STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: GOP Megadonor Charles Koch, 85, Now Says He Regrets Fueling Partisanship With His Fortune.

Flashback: How Decades Of Paranoid Attacks On The Koch Brothers Turned Into Mainstream Leftist Tactics.

Well, more like a decade of paranoid attacks. In the late 1990s, the conservative zillionare baddy du jour was Richard Mellon Scaife, but in his last years, Scaife’s cold war with Bill Clinton thawed to the point where, as this 2014 Politico article notes, after Scaife’s passing, “Bill Clinton on Saturday fondly memorialized one of the key financiers of what Hillary Clinton years ago deemed the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy.’”

Thus, new a new shadowy replacement was needed to counterbalance the right’s obsession with George Soros. That the Koch brothers were much more libertarian than conservative didn’t stop the left from picking the target, personalizing it, and polarizing it, as Hillary and Obama’s chief influence would say.