Revealed: how top pop stars are used to ‘launder the reputation’ of Koch family | US news

Last September, rapper Killer Mike was DJing hip-hop classics like Snoop Dogg’s Ain’t No Fun at a music festival after-party in Louisville, Kentucky. “The inspiration for the evening’s set is freedom of speech, so say what the hell you want!” he tell a crowd of hundreds. Killer Mike, one half of the duo Run the Jewels, is known for speaking out against police brutality and racial injustice, as well as conduct campaigns for Bernie Sanders.

But tonight’s set was co-sponsored by Stand Together Music, an organization backed by libertarian billionaire Charles Koch, who made his fortune in fossil fuels. Other sponsors of the party include the free speech group Fire (which received millions of dollars in contributions from the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation), as well as the music store Spin, an official partner of Stand Together Music.

Why would Killer Mike associate himself with an 88-year-old political power broker whose network has given hundreds of millions of dollars to conservative causes? Researchers who monitor the network, say it is possible that the rapper, which is not listed as a partner of the group, did not know his set was connected to Koch.

“It shows how shrewd and successful Stand Together Music has been in achieving collaborations with artists who I don’t think share the value sets of Charles Koch,” said Connor Gibson, a former Greenpeace researcher who now runs the website Grassroots Beer Investigations.

This organization is expanding its influence as Koch, whose brother David died in 2019, thinks about how he wants the public to remember him. Stand Together Music is part of a wider conservative advocacy network promoting “Charles Koch’s principled legacy”. Stand Together Music itself was founded by Koch’s son Chase, who says he had to listen to “books on tape by Milton Friedman” as a child. Turned on to music by Pink Floyd in his teens, he is now a 46-year-old guitarist who plays in various bands and is said to inherit 42% control of Koch Industries when his father dies.

But Stand Together Music is more than just a rich, middle-aged heir’s pet project. Gibson and other critics claim it allows Koch and his allies to co-opt pop musicians, young music fans and other hard-to-reach constituencies into a conservative political movement whose ultimate goals include dismantling the government’s ability to regulate polluting corporations like Koch Industries.

Stand Together Music, what appears to have been launched in 2022, lists as its official partners the likes of pop-punk rapper Machine Gun Kelly, electronic duo the Chainsmokers and Miami rapper Pitbull. “The result is that these musicians are being used to wash the reputation of Koch Industries, whether they know it or not,” Gibson said.

On a section of its website dedicated to “free speech and peace”, the organization contains an interview filmed earlier this year with Tom Morello, the former guitarist for Rage Against the Machine. “Watch him discuss how RATM has made a career out of speaking out about the issues they care about,” the website explains.

It’s a bizarrely generic way to describe Rage Against the Machine’s politics. Morello aligned himself with left-wing causes such as Occupy Wall Street and the release of indigenous activist Leonard Peltier from prison, as well as attacking capitalism’s role in “the impending environmental crisis”. So it may seem strange that he is being championed by a music organization linked to a conglomerate that owns oil refineries, pipelines and petrochemical facilities and a top greenhouse gas polluter in the USA.

Representatives for Machine Gun Kelly, the Chainsmokers, Pitbull and Tom Morello did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

In a statement sent after this story was first published, Stand Together Music said it was “honoured to partner with incredible musicians who share our passion for solving problems that hold people back” and that music brings people together brought in “today’s polarized world”.

It added, “The artists we work with have the ability to elevate meaningful solutions to issues like addiction, criminal justice, mental health by engaging with incredible nonprofits across the country.”

Charles Koch, with a net worth of around $60 billion, is among the top 25 richest people in the world. For decades, he and his late brother David used their vast wealth to fight environmental regulations and pull American politics to the right. From 1997 to 2018, they gave more than $145 million to conservative groups such as the Manhattan Institutewho has a record of attacking climate solutions and denying that a climate emergency exists, According to Greenpeace calculations. The Kochs founded the political advocacy group Americans for Prosperitywho in the late 2000s played a leading role in catalyzing the Tea Party, a populist movement that elected dozens of hard-right Republicans to Congress and arguably helped create the conditions for Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016 become

This sprawling political operation was previously coordinated under an umbrella group called the seminar network (referred to by some critics as the “Kochtopus”). Its organizers cited it as a major achievement pushing the Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, according to private documents obtained by the Intercept and Documented.

