Jim Piereson of the Manhattan Institute has a sharp essay on the supposed villainy the Koch Foundation is attempting to perpetrate at Florida State.

The statists know that they need a stream of enemies to keep people from thinking about the harm big government is doing, so they whip up attacks against people like Charles and David Koch.

Here’s one terrific paragraph from the essay:

The Koch brothers have been on the receiving end of non-stop attacks from liberal journalists and academics ever since Jane Mayer published a hit piece on them last year in The New Yorker purporting to show that their contributions were behind the rise of the “Tea Party” movement. This wildly exaggerated claim was meant to cast the Koch brothers as great villains, but villains possessed of a satanic combination of power and tactical brilliance. In a predictable course, Mayer’s fairy tale was circulated by the columnists and editorial writers of the New York Times and from there through a network of second-level columnists and political magazines until at length it came to the attention of the credulous foot soldiers of the liberal-left who have kept the pot boiling in recent months with ever more inventive and exaggerated versions of the original lie.

Piereson proceeds to show that there is nothing unusual or amiss here. But because the Kochs are opponents of the Obama regime’s plans for expanding further our already-bloated government, they have to be given the Two Minutes Hate treatment.