Fox News host Tucker Carlson tore into Charles and David Koch on his show Wednesday night, arguing that the billionaire Republican donors are largely to blame for the resistance President Trump is meeting from his own party.
“For years, the brothers have been the single most important funders of Republican politics in Washington,” Carlson said, explaining that Koch money funds most conservative nonprofit organizations in the capital and has also been responsible for many Republican legislative careers.
“But in the case of the Kochs, conservatives might want to pause and rethink the relationship,” Carlson continued. “As it turns out, the Kochs don’t have much in common with conservatives. They are totally opposed to most conservative policy goals. The Kochs are libertarian ideologues, passionate and inflexible.”
Carlson went on to describe how the Kochs hate the major staples of the president’s platform such as nationalism and a strong border policy, and claimed that much of Trump’s inability to secure the border can be blamed on them.
“The overwhelming majority of Republicans want a secure border and less immigration,” he said. “That’s why they voted for Donald Trump. Two-and-a-half years later, the border is more porous than ever. A tide of humanity is flooding in illegally. Republicans in Congress have done almost nothing to help. Why? You can thank the Kochs for that.”
“In 2018, Koch-backed organizations, Freedom Network and Americans for Prosperity, pressured Republicans in Congress to use their post-election lame duck session to pass an amnesty for the so-called Dreamers,” Carlson said. “Going into the 2020 race, amnesty remains the Kochs’ top legislative priority. If you’re wondering why the Republican Party often seems so out-of-sync with its own voters, this is why.”
From crime and drugs to Medicare and tax cuts, Carlson further condemned the Kochs for their stance on several other issues “that bear no resemblance to those of most Republican voters.”
Carlson also accused the Kochs of colluding with the “left-wing campaign against free speech,” joining with tech companies such as Pinterest, AirBNB, Patreon, and Mozilla, which hope to formulate the “best practices on the fight against hate and extremism online,” which Carlson argued really means censorship.
“Big tech has become a far bigger threat to your freedom than government is,” Carlson concluded. “The Kochs don’t care. Nothing Google does violates libertarian orthodoxy. More to the point, the Kochs don’t care about Republican voters or what happens to them. OK, but then why are they running the Republican Party? That’s a question Republicans should start asking themselves.”
