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

by Jane Mayer

Another veteran of Citizens for a Sound Economy concluded that while the Kochs loved liberty as an abstraction, “they were very controlling, very top-down. You can’t build an organization with them. They run it.”

To run this more political side of the operation, the Kochs hired Tim Phillips, a political veteran who had worked with Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition. Reed was regarded as the religious Right’s savviest political operative. He and Phillips had co-founded Century Strategies, a dynamo of a campaign-consulting firm that became notorious for its close and lucrative business ties to Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who went to prison for defrauding millions of dollars from Native American casino owners, among other clients. Phillips was not charged in connection with the scandal but had helped create a religious-sounding organization that in fact handled casino cash for Abramoff. Phillips was part of a tough, hardball-playing group, far from the wonky, intellectual mists of Charles Koch’s early libertarian musings. Both Reed and Abramoff were early protégés of Grover Norquist, the influential Washington-based antitax activist famous for proclaiming his hope of shrinking government to the size where he could “drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist had confided once that he regarded Reed and Abramoff as his two greatest students. “Grover told me Ralph was his Trotsky, and Abramoff was his Stalin,” recalls Bruce Bartlett, the conservative economist.

Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message.

As his fellow traders whistled and cheered, he went on to say, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.” From the start, the analogy was inapt. As Michael Grunwald, author of The New New Deal, a richly reported book about Obama’s stimulus plan, observed, “The Boston Tea Party was a protest against an unelected leader who raised taxes, while Obama was an elected leader who had just cut them.”

To begin with, the Tea Party was not “a new strain” in American politics. The scale was unusual, but history had shown that similar reactionary forces had attacked virtually every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. Earlier business-funded right-wing movements, from the Liberty League to the John Birch Society to Scaife’s Arkansas Project, all had cast Democratic presidents as traitors, usurpers, and threats to the Constitution. The undeniable element of racial resentment that tinged many Tea Party rallies was also an old and disgracefully enduring story in American politics. Nor could the Tea Party accurately be described as nonpartisan. As a New York Times poll later showed, over three-quarters of its supporters identified as Republican. The bulk of the remainder felt the Republican Party was not Republican enough. Finally, although many of its supporters were likely political neophytes, from the start the ostensibly anti-elitist rebellion was funded, stirred, and organized by experienced political elites. On closer inspection, as the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol and the Ph.D. student Vanessa Williamson observed in their 2012 book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, the Tea Party movement was a “mass rebellion…funded by corporate billionaires, like the Koch brothers, led by over-the-hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire media celebrities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.”

What Obama was up against was a new form of permanent campaign. It was waged not by politicians but by people whose wealth gave them the ability to fund their own private field operations with which they could undermine the outcome of the election. So-called outside money—that spent by individuals and groups outside of the campaigns themselves—exploded during the Obama years. Much attention was paid to the portion of this spending that was directed at elections. Less attention was paid to the equally unrivaled role that outside money played in influencing the way the country was governed. Most of this spending was never disclosed. But as the Kochs’ political lieutenant, Fink, boasted to The Wichita Eagle in 2012, “I think that’s actually one of the things that happened at the Obama administration, is that every rock they overturned, they saw people who were against it, and it turned out to be us.”

The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the Obama presidency was that the 2008 election had been such a wipeout for Republicans that their only hope of staying relevant was to cut deals with Obama, who was seen as far too popular to oppose. But those who expected compromise—which included the president and his top aides—hadn’t noticed the growing extremism in the Grand Old Party. Even before the new congressional session began, Eric Cantor, a lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, who was about to become the new minority whip in the House, told a handful of trusted allies in a private planning meeting in his Washington condo, “We’re not here to cut deals and get crumbs and stay in the minority for another forty years.” Instead, he argued, the Republicans needed to fight. They needed to unite in opposition to virtually anything Obama proposed in order to deny him a single bipartisan victory. The group, which included his deputy, Kevin McCarthy, called itself the Young Guns. The strategy of obstruction that they adopted won the Republicans the nickname the Party of No.

