Jane Mayer, the author of this essential book, is a gifted staff writer for The New Yorker, as well as the author of several other titles, and a specialist in researching and documenting complex political phenomena.
In Dark Money, she takes an in-depth look at the history of the Koch brothers and their right-wing billionaire friends, and explores their lifetime ideology and mission to undermine democracy in favor of a plutocracy that will be favorable to their interests. In doing so, she provides an exhaustive account of why and how our democracy and its institutions have been systematically shredded at the hands of the Kochs, the Mercers, the DeVos family, the Tea Party and the radical right.
Mayer shows how this dedicated right wing subset of the ultra-rich have learned to undermine and defeat popular political ideas, by playing a long game of building dozens of self-financed organizations of influence with misleading names, and how in Donald Trump they may have found a near-perfect instrument to enact their far right agenda, while also destroying popular faith in our democracy, its norms and its checks and balances.
If you want to understand how we reached our current political and economic situation in the United States, this book is an indispensable piece of the puzzle. Highly recommended.
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