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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right Paperback – January 24, 2017

by Jane Mayer (Author)

4.7 6,750 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today? From the bestselling author of The Dark Side, an electrifying work of investigative journalism that uncovers the agenda of this powerful group.

In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump's victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system.

Why is America living in an age of profound and widening economic inequality? Why have even modest attempts to address climate change been defeated again and again? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats—headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys—who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Mayer traces a byzantine trail of billions of dollars spent by the network, revealing a staggering conglomeration of think tanks, academic institutions, media groups, courthouses, and government allies that have fallen under their sphere of influence. Drawing from hundreds of exclusive interviews, as well as extensive scrutiny of public records, private papers, and court proceedings, Mayer provides vivid portraits of the secretive figures behind the new American oligarchy and a searing look at the carefully concealed agendas steering the nation. Dark Money is an essential book for anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
LA Times Book Prize Finalist
PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist
Shortlisted for the Lukas Prize

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Jane Mayer’s Dark Money

“Revelatory. . . . Persuasive, timely and necessary.” —The New York Times

“Dark Money is more than just a work of political journalism—it’s a vital portrait of a nation that, as perhaps never before, is being shaped by a few very rich, very conservative businessmen.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics.” —The New York Review of Books

“Deeply researched and studded with detail . . . Seems destined to rattle the Koch executive offices in Wichita as other investigations have not.” —Washington Post

“With such turmoil on the right wing of American politics, reading Dark Money is like reading the first chapter of what may be a great political page-turner.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Jane Mayer . . . is, quite simply, one of the very few utterly invaluable journalists this country has.” —Esquire

“Amazing. . . . The most important political book of the year.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Dark Money is almost too good for its own good.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] comprehensive history. . . . Stunning.”
—Salon

About the Author

Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

Radicals: A Koch Family History

Oddly enough, the fiercely libertarian Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history’s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The family patriarch, Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with both of their regimes in the 1930s.

According to family lore, Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer and publisher who settled in the small town of Quanah, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border, where he owned a weekly newspaper and print shop. Quanah, which was named for the last American Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, still retained its frontier aura when Fred was born there in 1900. Bright and eager to get out from under his overbearing old-world father, Fred once ran away to live with the Comanches as a boy. Later, he crossed the country for college, transferring from Rice in Texas to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he earned a degree in chemical engineering and joined the boxing team. Early photographs show him as a tall, formally dressed young man with glasses, a tuft of unruly curls, and a self-confident, defiant expression.

In 1927, Fred, who was an inveterate tinkerer, invented an improved process for extracting gasoline from crude oil. But as he would later tell his sons bitterly and often, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a business threat and shut him out of the industry, suing him and his customers in 1929 for patent infringement. Koch regarded the monopolistic patents invoked by the major oil companies as anticompetitive and unfair. The fight appears to be an early version of the Kochs’ later opposition to “corporate cronyism” in which they contend that the government and big business collaborate unfairly. In Fred Koch’s eye, he was an outsider fighting a corrupt system.

Koch fought back in the courts for more than fifteen years, finally winning a $1.5 million settlement. He correctly suspected that his opponents bribed at least one presiding judge, an incompetent lush who left the case in the hands of a crooked clerk. “The fact that the judge was bribed completely altered their view of justice,” one longtime family employee suggests. “They believe justice can be bought, and the rules are for chumps.” Meanwhile, crippled by lawsuits in America during this period, Koch took his innovative refining method abroad.

He had already helped build a refinery in Great Britain after World War I with Charles de Ganahl, a mentor. At the time, the Russians supplied England with fuel, which led to the Russians seeking his expertise as they set up their own oil refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution.

At first, according to family lore, Koch tore up the telegram from the Soviet Union asking for his help. He said he didn’t want to work for Communists and didn’t trust them to pay him. But after securing an agreement to get paid in advance, he overcame his philosophical reservations. In 1930, his company, then called Winkler-Koch, began training Russian engineers and helping Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries under the first of Stalin’s five-year plans. The program was a success, forming the backbone of the future Russian petroleum industry. The oil trade brought crucial hard currency into the Soviet Union, enabling it to modernize other industries. Koch was reportedly paid $500,000, a princely sum during America’s Great Depression. But by 1932, facing growing domestic demand, Soviet officials decided it would be more advantageous to copy the technology and build future refineries themselves. Fred Koch continued to provide technical assistance to the Soviets as they constructed one hundred plants, according to one report, but the advisory work was less profitable.

