This is a valuable and interesting article, but there’s an offhand remark that really jumps out at me as incorrect:

“…dictatorship doesn’t really square with limited government.”

That’s not remotely the case, as practiced by today’s libertarians & conservatives. Limited government is simply their framing for limiting democracy, and placing control in the hands of an oligarchy.

The Koch’s and their #KochNetwork were #NeverTrump EXCEPT when it came to tax cuts for the rich and corporations — and of course SCOTUS justices; Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh!

In spite of the network’s decision to stay out of the presidential race, it will still support candidates for Senate and governor through its various groups like Americans for Prosperity.

Here’s what happens when the Koch’s turns a Republican into a #KochSucker: “Marco Rubio voted 98 percent of the time with Koch brothers”, PolitiFact #PaulRyanToo

Koch network Spokesman James Davis told the Post the organization plans to “significant investment to support policy champions in Senate, House and state races, build broad-based policy coalitions, and to launch a major new initiative to fight poverty in America.”

From the Washington Post

The snub of the president is likely to reinforce the personal divide between Trump and Koch.

At a meeting of top Koch network donors last summer, senior network officials criticized the “tremendous lack of leadership” in Trump’s Washington, saying “the divisiveness of this White House is causing long-term damage.”

The Dark Money of the Koch Network - 2014

We see through Trump’s Con Job to create a Permanent Republican Majority #KavaNOPE

☝️😡

“What was eye-catching was her explanation of why. In her ruling, Mizelle wrote she had consulted the Corpus of Historical American English, an academic search engine that returns examples of how words and phrases are used in select historical texts. Mizelle searched “sanitation,” a crucial word in the 1944 statute that authorizes the CDC to issue disease-prevention rules, and found it generally was used to describe the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask,” she wrote, “cleans nothing.”

Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?

Now, new disclosures seen by HuffPost shed some light. Just weeks before she issued the ruling, Mizelle had discreetly attended an all-expenses-paid luxury trip from a conservative group whose primary mission is to persuade more federal judges to adopt the use of corpus linguistics. For five days, Mizelle and more than a dozen other federal judges listened to the leading proponents of corpus linguistics in the comfort of The Greenbrier, an ostentatious resort spread out over 11,000 acres of West Virginia hillside.

The newly formed group that picked up the tab, the Judicial Education Institute, received more than $1 million in startup funding from the billionaire libertarian Charles Koch’s network and DonorsTrust, a nonprofit that has funneled millions in anonymous donations to right-wing causes and has been dubbed “the dark money ATM of the conservative movement.”

Trump appointed Mizelle to the federal bench in late 2020 over objections from the American Bar Association that she had not been practicing law long enough to be qualified. A search of her other rulings found she had never previously applied corpus linguistics.

Neither Mizelle nor the Judicial Education Institute responded to requests for comment.

In response to the new disclosure, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who chairs the subcommittee on federal courts and oversight, called for more disclosure surrounding when judges attend ideological educational retreats.

This is just one of many ways that Republican oligarchs influence elections with their unlimited dark money. The Koch and Walton families will each spend about a billion dollars supporting every Republican candidate for office in a presidential election year. The Republicans have been doing this since the ‘60s with their political foundations. Democrats have nothing even close to this level of organization or funding.

Americans For Prosperity Action, the powerful conservative group supporting Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary, will no longer spend money on behalf of her campaign.