PDF Summary:Dark Money, by Jane Mayer

Have you noticed a shift in American politics throughout your lifetime? Over the past four decades, ideas like libertarianism and free market capitalism have gone from fringe beliefs held mostly by the elite to ideas with significant popular support and impact on our political sphere. In Dark Money, award-winning journalist and author Jane Mayer explores how a small group of extremely wealthy individuals, led largely by Charles and David Koch, have effectively legitimized far-right beliefs in America using their massive wealth.

In our guide, we’ll look at how the Kochs developed their political beliefs, the tactics they used to create their political movement, and how those tactics have affected American society and politics over recent decades. We’ll also examine the historical, social, and political contexts of the book’s events and how they have impacted society today.

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Taking Over American Politics: Richard Fink’s Plan

While the Kochs felt motivated to enter politics, they struggled to gain traction. In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the libertarian ticket on a platform that mirrored the Freedom School’s curriculum. It called for the abolition of Medicare, Social Security, the EPA, income tax, child labor laws, public education, and essentially every government service except the enforcement of property laws. The campaign failed, receiving just 1% of the vote.

(Shortform note: The libertarian party is currently the third-largest political party in America. However, the Democratic and Republican parties still dominate American elections to the degree that the greatest percentage of the vote that a libertarian presidential candidate has received is just over 3%, which went to Gary Johnson in 2016. The libertarian candidate for president in 2020, Jo Jorgenson, received just 1.2% of the vote.)

Taking a lesson from this, Mayer explains that the Kochs decided to keep their political influence at the funding level instead of running for office themselves. They began devoting their fortune to front groups that presented the government as the enemy of the people and believed that the purpose of the nation should be to enable private citizens to accrue immense wealth.

(Shortform note: In recent years, Charles Koch has expressed some regret over his heavily partisan participation in the political sphere. He’s begun trying to reach across the aisle and appeal to liberals and Democrats on criminal justice reform and foreign affairs in order to bridge the ideological divide in America he feels he helped create. However, the vast majority of his political spending continues to go to Republican candidates.)

To this end, Charles Koch hired Richard Fink as his political advisor. According to Mayer, Fink laid out a specific plan consisting of three phases for taking over American politics. These three steps were 1) invest in conservative intellectuals who could produce the ideas for the movement, 2) invest in think tanks to market these ideas as policies, and 3) create groups that supposedly represented the will of the people to pressure politicians to adopt the policies.

(Shortform note: Some argue that the Trump presidency called into question the necessity of hiring political advisors like Richard Fink to win races or achieve political victories. Trump’s campaign was highly unconventional, and his win defied the predictions of professional pollsters, making it seem that perhaps political success isn’t contingent on having expert advisors. Still, it’s unlikely that politicians will dispense with advisors, simply because the politicians are so eager to win: It seems more sensible and less risky to just hire an advisor, even though you can’t truly know how helpful they’ll be to your campaign.)

Phase 1: Produce Conservative Ideas

To carry out phase 1, explains Mayer, the Kochs sought to establish a beachhead, or a program at a prestigious university that they could fill with conservative-minded faculty and then grow into much larger programs. Such programs were given deliberately innocuous names to avoid the appearance of being ideologically driven.

They did so at Virginia’s George Mason University, where they established the think tank called the Institute for Humane Studies, a program aimed at building a new generation of libertarian scholars. The libertarian emphasis of the program was so heavy that at one point applicants’ essays were scanned by computers for mentions of libertarian icons like Ayn Rand. This, as well as the funding of other far-right think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, created the intellectuals who would produce ideas for the libertarian movement.

(Shortform note: Today, the Institute for Humane Studies continues to fund research supporting libertarian ideas, offering $2 million in grants for scholars as well as tens of thousands of dollars in fellowship grants. As part of their talent identification rubric, the program assesses potential applicants for their openness and sympathy to the ideas of classical liberalism—which are comparable to libertarian beliefs—and notes this as their most essential measure for accepting applicants.)

Phase 2: Market Conservative Policies

For phase 2, the Kochs established the Mercatus Center, also at George Mason University, which critics described as nothing more than a lobbying group. Conservative faculty members wrote drafts of bills for issues like supply-side tax cuts that were then passed on to legislators to introduce into Congress. According to Mayer, such programs led these previously far-right ideas to be taken seriously in politics and to begin affecting legislation, just as Fink had planned.

