remember that's assets and money, you know, cash, money, accounts, all those things. It's all of it together. In property in particular, it becomes very important.
So what to do with all this scratch, all this cheddar, all these gains, this real superpower, this genuine superpower, this very real version of time travel, which is a nice easter egg there for some of our longtime listeners, well time. David Cooke was a man of principle as he saw it, and his most well known spending fits into two broad categories, first philanthropy and second politics. In terms of philanthropy, we see a I guess well and yeah, well intentioned but imperfect person. He's been on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's list of the world's top fifty philanthropists consistently since two thousand and six. In a twenty thirteen interview with The Wall Street Journal, he called himself a sugar daddy for charity, his words, not ours. He said he had a moral obligation to help. He said he preferred to donate his money to outstand institutions rather than use it on buying a bigger house or a one hundred and fifty million dollar painting. That again, is a direct quote from him. I get it, that feels like the right thing to do. He conducted most of his visible philanthropy through his foundation named the David H. Coke Charitable Foundation. They save the money on creative names and pass those savings to you.
I guess you've probably heard that mentioned a couple of times in passing from you. Know, this is brought to you and thanks thanks to impart by that foundation.
And they're doing good work. They're giving, they're giving to institutions and causes that are making pioneering breakthroughs, especially in the medical space.
Yes, and sometimes it is difficult to square these things when depending on what you think about David Coke or the Koch Brothers, knowing that this is a real side of him and his spending and his wealth and his family's wealth, this charitable side, it is real, and it's you can't deny it.
Well, I have some I don't want to call him hot takes, but I have some observations on that. Well, we'll get to him in a second. Right, It's you're right, Matt, objectively not bad. So he gave over a billion dollars to charity throughout his life, so over or right around one fiftieth of his assets he donated to things like the Lincoln Center of the American Museum of Natural History. In terms of medical causes, he started the Coke Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT New York Presbyterian Hospital, M D. Anderson Cancer Center, JOHNS. Hopkins, Stanford University Hospital, Mount Sinai, the Hospital for Special Surgery. Good stuff, great stuff, saved lives. Right inarguably, here's the thing though, here's the thing that some of his critics will point out, and that I have to admit, has some sand people who people who argue that coke industry's business practices have raised the rates of cancer in their communities, right, people who have never smoked, never drank, gay lung cancer left and right. They say, you know why is if this guy really wants to fight cancer, why doesn't he change what his company is doing? Why is he donating after the fact? You know what I mean?
That's quite a good point.
Was I thought it was. I thought it was a good point. Additionally, he cites a close call he had an aircraft accident with inspiring him to become a philanthropist. But also if you look at the specific acts of philanthropy that he's responsible for, a lot of them do center on cancer. And again he was diagnosed in nineteen nine.
He certainly has a personal reason to be very interested in that.
A personal identification with it. So again, objectively inarguably good things, but you can see why people would criticize even that part of this person's life. And that's not even talking about the other huge category of donations for the Coke industries, for David Cooke himself, for his brother as well, and all their related name brands. And that is the realm of politics.
And we're going to get into that right after a quick word from our sponsor.
So politics, right, Yeah, you become a billionaire and two things happen. People keep trying to draw you into politics, right, and you are, as we said, inherently going to be a controversial figure to some. That is literally the most fair way to say it.
Yeah, on the bottom of that spectrum is you're going to get frequent calls when there's an election coming up.
Right, So David Coke did become involved in politics. In fact, he ran for vice president once back in nineteen eighty. He did not run on the GOP ticket. He did not run on the Democratic ticket. He ran as a libertarian along with the presidential candidate Ed Clark, so they had a very i would say nowadays for most people who are familiar with the concepts of libertarianism. They had to pretty much buy the book Libertarian Platform. Let's get rid of minimum wage laws, Let's get rid of corporate taxes, agricultural subsidies, Let's give the FED the boot a cavalcade of federal agencies. Interestingly enough, the FBI and the CIA were on that list, and I thought, wow, you guys are not going to win this election if.
We don't want any policing either here or abroad.
Right. They also they also wanted to get rid of Social Security, but and some of our fellow listeners are already well aware of this, the ticket had some things that could be seen as surprisingly socially progressive, especially for that time and era.
Yeah, specifically, if they were seeking equal rights for the LGBTQIA group, they wouldn't have referred to it as that in nineteen eighty, but yes, they were looking for equal rights for all people. They wanted to end the drug war, which you know is if anything is progressive, that feels like one of the top things. And especially you have to remember that if you're thinking about a conservative person or group of people with so much wealth. You don't imagine that those two things would exist on a ticket, or are as policies on it ticket.
