““To this end, the Kochs waged a long and remarkable battle of ideas. They subsidized networks of seemingly unconnected think tanks and academic programs and spawned advocacy groups to make their arguments in the national political debate. They hired lobbyists to push their interests in Congress and operatives to create synthetic grassroots groups to give their movement political momentum on the ground. In addition, they financed legal groups and judicial junkets to press their cases in the courts. Eventually, they added to this a private political machine that rivaled, and threatened to subsume, the Republican Party. Much of this activism was cloaked in secrecy and presented as philanthropy, leaving almost no money trail that the public could trace. But cumulatively it formed, as one of their operatives boasted in 2015, a “fully integrated network.””
![“Americans for Prosperity annoyed some of the Tea Partiers,” recalls the libertarian blogger Ralph Benko. “These people drove up, opened the door, put T-shirts on them, then took pictures and sent them to Charles [Koch] saying, ‘See? We’re doing great things with your money.” quote by Jane Mayer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/08d/jane-mayer-1031_tea_americans-for-prosperity-annoyed-some-of_21572.jpg)
![“One of the oddities of this election is the man that [Donald] Trump chose as his vice-president, Mike Pence, is one of the Kochs' favourite politicians.” quote by Jane Mayer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/dff/jane-mayer-1031_election_one-of-the-oddities-of-this-election-is_93991.jpg)
![“[The Kochs] they hate big government.” quote by Jane Mayer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/758/jane-mayer-1031_big-government_the-kochs-they-hate-big-government-21587_215871.jpg)