What happened next has been excised from the official corporate history of Koch Industries. After mentioning the company’s work in the Soviet Union, the bulk of which ended in 1932, the corporate history skips ahead to 1940, when it says Fred Koch decided to found a new company, Wood River Oil & Refining. Charles Koch is equally vague in his book The Science of Success. He notes only that his father’s company “enjoyed its first real financial success during the early years of the Great Depression” by “building plants abroad, especially in the Soviet Union.”

A controversial chapter is missing. After leaving the U.S.S.R., Fred Koch turned to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and soon after, his government oversaw and funded massive industrial expansion, including the buildup of Germany’s capacity to manufacture fuel for its growing military ambitions. During the 1930s, Fred Koch traveled frequently to Germany on oil business. Archival records document that in 1934 Winkler-Koch Engineering of Wichita, Kansas, as Fred’s firm was then known, provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.

The refinery was a highly unusual venture for Koch to get involved with at that moment in Germany. Its top executive was a notorious American Nazi sympathizer named William Rhodes Davis whose extensive business dealings with Hitler would eventually end in accusations by a federal prosecutor that he was an “agent of influence” for the Nazi regime. In 1933, Davis proposed the purchase and conversion of an existing German oil storage facility in Hamburg, owned by a company called Europäische Tanklager A.G., or Eurotank, into a massive refinery. At the time, Hitler’s military aims, and his need for more fuel, were already well-known. Davis’s plan was to ship crude petroleum to Germany, refine it, and then sell it to the German military. The president of the American bank with which Davis dealt refused to have anything to do with the deal, because it was seen as supporting the Nazi military buildup, but others extended the credit. After lining up the American financing, Davis needed the Third Reich’s backing. To gain it, he first had to convince German industrialists of his support for Hitler. In his effort to ingratiate himself, Davis opened an early meeting with Hermann Schmitz, the chairman of I.G. Farben—the powerful and well-connected chemical company that soon after produced the lethal gas for the concentration camps’ death chambers—by saluting him with a Nazi “Heil Hitler.” When these efforts didn’t produce the green light he sought, Davis sent messages directly to Hitler, eventually securing a meeting in which the führer walked in and ordered his henchmen to approve the deal. On Hitler’s orders, the Third Reich’s economic ministers supported Davis’s construction of the refinery. In his biography of Davis, Dale Harrington draws on eyewitness accounts to describe Hitler as declaring to his skeptical henchmen, “Gentlemen, I have reviewed Mr. Davis’s proposition and it sounds feasible, and I want the bank to finance it.” Harrington writes that during the next few years Davis met at least half a dozen more times with Hitler and on one occasion asked him to personally autograph a copy of Mein Kampf for his wife. According to Harrington, by the end of 1933 Davis was “deeply committed to Nazism” and exhibited a noticeable “dislike for Jews.”

In 1934, Davis turned to Fred Koch’s company, Winkler-Koch, for help in executing his German business plan. Under Fred Koch’s direction, the refinery was finished by 1935. With the capacity to process a thousand tons of crude oil a day, the third-largest refinery in the Third Reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch. Significantly, it was also one of the few refineries in Germany, according to Harrington, that could “produce the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes. Naturally,” he writes, “Eurotank would do most of its business with the German military.” Thus, he concludes, the American venture became “a key component of the Nazi war machine.”

Historians expert in German industrial history concur. The development of the German fuel industry “was hugely, hugely important” to Hitler’s military ambitions, according to the Northwestern University professor Peter Hayes. “Hitler set out to create ‘autarchy,’ or economic self-sufficiency,” he explained. “Gottfried Feder, the German official in charge of the program, reasoned that even though Germany would have to import crude oil, it would be able to save foreign exchange by refining the products itself.”

In the run-up to the war, Davis profited richly from the arrangement, engaging in elaborate scams to keep the crude oil imports flowing into Germany despite Britain’s blockade. When World War II began, the high-octane fuel was used in bombing raids by German pilots. Like Davis, the Koch family benefited from the venture. Raymond Stokes, director of the Centre for Business History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and co-author of a history of the German oil industry during the Nazi years, Faktor Öl (The oil factor), which documents the company’s role, says, “Winkler-Koch benefited directly from this project, which was designed to help enable the fuel policy of the Third Reich.”