At their first official leadership retreat in January 2009, the model that the House Republicans chose to emulate was the Taliban. The Texas congressman Pete Sessions, the new leader of the Republican House campaign committee, held up Afghanistan’s infamous Islamic extremists as providing an example of how they could wage “asymmetric warfare.” The country might be in an economic crisis, but governing, he told his colleagues, was not the reason they had been elected. As he flashed through a slide presentation at the Annapolis Inn, he asked his colleagues, “If the Purpose of the Majority is to Govern…What is Our Purpose?” His answer was simple: “The Purpose of the Minority is to become the Majority.” That one goal, he said, was “the entire Conference’s mission.”

Steve LaTourette, a longtime Republican moderate congressman from Ohio who was a close friend of Boehner’s, explained, “In the past, it was rare that someone would run against an incumbent in their own party. But the money that these outside groups have is what gives these people liquid courage to run against an incumbent.” He described the outside donors as “a bunch of rich people who you can count on maybe two hands who have an inordinate impact. One or two might have been the guy in high school with the pocket protector picking his nose, but now he’s inherited $40 million and has his chance to be a player. Once they were able to infuse massive amounts of money, they got a disproportionate amount of influence. It’s not one man one vote anymore,” he said with a sigh. “It’s all about the money. It’s not a function of anything else.”

The Republican leadership, according to an anecdote related by Grunwald, told GOP members of the House that as one of them, Jerry Lewis, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, put it, “We can’t play.” David Obey, the Democratic chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was incensed at the lack of cooperation. “What they said right from the get-go,” he said, was that “it doesn’t matter what the hell you do, we ain’t going to help you. We’re going to stand on the sidelines and bitch.” The Republicans of course saw it differently. They accused Obama of being too partisan and took umbrage when he flaunted his election mandate and reminded Cantor during one tense session, “I won.” In Lewis’s view, the Democrats were arrogant, intolerant, and overbearing. Obama nonetheless continued to seek bipartisan support. His experience with what Hillary Clinton labeled the “vast right-wing conspiracy” was limited. He had vaulted in only five years from the Illinois State Senate to the White House. He turned out to be unrealistically confident that he could transcend partisan rancor as he had while editing the Harvard Law Review.

Bill Burton, the deputy press secretary for Obama in the White House, looks back at the level of obstruction in the administration’s first month as a complete shock. “They turned on Obama so early,” he later recalled ruefully. “Not only did we not have the answers yet, we barely knew where to sit down. The chairs in the White House were still spinning from the people who had left them.” Looking back, Burton shook his head at the administration’s naïveté. “No one at the time saw it coming.” Specifically, he said, “We didn’t really see the force, the outside money, until after he was elected. Then the first thing he had to do, the only thing he could do, was spend trillions and trillions of dollars, passing the stimulus bill first, and that led to Stimulus Two, and TARP, and the auto bailouts. The right-wing plutocrats really fed off of that. They tapped into this anger about spending.” He admits, “No one saw the Kochs or the Dick Armeys out there.”

Within two months of Obama taking office, he recalled, the political environment had been transformed. “In January, we were working with the Republicans on an economic recovery package grounded firmly in centrist thinking,” he recalls. “The mainstream economic view was that the size of the calamity required massive economic spending. We asked the Republicans for their ideas. We were getting cooperation. Letters from all sorts of members of Congress were coming in with their heartfelt ideas. One high-ranking member of the House Republicans even suggested high-speed rail! But by early February, it started to shift. They were no longer sending letters. They were all expressing doubt about any kind of spending at all.” Senator DeMint, who was headlining the Kochs’ No Stimulus campaign, began a floor speech by proclaiming, “I like President Obama very much.” He then went on to call the stimulus bill “a trilliondollar socialist experiment” that was “the worst piece of economic legislation Congress has considered in a hundred years.” As Burton put it, “DeMint was saying ‘One-Term President’ within six weeks of Obama taking office.”