(Shortform note: The Mercatus Center remains one of the country’s most influential libertarian think tanks. Though it officially represents itself as a nonpartisan group that doesn’t engage in lobbying, critics have noted that the group has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on trips for government officials and suggested that it should be required to register itself as a lobbying group. Funded by millions of dollars from Koch Industries, the center also provides money and benefits to conservative media figures such as FOX News contributor Larry Kudlow.)

Phase 3: Apply Popular Pressure to Influence Politicians

Finally, for phase 3, Charles Koch established the nonprofit educational group Citizens for a Sound Economy, which would act as a sales force to build public support for their libertarian ideology. This group had the appearance of a grassroots movement, but in reality it was funded by corporate sponsors, mainly the Kochs. Rather than being made up of average citizens fighting for what they believed in, Mayer writes, it was instead run by pro-capitalist businessmen who would use the group to promote their own interests.

Over the next few decades, the Kochs repeated this pattern at hundreds of other universities and think tanks.

(Shortform note: In 2003 Citizens for a Sound Economy disbanded and split into two groups: Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Freedomworks played a significant role in the fight against climate legislation and continues to downplay the impact of climate change, citing it as a “woke” political grab by the Democrats. This might be considered evidence that the group is indeed run by business people who don’t want climate change legislation to hamper their money-making efforts.)

Electoral Politics: Funding Candidates and Campaigns

Though they had previously been opposed to the Republican Party because it was too moderate, explains Mayer, the Kochs began donating heavily to Republican politicians in the 1980s and 1990s. They were among the top three financial backers of Bob Dole’s campaign against Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1996, and in return, Dole promoted legislation that saved Koch Industries millions of dollars.

(Shortform note: The Kochs may have been spurred into their explicit support of the Republican party by the Senate’s investigation into Koch Industries for the theft of oil from Indian reservations. This investigation convinced Charles Koch that he had to get involved in Washington if he wanted to protect his company. Bob Dole helped the Kochs by submitting an article into the Senate record that included a quote from the chief of one of the involved Indian tribes saying, based on information presented to them by Koch Industries, that the company had not been stealing oil from them. This article damaged the Senate’s case against the Kochs and further endeared Dole to the Kochs.)

They also funded vicious attack ads against Democrats in the 1996 election. According to Mayer, to conceal the money’s origin, they funneled their money through the tax-exempt nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust, which then poured the money into a shell corporation called Triad Management Services that made the ads. It’s suspected that the ads affected the outcomes of four races which helped Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives.

(Shortform note: The Kochs’ funding of attack ads may have had a greater effect than comparable funding from the Republican party. Research suggests that attack ads funded by independent sources—like the Economic Education Trust—are more effective than attack ads funded by candidates against their opponents. Ads funded by candidates often receive backlash that independent groups are not subject to, and this may incentivize those independent groups to make more controversial, and potentially less truthful, ads.)

Over the next two decades, the Kochs continued to flood money into conservative politicians’ campaigns, think tanks, and public interest groups in order to promote free market economics. The exact amount of dark money they spent is unknown, and the flexibility of laws exempting charities from taxes enabled them to have an immense monetary impact on electoral politics.

(Shortform note: Americans may be becoming increasingly opposed to the role of dark money in elections. A 2019 study showed widespread support for requiring political groups to disclose their donors, with less than 25% saying they shouldn’t have to disclose the source of their funding. Additionally, a 2018 study indicated that most Americans favor putting limits on campaign spending because without them, the wealthy have a disproportionate influence on politics.)

The Election of Barack Obama and the Tea Party Movement

According to Mayer, in the 2008 election, outside individuals and groups spent an unprecedented amount of money to influence the results. However, despite the Kochs’ and their donors’ best efforts, Barack Obama was elected president. His platform promised to reduce income inequality by making the wealthy pay their fair share. The Kochs and other elites were highly disturbed by this and were determined to undermine his presidency.

