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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

And Soros funded groups are different? Come on now. There are plenty of think tanks that are supported by anti-capitalist interests as well.

It feels to me like “Koch Brothers” is some kind of socialist dog whistle to rile people up. It’s like mentioning Rush Limbaugh: people get riled up over just the name, but it’s highly likely most people have never heard his show — just cherry picked, out of context quotes that are like red-meat to the starving tigers of left wing interest groups.

To be fair, the right has their dog whistles too. Mention Nancy Pelosi or George Soros and the right loses their mind as well. Acting like think tanks are some sort of capitalist conspiracy is just ridiculous.

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The comment you replied to wasn't great, but you took what was worst about it and dialed it up to 11.

I agree. Soros and the Koch bros are two sides of the same coin. They both advocate pro-globalization policies, Soros the social aspects, and Koch the economic aspects. It's clear that globalism has massively benefitted the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the lower and middle class, and one way they justify the madness is by funding these propaganda organizations.

What bugs me is how often reports from "Think Tanks" and NGOs are uncritically reported as news by the media without disclosing their donors.

Nancy Pelosi is a mainstream center-left Democrat who just happens to be a woman (!) from San Francisco (!) in a position of power, which gets some people in a tizzy. Most of the outrage about whatever it is she’s saying or doing this week is manufactured by a propaganda machine.

The Koch Brothers, by contrast, have a self-serving radical fringe ideology and no public accountability whatsoever, but because they are billionaires who have organized with other billionaires, can spend huge amounts of money in a subversive campaign to make their fringe ideas seem respectable.

Have you ever heard Limbaugh’s show? My grandfather once was a reasonable, competent, practical mainstream Republican (worked in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations), but 20 years of listening to Limbaugh and later Fox News turned him into a ranting conspiracy theorist.

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