KOCH, DEVOS, SOROS: DONORS, POLITICS, AND PASTORS
Leading figures of the Council for National Policy compromised their partnerships as well. At first glance, Charles and David Koch were unlikely allies for the fundamentalist right. Religion has played little part in their rhetoric; they preach the free market gospel. Fundamentalists should have been dismayed at the way the Kochs extended their free-wheeling notions to the private sphere. David Koch advocated civil liberties that the fundamentalists bitterly opposed, including same-sex marriage and abortion rights.1 Outlining his philosophy in a 2014 interview, he explained, “I’m basically a libertarian. And I’m a conservative on economic matters and I’m a social liberal.” Koch didn’t care whether the candidates he backed agreed with him. “That’s their problem,” he told Barbara Walters in an interview. “I’m really focused intensely on economic and fiscal issues, because if those go bad the country as a whole suffers terribly.”2
But the Kochs and the core of the CNP also shared common ground. The Koch and DeVos families had both suffered irksome run-ins with the law. The DeVos company Amway was investigated by the United States and other governments for various forms of fraud, while the Kochs’ companies tangled with the federal government on both environmental and financial grounds.3 In 1974 a Koch oil company, along with two other oil companies, was cited for violating federal price controls, and the following year federal regulators found another Koch company guilty of overcharging for propane gas.4
A month after the first offense, the New York Times covered Charles Koch’s Dallas speech about his new approach to promoting Koch family values: “The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today,” he said.5 By 1977 the Kochs had begun to establish their “well-financed cadre” with a handsomely endowed think tank called the Cato Institute.6 Their initiative would expand into a complex web of donors, front organizations, and shadowy alliances that defy a full accounting.
Charles Koch saw the Nixon-era price controls as evidence of “the bankruptcy of the Republican alternative to Democratic interventionism.”7 His brother David decided to take things a step farther, with an attempt to disrupt the bipartisan status quo. In 1980 he ran as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president, on a platform that can only be described as bizarre. It called for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration and the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the repeal of all gun laws, opposition to all taxation, the abolition of the FBI and the CIA, and the repeal of Social Security.8 It added that no one, no matter how psychotic, should be involuntarily committed to an institution for care. The platform also called for the legalization of homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, and all forms of drug use.
David Koch campaigned enthusiastically in twenty-seven states, traveling to most of them on his own dime. But his platform was too radical and the entrenched parties too powerful for him to get traction. Koch’s ticket garnered a humiliating 1 percent of the national vote. Brother David had basked in the limelight, but brother Charles was unimpressed, given the amount of David’s own money he had invested to float the campaign.9
The two brothers reluctantly turned back to the GOP. Like Richard Viguerie and Morton Blackwell, they were dismayed by centrist Republicans. Nixon had founded the Environmental Protection Agency, and moderate Republicans were willing to reach across the aisle to collaborate and compromise with Democrats on taxes and entitlement programs. But Reagan’s “Southern strategy” showed new potential to widen the country’s political divide, and Texas was a key component. It was no coincidence that Reagan’s alliance with the South was launched in Dallas.
There was a regional affinity with the Kochs. Charles and his younger brother David were Wichita born and bred, but their father, Fred Koch, hailed from the tiny town of Quanah, Texas, eight miles from the Oklahoma border. Fred was born in 1900, at the dawn of the automobile era.10 In 1901, when Fred was a babe in arms, prospectors struck oil at the Spindletop salt dome in Beaumont, Texas, a small town near the Gulf of Mexico, some thirty miles from the Louisiana state line. According to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society, “The Spindletop oilfield … would produce more oil in a day than the rest of the world’s oil fields combined,” launching the modern oil and gas industry.11
Fred Koch grew up along with the industry. He launched his career with a degree in engineering from MIT—a rare achievement for a kid from a Texas cow town—and returned home to witness a feverish army of wildcatters blasting the prairie. The lucky few struck oil.