(Shortform note: The Kochs maintained a rocky relationship with President Obama throughout his presidency, particularly over climate change issues. In 2015, Obama singled out the Koch brothers as major contributors to climate change, accusing them of trying to keep clean energy businesses from succeeding by opposing subsidies for such businesses. This prompted a backlash from Charles Koch, who asserted that they’re against government subsidies of all kinds, though he admitted his company benefits from them. However, they have occasionally aligned on other issues, such as criminal justice reform.)

Because he took office during a recession, explains Mayer, one of Obama’s first pieces of legislation was a stimulus bill, which involved putting trillions of dollars of government money into the economy to pull it out of the recession. Immediately after Obama’s inauguration, the Kochs’ nonprofit advocacy group Americans for Prosperity began attacking his platform, organizing rallies and other events decrying public spending to undercut his proposed stimulus bill. Think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation began publishing research papers and opinion pieces in opposition to the bill, sometimes based on incorrect facts that were nevertheless repeated by conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh.

(Shortform note: The Heritage Foundation has maintained its anti-stimulus spending stance during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing the 2008 stimulus to suggest that stimulus spending is ineffective and costly. The Cato Institute has echoed this sentiment and painted stimulus checks as a political stunt. However, research from other groups suggests that the stimulus checks sent out during the pandemic resulted in the first major reduction of income inequality in a generation. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that income inequality will increase over the coming years absent further stimulus checks.)

According to Mayer, this unrest combined with the ideological movement fueled by the Kochs led to the creation of the Tea Party movement. The movement was partly a response to Obama’s proposal in 2009 to help bail out homeowners facing foreclosure during the economic crisis. Those on the far right balked at this suggestion and claimed that people who were facing foreclosure had made bad decisions and that others shouldn’t have to help pay for them.

(Shortform note: Libertarians and conservatives have been making similar arguments in recent years regarding the issue of student loan forgiveness, suggesting that it incentivizes government dependence and that loan debt is the result of poor decision making by students—a belief held disproportionately by older Americans. For these reasons, some groups have even brought lawsuits against President Biden’s proposed debt relief plan.)

This sentiment—that poverty is a personal failing, that people shouldn’t be expected to help other people who are struggling, and that personal opportunity is more important than others’ welfare—defined much of the Tea Party platform. The movement was painted as a widespread grassroots movement, but in reality it was engineered by outside money.

(Shortform note: While outside money was responsible for the creation of the Tea Party Movement, some have argued that it is still a grassroots movement because of the widespread popular support it received due to existing beliefs among citizens. However, other research indicates that the Tea Party Movement is largely out of line with public opinion and that its influence on the GOP agenda is disproportionately large.)

Officials in Congress like Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Pete Sessions formed a strategy of obstructionism designed to prevent any of Obama’s platform from being enacted. This extreme wing of the party began pressuring more moderate members to support this obstructionism. These moderates now saw that if they didn’t shift to the right, they would be ousted in primary races and replaced with extreme candidates funded by outside money.

(Shortform note: The strategy of obstructionism was extremely successful, but it may have backfired on the Republican party as its leaders began to lose control of the movement. Eric Cantor ended up losing his seat in the House of Representatives in 2014 to a candidate who claimed Cantor wasn’t conservative enough. In 2023, Kevin McCarthy won the position of Speaker of the House on the 15th ballot, but only after surrendering much of his power as speaker to far-right candidates who were denying him the position.)

Redistributing Power in the States: Citizens United and REDMAP

Having heavily impaired Obama’s power by undermining the bipartisan support he was expecting, the Kochs next went after power at the state level, explains Mayer. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case let wealthy donors and corporations have an even greater influence on politics by removing restrictions on the amount of money they could spend to influence elections. Critics predicted that the decision would result in a huge upswing in corporate political spending, but instead it enabled just a handful of extremely wealthy people to implement their personal agendas in the political sphere.

(Shortform note: Some experts have suggested that the Citizens United case was not as consequential as many believe. They note that the amount of outside spending on elections was already increasing in the early 2000s and maintained a steady rate of increase before and after Citizens United. Some attribute this to the 2002 passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, suggesting that its limits on individual donations to political parties actually prompted a much greater inflow of dark money through independent groups despite its intended purpose of reducing outside influence on elections.)

