Doug Henwood | July 7, 2017
My radio
guest the other week, Nancy
MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, is under attack by libertarians
for her criticism of the doctrine, one of its leading propagandists James
Buchanan, and its funders, the Koch Bros. It’s an excellent book and she needs
help. Here’s a note she posted to Facebook with more:
Friends, I really, really NEED
YOUR HELP. If you trust me based on all that you know about me, please read
this, help me as indicated, and share this post with anyone interested the Koch
operations and the mayhem they have caused.
This will sound nutty, I know,
but it’s actually happening: the Koch operatives and the riders of their
academic “gravy train,” as James Buchanan called it, are working very hard to
kill DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS –and to destroy my reputation (as they have done to
climate change scientists and others bearing inconvenient truth).
It appears they are using Washington
Post blogposts as a seemingly respectable pivot for a coordinated and
interlinked set of calculated hit jobs. By using the WAPO blogposts, they make
it appear to the ordinary web surfer that the WAPO itself is trashing my book
when it’s really the Koch team of professors who don’t disclose their conflicts
of interest and the operatives who work fulltime for their project to shackle
our democracy. The other side was getting top placement because their team was
clicking and re-clicking and sending embedded links, and the velocity of their
activity drove up their links.
Here’s how you can help if you
want to stop the suppression of my research and the reputation assassination
underway:
• Google me and the book and
click on the REAL listings (e.g. my department
page and the actual Viking book page or reviews by honest reviewers) to drive
them above the paid “top stories” position.
• Go to DEMOCRACY
IN CHAINS on Amazon, and click as “helpful” honest reviews by real
reviewers and scholars who have read the book. The operatives are juking the
Amazon stats so that their hit jobs (by people who in nearly every case never
read the book) come up first by the number of “helpful” votes they got, no
doubt from their fellow apparatchiks.
Oh, and one of them—under the
name NPalgan2–also set up a wiki site on me (s/he also added criticism of
another academic, who wrote on mass incarceration). We are trying to fix it
now. And UnKoch My Campus is posted the undisclosed conflicts of interest.
People: this is real. Please
help, if you’re willing, and then share this post with any journalists you know
and anyone concerned about the Koch’s power to undermine our institutions.
I won’t be the last they set
out to get; anyone who challenges them is subject to that have called “upping
the transaction costs for the other side.”
Help me stand up to them, for
all of our sakes?
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