Joining forces with an MIT classmate from Wichita, Fred Koch parlayed his education into a network of refineries and pipelines to monetize their strikes. Over the 1930s Koch expanded his operations to build refineries in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.12 In 1940—just in time for the war—he founded the company that would become Koch Industries. This grew into an industrial behemoth with subsidiaries in chemicals, minerals, and finance, as well as petroleum. By 2019 it had grown into the second-largest privately held company in the United States (after the Cargill agricultural conglomerate), with over $120 billion in revenues and over a hundred thousand employees in sixty countries.13
Fred Koch and his wife Mary had four sons. Frederick, the oldest, devoted his life to the arts as a connoisseur of paintings, rare books, and historic properties. David and Bill were fraternal twins. Bill’s passion was for sailing; his team won the America’s Cup in 1992. He pursued the energy business but quarreled with David and their youngest brother Charles. David and Charles bought out their brothers in 1983, leading to a lengthy and acrimonious lawsuit. Frederick and Bill retained fabulous fortunes, but they were dwarfed next to their brothers’.14
Charles and David were left with a total of 84 percent of Koch Industries, and a net worth of over $50 billion each. The company operated refineries in the frozen reaches of Minnesota and the Gulf of Mexico. Their pipelines snaked four thousand miles across the continent, through Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana—which happened to be the buckle on the Bible Belt.
Charles Koch was indisputably the richest man in Wichita, the largest city in Kansas, with a population approaching four hundred thousand, some fifty miles north of the Oklahoma border. In the days of the Wild West, Wichita represented the southern edge of civilization. Young Bat Masterson herded cattle a few miles up the road, while Wyatt Earp kept the peace. In Edna Ferber’s 1929 novel Cimarron, her heroes, displaced from the Confederate South, start out in genteel Wichita before they set off for the Oklahoma land rush.
In modern Wichita, Koch Industries employs over thirty-five hundred people, and the brand is affixed to everything from the Koch sports arena to the Koch Orangutan and Chimpanzee Habitat at the zoo.15 But much of Charles Koch’s philanthropy, distributed through countless outlets, has gone toward promoting his vision of free market absolutism and a government that disregards all forms of public welfare, limiting its purview to keeping the peace.
Koch’s son Chase has joked about his upbringing, first as a six-year-old, listening to Milton Friedman read aloud at story time, and later as a teen dispatched by his father to a family feedlot where he—literally—shoveled shit. “About five miles away, you can smell it,” he recalled.16 In the family tradition, young Koch was rewarded with a corporate position and a mansion in Wichita, while the residents of western Kansas were left with the stench.
Charles may have been the richest man in Wichita, but his brother David became the richest man in New York City, a far more competitive position.17 David shared his brother’s libertarian philosophy, but he aspired to a different place in society. After some years as a confirmed bachelor, he married a beautiful young fashion assistant from Conway, Arkansas, more than twenty years his junior. The New York Times magazine published a chatty article wondering how far Julia Koch would ascend as a “fin de siècle society wife.” The couple made a good start with their patronage of the Metropolitan Museum, but, socialites cautioned, Julia Koch “must find one or two more causes, besides the Met, to which she needs to give serious amounts of David’s money and her time.”18
The causes multiplied, and the Koch name blossomed across the city. As a trustee to the Metropolitan Museum, Koch donated $65 million to construct the David H. Koch Plaza on Fifth Avenue. As a ballet patron, he gave Lincoln Center $100 million toward the renovation of the renamed David H. Koch Theater. His $1.1 billion bought him the David H. Koch Center for ambulatory care at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. He took a long-term interest in public television, joining the boards of the influential stations WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York (though he resigned from the WNET board in 2013, after the station aired a documentary that portrayed him in an unflattering light).19 Despite these efforts, the couple’s social profile seemed to lower over time. One factor was David Koch’s ongoing battle against prostate cancer. But his reputation was also affected by the mounting criticism of Koch Industries’ record of pollution and influence peddling, detailed in another major documentary and Jane Mayer’s prizewinning reporting.
New York society had turned a skeptical eye on new money for generations, but in Charles Koch’s western fiefdom, the Koch fortune was old money. The fiefdom extended for miles. Just as New York’s tri-state area subsumes Connecticut and New Jersey suburbs, the four south-central states function as a cultural and economic unit. “Kansmatexiana” is a virtual petrostate, made up of four of the nation’s top dozen oil-producing states. Its politics are marked by a deep-seated resistance to federal authority, shaded by a pervasive sense of loss.
As an antebellum sugar producer, Louisiana was the richest state in the Union, and its francophone past included waves of French refugees from the Haitian revolution bent on re-creating their plantocracy on U.S. soil. After the defeat of the Confederacy, they were dispossessed once again. With the dismantling of the slave economy, carried out under federal authority, Louisiana would plummet from the wealthiest state in the Union to one of the poorest.
