The Koch brothers are controversial to say the least, and nowhere is this more obvious than in their financial support of the Republican party. Last year, they announced that their fundraising network would likely spend almost $900 million advancing conservative candidates and policies in the 2016 election. Despite Charles Koch saying that he is unsure whether the money has any effect on politicians, many in the US—including presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton—often highlight their donations as a problem within the country’s politics.
So perhaps it is surprising that in an interview with the Financial Times, Charles Koch slammed the current lineup of Republican candidates for the 2016 nomination. When asked about Donald Trump’s plan to have US Muslims register themselves with the government, he noted that it went against the very idea of freedom.
“Well, then you destroy our free society,” he said. “Who is it that said, ‘If you want to defend your liberty, the first thing you’ve got to do is defend the liberty of people you like the least’?”
He criticised the so-called war on terror, noting that despite the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the US did not feel any safer.
“It seems like we’re more worried about it now than we were then, so we need to examine these strategies.”
Ted Cruz’s plans to carpet bomb the Islamic State does not match Koch’s thinking on how to solve the issue of extremism. The billionaire business magnate argued that US policy had not worked in stopping extremists thriving in certain communities.
“I’ve studied revolutionaries a lot,” he said. “Mao said that the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims. Not that we don’t need to defend ourselves and have better intelligence and all that, but how do we create an unfriendly sea for the terrorists in the Muslim communities? We haven’t done a good job of that.”
