Resident Lon Chesnutt will review Dark Money by Jane Mayer on Tuesday, January 21, 2020 at 7 PM in the Auditorium.

If you’ve ever wondered about who started the ‘Tea Party’ in Congress, or who’s behind it’s operation, or why the title ‘Citizen’s United’ is the designation for such a small conservative group that has global power, then this is the book review you should attend. Lon Chesnutt, who has been offering a review every year since 2007, is giving it on January 21. The author of DARK MONEY, Jane Mayer, is a well-respected journalist on staff of the ‘New Yorker’ magazine. She’s also author of three other books including THE DARK SIDE, which treated the war on terror and how it affected American ideals, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Not very well known is the fact that brothers Charles and David (recently died in August, 2019) Koch were listed as the sixth and seventh wealthiest men in the world in 2009. With each owning between fourteen to sixteen billion dollars, they have been pumping millions of dollars into conservative causes since the 1970’s. For them, free enterprise is what has made America great, and any government law or regulation that regulates business should be fought or opposed as binding on one’s personal freedom.

That’s the theme of DARK MONEY, as Mayer traces the rise of Koch Industries, Inc., a family business out of Wichita, Kansas. She shows how their private foundations, the Charles G. Koch Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, has channeled over 88 Million Dollars as educational gifts through their non-taxable system into political campaigns and business fights for conservative causes. Mayer follows the Kochs and other conservative billionaires as they come together to make their philosophy the normative thought for current Americans.

The book is filled with many explicit examples of malfeasance and will cause you to think twice about which politician to support. More importantly, it should give one incentive to learn more about political systems in order to then build a stronger democracy.

Janet Neer and Jane Backstrom, Book Review Co-Chairs
~The Sunburst, January 2020~