Texas had an equally rebellious history, first as an independent republic and then as a member of the Confederacy. It would become the leading oil producer in the country, responsible for 40 percent of the national output, Houston overtaking Tulsa as the oil capital of the world.20 Texans felt a long-standing rivalry with New York, a resentment shared throughout the West. They produced tangible goods: oil, beef, cotton, wheat. New York City money men traded numbers in the air. When commodity prices plummeted, it was easy (and sometimes justifiable) to blame Wall Street. So it was deeply satisfying when, in 2006, Texas’s gross domestic product surpassed New York’s, coming second only to California; soon its population did the same. Texas’s growth rate, fueled by the oil boom, outstripped New York’s in the 2010s.21
The independent spirit was reflected in the Texas economy; it is one of seven states with no state or local income tax. In oil-dependent states such as Texas and Oklahoma, state budgets rise and fall with revenues from oil and gas severance taxes. (These are state taxes applied to resources “severed” from the ground.) State legislators walked a fine line: lower the taxes and lose budgets for roads and schools, or raise them and lose campaign contributions. Votes were at stake as well; roughly a fourth of the jobs in Oklahoma are connected to the energy sector.
The same game took place in Washington, with different stakes. Oil and gas campaign contributions come in fifth among U.S. industries, and Koch Industries leads the sector.22 Unlike the top four industries, the energy sector political contributions are utterly lop-sided; the vast majority go to Republicans, and a major share of those go to legislators from oil-producing states.
The oil and gas industry’s principal antagonists are the Environmental Protection Agency and its supporters in the Democratic Party. Here too there was resonance with the nineteenth century, when northern abolitionists’ campaigns led to war and the federal government’s dismantling of the plantation economy. There were more echoes in the late twentieth century, when the South’s lucrative tobacco industry was decimated by lawsuits and public health campaigns leading to government smoking restrictions. In the minds of the oil barons, the environmentalists and their Washington allies were threatening to dethrone their petrostate just as it reached its apex.
Whatever their divergence over abortion and same-sex marriage, the Kochs and the CNP leadership shared a profound faith in petroleum. Morton Blackwell and CNP president Tony Perkins both arrived in Washington by way of Baton Rouge, and Louisiana was a key state for the oil industry. There is no indication that the Koch brothers joined the Council for National Policy, but their organizations funded a number of groups run by CNP members over two decades, and leaders of the Kochs’ key organizations are members of the CNP.
The web of relationships between the Kochs and the CNP can be traced back to at least 1995, when there is a record of a Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation contribution to Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute.23 The Kochs and the Council for National Policy needed each other. The Koch brothers had proved themselves to be master corporate strategists, but David’s 1980 campaign demonstrated they hadn’t a clue how to appeal to the electorate. The Council for National Policy leadership was well on the way to creating a network of “grassroots” organizations and the strategists to manage them, but they needed timely infusions of cash.
The Koch brothers and their subordinates thought along the same organizational lines as Paul Weyrich and Morton Blackwell, with higher social aspirations. In the winter of 1996 a member of the Kochs’ inner circle, Richard Fink, published a paper in Philanthropy that echoed the CNP approach. “From Ideas to Action: The Role of Universities, Think Tanks, and Activist Groups” called for a three-stage model of social change—a political assembly line in which universities would generate “intellectual raw materials,” think tanks would process them into “useable form,” and “citizen activist” groups would “press for the implementation.”24 The process was not unlike oil production: academic wells of ideas, think tank refineries, and pipelines to propel them into the mass culture.
The Kochs had already laid the foundations. In 1974 the brothers launched their think tank, the Charles Koch Foundation, later renamed the Cato Institute. In 1980 they founded an academic base, the Mercatus Center, to promote their brand of radical free enterprise. It was later moved to George Mason, a public university in the Washington suburbs that became the Kochs’ academic flagship. “Grassroots operations” were the most problematic. The Kochs launched Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1984, but it failed to thrive.