Among this group’s earlier political efforts was a stealth attempt in the early 1990s to get voters to approve ballot measures imposing congressional term limits. Experts suggested that term limits would hurt Democrats, who had more congressional incumbents at the time, and also strengthen the power of outsiders with money, like themselves. As was true of the later Tea Party movement, the supporters of term limits described their movement as a grassroots outpouring fueled by populist outrage at entrenched power. In California, the Kochs were rumored to be behind a 1992 referendum on whether to impose them, but a spokesman denied they had any direct role. But after the referendum succeeded, the Los Angeles Times discovered that the true organizers and much of its funding traced back to a secretive group run by Howie Rich and Eric O’Keefe, U.S. Term Limits. There were ties to the Kochs, too. Fink admitted when confronted by the paper that they had in fact provided “seed money.” Similarly, in Washington State a congressional term-limits ballot initiative nearly passed in 1991 until The New York Times exposed what Murray Rothbard, the irreverent libertarian theorist who had split with the Kochs, called “the Kochian deep pockets behind the ‘grassroots’ movement.” The paper discovered that what supporters billed as “a prairie fire of populism” was in fact the product of a Washington-based group calling itself Citizens for Congressional Reform, which was started with hundreds of ...

As the operatives linked forces online, they set a date for the first national Tea Party protests, February 27. That day, more than a dozen protests were held in cities across the country. The organizers claimed 30,000 participants, but the crowds in many places were still sparse. But on April 15, when there was a second series of “Tax Day” Tea Party rallies across the country, the numbers had increased tenfold, to 300,000. The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Americans for Prosperity provided speakers, talking points, press releases, transportation, and other logistical support. Lee Fang, a blogger for the progressive Web site ThinkProgress, was among the first to question whether the movement was organic or synthetic “Astroturf.” He noted that Americans for Prosperity was suddenly planning protests “coast to coast,” while FreedomWorks seemed to have taken over a local rally in Florida. Not everyone liked the top-down control of the protests. “Americans for Prosperity annoyed some of the Tea Partiers,” recalls the libertarian blogger Ralph Benko. “These people drove up, opened the door, put T-shirts on them, then took pictures and sent them to Charles [Koch] saying, ‘See? We’re doing great things with your money.’

No organization played a bigger early role than FreedomWorks, the estranged sibling of Americans for Prosperity, which was funded by donations from companies like Philip Morris and from billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife. “I’d argue that when the Tea Party took off, FreedomWorks had as much to do with making it an effective movement as anyone,” said Armey.

FreedomWorks, it was later revealed, also had some hired help. The tax-exempt organization quietly cemented a deal with Glenn Beck, the incendiary right-wing Fox News television host who at the time was a Tea Party superstar. For an annual payment that eventually topped $1 million, Beck read “embedded content” written by the FreedomWorks staff. They told him what to say on the air, and he blended the promotional material seamlessly into his monologue, making it sound as if it were his own opinion. The arrangement was described on FreedomWorks’ tax disclosures as “advertising services.” “We thought it would be a useful tool if it was done in moderation, but then they started doing it by leaps and bounds,” Armey recalled about the arrangement. “They were keeping it secret from their activists and supporters,” he alleged. “They were creating an illusion that they were so important this icon, this hero of the movement, was bragging about them. Instead of earning the media, they were paying for it.”

Beck, whose views were shaped by W. Cleon Skousen, the fringe theorist whose political paranoia had inspired the John Birch Society, reached a daily audience of some two million, disseminating the ideas of early conservative extremists like Fred Koch on a whole new scale. Frank Luntz describes the impact as historic. “That rant from Santelli woke up the upper middle class and the investor class, and then Glenn Beck woke up everyone else. Glenn Beck’s show is what created the Tea Party movement,” he said, adding, “It started on Tax Day 2009, and it exploded at town hall meetings in July.

Another factor was Obama’s aversion to confrontation and hot rhetoric, which resulted in largely milquetoast messaging about Wall Street. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who blamed the “money changers” for the Great Depression in his first inaugural address, Obama’s public utterances were muted. In a matter of weeks, critics argued that he had ceded the mantle of populism to his Tea Party opponents. “In an atmosphere primed for a populist b...

Fink, the Kochs’ political lieutenant, professed to be discomfited by the racism. But David Koch echoed the specious claims that Obama was somehow African in his outlook, even though he was born in America, abandoned by his Kenyan father as a toddler, raised mainly in Hawaii by his American mother, and had never set foot on the African continent until he was an adult. In a revealing later interview with the conservative pundit Matthew Continetti, David nonetheless disparaged Obama as “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation” and opined that the president’s radicalism derived from his African heritage. “His father was a hard core economic socialist in Kenya,” he said. “Obama didn’t really interact with his father face-to-face very much, but was apparently from what I read a great admirer of his father’s points of view. So he had sort of antibusiness, anti–free enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life. It just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.”