Fred Koch often traveled to Germany during these years, and according to family lore he was supposed to have been on the fatal May 1937 transatlantic flight of the Hindenburg, but at the last minute he got delayed. In late 1938, as World War II approached and Hitler’s aims were unmistakable, he wrote admiringly about fascism in Germany, and elsewhere, drawing an invidious comparison with America under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. Koch added, “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, family members say that Fred Koch tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Instead, the government directed him to use his chemical engineering prowess to help refine high-octane fuel for the American warplanes. Meanwhile, in an ironic turn, the Hamburg refinery that Winkler-Koch built became an important target of Allied bombing raids. On June 18, 1944, American B-17s finally destroyed it. The human toll of the bombing raids on Hamburg was almost unimaginable. In all, some forty-two thousand civilians were killed during the long and intense Allied campaign against Hamburg’s crucial industrial targets.

Fred Koch’s willingness to work with the Soviets and the Nazis was a major factor in creating the Koch family’s early fortune. By the time he met his future wife, Mary Robinson, at a polo match in 1932, the oilman’s work for Stalin had put him well on his way to becoming exceedingly wealthy.

Robinson, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Wellesley College, was tall, slender, and beautiful, with blond hair, blue eyes, and an expression of amusement often captured in family photographs. The daughter of a prominent physician from Kansas City, Missouri, she had grown up in a more cosmopolitan milieu. Koch, who was seven years older than she, was so smitten he married her a month after they met.

Soon, the couple commissioned the most fashionable architect in the area to build an imposing Gothic-style stone mansion on a large compound on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas, where Winkler-Koch was based. Reflecting their rising social status, the estate was baronial despite the flat and empty prairie surrounding it, with stables, a polo ring, a kennel for hunting dogs, a swimming pool and wading pool, a circular drive, and stone-terraced gardens. Some of the best craftsmen in the country created decorative flourishes such as wrought-iron railings and a stone fireplace carved with a whimsical snowflake motif. Within a few years, the Kochs also purchased the sprawling Spring Creek Ranch near Reece, Kansas, where Fred, who loved science and genetics, bred and raised cattle. Family photographs show the couple looking glamorous and patrician, hosting picnics and pool parties, and riding on horseback, dressed in jodhpurs and polo gear, surrounded by packs of jolly friends.

In the first eight years of their marriage, the couple had four sons: Frederick, known by the family as Freddie, was born in 1933, Charles was born in 1935, and twins, David and William, were born in 1940. With their father frequently traveling and their mother preoccupied with social and cultural pursuits, the boys were largely entrusted to a series of nannies and housekeepers.

It is unclear what Fred Koch’s views of Hitler were during the 1930s, beyond his preference for the country’s work ethic in comparison with the nascent welfare state in America. But he was enamored enough of the German way of life and thinking that he employed a German governess for his first two sons, Freddie and Charles. At the time, Freddie was a small boy, and Charles still in diapers. The nanny’s iron rule terrified the little boys, according to a family acquaintance. In addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer, who frequently touted Hitler’s virtues. Dressed in a starched white uniform and pointed nurse’s hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children’s books, including the Victorian classic Der Struwwelpeter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior ranging from cutting off one child’s thumbs to burning another to death. The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid toilet-training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.

The despised governess ruled the nursery largely unchallenged for several years. In 1938, the two boys were left for months while their parents toured Japan, Burma, India, and the Philippines. Even when she was home, Mary Koch characteristically deferred to her husband, declining to intervene. “My father was fairly tough with my mother,” Bill Koch later told Vanity Fair. “My mother was afraid of my father.” Meanwhile, Fred Koch was often gone for months at a time, in Germany and elsewhere.

It wasn’t until 1940, the year the twins were born, when Freddie was seven and Charles five, that back in Wichita the German governess finally left the Koch family, apparently at her own initiative. Her reason for giving notice was that she was so overcome with joy when Hitler invaded France she felt she had to go back to the fatherland in order to join the führer in celebration. What if any effect this early experience with authority had on Charles is impossible to know, but it’s interesting that his lifetime preoccupation would become crusading against authoritarianism while running a business over which he exerted absolute control.