Koch Industries operations continued to provoke outrage and lawsuits. In 1996 a Koch butane pipeline exploded in the hamlet of Lively, Texas. Two teenagers who had set out in a truck to get help and warn their neighbors were burned alive. Exposure to dangerous substances was a way of life for the people who lived near Koch facilities. The federal government sued Koch Industries for more than three hundred oil spills from Koch pipelines in 1995 and 1997. Fresh water supplies in six states were affected; the Department of Justice reported that most of the spills took place in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The lawsuits sought amounts ranging from $71 million to $214 million in penalties. But when the Bush administration took office in 2001, the suit was settled for $35 million. This sum, greatly reduced, still represented the largest civil fine for violating an environmental law ever imposed until then.25
The Kochs fared even better with a second lawsuit over the same period. As the Center for Public Integrity explained,
In late 2000—as the Clinton Administration was preparing to leave office—Koch was hit with a 97-count indictment for covering up the discharge of more than 15 times the legal limit of benzene, a carcinogen, from a refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. The company faced penalties of more than $350 million. Four Koch employees were also charged individually and faced up to 35 years in prison.
Three months after the Bush administration took office—and just before the lawsuit went to trial—the Justice Department abruptly settled the case. Koch agreed to pay $20 million and plead guilty to a single count of concealment of information. In return, the Justice Department dropped all criminal charges against Koch and the four employees.26
The Kochs had gotten off lightly, but looking to the future, they stepped up their political activity. They focused most of their efforts in the realm of donor activity, often described as philanthropy, informed by their talent for corporate strategy. Like their father, Charles and David Koch were MIT graduates. Every major undertaking showed the careful assembly of the interlocking parts: the political equivalent of wells, refineries, pipelines.
The brothers funded their political machine from multiple pockets, described by Jane Mayer in her essential book on the Koch empire, Dark Money. Between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation donated over $48 million, mostly to groups supporting his agenda. Another $28 million came from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, named after a Wichita real estate developer and early investor in Fred Koch’s business. Lambe left his fortune in the care of Charles Koch; the foundation board was comprised entirely of Charles Koch, his family members, and his employees. (It was dissolved in 2013.)
Over the same decade, Koch Industries disbursed over $50 million in lobbying activities, and the Koch PAC donated $8 million to political campaigns.27 The sums added up to a vast fortune—but that didn’t tell the whole story. The Koch brothers spent millions more in personal contributions, and the privately held Koch Industries conglomerate was exempt from the reporting requirements of publicly held companies.
The dark money didn’t stop with the Kochs; they were keen to leverage their influence with other donors. Like the founders of the CNP, they looked to their rivals for inspiration. Many philanthropic foundations had taken a liberal bent, even when their founders, such as Henry Ford, were reactionary; the liberal Council on Foundations helped its member groups reinforce each others’ projects, contributing to initiatives ranging from the civil rights movement to the green revolution. The Koch brothers set out to create a parallel universe of philanthropy. Through various dark money trusts and donor networks, their millions would serve as a magnet for like-minded plutocrats.
The Kochs coordinated their efforts through the Philanthropy Roundtable, founded in 1987, a conservative version of the Council on Foundations. A young woman named Whitney Ball, the director of development at the Koch’s Cato Foundation, left to work for the roundtable, which received massive support from various Koch outlets, as well as CNP donors such as the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation.28
In 1999 the Kochs helped to launch a new consortium called the Donors Trust, with Whitney Ball in charge. Donors who committed $1 million or more per year could join the affiliated Donors Capital Fund.29 These groups functioned as tax-exempt “donor-advised funds,” obscuring the relationship between donor and beneficiary. Donors knew their contributions went to a list of approved causes, and they received a tax write-off in return.
The result was a merry-go-round of reciprocal funding. The Koch network and CNP donors—especially the DeVos family—grew ever closer, despite their religious differences. The DeVoses joined the Kochs’ Seminar Network, and Charles Koch attended CNP meetings. In January 1999 he received the Richard DeVos Free Enterprise Award at the Council for National Policy’s biannual meeting in Naples, Florida.30
The Koch brothers and the CNP took the 2000 elections as a warning signal, after George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore and squeaked into the presidency by a single vote in the Electoral College. The contest was stained by serious voting irregularities in Florida and elsewhere. (A study by the Carnegie Corporation found that as many as four to six million votes “were lost” in the election.31) It was a narrow escape for the Kochs. Former Texas governor George W. Bush was a longtime friend to the oil industry, but Al Gore was a committed environmentalist who promised to lead the nation in tackling climate change and pollution. But the plutocrats were also concerned by the course of the new administration. Once in office President George W. Bush began to behave more like a traditional Republican than a libertarian, taking an interventionist position in the Middle East and proposing expanded Medicare benefits.32
The Kochs regrouped. In 2003, with the 2004 elections in sight, they launched their donor summit. The initial event was a modest affair, consisting of some fifteen friends of Charles who sat through lectures on libertarian philosophy. Not surprisingly, even fewer participants returned for the next round; Charles Koch admitted that his target audience lacked motivation so long as Republicans were in office.33 That would change. In time, the summits would expand to hundreds of donors—including the CNP’s DeVos and Friess families—meeting on a biannual basis to renew their contributions to the Kochs’ Seminar Network.34 A $100,000 commitment was required to get in the door. The Seminar Network, even less transparent than the Donors Trust, would channel millions of dollars toward reshaping the U.S. government on behalf of the one percent.
The Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded in 1984, was harder to manage. Many observers described it as “astroturf”: an artificial grassroots organization, driven by funding from the top, designed to resemble a popular initiative.35 In 2003 Dick Armey became head of Citizens for a Sound Economy. Armey was an outspoken former congressman from Texas, a Republican majority leader, and a member of the CNP. Although he was resolutely antiabortion, Armey, the bearer of a PhD in economics from the University of Oklahoma, focused more on lowering taxes than promoting fundamentalist concerns. Over the 1990s he had encouraged a sputtering movement that became the Tea Party, whose scattered local activists agreed on vague notions of lowering taxes but little else.
In 2003 Armey fell out with David Koch, and Citizens for a Sound Economy split into two organizations. Both maintained their 501(c)(4) status as nonpartisan “social welfare” organizations that were allowed to conduct political activity so long as it was not their primary function. They were also allowed to fund other 501(c)(4) groups.36 Armey’s faction was dubbed FreedomWorks, and continued to receive major funding from the Donors Trust as well as from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation.37
The second group, Americans for Prosperity, was chaired by David Koch and became the hub of Koch-sponsored political activity. The Koch brothers still found financial strategy more intuitive than politics. As investigative reporter Lee Fang pointed out, the Kochs “struggled with ways to engineer public support for their extremely unpopular ideas, such as slashing the size of state government, thus laying off teachers and firemen, and reducing services.”38
It was a unique challenge: to engineer the mechanisms of American democracy and media to convince voters to support candidates who would compromise the safety of their water, soil, and air, and limit their families’ access to health care and public education. It would require all the strengths of American corporate culture, including strategy, messaging, and marketing. But the Kochs, increasingly impatient with the traditional Republican Party, were ready to make an end run.
Over time, Americans for Prosperity developed into an organization to rival the traditional GOP. In their ground-breaking 2018 paper, Columbia professors Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Jason Sclar and Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol described it as “a new political-party-like federation … to synchronize lobbying and grassroots mobilization for elections and policy battles in dozens of states as well as in Washington, DC.”39
The CNP connection was bred in the bone: the director of Americans for Prosperity, Tim Phillips, attended Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University before completing his studies at Virginia Tech. In 1997, at the age of thirty-three, he cofounded a consulting firm called Century Strategies with Ralph Reed, a leading figure in the CNP.40 Phillips and Reed handled financial operations for the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, also a CNP member at the time. Phillips himself joined the CNP sometime before 2014.
The Koch organization made a strategic decision to focus on state-level activity, with Americans for Prosperity as their lever. “A nation-spanning organization,” wrote Skocpol and her colleagues, “AFP is by far the most important political organization in the overall network supported by the Koch seminars … By 2007, before Barack Obama even declared his candidacy for the presidency, AFP had installed paid directors and usually additional paid operatives in fifteen states spread across all U.S. regions and encompassing close to half the U.S. population.”41 By 2019, Americans for Prosperity would expand across thirty-five states and claim an army of 3.2 million activists.42
The reciprocal funding accelerated. Over its first two decades, the Koch-founded Donors Trust disbursed over $218 million. Its number-one beneficiary was the Koch-funded “grassroots organization” Americans for Prosperity. The top fifty beneficiaries included the Koch-funded FreedomWorks Foundation (the “charity” arm of FreedomWorks), the Mercatus Center, and the Cato Institute.43 The DeVoses were surely pleased to see that organizations headed by fellow CNP members also benefited, including the Federalist Society (ranked no. 4), the State Policy Network (no. 23), and the NRA, through the NRA Freedom Action Foundation (no. 42).44 The DeVoses reciprocated. Between 2007 and 2011, the DeVos family foundation gave $800,000 to the Kochs’ FreedomWorks Foundation.45
The Koch-CNP cross-funding brought other benefits. Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute received funding from the Donors Trust, the Donors Capital Fund, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.46 Tim Phillips served as volunteer faculty for the Leadership Institute, and the Leadership Institute provided training and seminars for Americans for Prosperity interns.47
The idea of the consortium was popular among donors. CNP donors not only supported the Koch-backed consortium but were also active in the National Christian Foundation, a donor network comprised of affluent evangelicals. Launched in the 1980s by a fundamentalist network known as “The Family,” the National Christian Foundation became a major, if obscure, force in U.S. philanthropy. Its meetings, held in luxury resorts, were known as “the Gathering”; adult attendees were charged $2,200 for admission and required to commit upward of $200,000 a year.
