Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

According to diZerega, who befriended Charles in the mid-1960s after meeting him while browsing in a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita, Charles didn’t accept all of the group’s conspiracy theories. He recalls that Charles, who was several years older, steered him away from the Communist conspiracy books and toward the collection of antigovernment economic writers whose work he found especially exciting. “This is the good stuff,” he recalls Charles telling him. The founder of the John Birch Society, Welch, was a board member of the Foundation for Economic Education, which spread a version of laissez-faire economics so extreme “it bordered on anarchism,” as Rick Perlstein writes in his history of Goldwater’s ascent, Before the Storm.