GOP Billionaires Waging War On Progress Says Sen. Whitehouse
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse joins The ReidOut on the influence of Americans for Prosperity and other conservative groups, which are waging a behind-the-scenes effort to stop progressive priorities like the For the People Act.
Today we got a stark warning of the very real effects of Big Oil’s impact on the world. An arctic scientist said global warming may have already passed an irreversible tipping point. And if this, as the world burns, isn’t enough, Big Oil is also not paying taxes, not getting regulated, and ruining our politics. The very people who have been killing the planet, pour tons of money into targeting progressive politics, specifically the organizations funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and the late David Koch.
He helped funnel billions into climate-denying organizations for decades since his family made money on oil and gas. With his money, he founded Americans for Prosperity, the
group that mobilized the Tea Party. It is still going along with its other partners in the Koch network, waging a behind-the-scenes war to stop progressive priorities like the For the People act and launching a Tea Party version 2.0 campaign to target president Biden’s infrastructure plan. Whining about spending and taxes, targeting lawmakers from both parties in 27 states.
Joining me is Sheldon Whitehouse. I’m so glad you’re available. I watch C-Span and I have seen your presentations with charts about Big Money and its influence on our politics. I am obsessed with this. Talk to me about how this works, because the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party. They are now backing this push to kill S1, HR1, the For the People act. They’re now targeting Democrats like Joe Manchin. >> Well, the Koch brothers and a couple of other creepy Right-wing Republican billionaires have basically built out what, in the intelligence community, you’d call a massive covert operation. It’s primarily for oil and gas. That’s where it began to propagate climate denial and block climate legislation in its most kind of powerful sense. It worked for Big Tobacco before, but it really came alive to do climate denial. And like a good covert operation, they use anonymous money, they use cutouts, they use front groups, they use disinformation. They have people who pretend to be real scientists, who can act like scientists on TV, but say complete ‘non-science’ if not, you know, nonsense. So it’s a really, really significant operation. I’m really glad you’re paying
attention to it because, frankly, we have not been attentive enough to it as Democrats. >> One of the things that gets buried in the conversation about S1 is the extent to which it is an anti-dark money bill. >> Yeah. >> Joe Manchin used to be a backer of S1. He’s a co-sponsor of the bill, then all of a sudden Americans for Prosperity posts this website, tells him to be against the bill, and now he’s suddenly against the bill. You had him and Kirsten Sinema who didn’t even show up today to talk with Texas lawmakers who are fighting for voting rights. So you have these organizations that are anti-voting rights. They want climate change “Sunshine science” to be buried and now they’re anti-voting. But it’s the money piece we don’t talk enough about. Do you agree with that?
>> Yeah. If you connect the dots a little bit, Heritage Action, which has long been a part of the Koch
dark money network, was the group that was caught recently with the clip from their fund-raiser saying how they were anonymously funding voter suppression activities in all these
Republican states. That sometimes the Republican legislators don’t even know it’s us and that they work through what they ominously called ‘Sentinels’ in these places to hide their role. You had Leonard Leah, the mastermind of the court cap operation that pushed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett onto the Supreme Court. When the Washington Post did the big expose scheme, he jumped out and jumped to the Elections Project, which is dark money-funded voter suppression. Which, by the way, if you do the corporate links, it’s related to the judicial education project, which is related to the Judicial Crisis Network, which paid for the ads for Gorsuch, for Kavanaugh, and for Barrett. So, it’s the same central command scheme operating against climate legislation, operating for Dark Money, and operating to pull off this voter suppression stunt. Frankly, Democrats have had crap for countermeasures against it for a very long time and it’s really hard to fight a group like that if you don’t take them seriously and take it on. >> Well, that was going to be my question, which is, what can we do about it? Right, they also have these organizations like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council that are also heavily involved in pushing cookie-cutter legislation. There is the Heritage Action organization, they have a plan with ALEC to write voter suppression bills. If you just poll things like saving the planet from doom, and we are at this tipping point in terms of saving the planet from climate doom, if we don’t do anything, we’re going to get passed the point where we can stop it. Most people want to do something about it and they say no, you cannot. Then they say no, you cannot vote because they know the majority would vote to save the planet. So us little folks out here who are not multi-billionaires and just want our planet to continue and want us to be a democracy, what the hell can we do about it when people like Manchin, who has an impoverished state, who needs infrastructure, and has miners dying at age 50-something because they’re in the mines instead of being changed into green jobs, what do we do? If he doesn’t want to help, what do we do? >> You’ve got to demand transparency and fight back and call on leaders of the Democratic party to ask what their countermeasures are against this big operation. It’s like the other side has an air force and we have none. And we’re going to war and we’ve got to have our own air force to fight back against theirs. And ours will be an air force of, like, truth and light and exposure and transparency and showing who these rascals are. But we haven’t deliberately gone about it. To your point about these groups, there are scientists who study this stuff who Democrats have not put to effective use. But they study this stuff and they’ll show that there are 50, 60, 80, 100 different front groups all operating in this same network and that’s mostly on the
climate denial side. The network can dial up whichever phony-baloney group it wants like a pianist playing keys on the piano and we don’t bother to point out to the American people that this is a big piano that is being played by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires. And half of the stuff that comes out of it is completely phony and it’s all controlled. >> Have you had this conversation with Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, because Texas legislators tried to have that conversation and they didn’t show up to the democratic meeting, they just weren’t there.
>> You know, not precisely, but I tell you what, when we go at the Dark Money thing, I’m confident that we will have them. The reason I’m confident that we will have them is what you just quoted from Jane Mayer’s expose, which we know from polling, and that is that a conservative Tea Partier hates special interests, anonymous Dark Money corrupting American politics just as much as the Bernie Bro does. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are unbelievable. The numbers are off the chart. We poll in the high 80s and the 90s fighting that. Independent voters, on a related question, polled 100 to nothing. So, we can make it work with the public with us.