At the Kochs’ secretive January summit in Palm Springs, one of the group’s largest donors, Randy Kendrick, posed a question. Her shoulder-length cascades of frosted hair and flashy jewelry made her an unlikely-looking rabble-rouser, but Kendrick was an outspoken lawyer who had abandoned the women’s movement decades earlier for the Goldwater Institute, a far-right libertarian think tank in Phoenix, where she was on the board of directors. She and her husband, Ken, the co-owner and managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, had the kind of fortune that made people take note. Earl “Ken” Kendrick, who hailed from West Virginia, had made many millions on Datatel, a company he founded that provided computer software to colleges and universities. He subsequently bought into the Woodforest National Bank in Texas, a private bank that was in 2010 forced to refund $32 million and pay a $1 million civil fine to settle charges of usurious overdraft fees. Hard-core economic and social conservatives—except for the state subsidies that paid for the Diamondbacks stadium and brought public transit to the field—the Kendricks were horrified by the election of Obama. They were charter members of the Kochs’ donor network, having written at least one seven-figure check. Their generosity had been a two-way street. They had supported institutions that the Kochs favored, such as the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The Kochs h...

She argued that the choice of private health care had saved her from spending the rest of her life confined to a wheelchair after a leg injury. She had initially been told that because she suffered from a rare disorder, she couldn’t risk surgery. But a specialist at the renowned Cleveland Clinic had found a successful treatment. She survived the surgery and was now an active mother of teenage twins. “Randy was convinced that if America had government health care like Canada or Great Britain, she would be dead,” a friend who asked not to be identified confided. It was a powerful testimonial, and the donors at the Koch seminar were deeply moved. But the Obama administration had never proposed government health care like that in Canada or Great Britain. Reached later, after the implementation of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Donald Jacobsen, professor of molecular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, who cared for Kendrick, recalled her as a generous donor but dismissed as nonsense her argument that Obama’s health-care plan ever threatened treatment of the kind that she received. “I can assure you that ‘Obamacare’ did not diminish our research efforts in any way,” he said. “However, the sequestration efforts of the right-wing conservatives and their Tea Party colleagues have hampered progress in medical research. The National Institutes of Health is suffering greatly, and it is very difficult for all investigators to obtain funding. You can’t blame the ...

The Kochs of course opposed the expansion of any government social program, including any potential universal health-care plan. But the sources said they hadn’t focused much on the issue. They had assumed the health-care industry would fight its own battles, in its own interest, so they hadn’t thought they’d need to step in. Instead, the Obama administration had cut deals with much of the health-care industry, winning much of its support. “They were unprepared on the issue,” said one of the sources. Despite their later reputation for orchestrating opposition to Obamacare, it was actually Kendrick, not the Kochs, who first led the way. She and a handful of other multimillionaires had recently helped fund an unsuccessful effort to prevent Arizona from “coercing” citizens into buying government-run, or any other kind of, health-care coverage.

The first tangible sign of this underground funding stream was a television ad called “Survivor.” It featured a Canadian woman named Shona Holmes who said, “I survived a brain tumor,” but claimed that if she had been forced to wait for treatment from Canada’s government health service, “I’d be dead.” Instead, she said, she had received lifesaving treatment in Arizona. Fact-checkers later revealed that her dramatic story was highly dubious and that in fact the reason the Canadian health authorities hadn’t expedited her treatment was that she actually had a benign cyst on her pituitary gland. Nonetheless, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the charitable wing of the tax-exempt organization chaired by David Koch, spent $1 million airing the ad in the summer of 2009. The message was made by Larry McCarthy, a veteran Washington media consultant best known for creating the racially charged Willie Horton ad, which featured the crimes of a convicted African-American murderer on a weekend furlough from prison in Massachusetts. It helped sink the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis in 1988 by making him look soft on crime. McCarthy was infamous for using manipulative emotional messages, especially fear. As Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster, said of McCarthy, whom he had worked against, and occasionally with, over the years, “If you want an assassination, you hire one of the best marksmen in history.” That spring, flush with cash, Noble signed McCarthy up.

