Summary and Analysis of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Based on the Book by Jane Mayer

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• Publisher: Worth Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781504044967
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Dark Money tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Jane Mayer's book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Dark Money includes:

• Historical context
• Chapter-by-chapter overviews
• Profiles of the main characters
• Detailed timeline of key events
• Important quotes
• Fascinating trivia
• Glossary of terms
• Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work

About Dark Money by Jane Mayer: Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right tells the fascinating and troubling story of how a small group of activist billionaires has come to exert an enormous influence on American politics. By using their wealth to gain effective control of the Republican Party, Charles and David Koch have tied it to a conservative agenda that furthers their own business interests. Drawing on five years of carefully documented research, Jane Mayer, an investigative journalist and New Yorker staff writer, covers the family history of the Koch brothers and their decades-long journey from the fringes of right-wing politics to the very center of political power. Her message offers implicit warning about how anonymous, unlimited funding threatens to turn American politics into a government run by a few. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Summary

New Preface to the 2017 Edition

The 2016 presidential election marked the apotheosis of the Koch brothers’ political power. Although they did not support Donald Trump’s candidacy, the brothers donated a record $750 million to Republican candidates for the Senate, House of Representatives, and state legislatures across the country. This was accomplished through a nationwide network of political operatives whose paid staff was larger than that of the Republican National Committee.

Despite his previous disavowal of Trump, David Koch was on hand at Trump Tower on November 8, 2016, to celebrate the Republican candidate’s victory. The Koch brothers have connections to the Trump administration at the highest level: Vice President Mike Pence was Charles Koch’s first choice for Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and CIA Director Mike Pompeo formerly represented their Kansas district in Congress, where he was “the single largest recipient of Koch campaign funds.”

Need to Know: During the campaign, Donald Trump mocked the candidates who attended the Koch brothers’ secret fundraising sessions as “puppets” and boasted that he would “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and other moneyed interests in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, his transition team included many political insiders with deep ties to the Koch network eager to advance the brothers’ free-market, antiregulatory agenda.

Introduction: The Investors

On the day of President Barack Obama’s first inauguration—January 20, 2009—Charles and David Koch, the heads of Koch Industries, hosted a seminar for wealthy political donors at a luxurious resort in Indian Wells, California. They brought together a group of fellow billionaires and multimillionaires from the energy, finance, and manufacturing industries to plot the agenda to oppose the incoming administration’s economic policies—policies they felt would be catastrophic.

Once regarded as leaders of a fringe element in conservative American politics, the Kochs had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the previous three decades to advance their causes by financing think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, and congressional lobbyists. Charles and David Koch, owners of the Georgia-Pacific lumber and paper company, oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and thousands of miles of pipelines, were each worth an estimated $14 billion in 2009. Forbes had ranked them as the sixth- and seventh-wealthiest men in the world. In 1980, when David Koch ran for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian ticket, influential conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr. rejected his platform as “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

Over the next 30 years, the Kochs used their vast wealth to move their minority views firmly into the mainstream and create a “private political machine” whose power rivaled that of the Republican Party itself. Taking full advantage of financial regulations meant to encourage philanthropy, the Kochs cloaked their activism in secrecy, making it nearly impossible to trace the full amount of their political spending. They offered the same anonymity and infrastructure to other conservative donors, creating a sprawling network to advance the agenda of the nation’s wealthiest citizens—“the top 0.1 percent or higher.” After enjoying enormous influence during George W. Bush’s presidency, these corporate titans viewed the 2008 financial collapse and the Democratic takeover of the executive and legislative branches as existential threats. Flatly rejecting the argument that Republicans should compromise their principles and try to work with the new administration, donors invited to the Indian Wells summit vowed to resist President Obama at every turn and push back aggressively against higher taxes and increased regulation. As political adviser Richard Fink told the Koch brothers, beating back the progressive tide of 2008 would require “the fight of their lives.”

Need to Know: Although they claim to be motivated purely by free-market ideology, the Koch brothers have quietly abandoned their principles when it serves their interests. At the height of the financial crisis in September 2008, when it became clear that Charles and David’s vast investment portfolio would take a massive hit as the stock market plunged, their political organization, Americans for Prosperity, switched from opposing the government’s bailout of private investment banks to supporting it.

Part One: Weaponizing Philanthropy

The War of Ideas, 1970–2008

Chapter One: Radicals: A Koch Family History

Fred Chase Koch, Charles and David’s father, was born in Texas and studied chemical engineering at MIT. He invented a better process for extracting gasoline from crude oil, but was shut out of the oil industry by powerful companies who sued him for patent infringement. Judging the American corporate and legal systems corrupt and unfair, he took his refining technology first to England and then to the Soviet Union and Germany, where he oversaw the construction of a massive oil refinery near Hamburg that became “‘a key component of the Nazi war machine.’” While his experiences in Russia made him a fervent anti-Communist, Fred Koch’s correspondence reveals that he was an admirer of the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The Koch family lived on a baronial estate outside Wichita, Kansas, where Fred raised his four sons with an iron discipline. Freddie was born in 1933, Charles in 1935, and twins David and William in 1940. Charles was the most driven and fiercely competitive of the bunch, and David became his loyal sidekick. The sibling rivalry between the brothers was so intense they had to be separated and shipped to different boarding schools and military academies. Charles quit or was expelled from a number of institutions, and, according to one person with access to family records, the first thing he did whenever he came home was beat up his brother Bill.

In 1958, Fred Koch became involved in radical right-wing politics as one of the 11 original founding members of the anti-Communist John Birch Society. Fred was also vehemently opposed to inheritance taxes, which he avoided by passing on his estate to his sons through an elaborate “charitable lead trust” that required them to donate the accruing interest on the principal to charity for 20 years. As a result, the boys became expert philanthropists.

In 1964, Charles Koch was introduced to the Freedom School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Founded by Robert LeFevre, a radical conservative thinker who had been indicted for mail fraud, the school taught a revisionist history in which the South should have been allowed to secede, the Gilded Age was the apotheosis of American society, and the New Deal was a disaster. Charles arranged for his brothers and friends to attend sessions at the school and became one of its principal funders, taking his “first step toward what would become a lifelong, tax-deductible sponsorship of libertarianism in America.”

With Fred Koch in poor health in the 1960s, his sons entered an intense confrontational period involving corporate infighting, lawsuits, and, according to a sworn deposition by Bill Koch, an attempt by the three younger brothers to blackmail Freddie with the threat of exposing his homosexuality to their father. Charles became chairman and CEO of Koch Industries after Fred’s death in 1967, and he and D...

Table of contents

• Title
• Disclaimer
• Contents
• Context
• Overview
• Summary
• Timeline
• Cast of Characters
• Direct Quotes and Analysis
• Trivia
• What’s That Word?
• Critical Response
• About Jane Mayer
• For Your Information
• Bibliography
• Copyright