Fred Koch was himself a tough and demanding disciplinarian. John Damgard, David’s childhood friend, who became president of the Futures Industry Association, recalled that he was “a real John Wayne type.” Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa and filling the basement billiard room with what one cousin remembered as a frightening collection of exotic stuffed animal heads, including lions and bears and others with horns and tusks, glinting glassy-eyed from the walls. In the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool at the country club across the street, but instead of allowing the boys to join them, their father required them to dig up dandelions by the time they were five, and later to dig ditches and shovel manure at the family ranch. Fred Koch cared about his boys but was determined to keep them from becoming what he called “country-club bums,” like some of the other offspring of the oil moguls with whom he was acquainted. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (January 24, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307947904
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307947901
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.16 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 1.21 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #20,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Elections
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Customers find the book well-researched and detailed. They describe it as an important read that provides a deep understanding of the backstory to the 2016 election results. The book is described as valuable and well-written, with fine footnotes. Readers appreciate the history and value for money. However, opinions differ on how frightening or disturbing the content is.

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Customers find the book well-researched and detailed. They say it's easy to read and provides a credible depiction of what we are facing. The book starts with a good narrative, but throughout it seems more like a report than an investigation.

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91 customers mention "History"83 positive8 negative

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Customers find the book provides good value for money. It explains how money is used to achieve pro-business and limited-government goals. They say it's an excellent book that follows the money into every corner of America.

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One of the Most Important Books on Modern American Politics
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2016
Verified Purchase
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is the carefully-researched, well-written story of how the American “conservative movement” and the Republican Party became little more than a well-financed storefront operation and sales force for plutocracy, sponsoring and placing political figures that are just sock-puppets for wealthy donors who dictate their policies. This is a political force that uses racism, misogyny, nativist xenophobia, media manipulation and sheer human gullibility, along with heaps of cash and other tools, to accomplish its ends. It is the story of how a few hundred extremely wealthy individuals and families, in a determined effort to avoid taxation and evade government prosecution of their own often financially-corrupt and polluting business enterprises, are engaged in a decades-long ongoing coup d’etat as much against the American people as against our government.

The billionaires involved—principally but by no means exclusively the brothers Charles and David Koch; Richard Mellon Scaife; John M. Olin and the Bradley brothers—were raised within families of astounding wealth and privilege. They inherited hundreds of millions of dollars, plus businesses that produced yet more income. They also appear to have disliked and feared two things: taxation that would mitigate and reduce their family wealth; and being called legally to account for the public health, environmental and financial violations of their enterprises. They turned those fears into an ideology whose basic premise was: we should be able to do whatever we want, and any restriction on that is not only unjustified but un-American. They equated their personal interests and preferences with the good of the nation, and they funded a movement to raise their own self-interest to the status of a political crusade and an ideological war of principle. They lied to themselves and everyone else. As Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas, “Libertarianism is supposed to be all about principle, but what it is really about is political expedience. It is basically a corporate front, masked as a philosophy” (quoted from Dark Money, p. 123).

A primary vehicle for putting the plutocratic campaign into practice was an ingenious tax dodge. It involved creating foundations and funneling money through nonprofit organizations (usually of the donors’ own creation) in such a way that the funds were tax-deductible. So, in lieu of paying more taxes, they used the money instead on a form of fake "philanthropy", claiming a social benefit for what were really investments in their own self-interest--very affordable investments with an enormous payoff. Basically, they bought staff to come up with "research” and “studies" that justified and promoted a disguised plutocracy; and followed that up with “policy” shops that would develop and advocate for specific legal and judiciary measures that would enshrine their interests into law. Finally, they created and funded staged “citizens’ groups” (like the Tea Party) that would give their campaign an appearance of popular support. They also learned that they could get the support of some of the victims of these policies by giving them something non-financial that they wanted, whether that was support for their religious preferences, sanction for their hatreds or whatever.

The Kochs have tried to obscure their influence and that of their billionaire donor network, by hiding behind a web of "nonprofit" organizations with innocuous names, seeming to represent popular interests but actually funded and controlled by the Kochs and their fellow plutocrats. They even have a central donation organization, the "DonorsTrust", set up to obscure further the identities of the donors while funneling money to the campaign.

