Only way we will win. In to do things like that and the matter has gone too far now we have no choice but to act in a reduced need to call on the courage to resilience. I was Young Americans everywhere to know to call on the spirit of the 16th president of ameritech, Abraham Lincoln a common man who rose to be an common leader. And with extraordinary desire that went through so much loss that ended that the emerging at enormously critical time that is what i want American Children to be taught it doesnt matter how much you disappoint or fight the great thing about america is to get the opportunity other countries dont give you that opportunity but this gives you the greatest chance to succeed and that is something that we need to break to people and the personal story of Abraham Lincoln has propelled me throughout my life a man whose first love died he lost six elections and had a terrible relationship with his father and had no indication whatsoever no College Education everything he learned was selftaught. Boris did kentucky race in illinois he was a wrestler and never back down when challenged. That is the spirit we need to call on. End i say to those that are watching on cspan to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve to make that clear with the extraordinary honker and desire in to get back up on that horse. That is interesting of action because what i am suggesting it requires leadership. Because historically prior to world war ii coming back in declaring peace forever only churchill stood up in parliament we send people over to read maya area in germany and later mussolini. Only when a catastrophe occurs to reappear to wake up is that required to respond . To the american us that he loved after exhausting every other option. And alexis de tocqueville said with the ability to recognize a trajectory and i remained wildly optimistic that america will crush Political Correctness. I am optimistic because there is a remarkable brings spirit. I am optimistic because even right now in the depths of despair and the traditions of america were optimistic because we have to be. It is also zero other american and not only of leaper ugly. To take a pearl harbor type of situation. The mime message she today thules believe in america because it is a providential nation. And asian and like any other to preserve them protected and defended it to retake from the elites that force us into conformity to retake america to crush Political Correctness and i encourage all of you to see me with advance copies of my book i will be more than happy to personalize if you love america and aPolitical Correctness this is the book free of. This past september with the Chairmans Council if you want to know please ask but we stood in gettysburg talk about standing and facing adversity of a common man not a professional military officer and then to come up that hill they are though last space they knew the orders are you cannot retreat or surrender. And run out of ammunition they were ready for one last final charge. Up until the entire civil war stated on a Little Round Top and there is no other recourse with the new embodiment and that is bayonets. They give for the year today with the former head of the Defense Intelligence agency and that would be great to understands god bless you all in place for being with us. All the weekends it is all others. Watching those nonfiction authors and to have a longer conversation. Booktv brains you off there after offer like the work of fascinating people. [inaudible conversations]. Founder of several nonprofit organizations including the investigative reporting workshop here at the school of indication in the fourth epicenter of republican integrity. Chucks most recent book 935 lies in the future truth and the decline of American Integrity and he was counting the number 35 is a fascinating exploration of the many ways to the sum is manipulated by Government Corporation or burned an Important National conversation. Check is the author of a while new book series the buying of the president the chilling look into the financing of president ial campaigns written with staff from the center for public integrity. Chuck is a fulltime professor in the school of indications and does investigative journalism. He recently returned from a fellowship at the university of oxford Writers Institute for the study of journalism. Tonight he is going to have a conversation with jane mayer someone who spent five years influencing the research of dark money and our system of passion that chuck shares. Chuck. [applause] sydney thank you very much just than welcome everyone and jane welcome very much to American University. By way of introduction and then we will Start Talking but to introduce jane, we would take 10 minutes just to go through her bio, which is an astonishing bio one of the preeminent journalist in the u. S. , the new yorker now 11 years. I shouldnt ask ray several years, a few years yeah and anyway literally the winner of so many words John Chancellor award george poca road turner prize for excellence in political reporting bad stone medal for journalistic independence and of course the j. Anthony lukas prize, rice and our prize and thats for her book dark money but numerous awards but i urge those of you who should absolutely buy this book dark money, read the bio too. Its a pretty interesting bio. Welcome and where do we start here . Since we have several aspiring or current students, many are students but they aspire to be jane mayer. Could you please explain to us where you come from and what that