For a time, the press lord William Randolph Hearst did everything in his vast powers to keep the film \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d from finding an audience. He intimidated theater owners, refused to let ads run in his newspapers, and even pressured studio sycophants to destroy the negative.<\/p>\n
At first, the titan of San Simeon had his way: the film faded from view after a splashy initial release. But over the years, \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d came to be recognized for the masterpiece it is, and now regularly tops lists as the greatest film ever made.<\/p>\n
The modern equivalent of Hearst is the Koch Brothers, David and Charles \u2014 known without affection as the Kochtopus. On certain days, depending on the stock market, their combined worth is more than any single American\u2019s, somewhere around $80 billion.<\/p>\n
They have used a big part of this fortune to attack the indisputable science on climate change, to buy junk scholars, to promote harmful legislation at the state level, to go after clean, renewable energy like solar, and to try to kill the greatest expansion of health care in decades. Money can\u2019t buy love, but it certainly can cause a lot of havoc.<\/p>\n
Yet, while these billionaire industrialists may win in the short term \u2014 the Republican Party, their toady, is likely to pick up seats in the House and may take control of the Senate as well \u2014 in the larger fight against progress and modernity the Kochs have already lost. Clean energy is here to stay, and no sane political party would try to take away the health care of eight million fellow Americans.<\/p>\n
Check that \u2014 they\u2019ll try in both instances. According to one study, the Kochs have already spent $61 million on various front groups dedicated to the flat-earth proposition that the globe is not warming. But so far, the only return on that investment is a cohort of people flopping around in the waters of stupidity. About 44 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Tea Party-leaning voters believe there is no solid evidence that the earth is getting warmer, according to the Pew Research Center.<\/p>\n
Now, this is not 70 percent who think Donald Duck is really a platypus, though in a way it is. This is 70 percent who have been convinced that the actual hard numbers, that 9 of the 10 warmest years<\/a> on record have occurred in this century, are a hoax. It\u2019s like saying, No, it was not 75 degrees in Atlanta yesterday \u2014 that\u2019s just your view.<\/em><\/p>\n What this shows is that you can buy a lie, but you can\u2019t make that lie the truth. Over the last nine months, three exhaustive studies have shown that climate change is happening now, and will continue to unfold in real time, with record droughts in the American West, rising seas along the Atlantic coast, and global megastorms so catastrophic they will divert CNN from the missing plane. The climate experts in these studies are the gold standard \u2014 from places like the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society. They are not political hacks looking to spin something.<\/p>\n So, the real Sisyphean struggle for the Kochs is against science itself. With the fight against solar \u2014 and other alternatives to the carbon-based source of the brothers\u2019 wealth \u2014 the Kochs are up against market forces and the inevitability of an idea whose time has come. Across the nation, homeowners with solar have taken advantage of incentives that allow them to sell power they don\u2019t need back to the grid. They get the citizen satisfaction of doing their own small part to reduce emissions, but they also get to tell a big corporate or government entity to stuff it. Once you\u2019ve shown people they can be their own electrical utility, you\u2019ve unleashed something that will be very hard to take away.<\/p>\n The Kochs, whose industries are among the nation\u2019s biggest corporate polluters, are currently funding stealth campaigns to roll back incentives for clean energy. What they\u2019re running up against are American do-it-yourselfers. The future of solar is now, with every homeowner tinkering on a roof, every company looking for tomorrow technology, every market improvement that brings the cost down and effectiveness up.<\/p>\n With their fight against health care, the Kochs are bumping into another wall of inconvenient truths. Not only has Obamacare exceeded expectations for sign-ups<\/a> in the first year, but it\u2019s projected now to cover more people over 10 years \u2014 25 million \u2014 and cost $104 billion less than previously forecast, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.<\/p>\n A study by the Annals of Internal Medicine found, in looking at the Massachusetts model for Obamacare, that expanding health insurance appeared to save many lives. Duh. But extrapolated from this report for the nation as a whole, you can make a case that the Affordable Care Act will prevent 24,000 deaths a year. Put another way, about 6,000 people a year will die in red states that refuse to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. There are your death panels.<\/p>\n The Kochs also had funding ties to a campaign to persuade young people not to sign up for health care, hoping to sabotage it with beer parties and scare ads of a creepy Uncle Sam looking at a woman in an examining room. No surprise, the kids saw through it. More than enough millennials got coverage \u2014 so many, that premiums may fall in the coming sign-up period.<\/p>\n Next year, the Kochs will have a Congress loaded with crackpots ready to serve their agenda. There will be show hearings, bills will be introduced, meaningless votes will be taken. In the end, health care and clean energy will march on. The Kochs, to close with another film reference, will be like Harold Lloyd in one of the great scenes from the silent movie era \u2014 hanging from the hands of a giant clock. It may cost them half a billion dollars to learn that they can\u2019t stop time.<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times. In 2006 he won the National Book Award. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America<\/a>. Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including \u201cThe Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest,\u201d and \u201cLasso the Wind, Away to the New West.\u201d He lives in Seattle.<\/em><\/p>\n