Luntz used polls, focus groups, and “instant response dial sessions” to perfect the language of health-care attacks and then tested the lines on average Americans in St. Louis, Missouri. Out of these sessions, Luntz compiled a seminal twenty-eight-page confidential memo in April warning that there was no groundswell of public opposition to Obama’s health-care plan at that point; in fact, there was a groundswell of public support. By far the most effective approach to turning the public against the program, Luntz advised, was to label it a “government takeover.” He wrote, “Takeovers are like coups. They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.” “I did create the phrase ‘government takeover’ of health care. And I believe it,” Luntz maintained, noting too that “it gave the Republicans the weapon they needed to defeat Obama in 2010.” But most experts found the pitch patently misleading because the Obama administration was proposing that Americans buy private health insurance from for-profit companies, not the government. In fact, progressives were incensed that rather than backing a “public option” for those who preferred a government insurance program, the Obama plan included a government mandate that individuals purchase health-care coverage, a conservative idea hatched by the Heritage Foundation to stave off nationalized health care. Luntz’s phrase was so false that it was chosen as “the Lie of the Year” by the nonpartisan fact-checking group PolitiFact. Yet while a re...

Goodyear, the firm’s managing partner and chief executive, had founded DCI Group in 1996 with two Republican campaign operatives while he was handling outside public relations for the huge tobacco company R. J. Reynolds. The work had shown the trio that ordinary campaign tools could succeed at marketing even the most toxic products. The key, according to an internal 1990 memo the tobacco industry was forced to disclose in a later legal settlement, was to disguise the company’s financial interest as a matter of great principle. Instead of pitching cigarette sales, it would create fake “smokers’ rights” groups who would agitate against smoking restrictions as a fundamental matter of liberty. Or, as the memo written by Tim Hyde—one of the three founding partners of DCI Group and at the time R. J. Reynolds’s director of national field operations—put it, the company needed to “create a movement” that would “build broad coalitions around the issue-cluster of freedom, choice, and privacy.” The company, Hyde wrote, “should proceed along two tracks.” One was the “intellectual track within the DC–New York corridor,” which could influence elite opinion with op-ed pieces, lawsuits, and expert think tank studies. The other was “a grassroots organizational and largely local track,” which would use front groups to simulate the appearance of popular political support.

That summer, traditional town hall meetings held by Democratic congressmen and senators returning to their districts and states exploded in acrimony. The anger appeared entirely spontaneous. But the investigative reporter Lee Fang discovered that a volunteer with FreedomWorks was circulating a memo instructing Tea Partiers on how to disrupt the meetings. Bob MacGuffie, who ran a Web site called RightPrinciples.com, advised opponents of Obama’s policies to “pack the hall…spread out” to make their numbers seem more significant, and to “rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation…to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early…to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda…stand up and shout and sit right back down.” While MacGuffie was quickly dismissed as a lone amateur, some of the outside agitation was professional, paid for by the Koch network. Noble later admitted, “We packed these town halls with people who were just screaming about this thing.”

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.

For most of the world’s population the costs of inaction on climate change were far greater than those of action. But for the fossil fuel industry, as Mann put it, “it’s like the switch from whale oil in the nineteenth century. They’re fighting to maintain the status quo, no matter how dumb.”

Kert Davies, the director of research at Greenpeace, the liberal environmental group, spent months trying to trace the funds flowing into a web of nonprofit organizations and talking heads, all denying the reality of global warming as if working from the same script. What he discovered was that from 2005 to 2008, a single source, the Kochs, poured almost $25 million into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reform. The sum was staggering. His research showed that Charles and David had outspent what was then the world’s largest public oil company, ExxonMobil, by a factor of three.

Robert Brulle, a Drexel University professor of sociology and environmental science, discovered that between 2003 and 2010 over half a billion dollars was spent on what he described as a massive “campaign to manipulate and mislead the public about the threat posed by climate change.” The study examined the tax records of more than a hundred nonprofit organizations engaged in challenging the prevailing science on global warming. What it found was, in essence, a corporate lobbying campaign disguised as a tax-exempt, philanthropic endeavor. Some 140 conservative foundations funded the campaign, Brulle found. During the seven-year period he studied, these foundations distributed $558 million in the form of 5,299 grants to ninety-one different nonprofit organizations. The money went to think tanks, advocacy groups, trade associations, other foundations, and academic and legal programs. Cumulatively, this private network waged a permanent campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in climate science and to defeat any effort to regulate carbon emissions.