whole story is about . Seriously how did you end up causing all this trouble . Does this work . Part of what got me on that trajectory i have to say is chalk. Check it were some of the inspiration for this book. I kind of remember and iced tea together as we were talking that i was working on a story for the new yorker magazine and they caught my eye for friday reasons that we can talk about in a minute. But i just wanted to say chop lewis as i was talking to him over this iced tea gave me this quote that was kind of the money quote for the whole piece. Its sort of was the thing that made me think okay there may be more here when im doing a book. So professor lewis has exactly the right quote and it says the kochs run a whole different level. There is no one else else who is spent as much money. This year dimension of that it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation and opposite vacation today been washington since watergate and im very seen anything like it. They are the standard oil of all times. That quote, wow. When i read that quote i think why did they spend years in 450 pages adding to it. He kind of summed it up you know so i want to thank you. You have been an incredible colleague, amazingly generous and set the path on how to cover the kochs kochs and the work you have done the work you have been following my main manpower and america. And how i got into this, you know like most things it started innocently. I turned a corner in new york city at one point where i grew up and saw david kochs name and i thought david koch anaconda ring a bell. I remembered while i had read a story about them putting money into the tea party somewhere and i thought i wonder if new yorkers through sophisticated manhattanites who are the people who go to Lincoln Center have any idea who david koch really is. I thought it was worth taking a peek. Thats kind of, so was crossing that street i think going around the corner that got me going on this. One thing led to another and thats how five years went down the drain. [laughter] im not going to let you wiggle out of the question either. Thank you for the kind words. If they are the standard oil of our times and i still very much believe that, that would make you a guitar bell. One of my heroes. You doggedly investigated the subject unlike any other journalist and it was inevitable that we would discuss this. I didnt know at what point we would would bring it up but while we are at it not only did you devote all these years and obviously upset them and its reported i think you mention in your book that or your article in august 30, 2010 the new yorker, was actually nominated for a National Magazine award and they mounted a campaign against you. You have additional dealings with them that have been chronicled recently in the new york times. Im sorry to ask you but clearly , well they are perhaps equally interested in you but maybe you can describe that whole story. Its an amazing story. Its a badge of honor or any representative order what you hopefully will tell us. Well, thank you. It was an unexpected bright product of writing about the kochs which to me was an investigative piece. I covered policy for the new yorker magazine and inevitably covering money and the kochs you cannot cover money in politics without them. They are such a concentrated force financially in american politics. It basically was going about my job but when i finished the story and it came out they had have declined to participate and declined to give interviews. I guess we can say they were not happy with it. Its too bad but i felt it was a very good piece and captured the subterranean world they were playing in american politics. They have been very much in the shadows so wasnt surprising really that they have been secretive for many years. And so anyway they were unhappy with the piece and i discovered, ive yet to hear strange things. I began to hear that there was a private eye poking into my life and i at first thought was kind of funny because im married, had kids, a dog, a pretty subtle life and not that interesting. I thought the poor private eye, but anyway i laughed it off and then i was at Christmas Party and a colleague said to me who had been a reporter, you know a couple of legionnaires have hired a private eye to look into a reporter wrote a story that they didnt like about them and they are looking for dirt. They asked me if i might work on this too. She said it occurred to me that might be you. So i thought of code thats weird. Anyway very soon after i discovered there had been an Opposition Research project on me and a couple of the top people at koch industry organized it. They had hired a private eye who turned out to be the Police Commissioner in new york city howard safer the former Police Commissioner, not current, with his son and daughter who were in the fbi and they have left ripe firm in new york. I eventually pieced together the story is a reporter would and i found a source who told me they were looking for dirt, dirt, dirt and if they couldnt find it theyd make it up. So she made something up and they put together a story saying that i was a plagiarist and they tried to peddle it to a couple of news organizations neither of which would run it because it turned out not to be true. It would have been pretty terrible if it would have got into print in anyone believed it. Nobody ran with it but in the reporters who works work i was supposed to rep doffed stood up for me and said is untrue. It was eyeopening. Truthfully i can look back on this and almost say this kind