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Name: Dark Money
Rating: 3.9 (142 reviews)
Author: Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer

The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

3.9 (142 ratings)

19 mins

Brief summary

'Dark Money' by Jane Mayer exposes the billionaires' funding of the radical right and reshaping of American politics to advance their interests.

Topics

US Economics US Politics

Table of Contents

Dark Money
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Follow the money to the highest levels of US politics.

Have you ever heard the phrase “follow the money?” Popularized by the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, it was used by the FBI informant known as Deep Throat to describe a money trail that would lead to corrupt politicians. But is the corrupting influence of money in politics still something we need to fear?

You bet.

These blinks reveal how two brothers, Charles and David Koch, and their conservative friends have used their enormous financial resources to influence and alter politics in the United States over the last decades. We’ll look into where this involvement stems from, as well as the methods the Koch brothers use and the impact they’ve had on the country’s political landscape.

So let’s follow the dark trail of money and see how it has fostered the emergence of radically conservative politics in the United States.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why the Koch brothers decided to get involved and influence politics;
how think tanks and other NGOs hide the money trail; and
how the Tea Party movement was stirred up and utilized by the Koch Brothers.

The Koch brothers head a network funded by billionaires who are determined to control US politics.

When it comes to US billionaires, you probably think of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. But there are others who wield even more power, yet remain in the shadows.

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch run Koch Industries, the nation’s second-largest private company, which was founded by their father, Fred Koch, in 1940.

Fred Koch started amassing his fortune by building oil refineries for the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin, which led to Koch’s company being commissioned to construct a massive oil refinery for Nazi Germany in 1934.

Fred was indeed a Nazi sympathizer at the time. He even hired a nanny who was a Nazi sympathizer to look after his children. In fact, the nanny was such a passionate Nazi supporter that she moved back to Germany after Hitler’s invasion of France in 1940, when Charles was just five years old and David was a newborn baby.

Eventually, Charles and David would grow up to become business partners, and since the 1970s they’ve been building an elaborate network of political donors and fundraising institutions. This network has so many arms, and reaches so deep into the heart of American politics, that it’s known as the Kochtopus.

Ultimately, the goal has been to spread their message of libertarian values. These values focus on supporting a free market and small government devoid of regulations, taxes or anything else that might get in the way of profits.

In 1980, this crusade led David Koch to make a brief run for office as the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate. That year, the Libertarian Party only managed to capture around one percent of the national vote.

But the experience informed the brothers’ future political strategy. They realized that a politician is merely a public voice – real power is creating and shaping the messages that those voices project.

So, the Koch brothers decided to remain behind the scenes from that point onward, and began focusing their energy on an ambitious long-term strategy.

The Koch network uses nonprofits to keep political donations anonymous and tax-free.

For the Koch brothers to successfully change public opinion, they knew they had to find a subtle way for their ideas to gain traction. They eventually landed upon a great way to do this: disguising their political agenda as philanthropy.

They soon began spreading their libertarian ideology through nonprofit organizations such as advocacy groups, think tanks and private foundations. It proved to be a great strategy, since nonprofits are both cost-effective and require very little public disclosure.

The Koch network includes educational programs and think tanks focused on long-term influence.

To effectively influence public opinion and decrease the chance of future resistance, educational organizations and programs became a vital part of the Koch brothers’ conservative fundraising network.

The idea was to donate to respected universities that would return the favor by providing a space to nurture a new generation of conservative thinkers. This would increase their influence on society by churning out future political leaders who’d been taught the Koch ideology – which is why law schools quickly became a primary target.

The Tea Party movement became a way to manufacture grassroots credibility.

By 2009, the groundwork for a political movement had been put in place by the Koch brothers. It was now time for those patiently nurtured nonprofits and educational programs to pay off in the form of the Tea Party movement, which finally brought libertarianism to the mainstream.

The seeds of this uprising can be traced back to the Koch brothers’ right-hand man, Richard Fink, and his Structure of Social Change manifesto from the 1980s.

A Supreme Court decision in favor of Citizens United gave the Koch brothers even more power.

Things took a dramatic turn in 2010, when the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission went before the Supreme Court.

The conservative think tank Citizens United ended up winning their case, and the decision said that corporations have the right to freedom of speech. It was a game-changing ruling, and it opened the floodgates for even more cash to flow into the Koch network.

The Koch’s REDMAP plan gave Republicans control of key states and the House of Representatives.

After the Democrats won the presidential election in 2008 and increased their majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie came up with a plan known as REDMAP.

The goal was simple: get as many Republicans as possible elected to Congress in the 2010 midterms so they would have the legislative control necessary to then redraw the congressional districts in 2011.

With a Republican majority, the Kochs went after the Obama administration and climate change.

The Kochs’ intense hatred of Barack Obama was regularly discussed at their semiannual donor summits.

In June of 2011, Charles Koch borrowed a phrase from Saddam Hussein to describe the war they were about to enter and their hopes of being able to block Obama at every turn. He called it, “The mother of all wars.” Thanks to the success of REDMAP, and the radical Republican representatives that were elected as a result, they went on to engineer the government shutdown of 2013.

America is dangerously close to becoming an oligarchy.

At the heart of the American Dream is the belief that anyone can make their dreams come true, regardless of their background. Yet the work of the Koch brothers has widened the country’s economic divide. The rich are getting richer and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to challenge their authority.

In fact, their network is so big that it’s practically taken over the Republican party.

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What is Dark Money about?

Dark Money (2016) is a chilling look behind the scenes of American politics, outlining how a small handful of the country’s richest people have been influencing the country’s political landscape since the 1970s. Far from a conspiracy theory, these are the cold hard facts of the powerful and immensely wealthy individuals behind the rise of today’s radical right-wing conservative movement.

Best quote from Dark Money

At one Tea Party rally, protesters had a banner depicting corpses from Dachau concentration camp, implying Obamacare was comparable to the Nazis state-ordered murders.

—Jane Mayer

Who should read Dark Money?

Students of political science and economics
Political junkies and newshounds
Readers struggling to grasp the layers and complexities of US politics

About the Author

Jane Mayer is an investigative journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker and recipient of the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2008. She is also the author of The Dark Side: the Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

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