People who consider themselves reasonable and fair should pay more attention to this sort of story:

… as far as we know, no one at Koch had ever heard of [the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability (FFGA)] before Rachel Maddow’s show on Thursday of last week, and Koch did nothing–zero, nada–to support the Florida legislation in question.

So Rachel Maddow’s entire segment was one big lie. Her central premise, that the Florida welfare statute was an initiative of the Koch brothers, was false, and she knew it. She made the whole thing up to fool the low-IQ viewers who form MSNBC’s base. But the story gets even worse.

John Hinderaker elides some subtleties; SPN does state as one of its functions to “in the infrastructure of state think tanks through training programs and other resources.”  The overriding reality, though, is that it simply isn’t a top-down structure of billionaires giving money to a network that then filters down to think tanks with lots of strings and required policy positions.

That’s more like how big government works.

But the Progressive project isn’t about objectively figuring out what’s best for humanity and winning support for solutions.  It’s about political victory.  For the folks at the top, victory brings untold riches and power; for the rank and file, the payoff is an expedient path to ideological goals that they set based on a species of religious fervor.

So, we get the Koch Brothers as shadowy villains, whom Progressives paint as evil for the purpose of then tarring all of their other opponents.  Because Progressives have a proven track record of political attacks and boycotts against non-villain donors, conservative groups simply don’t talk about them, which Progressives exploit for ad hominem distractions from policy debates.

In fairness, how else are Progressives going to advance goals that leave us all poorer and less free?