The Kochs seem to have been good at identifying talent who could carry out their plans without revealing their direct involvement. The “conservative movement” is just another growth industry to which many people attached their careers when it became clear that the billionaires calling the shots would spend lavishly on it. The conservative publication National Review and the careers of many professional conservative journalists and scholars benefited greatly from this industry. The donors put literally billions of dollars into this effort over decades, which enabled them to buy an awful lot of conservatism.

I enjoyed the many stories, anecdotes, incidents and quotes through which Mayer tells her tale. The fact that it is done in both journalistic and scholarly style, with many, many named people saying very telling things, made it a researcher’s delight. My own copy is filled with underlined passages and bookmarked pages.

This is an eminently quotable book, with extensive end-note references. For instance, Steve Clemons, formerly an analyst at the Nixon Center, is quoted on page 82 saying: “Funders increasingly expect policy achievements that contribute to their bottom line….We’ve become money launderers for monies that have real specific policy agendas behind them.” On the Citizens United decision, Mayer writes on page 248 that: “…the Kochs were part of a national explosion of dark money. In 2006, only 2 percent of ‘outside’ political spending came from ‘social welfare’ groups that hid their donors. In 2010, the number rose to 40 percent, masking hundreds of millions of dollars.” And on page 249, there is a note about a meeting in April of 2010 in Karl Rove’s living room at his house in Northeast Washington, DC. Mayer quotes Kenneth Vogel, from his book Big Money, describing the meeting as “the birthplace of a new Republican Party—one steered by just a handful of unelected operatives who answered only to the richest activists who funded them.” Perhaps my favorite quote in the book is from Karl Rove who, right after the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, met with Republican donors at the Dallas Petroleum Club, to plot out how best to take advantage of the decision. Rove told the gathering: “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy. Now…..it is time to get serious.” (p. 242)

Jane Mayer has done a service to us all with this remarkable book. Get it, read it and tell everyone you know about it.

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Luis Ojeda
Fantastic book and great read!
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2016
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(Disclaimer. This is the first time I review a book on here with some thought. Id love to hear any suggestions, which I know I need a LOT, about what you what you think, so please comment "-). Or also if you have any comment on my thoughts on the review itself. Thanks!)

Many books change the way you look at situations where the most deprived, less respected, and less well-off citizens of this country have it the hardest to fulfill the "American Dream". In Michelle Alexanders book, The New Jim Crow, we learn about the new struggles of African-Americans who are impacted in today's society by egregious, outrageous policies enacted in the 90's by the Clinton administration.

We hear about the struggling lives of the elderly at the end of their life and how they can't seem to be getting better protection, treatment, or even care from a government that now is being controlled by those who wish to take away or even lower social security and medicare.

In a lot of ways, these policies or grand ideas are being built up by a secret group, not so secret now, of hardcore, extreme right wing billionaires who wish to have the power to enact laws with an ideological twist. Jane Mayer has done a service to this country with this brilliant, profound researched book on the rise of the radical right on the political stage of the 21st century.

In a small part of her book, Mayer talks about the in which after releasing an article on the influence of the Koch Brothers, who are mostly the main characters in this book, was informed of being tailed by private detectives trying to look up any dirt on her person with the goal of discrediting her. Whoever it was tried to go so far as to say that she plagiarized most of her work from other articles, which as she says, "Plagiarism ranks pretty high up on the list of crimes of moral turpitude in journalism." This gets to show that the startling revelations she made in that article riled up some very powerful people who did not agree with her work or wished that it was viewed as inaccurate and not reliable.

This book will open the eyes of those who still doubt that dark money isn't being spent, on the political apparatus, that we can see today, from those who wish to put in place laws that will benefit big corporations. Ms. Mayer writes about the rise of the Koch family and other families who subscribed to the same ideological thinking as the Koch brothers. With stunning research, we can understand the who's and why's of the radical right and get a better grip of their outstanding reach towards the peak of libertarian ideology.

It wasn't until the year 2008, the year Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, that the right started getting concerned about their future. The best part, in my opinion, of Jane Mayer's book is when she writes about the work the radical right used their money.to place people under their control, in the House of representatives using shady non-profit organizations, which would hide the name of their donors and would eventually make ads to attack opponents or anyone who didn't agree with them.

