Funding or Freedom: A Response To Jeremy Kauffman

Jeremy Kauffman is a libertarian political activist, and founder of Lbry, which became Odysee. Full disclosure: Odysee’s Thomas Zarebczan gave me 1000 LBC to get started. Unlike some people, I plan to be fully honest and transparent about such financial disclosures. Because in this case, something so hilariously reality-bereft happened that I like… can’t not say something.

Reason Magazine put out a piece challenging the claims of fash-adjacent, anti-woke grifter Vivek Ramaswamay that the January 6th tantrum was an inside job. Now, I won’t say my thoughts there, because that’s not the point of this piece. Only thing I’ll say about J6 is that it was an ineffectual hissyfit done by people who don’t want to abolish power – just angry they’re temporarily not at its helm. These were not insurrectionists. They were dumb adult babies, many of whom posted their personal data to a bad WordPress install, run by a former Secret Service guy, Dan Bongino, and attached personal financial and personal info to the files. They bought into one or more honeypots and got added to government databases, because they have no idea how to do an actual insurrection, nor any actual interest in subverting power. No opsec. NGMI.

But what caught my eye was an exchange between himself and Liz Wolfe of Reason. This started because he threw ad hominem at Reason for their funding sources. He – ACCURATELY, might I add – brought up their funding sources, and the fact that Charles G. Koch and DonorsTrust are some of the biggest supporters of Reason Foundation.

But when pressed on why he goes after DonorsTrust, he elaborated.

Fine, I’ll do an effortpost on Reason magazine. Here are the facts:

1) Anecdotally, on both social media posts and in their own comment threads, Reason is regularly attacked and ratioed by their own readers.

2) Reason journalists support Democrats disproportionately. In 2020, Reason tallied their journalists votes. The results were: Jorgensen: 10 Biden: 6 Trump: 1

Libertarians can always come up with a reason that one candidate is the “lesser evil”, but this is way off from how libertarians voted nationwide.

3) Reason magazine has 51,000 paying subscribers who pay $15-$20/year. At $15 for 11 copies of a print magazine, it’s unclear that this is even a break-even price for distribution, let alone labor. Their 2022 tax filings report $1,043,588 in program revenues, which matches this.

4) Reason’s tax filings report $13,980,606 in contributions and grants for 2022. Reason is receiving 14 times as much in donations as it is in revenue. Libertarians understand that incentives matter. Reason is incentivized to follow donors, not readers, because that’s where the money comes from.

5) Just a few of the donors contribute outsize amounts. Across 20 years of donations, just 4 donors have contributed 62% of all revenues. DonorsTrust is #4 and excluding them wouldn’t change the overall picture.

The simplest combination of these facts is that Reason exists not to serve a libertarian audience, but for a donor class to push their preferred stories onto libertarians. This donor class is substantially more culturally progressive, egalitarian, globalist, and neoliberal than the libertarian base.

I’m not making a claim that Reason journalists themselves are told to write certain stories, or that Reason journalists are liars. All that needs to happen is the donors pick the right editor, who then goes out and hires journalists with biases preferred by donors.

tl;dr – Reason is out-of-touch with libertarians because it’s paid to be that way.

See… I think this is an interesting attack locus. Not only because Liz and I don’t like Jeremy because of his messaging…

… but because Jeremy is a massive hypocrite in this area. For reasons I’ll be going over shortly, his claims about Reason’s funding don’t hold water, upon cross-examination, and with the historical context of orgs he supports. And because it seems he has thrown down the gauntlet, I’ll take it up.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1742925758555943005

I mean… a little wounded – she didn’t post those screenshots – I did. She just quoted me. Gotta give original credit where it’s due, Kough. And I did it, compiling some of your greatest hits last night, because I’m invested in people knowing that not all libertarians want to talk about minors sucking their dicks, downplay the murder of trans people, or tell black people to go back to Africa for disagreeing with their politics. Among other things. But that aside, sure. Let’s talk about DonorsTrust.

DonorsTrust is a modern arm of the Kochtopus. The Koch Family partly got rich off Nazi money, and now funds a whole lot of conservative outlets. To read more about the West funding , arming, and otherwise supporting Nazis, I wrote a piece for The Free Thought Project detailing that.

Click here to read that, and get caught up.

And to get caught up on this web, here are a couple images from a MediaMatters piece detailing connections between a ton of rightoid groups and their influence.

Now, why is this interesting? Because this influence runs through an absolute ton of organizations and thinktanks backing basically every one of Jeremy’s policy positions. Because Jeremy is, first and foremost, a conservative, who hates the left, and he finds himself most often in near-total agreement with many of the listed entities. But one didn’t make the list, above, which he has not only supported, but personally given money to.

