Charles Koch is trying to use a book, which I assume will be boring and terribly written, as a drive-through reputational laundromat, and the press should not fall for it. No redemption; no reinvention.

Plutes gonna plute.

If you’re thinking of buying Charles Koch’s book, ask your bookstore if instead they have DARK MONEY by @JaneMayerNYer. Read that first. And then buy his book afterward if you haven’t yet died of total horror.

In my book I wrote about the Carnegie tradition of philanthropy, in which you first made money at the society‘s expense, and then spent your latter years minorly atoning and scrubbing your name. But this is different.

Whether with Charles Koch or Mark Zuckerberg or others, the harm doing is ongoing, and the power grabbing continues as well, and so the philanthropic and media cleansing is less about atonement than about lubricating an ongoing machinery of destruction.