This book is an important read to anyone who desires to learn more about how a few billionaires got a hold of not just the political landscape of this country, but also how they influenced thinking of the general population, from organizing rallies, giving money to ivy league schools and professors to talk about free-market philosophy, and also give rise to political organizations such as the Tea Party.

Jane Mayer writes with stunning prose that will leave you to question on how sure we can be that our elected officials might not be representing just us, but another more powerful, shady group.

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TomR
A must read to see how the to 1% rich cut down their tax bills at the 99% expense.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 19, 2023
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A must read to see how top 1% rich cut down their tax bills, shows how the billionaires get a free ride while the rest of us are taxed to the hilt and how they control their so called 'independent' think tanks and buy off politicians who are only too willing to help them achieve their goals.
I highly recommend this book, it lifts the curtain!!!

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Arjun
Un libro que cambia tu visión de la política estadounidense
Reviewed in Spain on August 2, 2022
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Jane Mayer ha hecho un trabajo increíble en este libro, el nivel de investigación y de periodismo de investigación es simplemente irreal. Este libro realmente cambió mi visión de la política estadounidense y fue el primer libro que explica la razón por la que Trump ganó en los Estados Unidos. Es un libro muy bien investigado que explica el movimiento republicano para ganar poder usando el dinero que se remonta a mediados de 1900. Explica cómo el dinero de los ricos donantes republicanos, especialmente los hermanos Koch, han influido lentamente en la política estadounidense. Finalmente, conduciendo a la elección de Trump y quiénes eran los verdaderos actores que manipulaban al público, operando desde la sombra. Ella explica la cantidad de trabajo de base que se llevó a cabo para traer este cambio y cuánto tiempo y esfuerzo tomó. Realmente tuvo un gran impacto en mi comprensión de la política estadounidense. Definitivamente lo recomendaría a cualquiera que esté interesado en la política internacional y en el periodismo de investigación.

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Coutinho, edson vieira
Excelente
Reviewed in Brazil on August 9, 2018
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excelente

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Erik Star
A great book answering many questions of how such things are ...
Reviewed in Canada on August 5, 2018
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A great book answering many questions of how such things are possible in modern day politics. Just something we've forgotten, or at least many of us: follow the money and this book does it quite well, filling in the blanks, and hopefully informing those who care enough to learn what goes on in modern day politics, and business. A great read, and recommended.

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Anna v. D.
Uncanny
Reviewed in Germany on October 17, 2017
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This thoroughly researched book provides us with a compelling - and uncanny - explanation of how politics in the United States deteriorated into a state of hyper-polarization, producing almost irreconcilable rifts among the electorate and thus giving rise to political radicalism and the denouncement of compromise and constructive dialogue. Jane Mayer's book describes meticulously how a handful of heirs to vast industrial empires with amounts of cash at their disposal that outstrips entire state budgets of minor countries together with ultra-conservatives shaped a political movement that, under the guise of "philanthropy" began setting up tax-privileged foundations. These foundations in turn aim at subverting academia and political decision-making to steer public opinion by financing scholars and thinkers in return for research that ennobles their donors'egotistical agendas with academic terminology and "findings". The uncanny alliance forged between ultra-conservatives, foremost at the fringes of the GOP, and a minority of "libertarian" billionaires gave rise to an historically unparalleled political monster unchecked by the consitution and its democratic institutions and which poses a viable threat to democracy in the United States and beyond. Their influence shaped political debates from Reagan's presidency onwards to this day. Their activism actively subverts democracy, delutes the electorate with false ideals and promises of a great future while benefitting only the agendas of social- and fiscal arch-conservatives and the bank accounts of the super-rich. This isn't capitalism based on equal chances for everyone under democratic auspices but plutocracy in the making. Ultimately, the destruction of the GOP and the rise of Mr Trump and the likes to power are an indirect result of the unchecked actions of these "donors" to "philantropic" foundations. Where these individuals prefer to stay in the shadows, Jane Mayer drags them out in the spot-light. After reading this book, one feels that it is not building a wall and bringing back "beautiful coal" is what would make America great again but holding these people accountable for their actions and reinstating the prerogative of a democratic state over those with money.

Ultimately the destruction of the Grand Old Party from within its core

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