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1-Page Summary of Dark Money
A Convention for Conservative Investors
In January 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as president. At that time, many people felt that Democrats would be in power for a long time. However, the same month, wealthy conservative media executives and politicians met at the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort in Indian Wells to discuss how they could stop President Obama’s legislative agenda.
Mayer says that during the eight years of Republican rule, they had a lot of power and influence over the government. They were afraid Obama would take away their power.
The Koch Family
The Koch family has a long history. The patriarch of the family, Fred Koch, was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Texas. He earned his degree from MIT as an engineer and wanted to improve the oil refining process. However, he got into trouble with large oil companies because of his new method for separating gasoline from crude oil. As a result, he won $1.5 million but developed distaste for the legal system and anticompetitive business practices. He built a successful company that had refineries under Joseph Stalin in Russia and Adolf Hitler in Germany during World War II. Koch admired authoritarian regimes such as those led by Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.
Fred Koch’s sons grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Fred was a disciplinarian and taught his children the value of hard work. He warned them against big government and communism because he had worked on projects in the former Soviet Union.
To understand far-right US politics, Mayer describes the beliefs of Fred Koch and how they influenced his son’s political views. Fred Koch was a member of the John Birch Society, which believed that communists were trying to undermine the country. He also claimed that major political parties in America were communist agents, as well as universities and other institutions.
After Fred Koch died in 1967, Mayer tells how Charles Koch became chairman and CEO of the family company. As their wealth increased, Mayer identifies Charles and David as the principal promoters and funders of libertarian politics in the United States. Among the brothers, Charles was most ideological about reducing government to basic functions like protecting individual liberty and property rights.
The “Kochtopus”
In the 1970s, libertarians founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York City with a $65,000 donation from Charles Koch. At the time, he delivered a paper to help develop their movement and plan for where it should go. He drew on his extensive knowledge of the John Birch Society and believed that this new movement needed to cultivate a large donor class through all available means. As such, he became its chief funder and formulated its energy policy which advocated eliminating government regulation.
In 1979, the Koch family made a bold move: David Koch ran for political office. He joined the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate Ed Clark in order to circumvent campaign finance laws and spend more than $2 million of their personal fortune on the campaign. The Libertarian Party received only a tiny fraction of votes that year.
David Koch’s failed campaign for the vice-presidency inspired him to focus on influencing American politics. He and his brother Charles started funding think tanks and universities that shared their libertarian ideas. They believed in the accumulation of wealth as America’s purpose, and they wanted to reverse progressive achievements such as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society or Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Mayer describes their mission: using money to influence policy without having to be accountable to voters.