Young Americans For Liberty (YAL) is an organization devoted to giving college students their in to right wing politics. I know this, because I used to work with them. I’ve been to the conventions. Here’s some pictures, because internet rules say pics or it didn’t happen. Also, sorry in advance that you had to see this. Now you know why I have the beard. #BigDumbChin

Jeremiah Harding at a YAL convention in 2012

That was over a decade ago, and yes, that means I’m old. But it also means I know these people, and I’ve been in the greaseworks for a long time. And I have a beard now, so we can all be glad of that. My jawline is too much for the common person to see.

Point is, when I tell you that, at a YAL con, I got both a Charles Koch snap bracelet, and a Reason sticker for my laptop, you can buy that. I also encountered Heritage Foundation there. And American Enterprise Institute. And Cato. And Students for Liberty. And more. Like the John Birch Society, for instance.

So over the last decade, I’ve really been delving into those connections. And finding out how much I hate them. Especially when so many of them run cover for whatever statist and generally neoliberal agenda they can, run cover for industrialists, and back the authoritarian right, including many Christian nationalist ideologues. But when I started exploring Agorism, my hatred grew. Samuel Edward Konkin III had warned about these people, and warned of the inevitable and disastrous consequences of Rothbard and Nolan working with them. And what do you know, they ended up betraying many Cato originals, and turning it into a policy shield for the right. Konkin was right, and the Kochtopus had overtaken many aspects of the original Libertarian Party. Partyarchy was a disastrous failure, and remains a failure to this day.

I say all this to say I’ve been going against the Kochtopus for a long time. I’m no friend to the Koch money behind Reason. In fact, just for this article, I uploaded an excerpt of a stream where I went against this, three years ago, and got interruptions, fallacy, and politicians being politicians in return. When I was actually allowed to speak, people couldn’t really contest what I was saying, meaningfully.

So I don’t back Koch funding and influence, and I’ve consistently been one of the most obnoxious anarchists out there against this issue. Ask around. That’s why, when Jeremy Kauffman pretends that Koch funding is a reason to discount what a group says, it’s just hilarious to me, given that the organization I’ve spoken about here, and mentioned in the above stream, is a known Koch asset. Cause IQ lists them as the top two donors to YAL.

StandTogether and DonorsTrust are both Koch faucets.

Another site, Persagen, provides a well-sourced database of the places DonorsTrust trusts their money. It’s exhaustive and excellent. You’ll notice a running theme – overwhelming support for conservative statists. Propaganda against most others. Included in their sources is a 2020 tax filing highlighting 1.29 million to YAL. 2020 was a banner year for YAL as well.

Jeremy should remember. He was helping their campaign and endorsing where that Koch money was spent.

And then, when allegations against then-President of YAL Cliff Maloney. Jr. came out, he aggressively donated to YAL in protest.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1402986515152588809

Now, I’m not saying Cliff did it. All charges against him either rendered a not guilty verdict or were dismissed. But it’s worth noting that being primarily funded by Koch money didn’t stop JK Koffing from supporting them, tooth and nail, and celebrating their victories. So clearly consistently getting funding from rich, connected, statist megadonors is not a deterrent for his support, nor would he be consistent in saying Reason is any more compromised than they are. I mean if he wanted to condemn all recipients of corporate billionaire cash, that’d be admirable, but seemingly the only thing that ever upset him about this Kochtopus favorite is when they didn’t give Mises Cucus a table at a YAL conference.

And there are also persistent examples of the lengths and depths to which Kochtopus orgs and their tentacles go, but that’s more for another piece. Suffice it to say, most of his policy positions do very well in all Koch circles, which is why he fit in so well with at least one of them. Also why he’s spreading anti-LGBT bigotry, while also endorsing another Koch-funded organization, PragerU, and defending their racist and fascist indoctrination models used in public schools.

I guess it’s not enough that they’re Koch-funded, he also wants them state-funded. Other examples I could also mention, but you get the gist. So here’s the question…

If it’s so inherently compromising to be funded by these sorts of megacorporate billionaires, that he can “effortpost” about Reason because of it, how compromised must he also be for his direct affiliation with, support for, and donations to, Koch-funded organizations, and if the answer is “none”, why does it help his case to bring up the funding of the Reason Foundation?

I guess only time will tell. We’ll see if he endorses more Koch-funded candidates this election cycle, or if that was just a one time deal. Either way, it should be clear that regardless whether or not this is a good message, he is the wrong messenger for it. And given his other messaging, most people also don’t want him messaging for them to begin with.

I’ll take credit for my screenshots now, thanks 🦔