Didn’t you hear? The libertarian billionaire Charles Koch recently declared his support for the Communist leader of China over the leader of his own country! We learned it from a tweet by Lou Dobbs: “Outrageous Oligarch: Billionaire Charles Koch Admits He’s Working for China instead of America, for Xi and against @POTUS: ‘We’re Working Hard Against’ Trump’s Pro-American Tariffs on China.”
It would be big news indeed if an American billionaire who’d built his fortune in free markets suddenly embraced the statist mercantilism of a Chinese ruler-for-life. Of course, Koch said no such thing. He never said he was working for China instead of America or that he favored Xi over Trump. Even the tendentious Breitbart piece linked in the tweet didn’t say that. The tweet was fiction—as anybody familiar with the latter-day career of Lou Dobbs will readily believe.
Dobbs, the rumpled conspiracy theorist who hosts a show on Fox Business Network, also recently claimed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had become a functionary of the “deep state,” a view that led Dobbs to propound a bizarre theory about Sessions’s health. “Sessions has fallen ill, he’s incapacitated in some fashion, or he’s been coopted or captured: to preserve any dignity, for the good of the country he needs to resign. #MAGA @realDonaldTrump #TrumpTrain #AmericaFirst.”
Sessions was neither ill nor incapacitated. Nor had he been “coopted or captured” and turned into some postmodern Manchurian attorney general.
In the summer of 2016, Dobbs retweeted a Photoshopped image of House speaker Paul Ryan being raped by Barack Obama, as heavily tattooed prisoners looked on. Shortly before the election, he accused anti-Trump candidate Evan McMullin of being the tool of a “Mormon Mafia.” He was an early and eager proponent of “birther” conspiracies about Obama. After just nine months of the Trump presidency, he decided it “may be the most accomplished . . . in modern American history.”
Dobbs’s tweets reach more than 1.5 million followers. Through personal interactions and his TV show, he’s a key adviser to the president of the United States. Which is disturbing when you consider that Dobbs is a polygamist who recently converted to radical Islam.
Didn’t you hear?