And it's strange because it is. It is surprisingly progressive, or appears to be so if you just look at that one fastt of it. But things like cutting a ton of federal agencies, that's a harder pill for a lot of people to swallow.
But it's one of those it's one of those things that sticks out in some of our minds so strongly that maybe we don't even think about the other things. We just know, Oh, those those guys represent this one thing that I really like. But all the rest I'm not even going to pay attention.
To, right, Yeah, the danger of single issue voting. Yeah, so it did work out. They did not win. They were positive in terms of their surprise at just how much of the vote they did get, which was small but measurable, I believe.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they were like, hey, that's actually pretty great. But not winning that election did not spell the end of political involvement for David Koch. Quite the opposite. You see, he and his brother Charles had already been active in politics behind the scenes for a long time, and they escalated their operations over the following decades because they have been working on this kind of stuff since the seventies. Cooke's political spending, both through his institutions and his donations, was nothing if not thematically consistent. It was very much inligne with his deeply held libertarian beliefs as far as we know. In the money that we can trace, which is a pretty small slice of the pie, a tip of the financial iceberg here, the Kochs have collectively spent at least one hundred million dollars building this massive political machine, sometimes called the Coke to Pus Have you heard that one?
In a few places.
This machine is meant to bring mainstream US and maybe over a larger swath of the mainstream West in general, much more in line with their own right leaning libertarian beliefs. Critics have accused the Cookes of buying influence. That part is true. That is how lobbying works. Lobbying is legal in this country.
Yeah, especially the kind of lobbying that the Koch brothers and several other groups of billionaires and people representing billions of dollars put through as.
Law right exactly shout out to Alec.
Yeah, shout out to Citizens United.
So critics have also said that the Kochs are using this political machine they built to manipulate elections and government policies like you're pointing out, Matt, under the cover of vague and nice sounding words like liberty, freedom, patriotism. To supporters of one or more of these in depth, this is in line with their own ideological beliefs. To critics, this is a shell game, with the ultimate end being something very much like neo feudalism. There is not a state that functions the way that states are supposed to function in democracies or representative democracies, et cetera. But what is this machine exactly? Is this business as usual or is this a vast conspiracy? And perhaps most importantly, what happens to the engine once the driver has passed away. Here's where it gets crazy.
It gets handed down to the next in line in succession, just like that TV show, HBO.
What is the TV show Secession? Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So yeah, there's I'm being facetious. Let's let's get into it. No, I think you're absolutely right. Actually, we both know you're at spread. So yes, there is a conspiracy of foot. The issue here is that people will maybe disagree with the characterization of the conspiracy or focus on smaller parts of the whole. Probably the best or most well known of the coke critics is the investigative journalist and author Jane Mayer. In her book Dark Money, The Hidden History of Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, she explores the coke system and what she sees as its ultimate aim, which is instituting policies that directly benefit coke industries and protect it from the consequences of the widespread pollution it creates. So also it's weird because it's also advancing the libertarian ambitions or ideologies of the Koch brothers and their affiliates, but at the same time it's helping their bottom line in a very easily provable way, like a one to one match. If you look at if you look at how different members of the House of Representatives vote for what they prioritize, and that's again, that's legal, that's lobbying.
It is and it is certainly heartening to think of it in those terms the way Jane Mayor describes it in Dark Money, just about how and it's kind of what we talked about before, just how the consequences of their actions and their industries, and they're the way they're attempting to free those up to do whatever they want to do, however long they want to do, and however much they want to do in the end having those things also hurting the people that surround those industries. I mean that is that this is where we get into that territory really is dark money. It's it's scary, right.
Dark money is dark in that it is untraceable.
Right, Well, it's untraceable, but it's also like dark thematically, like it's uh, I don't know, not evil is a strong word, but it's uh, it has ill intentions.
Yeah, dark money typically does not refer to anonymous donors on a mission to give every kid a library with him walking distance or you know, free lunch.
Yeah, or prevent any of those kids from ever developing prostate cancer.
Right, right, that's the issue. So there's this other journalist, Peter Overbet writing for MPR, and I like the way that he phrased this. It's also clearly coming from a specific stance, right he says, quote, the Koke political network remains famous and infamous for its secret funding and fiercely negative advertising, which often aimed at then President Barack Obama and other Democrats. Their group, Americans for Prosperity, was funded with Koch Brothers money as well as contributions from other rich donors they recruited, and although David Cooke denied giving money to Tea Party candidates, in twenty ten, the Koch Brothers' efforts helped the Republicans win a net gain of sixty three seats in the House of Representatives. So again I agree or disagree with the aims of those representatives, the aims of the Cokes. The point here, the takeaway here is that the system they created works. You know what I mean, the secret seminars they have, which is a real thing. The secret seminars they have do result in actionable plans, and they do make a difference to your life if you live in the US well.