of flattering that they took that seriously but you dont see it that often. I have covered a lot of different things. I have covered awards. Ive covered cia. Ive covered several white houses, politics at every level and nobody has ever done this before. It was eyeopening in terms of showing you the kind of unaccountable power that these private leaders can have an america where they throw around their weight to try to control the free press from covering them as honestly as they possibly can wish is what i was trying to do. I learned when i was doing more research that i was far from alone. The kochs have hired private eyes whenever people have challenged them. They have had a bit eyes look into fbi when the fbi was investigating Koch Industries and they have gone after federal prosecutors who were looking into them and they have hired hybridized to look into their own brothers because there are four Koch Brothers and they broke into two teams of two. The 22 teams have to have litigated against each other for lease 20 years because they were fighting over who is going to get the bigger share in the Family Company and the family fortune. It got so brutal that they hired private eyes on each site to look into each others garbage. So its a company that is remarkable. Its remarkably successful and remarkably hardball playing. The standard oil of our time. In my assessment humor the attempt to destroy you occurred the two outlets one in particular was so anxious to get something out of the hits on line of the word koch that the headline and think with smear job gone bad or gone wrong. There is one that said smear disappears. The truth is that was the New York Post and the New York Post kind of did a good job. They could have just said thats weird and gone away. They did not. Kid kelly who covers the media to New York Post thought that strange, heres this reporter didnt plagiarize that i was being told that she did. I wonder who is behind this and it was the number of intermediaries in between so you couldnt really tell who is behind it. He kept pushing at it and then he said recently it is a pretty short list of suspects. It eventually took a long time but it got back to Koch Industries in this private eye that they had hired. Back when you and i were talking a few years ago we did a project at the workshop called the koch club and we had 20 people working on that over two and half years. One of the things was about Climate Change legislation dying in the congress mainly the house of representatives. There were so many things that pummeled out of that, switching gears here clearly, sorry but its not just a bunch of dilettantes billionaires here. In addition to trying to smear journalists. Can you talk about the impact . The Obama Administration came into power in one of the things i wanted to do was enact Climate Change legislation. Oil and gas contributions and lobbying doubled in the twoyear cycle. That was the 2008 residential cycle that president obama came in on partly because they were worried about him. As you both know died in the house of representatives and there are all kinds of reasons for that. Is that a good base to jump off . People lose sight is not just the atmosphere but the unusual thing about to billionaire brothers. Its also the impact that they and their other billionaire friends are brought to bear. Tremendous impact and im glad you asked because its not just about elections. We are obviously in an Election Year and thats what everybodys focused on both kochs these two particular billionaires have joined with 400 or 500 other spectacularly wealthy conservatives many of whom have serious financial interests in the u. S. Government. They have pooled their resources to some extent and created a project which has great flick influence over american policy. One of the policies they have affected the most is anything having to do with Climate Change. Many of the big interests in the koch group including the kochs himself our fossil fuel. There are bottomline boom depends on fossil fuels. They have colon they have got gas and they have got pipelines. Anything that moves the United States away from fossil fuels is a threat to their Business Model they have played a really thorough game of trying to capture congress and make it follow in a direction that is good for their business which meant as you were talking about 2010, 2011 congress is considering a bill to capandtrade Carbon Emissions putting some kind of price on carbon pollution. The reason it didnt work in great measure was because the kochs another fossil fuel interests is clobbered anybody who is going to support it. They worked very hard to take out particularly conservative democrats and moderate republicans who might have strayed from the orthodox line that they set which is to say Climate Change isnt real or doesnt matter or we can afford to do anything about it. Right in the bill to put Climate Change to the house of representatives ended up dying Something Like 90 or 100, and forget the numbers of house members all republicans would sign this pledge and climate tax pledge. Its now 156. How does a private interest the couple of really in their subject policy . The kochs have an Organization Called americans for prosperity which is supposed to be a grassroots Citizens Group which they founded and helps fund and it spreads across the country. It has a pledge and candidates who want to get backing from their organizations have to sign a pledge saying they will do nothing about Climate Change unless it costs nothing. 