Simultaneously, in 2011, many states were redrawing their districts as they did once a decade. A political tactician named Ed Gillespie created a plan to redraw districts to disproportionately benefit Republicans, a plan they called REDMAP. They used North Carolina as a guinea pig for this experiment, explains Mayer, and they redrew the district lines to concentrate Democratic voters into a few districts and left the rest of the map mostly Republican.

(Shortform note: The fact that the drawing of district lines is performed by elected officials in a majority of states has drawn some criticism, with some recommending that lines should be drawn by independent groups whose members cannot run for office for a few years before and after serving on the commission. They also recommend that the public should be able to submit proposals for districting to ensure that they’re representative of the will of the people. Currently, only four states use independent groups to draw district lines.)

In 2012, with the REDMAP plan and the spending power granted by Citizens United, Republicans successfully turned the swing state red, both at the state and national level. Though the Republican party received fewer votes than Democrats in North Carolina and other states the plan targeted, they won more seats in Congress, allowing Republicans to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives. A lawsuit filed by progressives against the new district maps was killed by the state’s majority-Republican supreme court. The pattern was repeated across the nation, giving Republicans control over both the legislatures and governorships in over 20 states and turning other previously swing states like Michigan and Ohio red.

(Shortform note: While the effects of partisan redistricting are lasting, experts note that changes in population will lessen their impact over the decade before the next redistricting. Additionally, in 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the gerrymandering of two districts in North Carolina was unconstitutional and was designed to limit the power of Black voters in the state.)

Obama’s 2012 Reelection and Its Aftermath: Retooling the Conservative Approach

By 2012, the Kochs had undermined Obama’s administration and created a cultural push in the Republican party towards far-right ideology. According to Mayer, they expected Republicans to beat Obama by a landslide in the 2012 election but were astonished when he was reelected. They had done well in the states, but Mitt Romney had proven to be too weak a candidate to beat President Obama despite the $2.5 billion spent against him.

(Shortform note: Some attribute Romney’s loss less to his weakness as a candidate and more to other circumstantial factors. They suggest that Obama only won in 2008 because of the financial crisis, and that his response to Hurricane Sandy helped him win in 2012. Others say Romney would have done better with a different running mate and that he should have chosen someone like Marco Rubio or Bob McDonnell instead of Paul Ryan.)

According to Mayer, the Kochs and other conservatives set about understanding their 2012 loss and what to do differently next time. Based on research from their think tanks, they realized that much of the issue was that people viewed the Republican party as lacking in empathy for the poor and for average citizens. Most people believed that free market policies disproportionately benefited the rich. The Kochs began funding a campaign to change Republicans’ public image to make them seem like they were working to protect American citizens and not just their own wealth (though in private conversations, they admitted that personal profit was their only goal).

(Shortform note: It’s unclear whether the rebranding of the Republican party was successful. Polling one year after the 2012 election showed that a majority of people felt either that the Republican party had made no significant changes or that it had moved further away from representing their interests. Continued polling showed the Republican party’s approval rating remaining around 35-45% in the years following, though it dipped as low as 28% in 2013 and as high as 51% in early 2020. For both parties, polling seems to indicate a declining approval rate over the past 30 years.)

Mayer writes that the Kochs began rebranding themselves publicly to convince people they were concerned with the well-being of average citizens. They made a show of public donations to groups like the United Negro College Fund, and they continued to target academia through the hundreds of programs they were funding at universities across the country. They also began targeting high school students through a nonprofit organization called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy that provided desperately needed funding to schools. That program then taught students that, for instance, it’s okay to pay women less than men for the same work, and that progressive policies are harmful to the poor and cause economic recessions.

(Shortform note: In a 2016 article in The New Yorker, Mayer discusses the success of the Kochs’ rebranding. She notes that they supplemented their philanthropic efforts and conservative educational programs with television ads that depicted them as regular people with deep American roots to make them seem more relatable. They also changed up their decades-long strategy of keeping their public activities secret and began courting the media to improve how they were portrayed. In 2018, Charles Koch announced to his network that they would begin publicizing their contributions to universities, and some Democrats have noted that their rebranding has been at least somewhat successful in that it placed them behind Donald Trump as the main enemy of the left.)