But Koch has publicly clashed with Trump on issues like the Muslim ban. And during Trump’s presidency, he renamed his network of wealthy donors, political influence groups and conservative advocacy operations Stand Together. That organization then began making charitable contributions to groups working on issues with modest bipartisan support, such as criminal justice reform, poverty and addiction, with Koch signaling at a gathering of supporters in Palm Springs in 2019 that he wanted to move away of partisan politics.

How much Koch actually meant this is debatable. One of Stand Together’s members is still Americans for Prosperity, which during the 2020 election spent nearly $48m to help Republican candidates, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets; spend it an additional $69m during the 2022 election cycle. Supporting bipartisan social causes while helping elect Republicans is all part of the same political strategy, said Lisa Graves, executive director of the watchdog organization True North Research.

She cited as an example Koch’s support for a sentencing reform bill known as the First Step Act. signed by law by Trump in 2019. That year, Americans for Prosperity went on tour with a Black man named Marshall Charles who was released from prison because of the law. Charles spoke at a Black church in Wisconsin, a state where Americans for Prosperity subsequently mailed nearly 2 million fliers in support of the 2022 re-election campaign of Republican Senator Ron Johnson. “What they came out of [the criminal justice reform bill] was some access to the African-American community, raising their political game,” Graves said.

For her, this illustrates a key organizing principle of the Koch network – that it is designed to appeal to and garner support from as many distinct identity groups as possible. Another member of Stand Together is the Libre Initiative, which issued free Thanksgiving turkeys in Latino communities and then asked people to fill out questionnaires with their political beliefs and contact information. There are Stand Together groups which reaches out to veterans, concerned parents, K-12 educators, professors and early-stage entrepreneurs. And now, with the launch of Stand Together Music, the Koch Network is targeting music fans.

Before founding the organization, Chase reportedly struggled to find a place in his father’s business and political empire. After giving up his dream of being a professional tennis player at 15, Chase took his first job at Koch Industries. He told Forbes that his father “sent me off to our feed yard in Syracuse, Kansas, to shovel cow shit and dig post holes. It was quite an adjustment from the country club.”

Chase was asked to run Koch Industries’ entire fertilizer business in 2014, but the pressure of overseeing thousands of employees in 30 countries didn’t seem like a good fit and he fired himself after nine months. Several years later, he formed a venture capital group within the company and began playing in his spare time in a band called Memento Mori with John Hardin, a Stand Together board member who had previously worked in golf course design and construction. Chase formed a second group, 2ŁØT, with the former drummer for Chance the Rapper. “I just went through a divorce, so I’ve been through a lot myself,” Chase told Forbes. “So we said, ‘Hey, let’s just play music together.'”

Chase then appears to have merged his musical ties into a new organization that serves the goals of his billionaire father. One of Stand Together Music’s first major ventures involved sponsoring an ongoing music series in 2022 at a new 10,000-seat sports and concert arena in Palm Springs. Brian Hooks, chairman and CEO of Stand Together and longtime Koch ally, posted on the news on LinkedIn: “Together we will bring artists and songs that can spark movements to help transform how the country tackles our greatest challenges.”

Stand Together Music has since then with the Chainsmokers and the sobriety organizations 1 Million Strong and the Phoenix for a “sobriety-supporting concert” in Berkeley, co-sponsored an “alcohol-free space” at the Lana Del Rey headline Newport Folk Festival and presented a panel discussion on trauma and healing in Black communities called “Stand Together Music Presents: Heal America” ​​at a music festival in Park City.

Critics say the banality of these causes is the point: Who doesn’t support helping people with addiction and healing America? But Graves said such events give the Koch network access to music festivals and hip-hop afterparties that aren’t exactly strongholds of Koch’s brand of free-market ideology, while creating opportunities to enroll younger voters.

The wider Stand Together network, meanwhile, pursues its more naked self-interested goals. At a panel discussion in 2022, video of which was previously shared with and reported on the Guardian, strategists said they were quietly backing cases before the US Supreme Court intended to overturn a legal doctrine known as Chevron deference, which limits the power of federal agencies to enact regulations, will weaken. That can make it more difficult for the US government to fight the climate crisis. “You won’t see them actually litigating that case directly,” one panelist said of an advocacy organization funded by Stand Together. “But they did a lot of work behind the scenes.”

Critics say all the tentacles of Stand Together ultimately serve the same master. The network is trying to hollow out the regulatory state while getting Killer Mike to play fun release parties that make Koch look like he’s out of politics. The musicians working with Stand Together Music, whether they know it or not, are “helping a billionaire who has been devastating to American democracy and efforts to deal with climate change,” Graves said. “It’s disappointing that these artists would fall for the Koch spin machine and give it any credibility.”