Brulle found that as the money was dispersed, three-quarters of the funds from these and other sources financing what he called the “climate change counter-movement” were untraceable.

Rather than funding the campaign directly, a growing number of private conservative foundations and donors had begun directing their contributions through an organization called DonorsTrust that in essence became a screen for the right wing, behind which fingerprints disappeared from the cash. Housed in a humdrum brick building in Alexandria, Virginia, DonorsTrust and its affiliate, Donors Capital Fund, were memorably described by Mother Jones’s Andy Kroll as “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”

Between 1999 and 2015, DonorsTrust redistributed some $750 million from the pooled contributions to myriad conservative causes under its own name. Ordinarily, under the law, in exchange for their tax breaks, private foundations such as the Charles G. Koch Foundation were required to publicly disclose the charitable groups to whom they made their grants. It was one way to assure that these public service organizations were in fact serving the public. But donor-advised funds defeated this minimum transparency. Ball argued that the mechanism wasn’t suspicious, or even unusual, and that liberals too had their own donor-advised fund, the Tides Foundation. DonorsTrust, the conservative answer to the Tides Foundation, however, soon had four times the funds and a far more strategic board. Its directors consisted of top officials of several of the most important institutions in the conservative movement, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Institute for Justice, the libertarian legal center whose start-up funds had been supplied by Charles Koch.

What Brulle noticed as he studied the money behind climate change denial was that as criticism of those blocking reform increased around 2007, tens of millions of dollars of contributions from fossil fuel interests like Koch and ExxonMobil seemed to have disappeared from the public fight. Meanwhile, a growing and commensurate amount of anonymous money from DonorsTrust started funding the climate change countermovement. In 2003, for instance, Brulle found that DonorsTrust money was the source of only 3 percent of the 140 groups whose financial records he studied. By 2010, it had grown to 24 percent. The circumstantial evidence suggested that the fossil fuel interests bankrolling climate change denial were deliberately hiding their hands, but Brulle couldn’t prove it. “We just have this great big unknown out there about where all the money is coming from,” he said.

What much of the stealth funding bought was the dissemination of scientific doubt. The fossil fuel industry thus followed the same deceptive playbook that had been developed by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of the tobacco companies in the 1960s, in order to fabricate uncertainty about the science linking smoking to cancer. As the firm’s memo had notoriously put it, “Doubt is our product.” To add credibility to their side, the tobacco companies funded a network of official-sounding institutes and smokers’ rights groups. This strategy soon characterized the global warming denial movement, too.

Inhofe’s spokesman, Marc Morano, had a reputation as a professional “pit bull,” as Mann later put it, derived from his earlier role promoting the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that had smeared John Kerry’s military record during his 2004 presidential campaign. At the time, Morano was working for a conservative news outlet that was funded in part by the Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations. By 2006, Morano had moved on to “swiftboating” scientists. “You’ve got to name names and you’ve got to go after individuals,” he explained in an interview with the documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner. He seemed to relish making political disagreements personal, taunting and inflaming opponents with a grin in televised showdowns. Morano denounced James Hansen as a “wannabe Unabomber” and Mann as a “charlatan.” He said of the scapegoating, “We had a lot of fun with it.” Morano charged that Mann was part of what he called “the ‘climate con,’ ” which he described as “a lavishly funded climate machine that is lobbying for laws and uses every bit of data or new study to proclaim ‘it’s worse than we thought’ or ‘we must act now.’ ” Morano’s background was in political science, which he studied at George Mason University, not climate science. “I’m not a scientist but I play one on TV,” he joked. Nonetheless, he asserted authoritatively that “man-made global warming fears are a grand political narrative, not science.”

The George W. Bush years, meanwhile, proved a bonanza for the fossil fuel industry, which had thrown its weight behind his election. The coal industry in particular had played a major role in delivering West Virginia’s five electoral votes to Bush in 2000, sealing a victory that would have gone to Al Gore had he carried the formerly Democratic state instead. “State political veterans and top White House staffers concur that it was basically a coal-fired victory,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. The industry was lavishly rewarded. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of the oil-field equipment and services company Halliburton, personally took charge of energy policy. Bush had vowed during the campaign to act on climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but once in office Cheney countermanded him. In what Cheney’s biographer Barton Gellman describes as a “case study in managing an errant boss,” Cheney shifted the administration’s position to arguing that the science on global warming was “inconclusive,” requiring “more scientific inquiry.”