Additionally, says Mayer, the Kochs decided to retool the Republican party, blaming its infrastructure for their 2012 loss. Now, even Republicans who had been touting these free market ideals found their positions jeopardized by wealthy donors threatening to fund and replace them with more extreme candidates.

(Shortform note: Dark money can be even more effective in curating party nominees than determining the results of general elections. Because the turnout for primary elections tends to be so low, it’s often easy for small, well-funded groups to elect the candidates of their choice.)

The Kochs’ efforts proved fruitful in the 2014 election when the Republicans managed to win both houses of Congress. It was the largest amount of outside money ever spent on a midterm election. From then on, explains Mayer, their goal was to obstruct every facet of Obama’s agenda and to undo everything he’d accomplished in the previous six years.

(Shortform note: In response to the attacks on his agenda, President Obama began to embrace his executive power. Though aware of the lack of cooperation he’d be receiving from congress, he declared 2014 a “year of action” and began enacting more regulations through executive order.)

Newly elected officials like Mitch McConnell began carrying out attacks on progressive legislation and agencies like the EPA. Republicans shifted further right or were replaced with far-right officials. The Kochs had effectively achieved their decades-long goal of making libertarianism mainstream and controlling the government in a way no private citizens ever had before. Nevertheless, Mayer explains, Charles Koch maintained that he was a disinterested party only looking to increase the well-being of the nation.

(Shortform note: While the Kochs have had a massive influence on politics, David passed away in 2019, and Charles is already 87, which raises the question: Will they continue to have a massive influence on politics? Charles’s son Chase has taken over David’s role in the company and made plans to move away from the political sphere in favor of advancing libertarian principles and issues of social justice, suggesting the Kochs’ fortune in the near future might no longer go to supporting political candidates or policies. Charles has said he doesn’t know who his successor will be but that they will be selected by the board after his death.)

The 2016 Surprise: The Election of Donald Trump

In 2016, the Kochs weren’t backing any presidential candidate but were focusing on maintaining their hold on both houses of Congress and further cementing their hold on governments at the state and local levels, which they accomplished. According to Mayer, they were surprised by the nomination of Donald Trump, who gained popularity by painting himself as a self-made billionaire who, unlike his opponent Hillary Clinton, was not reliant on other people’s wealth.

Leading up to the election, the Kochs seemed to oppose him, but after his victory, Trump put together a transition team full of corporate lobbyists, many of whom had ties to the Kochs. Mayer notes that though Trump had won on the claim that he would “drain the swamp,” or rid the government of individuals who were devoted only to enhancing their wealth, he immediately began adding such individuals, appointing people to positions of power in which they could pursue personal financial interests.

As a whole, Mayer explains, the Trump administration began implementing policies that aligned closely with the Kochs’ ideals, promoting fossil fuels, decreasing government regulations, and promising to dismantle the EPA, among other things. Though it remained unclear how much direct influence the Kochs would be able to wield over Trump, what was clear was that their wealth would continue to have a heavy influence on the nation’s politics for the foreseeable future—even after the Kochs’ deaths, as directed in their wills.

Radicalism Gone Wild: Did the Kochs Help Elect President Trump?

The Kochs weren’t the only ones surprised by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, as polls leading up to the election favored a strong win by Hillary Clinton. There are many theories as to what led to his win, including the idea that Clinton’s lead in the polls caused some citizens to not bother to vote because they assumed she’d win easily. Others have suggested it was because neither Clinton nor Trump was an appealing candidate to most people, noting that third party votes in 2016 were triple what they were in 2012. Charles Koch himself likened the choice between the candidates to a choice between cancer and a heart attack.

Some experts also suggest that Trump won by capitalizing on the momentum of the Tea Party Movement, by promoting fake news and misinformation, and by tapping into fringe conspiracy beliefs like those of the Birther Movement (the movement fueled by false claims that Obama was born in Kenya and wasn’t a US citizen). By fomenting the Tea Party Movement, legitimizing fringe beliefs, and creating a massive influx of disinformation, the Kochs may have helped secure Trump’s 2016 win.

Moreover, after he took office, the Koch operatives that he began filling his administration with discovered that he was highly impressionable and that they were able to shape much of his agenda to suit their interests. Still, the Kochs and Trump continued to clash over issues like government spending and small government policies.