The development of the German fuel industry “was hugely, hugely important” to Hitler’s military ambitions,

As Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, put it, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington

Phil Dubose, the former Koch Industries manager who spent twenty-six years working for the Kochs before testifying against them in court, had no doubt that they now had their sights on all three branches of government. “What they want is to get their own way,” he said. “They call themselves libertarians. For lack of a better word, what it means is

divisions devoted to various constituency groups, such as Hispanics, veterans, and young voters.

they had magnified their reach further by joining forces with a small and intensely ideological group of like-minded political allies, many of whose personal fortunes were also unfathomably large.

Brookings Institution, founded in 1916 by the St. Louis businessman Robert Brookings, who defined its mission as “free from any political or pecuniary interest.” To assure an ethic of “disinterestedness,” Brookings, who was himself a Republican, mandated that scholars of many viewpoints populate its board.

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,

Scaife was heir not just to one of the country’s greatest industrial fortunes but also to a distinctly reactionary political outlook rooted in the age of the robber barons.

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