Three weeks from now, on September 11th at the Sheraton Hotel downtown, Raleigh will host the fourth annual Conservative Leadership Conference. Is this conference a place for like-minded individuals to gather and celebrate their superiority to the rest of the population? Of course it is. Not only that, the food is good too!
The event also features nationally renowned speakers and classes taught by “non-partisan” groups including the Sam Adams Alliance, the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.
The latter group sounds friendly enough — who doesn’t like charities? Its bio claims, “The mission of the Foundation is to advance social progress and well-being through the development, application, and dissemination of the Science of Liberty.”
Charles G. Koch, the head of Koch Industries, leads the second largest private chemical, energy and oil corporation in the United States. Did he use the “Science of Liberty” to create this successful company?
Not exactly — according to the Koch Industries company timeline, Charles’ father, Fred C. Koch founded it in 1940 as the Wood River Oil and Refining Company. Sounds like the science of being born and bred to be rich and successful would be a better subject for the Koch Foundation to teach.
The Koch Foundation’s real purpose is dispensing a cult-like belief in the infallibility of extreme free-market capitalism. Not only does this sentiment run counter to mainstream political thought, it disguises the extreme free-marketers real motivation: making money. A phrase like “science of liberty” doesn’t carry political conviction, the only conviction they have is for making money.
They use their political platforms as an extension of their business model. Far-right free-marketers salivate at the very thought of privatizing the police and the school system, creating monopolies and eliminating wasteful government spending, i.e. public libraries so they can swoop in and set up for-profit entities.
Back to the leadership conference — another group that will be teaching classes on “liberty” is the Sam Adams Alliance. The event program states, they will “provide training on how to spread the Conservative message effectively in the ‘New Media’.” Examples of effective tools it provides for spreading its conservative message include blogging, Twitter and Wikipedia.
The first two are completely legitimate arenas for the dissemination of ideas and opinions, but not Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is not as trustworthy as more traditional sources, it does try extremely hard to police itself and maintain objectivity. It is immoral for political groups to promote or support the use of Wikipedia as a tool to spread their ideology.
I mentioned above that the conference features nationally renowned speakers from the conservative cause. Who is this year’s star speaker? Is it a politician, a think-tank founder or a popular conservative author?
Nope, this year’s star speaker is the former Miss California and “opposite marriage” supporter, Carrie Prejean. The Civitas Institute, the conferences sponsor, celebrates her in a passage from a National Review article as “a young, beautiful woman who did nothing other than answer a question honestly in a beauty pageant.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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