Koch Machine Backs Nikki Haley, Demonstrating the Hopelessness of the Swamp Right
The 'Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy' isn't that vast, isn't that right-wing, and its only conspiracy is keeping itself happy.
Surprising nobody, the lobbying network of libertarian billionaire Charles Koch is throwing its weight behind the closest Republican they can to the mold Republican voters have been chafing and rebelling against for the last twenty years, Nikki Haley.
“When we announced our decision to engage in our first ever Republican presidential primary, we made it clear that we’d be looking for a candidate who can turn the page on our political dysfunction – and win. It’s clear that candidate is Nikki Haley,” [Americans for Prosperity Action official Emily] Siedel said Tuesday. “We can’t keep looking to the politicians of the past to fix the problems of today. Nikki Haley represents a new generation of leadership and offers a bold, positive vision for our future. AFP Action is proud to be endorsing her and we will be doing everything we can to help make her the next President of the United States.”
The effort will begin with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in support of Haley launching this week in all early and several Super Tuesday states, and the group touted its data capabilities – including a contact database with millions of voters – and its extensive grassroots reach.
Seidel did not disclose a budget on behalf of Haley, but the network has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in previous election cycles, rivaling the financial might of the Republican National Committee.
A spokesman for the Ron DeSantis campaign shot back that financially supporting Haley “should be reported as an in-kind to the Trump campaign,” and with good reason—the New York Post reported Monday that in just two months, her super PAC Stand for America spent over $3.5 million attacking DeSantis but nothing on frontrunner Donald Trump, prompting speculation she’s angling for a job in a second Trump administration. That’s probably unrealistic considering Nikki’s former boss met the news by deriding her as a “globalist”-backed “puppet,” but the fact remains that Koch is effectively just subsidizing attacks on the only real opponent of the guy it claims to want to stop.
Why? Because they don’t really want to “fix the problems of today”; they want to will into existence a past where their milquetoast, Chamber-of-Commerce-aligned brand of conservatism had no serious competition. And to that end, they found a candidate who hasn’t held elected office in over a decade and are preposterously trying to sell her as representing the “new.”
Because nothing says courageous leadership like a politician who reflexively submits to leftist panics and race hoaxes, panders to corporations that are openly working to brainwash children into sex-obsessed leftists, thinks the real problem with abortion politics is that pro-lifers aren’t nice enough, and floats idiotic proposals to gut online privacy only to shrink from them days later. Haley would be better than Trump, but that’s about as low as bars get; she’s plainly not the relentless conservative warrior we need to beat back the Left’s multi-front campaign to unmake America.
Such self-centered obtuseness from the Right’s donor class is nothing new. The dirty little not-so-secret behind Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” line has always been that the real VRWC isn’t that vast, isn’t that right-wing, and its “conspiracy” consists mostly of propping up nonprofits for conservatives to make comfortable livings by writing and talking about political theory amongst themselves and place right-wing college kids on career tracks where they can have a great time playacting as patriots without actually changing anything.
Contrast that with George Soros, one of the Right’s favorite boogeymen because he puts his vast wealth toward advancing very, very bad things. Soros deserves just about every unkind word said about him in mainstream conservative circles, but our conversations about him tend to amount to little more than complaining for complaining’s sake, when what our side should have been doing all this time was taking notes.
Though his bank account has a lot more zeroes than yours or mine, ultimately Soros is simply a man who devotes his money to advancing the policies he wants and the causes he believes in—and does so with far more brains and conviction than rich conservatives do. Whereas the Koch network spends like investors seeking returns, Soros spends like a true believer, to not just win elections but shape the culture in which voters marinate.
Indeed, it should be a source of deep embarrassment to the American Right that the only billionaire whose spending to restore America comes even close to the impact of Soros’s spending in the opposite direction is Elon Musk through his purchase and transformation of Twitter—and he’s not even a conservative, just an independent-minded guy who believes in free speech.
Conservatives cannot and should not rely on rich activists to come along and simply buy our problems away. But we also shouldn’t let the rich activists we do have get away with pretending they’re doing good work from good motives when they bankroll disaster.