Climate contrarians also recruited conservative evangelical Christian leaders, who distrusted government in general and had impressive political and communications clout. One by-product of this pact was an organization in the Washington suburbs called the Cornwall Alliance, which released a hit film in evangelical circles called Resisting the Green Dragon that equated environmentalism with worship of a false god. It described global warming as “one of the greatest deceptions of our day.” Climate change became such a hot-button issue for Christian fundamentalists that Richard Cizik, a vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who was considered among the most powerful leaders in the movement, was forced to resign in late 2008 after publicly endorsing climate change science.

The Kochs themselves said little about their views on climate change at the time. But in one interview, David Koch suggested that if real, it would prove a boon. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he argued. Charles’s thinking was reflected in the company’s in-house newsletter, which featured an article titled “Blowing Smoke.” “Why are such unproven or false claims promoted?” it asked. Rather than fighting global warming, the newsletter suggested, mankind would be better off adapting to it. “Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s figure out how to get along with her changes,” it advised. A similar line was subtly argued in the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, which opened in March 2010. The message of the exhibition, funded by his fortune, was that the human race had evolved for the better in response to previous environmental challenges and would adapt in the face of climate change, too. An interactive game suggested that if the climate on earth became intolerable, people might build “underground cities” and develop “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

Within days, Inhofe and other Republicans in Congress who were recipients of Koch campaign donations demanded an investigation into Mann. They sent threatening letters to Penn State, where he was by then a tenured professor. Later, Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a graduate of the George Mason School of Law, would also subpoena Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia, demanding all records relating to his decade-old academic research, regardless of libertarians’ professed concerns about government intrusion. Eventually, Virginia’s Supreme Court dismissed its own attorney general’s case “with prejudice,” finding he had misread the law.

It was particularly disturbing to Mann that there appeared to be overlap between hard-core climate change deniers and Second Amendment enthusiasts, whipped up, he came to believe, by “cynical special interests.” Mann says, “The disaffected, the people who have trouble putting dinner on the table, were being misled into believing that action on climate change meant that ‘They’ want to take away your freedom and probably your guns, too. There was a very skillful campaign to indoctrinate them,” he said. “We’ve seen Second Amendment enthusiasts take action against abortion doctors. There’s an attempt to paint us as villains in the same way.”

“Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has, because that’s all you really want,” Morano later acknowledged. “There’s no legislation we’re championing. We’re the negative force. We are just trying to stop stuff.”

The DeVoses were devout members of the Dutch Reformed Church, a renegade branch of Calvinism brought to America by Dutch immigrants, many of whom settled around Lake Michigan. By the 1970s, the church had become a vibrant and, some would say, vitriolic center of the Christian Right. Members crusaded against abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and modern science that conflicted with their teachings. Extreme free-market economic theories rejecting government intervention and venerating hard work and success in the Calvinist tradition were also embraced by many followers. Within this community of extreme views, no family was more extreme or more active than the DeVoses. They were less well-known outside Michigan than some of the other founding families of the conservative movement, but few played a bigger role as its bankrollers. Among the many causes they supported was the Koch donor network. Although their views on social issues were considerably more reactionary than those of the Kochs, they ardently shared the brothers’ antipathy toward regulations and taxes.

Amway in fact was structured to avoid federal taxes. DeVos and Van Andel achieved this by defining the door-to-door salesmen who sold their beauty, cleaning, and dietary products as “independent business owners” rather than employees. This enabled the company’s owners to skip Social Security contributions and other employee benefits, greatly enhancing their bottom line. It resulted, however, in numerous legal skirmishes with the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In a charge that was later dropped, the government alleged that the company was little more than a pyramid scheme built upon misleading promises of riches to prospective distributors, many of whom bought its products in bulk, found themselves unable to sell them, and so were forced to cover their debts by recruiting additional distributors.

