Scott Walker Is King of Kochworld

On a sunny Saturday in September 2009, with Wisconsin in the throes of Tea Party fervor, conservative starlet Michelle Malkin fired up a crowd of thousands at a lakefront park in Milwaukee with rhetoric about White House czars and union thugs and the “culture of dependency that they have rammed down our throats.”

Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican candidate for governor, casually attired in a red University of Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, stepped to the podium to amplify the message. “We're going to take back our government,” he shouted, jabbing the air with a finger. The attendees whooped and clapped. “We've done it here, we can do it in Wisconsin and, by God, we're going to do it all across America.”

In a way, the event was Scott Walker's graduation to the political major leagues. The audience had been delivered up by Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party organizing group founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire energy executives whose fortune helps shape Republican politics. With Americans for Prosperity, the brothers had harnessed the Tea Party's energy in service of their own policy goals, including deregulation and lower taxes. And in Walker, they’d found the perfect instrument to help carry them out. The rally was one of the first times they’d joined forces.

The relationship between the Kochs and Walker was cemented during Walker's bitter war against public unions that led to a recall election in 2012. During the tense weeks of standoff at the capitol in Madison, it was the Kochs' Tea Party troops who provided the main counterforce to the tens of thousands of union activists protesting the governor, in a battle Walker eventually won.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-17/scott-walker-is-king-of-kochworld