The National Christian Foundation hosted a broad array of donors and many traditional charities, overlapping with the Council for National Policy. Its key donors included CNP members from the DeVos, Prince, Friess, Coors, and Templeton families; its major beneficiaries included many groups run by CNP members, including the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and other anti-LGBT organizations—as well as a host of Koch-backed organizations.48 By 2017 the National Christian Foundation had grown to be the eighth-largest charity in the United States, raising $1.5 billion a year.49
But the conservative donor networks faced a challenge from the left. One rival—who would become a bête noire for the CNP—was Hungarian-born financier George Soros. Soros began his philanthropic career in 1979, and eventually he assigned more than $32 billion of his fortune to his philanthropic network, the Open Society Foundations (leaving him with over $8 billion).50 Unlike the Kochs, Soros launched his philanthropy with an international emphasis, and only added U.S. domestic projects after the end of the Cold War.
In 2005 Soros and his son Jonathan provided seed funding for a liberal donor consortium called the Democracy Alliance, in partnership with an Ohio insurance executive named Peter Lewis.51 (Lewis was small fry compared to Soros, with a fortune of a mere $1.3 billion at the time of his death in 2005.52)
The Democracy Alliance bore some structural similarities to the Koch seminars and the National Christian Foundation. The Washington Free Beacon published a story about the alliance, based on documents left behind from a meeting. It reported that the group met several times a year, maintained a veil of secrecy regarding donors and grants, favored luxurious venues, and demanded a steep price for admission: $30,000 in annual dues and pledges of at least $200,000 a year.53 The Democracy Alliance’s approach allowed it, like the Koch seminars, to focus on long-term policy issues instead of the short-term electoral agendas of most political action committees (PACs). Both provided seed money to new organizations that promised to advance their values.
There were also significant differences. Three-quarters of the Democracy Alliance partners were coastal, concentrated in three areas: the Boston–New York–Washington corridor, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles. In contrast, almost two-thirds of the Koch Seminar participants lived in the South and the Midwest.54 In electoral terms, this meant that the Democratic donors’ focused on zones that weighed heavily in the popular vote, while the Koch seminar donors were more likely to inhabit critical swing states that tilted the Electoral College, and sparsely populated states with disproportionate influence in the Senate. Both networks featured a preponderance of donors from the fields of finance, insurance, and real estate. But the Koch seminars were weighted toward the extractive industries and manufacturing, while the Democrats skewed toward the information industries, the legal profession, and entertainment.55
In the short term, the demographics of the Democracy Alliance were to their advantage. In the fall of 2005 the alliance, with its depth in the information industry and Silicon Valley, seized the initiative to fund new approaches to digital campaign technology. Over the next three years the Democrats established a clear lead in digital technology, making a major contribution to Obama’s victory.
But these same qualities contributed to a disadvantage. The Koch seminars’ corporate culture produced a structured approach, with a clear sense of command and control and a defined hierarchy. Combined with the Council for National Policy and its affiliates, the network resembled a vertically and horizontally integrated corporation. A closely held circle of strategists and CEOs determined the policy, supported by a cohort of investors, executed by obedient franchises. Network donors contributed to a fund, and the management directed it to bankroll a chosen few network organizations.
