Dark Money by Jane Mayer is a detailed exposé of the radical right and how a small group of uber-rich businessmen used their fortunes to influence the current political climate in America. She explores how major families play a role in the ultra-conservative groups and how these families gained their wealth. She highlights the class disparities and how major businessmen use their money to manipulate lower-class families into voting for far-right policies. She also argues that these plutocrats used their fortunes to assert their political beliefs and drown the other side out. She explores the wider consequences of this disparity, and although the families she discusses are known conservatives, she dives deeper into how their wealth shaped them into politically self-serving donors and the effect this has on American politics.
Mayer focuses primarily on the Koch brothers and the Scaife family. She touches on many other families and their dynamics but since the Koch brothers were the ones leading the charge, her story focuses primarily on them. Although both the Kochs and the Scaifes refused to speak with Mayer as she was writing, Dark Money still provides intimate insight into the inner workings of these families. The story is told in a seemingly unbiased tone and uses many quotes from those who knew the families. Longtime conservative campaign operatives, business associates, political opponents, and political finance scholars all agreed to talk to Mayer, some on the record and some off. Although she didn’t gain any direct insight from the families, she talked to many who knew them, and overall, Dark Money came together as a very well-researched work. The Koch brothers have been written about many times, most of those writings exploring their financial involvement. While Mayer also discusses their financial involvement in shaping the conservative movement, she takes it a step further and explores why their beliefs were so far right-wing. Both the Koch brothers and the Scaife families come from a long line of money. They grew up hearing their parents’ conservative beliefs, and as they grew older, they wanted to make their uninvolved parents proud by continuing their financial legacy. Their main goal was to keep as much of their money from the government as possible. Mayer goes into the different ways they would evade taxes. The most common way they would do this was by giving to “nonprofits”. While these organizations masked themselves as charitable, they were run by those who had more sinister intentions, pushing political propaganda and preventing taxation.
One of the more well-known nonprofits funded by these ultraconservatives was the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation became a right-wing think tank designed to push free market economic principles and to keep the money of these billionaires where they can see it. Rather than giving tax money to the government, they funneled it into their own organizations where they could allocate funds and indoctrinate others into their secret political establishment. The Heritage Foundation is still remarkably influential today, and the Koch and Scaife families continue to fund it. In Mayer’s view, the Kochs and their allies have created a private political bank that allows them to fund candidates that embody their conservative beliefs with very little disclosure as to where this money is coming from.
Mayer writes this exposé with a moderately neutral tone (although we can clearly see her political stance), which allows her to deliver this information in a way that reads more factual than opinionated. Although the tone is neutral, her ideas are strongly anti-conservative. She believes that this funding is not merely to support political candidates but to shape the American Political System into something that serves the self-interest of those who have absurd amounts of money. This idea is not necessarily new, as there are precedent cases of money influencing elections; however, Dark Money brings a new light to the situation as it asserts the severity of the control held by these families. She makes a compelling argument that emphasizes the corruption this funding stems from. She warns against overlooking these institutions, and this warning comes at an essential time. The families she primarily discussed are the ones influencing our political policies now. Many aspects of Project 2025 have already been implemented just a short way into the Trump presidency, and the Heritage Foundation, which conservative plutocrats fund, wrote these policies.
Mayer’s investigation into the dark side of political money highlights the corruption in our current government and how in today’s political state, money does in fact mean power. Although Mayer’s novel can be slightly hard to follow due to the complexity of the inner workings of both the political foundations and the families that fund them, it is increasingly important for Americans to understand who is truly controlling their government. Overall, Dark Money is a very well-researched and necessary political exposé in which she uncovers the secretive funding from ultra-conservatives and how it can be asserted that America is becoming a plutocracy rather than a democracy.
