There's a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Afoot, Fueled by Dark Money

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35472-there-s-a-vast-right-wing-conspiracy-afoot-fueled-by-dark-money
"it's coming from right-wing libertarians and ultra-conservative nationalists who have billions of dollars to spend and are willing to do whatever it takes to win. Their agenda includes a desire to reduce government's function to a single item: Protection and promotion of business interests by eliminating things they consider roadblocks, such as taxes, unions, minimum wage laws, overtime protections and environmental regulations that limit toxic dumping and air and water pollution. To say that they're harkening back to the Gilded Age is an oversimplification, but it's close to the ideal put forward by a small cohort of unimaginably rich white men, and a handful of unimaginably rich white women, who are plotting to turn the US into a land of serfs and lords, with themselves in complete control of everything. Jane Mayer's exhaustively researched look at this network makes for an essential though terrifying read. She begins with a profile of the ringleaders, brothers Charles and David Koch, and offers a savvy history of sibling rivalry and competition for parental approval that pitted brother against brother and left two of the family's four children, Bill and Frederick, on the sidelines. After David and Charles joined forces to run the family's oil and gas companies, the pair -- whose combined worth is estimated by Mayer to be $41 billion -- developed into public figures, becoming Society Page regulars and conservative movement stalwarts. Their roots, however, rest with the racist John Birch Society, where, as 20-somethings, they were exposed to the anti-government economic theories of extreme laissez-faire capitalism. Classes at the Freedom School, founded by Robert LeFevre -- a man who had previously been indicted for mail fraud and who became an FBI informer at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts -- in the late 1950s cemented their ideology and fomented their longstanding hatred for Social Security and other New Deal programs."