As a result, the Koch network could, as the Skocpol study states, “nimbly form and revise overall strategies, while [the Democracy Alliance’s] rules have promoted scattering of resources and undercut possibilities for advancing any coherent strategy.”56 The Democracy Alliance expected its beneficiaries to collaborate, but the approach often resembled the tech start-up culture, with all of its exuberance, creativity, and chaos. Scores of organizations were invited to the meetings to make their pitches. Donors offered winning contestants the equivalent of venture capital, and they were placed in competition with each other to scrabble for a longer-term commitment. Many went broke along the way.
The Skocpol study noted that logically, Democrats should have enjoyed a competitive advantage, given that wealthy liberals are more prevalent in the United States than wealthy conservatives. Nonetheless, their network proved less effective. The Koch seminars “have fueled a tightly integrated political machine” that moved national and state-level Republicans toward the ultra-free-market right. The Democracy Alliance, on the other hand, achieved “more limited results by channeling resources to large numbers of mostly nationally focused and professionally managed liberal advocacy and constituency groups.”57 These differences would have a dramatic impact on the battle royal to come.
Fueled by massive investments into their networked organizations, the Council for National Policy members made many political inroads, particularly through activities of the Family Research Council. The year 2003 marked a new chapter for the organization, as founder James Dobson took up the cause of fellow CNP member and Alabama judge Roy Moore. Moore was fighting to retain a massive monument to the Ten Commandments at the Alabama Supreme Court after it had been ruled unconstitutional by a federal court.58
After Dobson brought in Tony Perkins as FRC director, Perkins launched a new FRC “ministry” called Watchmen on the Wall, after Isaiah 62:6: “On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen.” This organization served to recruit and network fundamentalist pastors in critical electoral districts. In their home states, members were treated to periodic “pastor appreciation breakfasts.” The FRC took the opportunity to distribute complimentary organizing materials, including a manual for organizing their own “Culture Impact Team” and “IRS-compliant voter guides produced by FRC.”59
Many pastors continued to be uncomfortable with preaching politics from the pulpit, and the Family Research Council offered them a menu of arguments and workarounds. One video, narrated by Tony Perkins, listed religious figures who challenged authority, including Moses, Elijah, and John the Baptist, demanding, “Were these men of God throughout history being too political?” FRC voter guides scrupulously avoided endorsing candidates in a literal fashion; they simply rated candidates according to their criteria, which led to an inescapable conclusion in favor of Republicans. Pastors were encouraged to join the P3 Pastor Program (“Praying for the nation, Preaching the whole counsel of God, and Partnering with others”). Members could access the FRC’s “church-friendly Bulletin Insert” to print and distribute to the congregations on Sunday, tucked into the order of worship. The FRC also produced compelling antiabortion videos to show in the church. They even offered a menu of ready-made sermons, including PowerPoint presentations written by Perkins and his partners for download and delivery from the pulpit.60
The Family Research Council sponsored regional briefings with names like “Keep God in Texas.”61 In 2003 Watchmen on the Wall hosted its first national conference, which became an annual event. Pastors and their wives enjoyed a heavily subsidized three-day junket in Washington at the swanky Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill.62 There they received FRC policy briefings, training sessions, and a “Spiritual Heritage Tour” of the U.S. Capitol.63 Then they were dispatched to Capitol Hill to carry the FRC message to their congressmen, whose office addresses were helpfully listed in the conference program. The materials also included painstaking guidelines for the legal boundaries for church politicking, and tips for setting up a “Culture Impact Team” in the home church. The orientation materials included a budget—suggesting that pastors should contribute 1 percent of their church’s undesignated receipts to the Family Research Council.64
The shadow network operated at full force. Watchmen on the Wall was heavily promoted on the CNP radio partner networks, which in turn recruited their followers for training at the Leadership Institute. The pastors’ training sessions instructed them in methods not only for getting their congregants to the polls but also for extending their influence to family and friends and recruiting their followers to run for political office. Any churchgoer who was misguided enough to support a Democrat was pounded with messaging on the twin virtues of “sanctity of life” (antiabortion) and “sanctity of marriage” (anti-same-sex marriage). The FRC website added a downloadable “Election Prayer Guide” asking worshippers to “pray that America’s Christians will all register to vote” and cast their votes based on candidates’ “biblical values,” in order to elect “godly men and women as leaders who fear the Lord and honor Him.”65
The FRC’s first iVoterGuide was drafted in 2004 by two Southern Baptist pastors, Kenyn Cureton and Richard Land, a CNP member.66 The guides routinely awarded high marks to conservative pro-gun, anti-tax Republicans for defending “biblical values,” at the expense of Democratic candidates. Soon after the guides were launched, Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time, described the promotional strategy in a question-and-answer session: “We currently have an 18-wheeler, which used to be used to sell merchandise from the Charlie Daniels Band—after all, we are based in Nashville—and it is now the iVoteValues.com Express. It’s part of a year-long campaign to heighten awareness of people in the Southern Baptist and evangelical community, that they ought to be registered to vote, to help them get registered to vote, to help them get informed on the issues, and then to encourage them to vote their values, their beliefs and their convictions.”67
The guides didn’t tell Baptists who to vote for, Land said—they were just “printing up platform comparisons”: “We will be printing a significant number this year, and we’re encouraging folks to order them from iVoteValues.com [linked to the Family Research Council] or FaithandFamily.com [a Southern Baptist Convention site].”
