Narrator: On a frigid January day in 2009, as millions celebrated the historic inauguration of Barack Obama, a very different gathering was taking place in the California desert. Hosted by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, a small, secretive group of conservative donors met to strategize. They saw Obama’s agenda not as a moment of hope, but as a grave threat to their free-market ideals and business interests. This meeting was not just a reaction; it was the activation of a political machine decades in the making, a machine built to reshape American democracy from the shadows.

This hidden history is the subject of Jane Mayer’s explosive book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. It uncovers how a network of ultra-wealthy families quietly funded a revolution, moving their once-fringe libertarian ideas into the center of American political power.

Narrator: The political empire of the Koch brothers was not built overnight. Its foundations were laid by their father, Fred Koch, whose own history was steeped in controversy. In the 1930s, crippled by lawsuits from major oil companies in the U.S., Fred Koch found willing business partners in two of the 20th century’s most brutal dictators. He first built fifteen modern oil refineries for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, a collaboration he would later regret. He then helped construct a massive refinery for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, a facility that produced high-octane fuel for the Nazi war machine. These experiences, combined with a deep-seated hatred for government regulation and taxes, forged an extreme anti-statist ideology that he passed down to his sons.

Charles Koch, the intellectual architect of the family’s political project, was further radicalized at the “Freedom School” in the 1960s. There, he was captivated by the ideas of Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek, who argued that any form of government planning was a step on “the road to serfdom.” It was here that Charles adopted his life’s mission, one he declared in 1978: “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.” This was not a plan for political compromise; it was a blueprint for a revolution.

Narrator: The Kochs were not alone. They were part of a small cadre of wealthy families who pioneered the strategy of “weaponizing philanthropy.” Figures like Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to a banking and oil fortune, and John M. Olin, an industrialist, used their tax-exempt family foundations to fund a "war of ideas" against the liberal consensus that dominated post-war America.

A pivotal moment for John Olin came in 1969. As a trustee at Cornell University, he was horrified to see a photograph of armed black student activists emerging from a building they had seized. To Olin, the university’s capitulation to their demands was a sign that academia had been lost to radicalism. He decided to redirect his philanthropy, not to build buildings, but to build a "counter-intelligentsia." The Olin Foundation began a "beachhead" strategy, funding specific, pro-business programs at elite universities like Harvard and Yale. They poured millions into the then-obscure field of “Law and Economics,” which subtly infused legal theory with free-market principles. This long-term strategy aimed to change the intellectual climate of the country, producing a new generation of scholars, judges, and clerks who viewed the world through a conservative, anti-regulatory lens.

Narrator: Guided by his strategist Richard Fink, Charles Koch developed a three-phase plan for social change: invest in intellectuals to generate ideas, fund think tanks to turn those ideas into policies, and subsidize "citizen groups" to create political pressure for those policies. This integrated network became known as the "Kochtopus." A key part of this strategy was the creation of "Astroturf" organizations—groups that appear to be grassroots movements but are in fact funded and controlled by corporate interests.

In 1984, the Kochs launched Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a group designed to look like a populist uprising. In reality, it was a private political sales force for the Kochs' anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda. When President Clinton proposed an energy tax in 1993, CSE unleashed a ferocious campaign of attack ads and staged rallies, successfully killing the bill and helping to hand a congressman from the Kochs’ own district a surprise defeat. After an internal power struggle, CSE split into two groups, with the Kochs taking control of Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Under the leadership of a seasoned political operative named Tim Phillips, AFP became the network’s primary "boots on the ground" force, ready to mobilize at a moment's notice.

Narrator: When CNBC contributor Rick Santelli delivered a fiery on-air rant in February 2009, calling for a "Chicago Tea Party" to protest Obama's mortgage relief plan, it appeared to be a spontaneous eruption of populist anger. But as Jane Mayer reveals, the fire had been carefully laid for years. The Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity was perfectly positioned to harness, fund, and direct this nascent movement.

AFP provided the Tea Party with its infrastructure: funding for buses, rally permits, speakers, and media training. While many attendees were genuinely angry citizens, the movement's agenda was heavily shaped by the Kochs' priorities. The focus was not on Wall Street bailouts, but on killing climate change legislation and fighting healthcare reform—two of the biggest threats to Koch Industries' bottom line. As one Koch strategist later boasted, "Every rock [the Obama administration] overturned, they saw people who were against it, and it turned out to be us." The Tea Party gave the Kochs' long-standing agenda a powerful, populist face.

Narrator: For decades, conservative legal activists, funded by families like the DeVos (of Amway fortune), waged a quiet war against campaign finance laws. Their goal was to establish a new legal precedent: that money is a form of speech and that corporations have the same free speech rights as individuals. This long campaign reached its zenith in 2010 with the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

The ruling overturned a century of precedent, declaring that corporations and unions could spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections, as long as they did so "independently" of a candidate's campaign. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, argued that transparency would prevent corruption, as the public could see who was funding the ads. But this assumption proved fatally flawed. The decision opened the floodgates for "dark money"—spending by nonprofit groups that are not required to disclose their donors. The Koch network and others like it could now pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections with complete anonymity, creating a system where a handful of billionaires could drown out the voices of millions of ordinary citizens.

Narrator: After their chosen candidate, Mitt Romney, lost the 2012 election, the Koch network did not retreat. Instead, they retooled. An internal review concluded they had an "empathy problem." The public saw them as self-interested and uncaring. The solution was a sophisticated public relations campaign to rebrand their movement as one of "well-being" for all Americans. They formed unlikely alliances, donating to the United Negro College Fund and partnering with liberals on criminal justice reform to soften their image.

Behind the scenes, they built a data operation that would soon rival, and even surpass, that of the Republican National Committee. Their company, i360, created detailed profiles of millions of voters, allowing them to target individuals with personalized messages. This combination of a softer public face and a ruthless data-driven machine proved devastatingly effective. In the 2014 midterm elections, the network spent nearly $300 million, helping Republicans capture the Senate. By 2016, they announced a budget of $889 million, a figure that rivaled the spending of the Democratic and Republican parties combined. The private political machine was now a full-fledged shadow party.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Dark Money is that a small, ideologically-driven group of billionaires has systematically built a private political machine that rivals the power of traditional political parties. By weaponizing philanthropy, manufacturing grassroots movements, and exploiting campaign finance loopholes, this network has successfully moved a radical, anti-government, and anti-regulatory agenda from the fringes to the very center of American power, often against the interests and wishes of the majority of the public.

The book leaves us with a chilling question about the health of democracy in an age of extreme wealth inequality. When money is speech, who gets to be heard? And what happens to a society when its political system is no longer a reflection of its people, but a product up for sale to the highest bidder?