156 members of the congress have now signed this pledge. Its a private agreement practically with sub live type industries which is pretty incredible when you think about it via. It is also the same year they did this with a pledge in blocking the legislation they also, they were all doing other things with universities. This is a fullcourt press on multiple levels and of course we have tracked to an 21 universities receiving 30 or 40 million from them in the span of a fiveyear period which i think has increased since we did this report. Its become the biggest of the kochs philanthropy. This book is a Hidden History and there is a history here. Its the back story and i fell as a reporter to cover stories for a magazine it wasnt really possible to tell the whole story without doing this book. Even though was hard to do and took more time it was to try to connect the dots that you cannot we see when you are reading the daily coverage of the magazine coverage. The story goes back 40 years at least and there has been a project that charles koch and david cote have funded for these four decades to change american politics. Charles and david were as far right and libertarian as you can get it in america as long ago as 1976. It Point Charles was in his 30s and he was saying that he wanted to found what he called a movement to smash and the word he used was destroyed the statist paradigm which means they government in america. He is someone who really regards government as a form of tyranny for the most part and taxation as thats. He wanted to change the whole set up in modern america, shrink the government get the government out of the way of this mrs. And get the regulations out of the business. That started in 1976 and he was thinking how do we do at . The first stage in the office thing you do when youre on to change politics in america see when profits. In 1980 charles toga brother david helped get david to run as Vice President of the United States on the libertarian ticket. They ran against Ronald Reagan and they ran against reagan from the right because they felt reagan was too much of a liberal that gives you an idea where they were on the political spectrum, really far out, so far up the conservatives at that point like blame but we were describing them as narcotote solitary and. They have interesting ideas but they are kind of unusual ideas. Theyre not in the mainstream of american politics and they certainly were not back then. So in that 1980 election they did abysmally. The libertarians took Something Like 1 of the vote. It costs david koch millions of dollars of his own fortune and he paid for 60 of whole campaign himself. So they realized we are not going to win it this way. What do you do then . The kochs are very smart. They are terrific businessmen. Their graduates of m. I. T. And their engineers. They went back to the drawing board to try to figure out a new model. In the years after that, pretty soon after that they began to think, draw up a blueprint for how you can do an Assembly Line to change american politics even if you could win the popular vote. They followed the footsteps of a couple of other major multimillionaires and billionaires on the right who were also funding this project and they figured out that from their standpoint politicians are just actors who are spouting lines and the key to changing america is to write the scripts. How do you get to write the script . Well, you have to change the whole way that elite opinion is formed in the country. There happened to have been right around the same time a little bit earlier of paper that was the blueprint for all of this preview was written by lewis powell who became Supreme Court justice and before he joined the court he wrote a piece a paper that said conservatives in particular the corporate conservatives are imperiled in america because liberals at the time he wrote the paper were ascending and he said you have got to fight back in to do that youre going to have to capture lead Public Opinion like what the kochs were trying to do and to get that you were going to have two change a couple of things, the real enemy he said is not the kids in the street who are hippies, who are protesting periods not the antiwar protesters. Its not even the Environmental Movement in some ways. He said what youve got to change are the people who write the editorials for newspapers, the professors at universities, the scientists who are putting out studies, the preachers in the pulpit and anything else that the judges on the court and you can see today why judges on the courts matter. This was kind of their game plan and after the 1980 election went badly for the kochs they followed this game plan pretty closely and began to take their fortunes and all the four sons in the koch family had inherited several Million Dollars from their father who made it in a new process for how to refine oil. They took those fortunes particularly charles who is the ideological leader in the family and began to think how you were going to change those Public Opinions. They funded the system to do it. University programs, think tanks and quite a few other things. We counted 89 nonprofit groups. They happened to the names for the esight the center for blue skies which is the row when i dont think that we identified all of them as you recall and it was 30 or 40 million in the fiveyear period at least that would to those groups. It could be more. All those numbers are on line. See back there in here too. Oh excellent. The breadth of it is astonishing, and the extent of that. No one has seen a single group doing this