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

by Jane Mayer

To be sure, the numbers on the far right had grown. Membership in the Liberty League, the anti–New Deal corollary to the Tea Party during the 1930s, has been estimated at 75,000, while membership in the John Birch Society in the 1960s has been estimated at 100,000 core members. Overall, at its height, 5 percent of Americans approved of the John Birch Society. The Tea Party movement, in contrast, was estimated by The New York Times to have won the support of 18 percent of the population at its zenith, but at its core, according to the researcher Devin Burghart, were some 330,000 activists who had signed up with six national organizational networks. If the estimates were correct, the actual number of hard-core Tea Party activists was not, by historical standards, all that large. But the professionalization of the underground infrastructure, the growth of sympathetic and in some cases subsidized media outlets, and the concentrated money pushing the message from the fringe to center stage were truly consequential.