A new review from The Guardian calls Jane Mayer’s new book out this week on the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors on the far right an “indispensable new history ‘of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right’ in America.”

In his review,Charles Kaiser outlines the Kochs’ multi-part plan decades in the making to advance their self-enriching, far-right political agenda:

First, the Kochs and other special interest donors on the right funded think tanks on the right, which are “[s]old to the public as quasi-scholarly organizations, their real function was to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for of the people who created them.” 

“Next, the right turned its sights on American campuses….The amount of spent money has been staggering. Between 2005 and 2008, the Kochs alone spent nearly $25m on organizations fighting climate reform. One study by a Drexel University professor found 140 conservative foundations had spent $558m over seven years for the same purpose.”

“The next step for the radical right was to support the creation of the Tea Party movement, through organizations like Americans for Prosperity, which was funded by the Kochs. ‘The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity provided speakers, talking points, press releases, transportation, and other logistical support,’ Mayer writes. As the writer Thomas Frank has pointed out, the genius of this strategy was to ‘turn corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets‘.”

“The last element of this multi-pronged campaign saw the direct investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in political campaigns at every level, from president to city councilman….In the 2016 elections, the goal of the Koch network of contributors is to spend $889m, more than twice what they spent in 2012.”