Electoral security

“They see themselves as heroes. Instead people are saying they’re manipulating American politics”: Jane Mayer on the method behind the Koch brothers’ brilliant madness

Jane Mayer is the best reporter we have, period. In one truly essential book after another, she gets behind the scenes and to the real truth of the most important stories — and the hardest stories to cover — in American politics today.

Her latest book is “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” and damn if Mayer doesn’t unpack — clearly, tenaciously, intently — every tentacle of the Koch brothers’ megamillion-dollar operation to reshape politics and policy, no matter how brilliantly the Kochs tried to bury and disguise its roots. (Or, as she shares in this book, no matter how much digging private investigators believed to have Koch ties did into her personal and professional life.)