As damaging as you think the Kochs are to American politics, the reality is infinitely worse
Jane Mayer is the best reporter we have, period. In one truly essential book after another, she gets behind the scenes and to the real truth of the most important stories — and the hardest stories to cover — in American politics today.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/25/they_see_themselves_as_heroes_instead_people_are_saying_theyre_manipulating_american_politics_jane_mayer_on_the_method_behind_the_koch_brothers_brilliant_madness/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
They see themselves as heroes. Instead people are saying they’re manipulating American politics”: Jane Mayer on the method behind the Koch brothers’ brilliant madness
Jane Mayer, author of "Dark Money," tells Salon how billionaires funded the radical right, remade American politics
DAVID DALEY Salon 1/25/16
Her latest book is “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” and damn if Mayer doesn’t unpack — clearly, tenaciously, intently — every tentacle of the Koch brothers’ megamillion-dollar operation to reshape politics and policy, no matter how brilliantly the Kochs tried to bury and disguise its roots. (Or, as she shares in this book, no matter how much digging private investigators believed to have Koch ties did into her personal and professional life.)
The book’s roots emerged from Mayer’s brilliant New Yorker stories on the Kochs, including this political thriller about the “billionaire brothers who are waging a war on Obama,” and this masterful look at how the Koch network and other wealthy and often secret GOP donors remade North Carolina politics after Citizens United. Go order a copy right now, then come back.
We sat down with Mayer last week in New York to talk about the Kochs, the audacious Republican plan to remake state and national politics, the impact that conservative money has had on the media and universities, and much more.
I loved your history of the Powell Memorandum, which feels like the clarion call in many ways that started billionaires and big business thinking seriously about how to use their money to influence the political process. Lewis Powell had been a lawyer for the tobacco industry, and would become a justice on the Supreme Court, but in the early 1970s he sounded the alarm to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That’s almost the starting line for the decades-long process of building think tanks and foundations and conservative media — but you dug out new information on what Powell was up to. How influential was he, and what did he help create?
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