The Koch Brothers Are Secretly Funding The GOP’s Latino Outreach

Ever since President Obama crushed Mitt Romney in 2012 with 71% of the Latino vote, the Republican Party has made noises about broadening their base to include more minorities. For the most part their efforts have been limited to lip service, while their actions have served only to further alienate African-Americans and Latinos.

While most Democrats have risen to the aide of child immigrants who are suffering and alone on the southern border, Republicans have responded with insensitivity that ranges from calls to deport them, to formations of armed militias to – well who knows what they intend to do with their weapons aimed at frightened kids. In the end they are behaving consistently with the long-held positions of conservatives who have never welcomed either minorities or immigrants with open arms.

So leave it to the Koch brothers to come to their rescue with a clandestine campaign to bridge the ethnic gap that threatens to make the GOP a permanent minority party. The Republican regulars would be hard pressed to suddenly flip-flop on immigration and anger their Tea Party base that is dead-set against passing comprehensive immigration reform that respects the traditional values of America as expressed on the Statue of Liberty. They won’t even pass legislation to provide humanitarian relief for children. So any effort to bring Latinos into the GOP fold has to be done without leaving any fingerprints on the party’s standard bearers.

Koch Brothers Libre

That’s where the Libre Initiative comes in. It is an ostensibly pro-Latino group that has begun offering English classes, health checkups and courses to help Spanish-speakers earn high school diplomas. The Associated Press, however, reports that it “has collected millions from the Kochs’ political network.” But its programs are served up with healthy doses of right-wing propaganda.

“Its organizers pitch conservative ideals while offering tutorials on U.S. immigration law, support for overhauling the broken immigration system that stops short of campaigning for the Senate’s bipartisan bill and collecting donations for the unaccompanied children crossing the United States-Mexico border illegally.

“In effect, it is a shadow GOP — one with a gentle emphasis on social services and assimilation over a central party often seen as hostile to immigrants and minorities.

The tactic is pure Koch Brothers. They were instrumental in creating the Tea Party, which they disguised as a “grassroots” organization despite the millions the Kochs poured into it. They created Generation Opportunity to make their fringe-right agenda appealing to young Americans. They recently donated $25 million to the United Negro College Fund, but rest assured, there are strings attached to that largess as well. The Koch brothers have a vast network of secretly bankrolled advocacy groups and think tanks that they use to advance their personal and business interests. The Center for American Progress published an extensive report cataloging their empire.

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Conservative media is playing its part also. The AP story was posted to Fox News Latino, albeit with a very small link. However, there is no mention at all of the story on Fox News. That is commonplace for the Fox editors. They have a long history of trying to pander to Latinos on their Latino-focused website, while ignoring, or reporting the same story negatively, on the Fox News mothership. That way they don’t upset their regular (i.e. racist) viewers.

GOP ‘Word Doctor’ Inadvertently Admits (And Praises) Blatant Fox News Bias

As one of Fox News’ favorite contributors J. Christ said: “Physician, heal thyself.” That would be good advice for Dr. Frank Luntz, who has dubbed himself “The Word Doctor” for his efforts to deceitfully manipulate language in order to peddle otherwise unpopular conservative policies.

Fox News Frank Luntz

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On Sunday’s episode of MediaBuzz, the Fox News media analysis program, host Howard Kurtz brought Luntz in to discuss the public’s low opinion of the media. The segment turned into a slobbering love fest of Fox News with Luntz heaping praise on the network with almost every answer. However, in one instance he may have provided a little too much information.

Kurtz and Luntz were attempting to demonstrate how “fair and balanced” the notoriously conservative network is with a clip from one of Luntz’s focus groups. Luntz began by asking the group if they trust Fox News. A distinct majority raised their hands to indicate that they did. One of the few dissenters who was asked to elaborate was a woman who said that “I really believe – I know no one wants to hear this, especially here – that Fox is an extension of the Republican Party.” Seizing on that candid opinion, Luntz heralded Fox for being “willing to challenge itself,” and took a swipe at MSNBC, who he said would not have allowed the question. Then he escalated his gushing adulation to say that…

“In 2008, when I did focus groups with Obama and McCain, all three of my sessions during the debates had Obama winning. And Fox still devoted six, seven, eight minutes to those focus groups. They have nothing to fear, and I appreciate that about this network.”

Imagine that. A Republican pollster holds focus groups that favor Obama but Fox aired the results anyway. That’s an open admission that Fox is exactly what the woman in the group said: “an extension of the Republican Party.” Otherwise, why would Luntz regard it as so extraordinary that it deserved special recognition? Luntz was praising Fox for broadcasting the segment even though it was contrary to their Republican political leanings. And of course they have nothing to fear when the other 99.9% of their programming is solid GOP talking points straight from RNC press releases.

But Luntz shouldn’t get so excited about this anomaly. Fox’s version of fairness and balance is anything but. Their oversampling of right-wing pundits and politicians has been well documented. They even provide a platform for Republican candidates to campaign while still employed by Fox as paid contributors. And just last week Bill O’Reilly did a segment that attempted to prove that Fox was ideologically evenhanded, but it backfired badly. His guest, Fox host Heather Nauert, noted that there were nineteen “liberals” on Fox “out of quite a lot” of conservatives, Nauert fumbled.

[FYI: I counted only sixteen liberals (and some of those were questionable) facing off against 121 conservatives according to Fox’s website. The “liberals” are Evan Bayh, Bob Beckel, James Carville, Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, Santita Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Mara Liasson, Leslie Marshall, Deroy Murdock, Kirsten Powers, Ellen Ratner, Geraldo Rivera, Julie Roginsky, Joe Trippi, and Juan Williams]

Elsewhere in the MediaBuzz segment Kurtz posed this question to Luntz: “You are saying that the audience has gotten more partisan […] Aren’t people like you in part responsible for that?” Good question, Howie. Here is Luntz’s ludicrous response which Kurtz left unchallanged:

“Well, it’s a simple question. Is the death tax an accurate description of being taxed when you die? Isn’t exploring for energy what oil companies do? Is it opportunity in education, in terms of vouchers or school choice? If you believe that the words that I’m using aren’t accurate, then you’ve got a legitimate point. I believe that these are accurate descriptions, which is why the American people seem to support it.”

Quite clearly these are not accurate descriptions. They are deliberate deceptions that Luntz carefully tested to assure that they would elicit predetermined reactions from voters. The “Death Tax” that Luntz coined is not a tax on dying. It is tax on property that is being transferred from one party to another, which is exactly what would happen if it were being done between two living persons. His “exploring for energy” dodge is meant to disguise the fact that it refers to environmentally risky off-shore drilling that the public opposes. As for “opportunity in education,” that is so vague as to be meaningless, and it dispenses with the truly descriptive phrasing of vouchers, which is what the program is all about.

Luntz is a professional deception specialist. Republicans rely on him for ways to package unpopular GOP policies so that citizens are persuaded to vote against their own best interests. In other words, he constructs lies that he sells to desperate right-wing politicos, and he supports a luxurious lifestyle by doing so.