This deeply researched and urgent book reads like a detective mystery. A riveting self-defense manual for all who fear for the future of our country and our planet.
Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep
History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America
Universities regularly conduct important discussions of free speech. And then there is the largely imaginary campus free speech crisis. This book is a detailed and valuable guide to the shadowy right-wing financial networks irresponsibly stoking the latter to the growing detriment of the former.
Hank Reichman, Professor Emeritus of History,
California State University, East Bay
First published 2021 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola 2021
The right of Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4302 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4301 3 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4305 1 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4303 7 EPUB
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Preface
We began writing this book a year after the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, when violent anti-Black racists and antisemites imposed themselves upon the national stage in a way that the majority of Americans could no longer ignore. We finished the book during the months following the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests sparked by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As millions of people from across American society came into the streets to demand justice, protestors were met with tear gas and pepper spray, run over by cars, and were abducted in unmarked vehicles. Far-right groups, including Republican politicians and the right-wing media ecosystem, diluted calls for justice, staging instead a dirge of white grievance and rekindled racist narratives of inner cities on fire. They rallied behind wealthy suburbanites who pointed guns at BLM protestors and behind a seventeen-year-old militia member who murdered two unarmed protestors. They demanded law and order and spewed culture-war fury over socialism, cancel culture, snowflakes, and social justice warriors. In 2021 they passed laws criminalizing protest as well as the teaching of critical race theory.
How did we get here? This book tells a small part of that larger story, a story about an organized counter-revolution seeking to reverse decades of progress made by movements for social justice.
Over the past 50 years the American libertarian movementparticularly those elements funded by Kochs growing network of corporate donorshas become a well-organized and well-funded political machinery. The Koch network seeks to fundamentally transform society in ways that reverse many of the progressive gains made during the middle of the twentieth century, especially those in the areas of civil and labor rights as well as consumer and environmental protections. Today this right-wing political infrastructure, which we term the Koch network, consists of academic centers, student groups, think tanks, policy mills, voter mobilization efforts, media outlets, legal organizations, and astroturf social movements (including the Tea Party). This political machinery has attacked the Kyoto Protocol, smoking regulations, labor unions, Medicare expansion, and gun-control efforts. It has championed the deregulation of money in politics and undermined voting rights. Elements have helped spread the Big Lie of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Against all credible scientific opposition, the Koch network has made climate change a debatable topic in American life. It has groomed and successfully placed a generation of radically individualist and pro-corporate academics and judges in the academy and on the court, including a majority on the Supreme Court. Within higher education, the Koch network attacks affirmative action, harasses faculty who write about racial, gender, and economic justice, and undermines efforts to diversify faculty and make campuses more inclusiveall in the name of individual liberty.
This political operation has proven particularly successful precisely because it has not been built simply to elect politicians or advocate for specific policy preferences. Sure, anti-union and anti-climate legislation, rolling back affordable healthcare, privatizing education, and tax cuts for the wealthy are desired policy outcomes. However, these outcomes are achieved by the Koch network not only with successful corporate lobbying or lavish donations to political parties or candidates, but also with a well-funded ideological and political machinery that seeks nothing less than social transformation. To this end, the Koch network has long devoted considerable energy and resources to gaining footholds within the university, and thereby changing the ideas that are produced, taught, researched, and published therein. The resulting network of academic centers and think tanks reproduces an ideology that coheres around the language of individual freedom and Western civilization, while denying the existence of actual material and historical legacies of racial, gendered, and class-based exclusions, marginalizations, and violences. Instead, this libertarian ideology holds that positive outcomes only follow from individuals maximizing utility within the freedom of immaculately self-regulating markets. The intellectual, ideological, and political infrastructure created by the Koch network seeks to remake the United States, and the world, in the image of this hardline libertarian worldview. Doing so, however, requires fundamentally remaking institutions of higher education, which have been a prominent source of intellectual criticism of the Koch networks preferred libertarian fantasy.
This book examines the Koch networks ideological and political machinery by exploring how it exerts power on college campuses through one particular strategy, namely manufacturing a campus free speech crisis. In the past few years, widely circulated examples of protests against Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, and others have come to be taken as evidence that the academy is intolerant toward conservative views. Free Speech and Koch Money, however, demonstrates that these instances are neither spontaneous crises nor examples of a spirited debate about speech on campus. Rather, they are manufactured crises, funded by political operatives and intentionally designed to achieve specific political outcomes.
The book examines how and why the Koch donor network funds the vast political machinery driving the free speech movement on college campuses. We argue that what often appears as localized and spontaneous outrage among conservative students should instead be understood within the context of a larger strategy deployed by wellorganized donors and political operatives seeking to fundamentally transform American society, including higher education. Understood as such, students, faculty, university administrators, journalists, and the general public should focus less on debating who does (and does not) have the right to speak on campus. We should instead be asking: Who funds these speakers? Who brings them to campus? And why? When we ask these questions, it becomes possible to take seriously the degree to which plutocratic libertarian donors value higher education as a cornerstone of social transformation.
