Art Pope: the Biggest Douchebag You’ve Never Heard Of

Art Pope is sort of a one-man Koch Brothers.  He’s been using his inherited wealth to single-handedly take North Carolina from the 21st century back to the early 1800s.

Here’s some more information on Art Pope.

I’ve done several posts about North Carolina’s lurch to the Far Right, but I hadn’t realized the whole process was being financed by one person.  As Bill Maher said:  “North Carolina is going apeshit in a way no state ever has.  Take every crazy angry idea your drunk right-wing uncle mumbles at Thanksgiving, turn it into a law, and that’s North Carolina today.”

In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, Bill Maher talked about North Carolina’s backward mutation as an example of the devastating impact of Citizens United:

“It certainly had a huge impact the last election when you saw the kind of money spent — just by me!  But Obama won, so the people who were supposed to steal the election didn’t because the Democrats scared up enough of their own PAC money to scrape by.  But not at the local level, like in North Carolina. Look at Art Pope, one man was basically able to take over the entire state. And the sad thing is it wasn’t even all that expensive. It should have cost more than it did.”

Maher’s description of Art Pope:

“He’s super-rich, super-anti-union, anti-tax, anti-big government, thinks government should have absolutely no role in helping the less fortunate, who should earn their money the same way he did — by inheriting it from their dad.”

North Carolina’s legislature has been controlled by Republicans for awhile, but until this year the state had a Democratic governor who kept vetoing the nonstop tide of Tea Klux Klan legislation.  Now that North Carolina has a Republican governor — Patrick McCrory — well, as Bill Maher said, the state “is going apeshit in a way no state ever has.”