And they also were working to target specific I guess you would say, types of people within the United States. And they were doing this in a lot of different ways. But some of these groups aimed directly at veterans, some directly at senior citizens, at latinos or women, and a lot of this stuff. It's strange how it would appear on the surface to not necessarily be political, like a lot of the ways that they would kind of get in the door. I don't know. But again, what we do know is that they were exploiting stuff. And this is a commonality that we'll see throughout a couple of other things with the Kochs, like loopholes in pollution standards with the EPA, loopholes in production standards, things like that. But in this case it was a lack of transparency within the US law and also weak enforce them by the IRS, and the Supreme Court had made some decisions in the past that created some serious loopholes or at least places for abuse.
And then, of course the other controversial causes, one of the big ones in the news today being climate change denial organizations. Examples of this would include funding studies and then directing those studies to spend the perspective or spin the data right. In an interview once upon a time, one of the Koch brothers argued that climate change was actually good for humanity and that it would create more arable land to grow food, or that it would help drive innovation.
It's really going to clear up Greenland for all the stuff we need to do on it.
Finally, right, So the big question here why is there not more accountability or transparency for this web and others like it? I would also add a further question. If this is truly the right thing to do, if this is truly something for the greater good, then why does it need to occur in secret? Why does the money need to be dark? If we are helping humanity, you know what I mean?
So it's more like a surprise for humanity.
There we go. Well, far be it for us to ruin a good surprise party?
Right?
According to Mayer, it's because these groups are considered charities, so they don't need to disclose the names of their donors, and she describes them as kinds of secret banks that affect American politics in a huge way without most people understanding who is behind them. Critics of the KOs operation don't stop at calling it dark money. You'll hear them accuse the Koch brothers of everything from actively conspiring to subverting democracy to enacting a slow motion, decades long coup detta God. And they certainly do again behave in a conspiratorial manner. A lot of the things that they support are things that the average US resident would be against or have have some serious concerns about. At the very least the Koch Brothers hold are held the co co organizations, a better way to say it, held twice a year seminars. They are carefully carefully hidden, sequestered, quarantined from the public. The guest list and the substance of the conversation at hand are closely guarded secrets. At one point, they even erected white noise machines that created static facing the outside due to concerns about people eavesdropping on what they're saying. And again, if what you're doing is the greater good, is the surprise that much more important than the substance of your actions?
No, certainly not. Man Well, and here's the crazy thing. It's not just a small group of influential people right who end up at these places, who go to these seminars. There was a leaked guest list, and it was somewhere in the realm of four hundred to four hundred and fifty people, and not just any people. We are talking about the wealthiest conservatives in America. And they get together and they hang out. Who knows what they're doing. They could be swapping recipes, they could be planning, you know, strategic ways to use their gathered monies, their fortunes to I don't know, influence politics, change the way we have to do things.
And they could be quantum leap fanfic. You know what I mean.
Absolutely, I mean that is not beyond the realm of possibilities.
It's a good show.
Wow.
So yeah, but that's what we know. We know the demo of the attendees, and we know some of what appear to be the results because we can see some other donations that these attendees make. And there's a fantastic ride up on this if you like more information about it. Again, a pretty biased source, but it's worth the read. It's called high toilow down dot org and this I wasn't familiar with this source beforehand, but they have They have a pretty good walkthrough of the mechanisms. Yea, some of the organizations that are the faces for these donations.
Yes, but as a heads up, as and as Ben said, some of the language in there from the author is a little you can feel it. You can feel the bias immediately and inherently.
This author probably does not attend those twice a year meetings. And I'm gonna go out on a lim Matt, I don't think. I don't think this person is a fan.
Yeah, of the Coke to PUS. And one thing this author does point out that was intriguing for me was that they're they're really outlining the whole citizens United changes to packs and super PACs and viewing money as essentially a vote or or voting with your money. Right, This concept of being able to make unlimited campaign donations to any candidate whatsoever for any reason, the author equates that to essentially a coup within the United States.
Yeah, and I believe the author of this is Jim high Tower, who bills himself as America's number one populist.
Oh that's his picture at the top, and he.