He helped funnel billions into climate-denying organizations for decades since his family made money on oil and gas. With his money, he founded Americans for Prosperity, the
group that mobilized the Tea Party. It is still going along with its other partners in the Koch network, waging a behind-the-scenes war to stop progressive priorities like the For the People act and launching a Tea Party version 2.0 campaign to target president Biden’s infrastructure plan. Whining about spending and taxes, targeting lawmakers from both parties in 27 states.
Joining me is Sheldon Whitehouse. I’m so glad you’re available. I watch C-Span and I have seen your presentations with charts about Big Money and its influence on our politics. I am obsessed with this. Talk to me about how this works, because the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party. They are now backing this push to kill S1, HR1, the For the People act. They’re now targeting Democrats like Joe Manchin. >> Well, the Koch brothers and a couple of other creepy Right-wing Republican billionaires have basically built out what, in the intelligence community, you’d call a massive covert operation. It’s primarily for oil and gas. That’s where it began to propagate climate denial and block climate legislation in its most kind of powerful sense. It worked for Big Tobacco before, but it really came alive to do climate denial. And like a good covert operation, they use anonymous money, they use cutouts, they use front groups, they use disinformation. They have people who pretend to be real scientists, who can act like scientists on TV, but say complete ‘non-science’ if not, you know, nonsense. So it’s a really, really significant operation. I’m really glad you’re paying
attention to it because, frankly, we have not been attentive enough to it as Democrats. >> One of the things that gets buried in the conversation about S1 is the extent to which it is an anti-dark money bill. >> Yeah. >> Joe Manchin used to be a backer of S1. He’s a co-sponsor of the bill, then all of a sudden Americans for Prosperity posts this website, tells him to be against the bill, and now he’s suddenly against the bill. You had him and Kirsten Sinema who didn’t even show up today to talk with Texas lawmakers who are fighting for voting rights. So you have these organizations that are anti-voting rights. They want climate change “Sunshine science” to be buried and now they’re anti-voting. But it’s the money piece we don’t talk enough about. Do you agree with that?
>> Yeah. If you connect the dots a little bit, Heritage Action, which has long been a part of the Koch
dark money network, was the group that was caught recently with the clip from their fund-raiser saying how they were anonymously funding voter suppression activities in all these
Republican states. That sometimes the Republican legislators don’t even know it’s us and that they work through what they ominously called ‘Sentinels’ in these places to hide their role. You had Leonard Leah, the mastermind of the court cap operation that pushed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett onto the Supreme Court. When the Washington Post did the big expose scheme, he jumped out and jumped to the Elections Project, which is dark money-funded voter suppression. Which, by the way, if you do the corporate links, it’s related to the judicial education project, which is related to the Judicial Crisis Network, which paid for the ads for Gorsuch, for Kavanaugh, and for Barrett. So, it’s the same central command scheme operating against climate legislation, operating for Dark Money, and operating to pull off this voter suppression stunt. Frankly, Democrats have had crap for countermeasures against it for a very long time and it’s really hard to fight a group like that if you don’t take them seriously and take it on. >> Well, that was going to be my question, which is, what can we do about it? Right, they also have these organizations like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council that are also heavily involved in pushing cookie-cutter legislation. There is the Heritage Action organization, they have a plan with ALEC to write voter suppression bills. If you just poll things like saving the planet from doom, and we are at this tipping point in terms of saving the planet from climate doom, if we don’t do anything, we’re going to get passed the point where we can stop it. Most people want to do something about it and they say no, you cannot. Then they say no, you cannot vote because they know the majority would vote to save the planet. So us little folks out here who are not multi-billionaires and just want our planet to continue and want us to be a democracy, what the hell can we do about it when people like Manchin, who has an impoverished state, who needs infrastructure, and has miners dying at age 50-something because they’re in the mines instead of being changed into green jobs, what do we do? If he doesn’t want to help, what do we do? >> You’ve got to demand transparency and fight back and call on leaders of the Democratic party to ask what their countermeasures are against this big operation. It’s like the other side has an air force and we have none. And we’re going to war and we’ve got to have our own air force to fight back against theirs. And ours will be an air force of, like, truth and light and exposure and transparency and showing who these rascals are. But we haven’t deliberately gone about it. To your point about these groups, there are scientists who study this stuff who Democrats have not put to effective use. But they study this stuff and they’ll show that there are 50, 60, 80, 100 different front groups all operating in this same network and that’s mostly on the
climate denial side. The network can dial up whichever phony-baloney group it wants like a pianist playing keys on the piano and we don’t bother to point out to the American people that this is a big piano that is being played by a bunch of creepy right-wing billionaires. And half of the stuff that comes out of it is completely phony and it’s all controlled. >> Have you had this conversation with Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, because Texas legislators tried to have that conversation and they didn’t show up to the democratic meeting, they just weren’t there.
>> You know, not precisely, but I tell you what, when we go at the Dark Money thing, I’m confident that we will have them. The reason I’m confident that we will have them is what you just quoted from Jane Mayer’s expose, which we know from polling, and that is that a conservative Tea Partier hates special interests, anonymous Dark Money corrupting American politics just as much as the Bernie Bro does. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are unbelievable. The numbers are off the chart. We poll in the high 80s and the 90s fighting that. Independent voters, on a related question, polled 100 to nothing. So, we can make it work with the public with us.
About the Author
MSNBC Online - The ReidOut
Joy-Ann Reid is a political analyst for MSNBC and host of “The ReidOut,” which is launching on July 20, 2020 and will air weeknights at 7 p.m. ET.
Tags: anti-democratic attack GOP progress
