Fred Koch, the patriarch of the Koch family, co founded the Birch Society.
As a founding board member of the John Birch Society, Fred helped engineer a hysterical wave of attacks on labor, intellectuals, public education, liberal clergy members, and other pillars of society he viewed as a threat. Birchers decried everyone from former President Eisenhower to water utility administrators as pawns in a global communist conspiracy. In the last two years, as the Koch name has become synonymous with right-wing plutocracy in the United States, the Koch family has played down its relation to the Birchers.
Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives,
from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television — all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. […] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer.
In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the
movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a “mongrelization” of the races.
Today’s Koch brothers Tea Party front group, Americans for Prosperity, is currently pursuing resegregation goals and efforts to block voting by minorities.
Fred Koch knew all about how bad Stalin was, because he knew Stalin personally, and did business with him. And Stalin undeniably was a bad apple in a rotten barrel. But you can argue that Fred overreacted when he started calling people like Eisenhower and Kennedy traitors. I wonder if the NKVD slipped drugs into his drinks when he was shmoozing with one of history’s worst mass murderers?