FreedomWorks

FreedomWorks, along with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), is an offshoot of Lobbyists Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). FreedomWorks was founded by Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, who authored the Wingnut Tea Party Manifesto together. It supports the same sort of Koch-sucking trickle down policies as AFP (though FreedomWorks itself has no known connections to the Kochs outside of its origins in CSE as it doesn't disclose all its donors), but one-ups them by dredging up the even dumber Austrian school of economics from the dustbin of history as well.[1] It is probably the most visible and egregiously blatant astroturf group behind Teabaggery, with lobbyists organizing bus trips, funding, and talking points for its members.[2]

A guide to
U.S. Politics
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Persons of interest
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Changing of the guard

In September 2012, Armey was ousted[3] from FreedomWorks after attempting to force Kibbe and senior vice president Adam Brandon out over "ethical misconduct". Armey and Kibbe had been in disagreement over who to back in the 2012 elections—Kibbe wanted to back Tea Party candidates, whereas Armey wanted to back traditional Republicans—which led to the rift between them. It was later revealed that Armey's assistant (who escorted Kibbe and Brandon from the building) was armed—though this may have been a precaution, in the aftermath of the shooting at the Family Research Council.[4]

Armey was replaced by Randroid millionaire Richard Stephenson, who founded the Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

gollark: You need more formal systems to organize people at scale, and we need scale.
gollark: Many companies doing things will have more people than that in one department.
gollark: According to the widely shared arbitrary estimate of Dunbar's number you can have something like 150 close social connections. This is probably at least order-of-magnitude accurate.
gollark: I'm saying that I don't think you can operate them off altruism/social connections because they involve too much scale.
gollark: If you want nice 5nm CPUs you're going to need giant fabs and the companies supplying tooling to them and whoever supplies exotic chemicals to them and whatever.

See also
  • The denialist Cooler Heads Coalition

References
  1. Geithner Should Read Mises Archive copy at the Wayback Machine
  2. Lobbyists Planning Tea Parties
  3. Well, forced to resign with an USD $8 million severance check.
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