The flood of money from Amway’s founders failed, though, to quash an investigation by the Canadian government into a tax-fraud scheme in which both DeVos and Van Andel were criminally charged in 1982. The scandal exploded when Kitty McKinsey and Paul Magnusson, then reporters for the Detroit Free Press, shocked readers accustomed to DeVos and Van Andel’s professions of patriotism and religiosity with an exposé tracing an elaborate, thirteen-year-long tax scam directly to the bosses’ offices. At its highest levels, they revealed, Amway had secretly authorized a scheme creating dummy invoices to deceive Canadian customs officials into accepting falsely low valuations on products the company imported into Canada. Amway had thus fraudulently lowered its tax bills by $26.4 million from 1965 until 1978. Amway denounced the news reports and threatened to file a $500 million libel suit against the Free Press. But the next year, the company released a terse statement announcing that it had pleaded guilty to defrauding the Canadian government and would pay a $20 million fine. In exchange, the plea agreement called for criminal charges to be dropped against four of the company’s top executives, including DeVos and Van Andel. In 1989, Amway paid an additional $38 million to settle a related civil suit.

The DeVoses were also deeply involved in the secretive Council for National Policy, described by The New York Times as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country,” which it said “met behind closed doors in undisclosed locations for a confidential conference” three times a year. Membership lists were secret, but among the names tied to the organization were Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association (NRA). There was overlap with a number of other participants in the Koch seminars, too, including Foster Friess, the multimillionaire founder of a Wyoming mutual fund, Friess Associates, who had collaborated politically with the Kochs at least since the 1996 election, when they both channeled money into Triad Management to surreptitiously fund attack ads. Charles Koch accepted an award from the Council for National Policy but was not a member of the group. It was, in Richard DeVos’s phrase, a place that brought together “the doers with the donors.”

Conservatives cast their opposition to campaign-finance restrictions as a principled defense of free speech, but McConnell, who was one of the cause’s biggest champions, had occasionally revealed a more partisan motive. As a Republican running for office in Kentucky in the 1970s, when it was almost solidly Democratic, he once admitted “a spending edge is the only thing that gives a Republican a chance to compete.” He had once opened a college class by writing on the blackboard the three ingredients that he felt were necessary to build a political party: “Money, money, money.” In a Senate debate on proposed campaign-finance restrictions, McConnell reportedly told colleagues, “If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next twenty years.”

The James Madison Center aimed to make this dream a reality by taking the fight to the courts. In addition to the DeVos family, early donors included several of the most powerful groups on the right, such as the Christian Coalition and the NRA. But the driving force behind the organization was a single-minded lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, James Bopp Jr., who was general counsel to the antiabortion National Right to Life Committee. Bopp also became the Madison Center’s general counsel. In fact, Bopp’s law firm and the James Madison Center had the same office address and phone number, and although Bopp listed himself as an outside contractor to the center, virtually every dollar from donors went to his firm. By designating itself a nonprofit charitable group, though, the Madison Center enabled the DeVos Family Foundation and other supporters to take tax deductions for subsidizing long-shot lawsuits that might never have been attempted otherwise. “The relationship between this organization and Bopp’s law firm is such that there really is no charity,” observed Marcus Owens, a Washington lawyer who formerly oversaw tax-exempt groups for the Internal Revenue Service. “I’ve never heard of this sort of captive charity/foundation funding of a particular law firm before.”

In 1997, the same year that she helped found the Madison Center, Betsy DeVos explained her opposition to campaign-finance restrictions. At the time, there was a national outcry against the way both the Democratic and the Republican Parties had evaded contribution limits in the 1996 presidential campaign by paying for what they claimed were “issue” ads rather than campaign ads, with unlimited funds that came to be known as soft money. There was a bipartisan Senate push for reform. But in a guest column in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, DeVos defended the unlimited contributions. “Soft money,” she wrote, was just “hard-earned American dollars that Big Brother has yet to find a way to control. That is all it is, nothing more.” She added, “I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party.” She said, “I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and ...

If the DeVoses expected a “return on our investment” in the Madison Center, as Betsy had put it, they got one in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. It “was really Jim [Bopp]’s brainchild,” Richard L. Hasen, an expert on election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles told The New York Times. “He has manufactured these cases to present certain questions to the Supreme Court in a certain order and achieve a certain result,” said Hasen. “He is a litigation machine.” Bopp agreed. “We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he told the Times. “And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”