Is an author, public speaker, and self described political spark plug. Twice he was served as the Texas Agricultural Commissioner, so he definitely has a anti corporate stance. Be aware of that. But with that in mind, they trace the nuts and bolts of the organism of the coctpus's functions pretty well. And that's where we go. That's the thing. So when David Coke passed away. There were quite a few people on Twitter, on social media and the pres and so on who were more or less lauding, dancing on the guy's grave, happy that he was gone, because they saw that as our species saw that as a way to prevent further damage right or further enactment of these policies. The thing is for everyone, everyone who is whistling in that particular graveyard, most of the people are celebrating this guy's death, are doing so because they object to the policies, the institutions, the machines that he helped create, and those machines, those policies, those institutions, they are alive and well, they are doing just fine. They are set to continue. The money is too good. We know a little bit about what comes next.
Well, yeah, it's the succession thing we were talking about. According to the source Business Insider, there is somebody who is ready to take over the heir to the throne, if you will, and it is David Coke's nephew. It's his brother, Charles's son, Chase Coke. He's at least being positioned, let's say, as being the one to take over next. But again, according to business insider, Chase has something different in mind. He wants to shift focus of the company away from a lot of these conservative politics, a lot of the things. He wants to shift away from support of a lot of the things that his uncle David had been wanting to do as well as his dad Charles. And apparently he isn't much of a fan of Donald Trump.
Right, well, Charles Koke was not much of a fan of Donald Trump either, because, you know, the policies of the current administration have at times clashed with the ideologies of the Coke libertarianism. Right.
Oh yeah, open aid with everybody. Let's all exchange all the money so that I can make more billions. Yes, sorry, that's putting it crudely, but.
Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is that he is apparently trying to how to Politico phrase it. They said, Chase Coke wants to steer the conservative juggernaut his family created toward a kinder, gentler libertarianism.
Interesting, it sounds nice, but uh, what does that mean? Kinder gentler libertarianism.
In addition to recruiting donors to the Coke Network, he's been doing things like anti poverty initiatives. He's been trying to grow relationships with high profile individual influencers Dion Sanders from the NFL. Yeah, he's getting down with him, or he's trying to build some kind of bridge, and you guide their philanthropy so that they can work together, guide their philanthropy and towards causes that they're both concerned with. And so the steps that Chase Coke is taking or is expected to take in the future are seen as separate, drawing a brighter line between what they do and the mainstream Republican party. And not all the donors are happy with this. They see the change as not one hundred percent on board with why they got into the game in the first place. Still, again, Chase Coke may be driving the machine, but it's still the same machine, maybe taking some different turns, some different routes. But it remains to be seen how different this will actually become. And there is in this case and an active conspiracy. It's inarguable, it's not a theory. The network created by the Koch brothers conspired through some backdoor things that were not very transparent, that were opaque, and they did this to bring their own their own belief system into the mainstream and to do their best to push conversation and thought in public policy toward that. So it's a real conspiracy. The difference here, or the big differentiation here is for some people that that is a conspiracy towards the greater good. For other people, that is a conspiracy to enrich the elite at the cost of not only every other living human being, but the planet upon which those human beings live.
Well, yeah, and if if you look at this story individually, it's about a family consolidating power, right, Yeah, a single family, not just a whole bunch of elite people out there. It's the Koch family. And when you have an air coming through like Chase, who has been relatively unknown for forty two years or so, it's interesting to then thrust somebody like that into the spotlight and you know, have some some changes to what may happen or what the forward facing ideology is of your conglomerate or whatever, because there is change in the air. It's really interesting because it is just one small group of people who are all related by blood, who are managing to have these massive waves within our culture and society.
So what do you think, folks, Is this all on the up and up. Is this how the game is played? Is this exceptionally evil or unethical? And if so, whatever your answer may be, why we'd love to hear from you.
If you controlled, let's say, one hundred billion dollar giant conglomerate, would you fight to have the rules and regulations put forth by the government in which you operate? Would you fight to have those weakened so that you could make more billions? Would you do that? I don't know. Put in that position, it feels like maybe we would if we knew that that money was all like for our family and for the future of our children. It's weird. It's a weird proposition.
Well again, you know, nobody thinks they're the bad guy. Nobody thinks they're the antagonists in the story. We're all the protagonists of our own stories. We all feel like we in general know the best way to do something or have a good idea about how to go about it. So with that in mind, we also have to we also have to note that, in a purely financial sense, a lot of organizations of this size are similar to sharks. They have to keep swimming, they have to keep eating, otherwise they will perish. I mean, that's the that's the part of the concept, right, And does that make it correct? I mean absolutely not.
No, But sharks are scary.
Right right. But I still think it's a good comparison because I know, yeah, sharks are scary. Scary. Sharks are scary, indeed, And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. It's right. Let us know what you think. It can reach you to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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