The iVoter guides defined the issues, and their wording influenced the reactions. At the top of their list they placed appointing conservative [or “originalist”] judges and banning same-sex marriage. Environmental issues were not worthy of mention.68
Voter guides are standard issue for all sorts of political parties and activists, of course, and it’s standard practice for the wording of the “questions” and candidate ratings to nudge the reader in the desired direction. But by making pastors and churches their vehicles of distribution, the iVoter guides gave their recommendations the imprimatur of spiritual leaders—perhaps even an air of divine authority.
In 2006 the Family Research Council appointed iVoter coauthor Kenyn Cureton as its vice president for church ministries, a post that included oversight of Watchmen on the Wall. Under his leadership, the website’s listing of its national pastors network grew from a base of 1,800 pastors to 75,000.69 Many were located in critical swing states, including Wisconsin (with 891 members), Michigan (1,778), Pennsylvania (2,464), and Florida (7,372).70 In a tight race, a cohort of pastors who influenced as few as fifty votes apiece could swing an election.
In 2006 Tony Perkins created an annual rally and networking event in Washington, D.C. The Values Voter Summit was hosted by FRC Action, the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm, and cosponsored by a long list of groups run by CNP members: the American Family Association Action, Alliance Defending Freedom, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Liberty University, the Susan B. Anthony List, and many more.71
The summit offered the movement’s middle tier of supporters—many of whom had never heard of the Council for National Policy—a chance to see CNP stars in person. Tony Perkins was the host. Oliver North was a regular, as were media figures such as Todd Starnes.72 The Values Voter Summit grew to more than three thousand attendees from across the country, some of whom paid over $600 for the full three-day package (not including travel and lodging). This included training workshops in political campaign techniques by staff from Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute and briefings from movement pollster George Barna.73 The summits wound up with a black-tie “Faith, Family and Freedom Gala,” with a 1950s-style stage band rocking gospel tunes and standards to a danceable beat. A few non-Baptists even danced. No alcohol was served.74
Perkins promoted the summit on his Washington Watch broadcasts on the Bott and American Family Radio networks. CNP member Richard Bott himself sometimes attended, and Bott Radio sponsored the meeting’s “radio row.” This was an improvised studio in the exhibition hall, where speakers could follow up with an interview and fans could snap pictures of them as they spoke. The exhibition hall featured booths and tables from a broad range of organizations: Liberty University recruited students, fundamentalist movie companies promoted feature films, and the NRA handed out bumper stickers.
The Values Voter podium became a required stop for Republican politicians seeking the FRC’s blessing and presidential hopefuls auditioning for the fundamentalist voting bloc. The Values Voter Summit became a media event for mainstream news outlets as well, a rare opportunity to view the shadow network in the spotlight.
Other American Christians agonized over the conflicts generated by the gaps between the world’s political realities and the ideals of their faith. What was a Christian position on the torture practiced by the U.S. government in the post-9/11 period in pursuit of combating terrorism? How could the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” be reconciled with capital punishment and the epidemic of gun violence? What would a humane refugee policy look like in a world beset by millions of suffering refugees?
These matters were absent from the prayer menu for Watchmen on the Wall and the program for the Values Voter Summit. Children’s welfare was only mentioned from conception until birth. The Family Research Council held that fundamentalist Christians “are victims of religious discrimination … From the Senate chamber to a corner bakery, Christians with natural or biblical views of marriage and sexuality have a bullseye on their backs.”75 Their sense of victimization left little compassion for anyone else.