Jane Mayer

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

— Jane Mayer

[The Kochs] they hate big government.

— Jane Mayer

“Direct rule by the superrich invites a dangerous amount of scrutiny.”

— Jane Mayer

Money has much more power down the ballot.

— Jane Mayer

If you have an informed electorate, it makes great choices.

— Jane Mayer

“Libertarianism elevated tax avoidance into a principled crusade.”

— Jane Mayer

The smaller the office, the more power individuals with big money have.

— Jane Mayer

“Charles’s aim, he said, was to tear the government out “at the root.”

— Jane Mayer

“The Boston Tea Party was a protest against an unelected leader who raised taxes, while Obama was an elected leader who had…

— Jane Mayer

There are some areas where the Kochs are on the same page with [Donald] Trump. He doesn't believe in global warming. He…

— Jane Mayer

It's hard to look at [Donald] Trump as a hopeful sign because, in his own way, he is offering false solutions to…

— Jane Mayer

There's a difference between those two [George Soroses and the Tom Steyers] and the Kochs that I think is important.

— Jane Mayer

“In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency’s database revealed Koch Industries to be the number one producer of toxic waste in the country.”

— Jane Mayer

There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.

— Jane Mayer

“But, he warned, “I’m not sure that the next candidate after me is going to be able to compete in that same…

— Jane Mayer

“the group couldn’t find a single family farm put out of business by the estate tax.”

— Jane Mayer

“Then, in a stunning turnaround in 2008, Scaife met with Hillary Clinton, who had fingered him as the ringleader of what she…

— Jane Mayer

The Kochtopus is the nickname that people who've worked for the Kochs came up with because there's so many tentacles and it…

— Jane Mayer

“For the big donors, Ryan was a superstar, a square-jawed, blue-eyed, earnest young Ayn Rand disciple described as “wonky” so often it…

— Jane Mayer

“Bopp agreed. “We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he told the Times. “And if we do it right,…

— Jane Mayer

The book that I wrote is called Dark Money, and it's about secret spending that is very hard to follow. [George] Soros's…

— Jane Mayer

“only one law school, at the University of California in Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students…

— Jane Mayer

“George Mason’s economics department, meanwhile, became a hotbed of controversial theories that began to transform Americans’ tax bills, serving as an incubator…

— Jane Mayer

“In order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organization is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised,” Charles wrote, arguing for…

— Jane Mayer

“The picture was far brighter in the key presidential battleground state of Wisconsin. There, the first-term governor, Scott Walker, had vaulted to…

— Jane Mayer

“Powell and others in the newly aggressive corporate vanguard inverted from a negative into a positive the accusation that conservative organizations were…

— Jane Mayer

“For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for…

— Jane Mayer

“David became a lavish supporter of the arts in New York and appeared regularly in the society pages. Charles, meanwhile, kept a…

— Jane Mayer

“once the Republicans won control of North Carolina’s general assembly. In a matter of months, they enacted conservative policies that private think…

— Jane Mayer

“As a college dropout with no exceptional charisma or charm, Walker might not ordinarily have been marked for high office, but Americans…

— Jane Mayer

This year [2016] we're seeing a really strange upending [of the party]. The money was coming from these super-wealthy donors who were…

— Jane Mayer

“Noble again chose Larry McCarthy, the veteran media consultant who was known for his ability to distill a complicated subject into a…

— Jane Mayer

“The assumption soon proved wrong. Instead, as critics had warned, more and more of the money flooding into elections was spent by…

— Jane Mayer

“One former insider in the Kochs’ realm, who declined to be named because he feared retribution, described the early donor summits as…

— Jane Mayer

“Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, warned in his zeitgeist-shifting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that without…

— Jane Mayer

“the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, DeVos defended the unlimited contributions. “Soft money,” she wrote, was just “hard-earned American dollars that Big…

— Jane Mayer

“Soft money,” she wrote, was just “hard-earned American dollars that Big Brother has yet to find a way to control. That is…

— Jane Mayer

“To this end, the Kochs waged a long and remarkable battle of ideas. They subsidized networks of seemingly unconnected think tanks and…

— Jane Mayer

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” As he described them, they were…

— Jane Mayer

“But one key part of Powell’s agenda remained unfinished. Conservative foundations might have financed a parallel intellectual establishment of their own, but…

— Jane Mayer