and it was this family sending money out. If we look at the 990 pf forms which shows what donors give out not just with organizations receive and thats the only way you can track it but while their commercial lobbyists were twisting arms in work in a town Climate Change and things they cared about these groups were experts, ph. D. S of course and they were going up to the hill and testifying there is really not a problem of Climate Change and they were creating this whole narrative all of these hearings the house and senate that was establishing this really is a contested area and everyone is quite concerned about it. They didnt say funded i. T. Industry. They work for the socalled cutout rips thirdparty entities and thats not the first time thats happened in washington but no one to my knowledge has ever done 89 at one time. Several dozen of which were focused on energy and environment issues. It creates the sense that there is a groundswell of opinion and a course of agreement out there come the export agreement. When you have these many different groups speaking at once about these different experts and chuck the work you guys did in particular was fantastic in showing that the experts didnt just put out papers that they testified on the hill were of course you become part of the Expert Opinion in legislation. And what was interesting to me and still is is that so much of this effort was done as charities. These nonprofit groups many of them are ivo one c. Threes which are charitable organizations so when you give a contribution to them he had a tax division. Theyre supposed to be publicinterest groups but there have been questions raised over the years about some of the ones that coax it even to a particular and organized in particular because they Serve Private interests as much as anything else. They serve the interest of Koch Industries they have experts out there lobbying essentially for policies that are good for the company and take meanwhile the people who are giving the contributions the kochs are taking tax productions for it. Its mindblowing when you look at the whole thing altogether. It was hard to do. You are very kind but then theres the larger issue. Not large enough here, the 889 million that the kochs pledged, think it was charles come up pledged that they will spend this year basically regarding the current president ial election. At that level of money you spend at the same level as political parties. We have never seen donors and its not just the kochs but maybe hundreds of other exceedingly wealthy folks who have these. I bake amusing strange meetings at fancy hotels and things and i have never seen anyone declare they were going to spend as much as a Political Party in a single election. The numbers now and the number of people similarly minded folks that are now joining forces most of which which are carefully clearly document and by the way she names them straight to she names names. There are all these billionaires and i guess some of them only have five or 600 million which i would reach for my handkerchief. Any way you talk about that or what it all means and its unprecedented. There has been an explosion and what we are talking about is dark money for the most part. This is money that is undisclosed sons of the being that charitable contributions that go to these 501 c threes they go to the kinds of groups that are called social welfare groups and they are not supposed to be specifically hampered him we involved in politics. To become the great dodge ever since Citizens United through which secret money flows. The kochs magic trick is to say was not just to put their own fortunes into this but they been brilliant at gathering 400 or 500 others with them and somehow convincing the others to let them control those contributions so they are all pooled in one place and have a huge throw away as a. This huge pile of money gets unheard of in American History to have as much money one place. Its 889 million. Its twice what the Republican National committee spent the last president ial campaign. It is so much money that its just such a distortion of what was expected. Also by the Citizens United opinion. People may forget that when the Supreme Court decided in that opinion the justices who voted for it including kennedy and scalia is well thought that money was going to be visible, that the spending would be transparent. You would see instantly where it was and away go up on line because of the internet. So that would keep that kind of money from becoming corrupting. It wouldnt be secret money. To the contrary though as some people have warned in advance most of that money or an awful lot of it is been sidelined into the secret groups where its being spent in ways that reporters as dogged as chuck cant wallow. Its pretty hard to figure out where its all coming from and who the original donors are. They keep their names secret. The only reason we know who some of them are is somebody left a guest list once and it got out. Every now and then theres another moment like that. You begin to see who are these people. I enjoyed trying to figure out who they were, how they made their money, why they were doing the things they were doing and what it was they really wanted to see the American Government do. As we move into all these things, 2012 the koch or others and many conservative republicans were hoping that romney would when. He did not win. They had other candidates they were flirting with a guess youd say, Chris Christie of new jersey and scott walker. They werent treated with them and i cant resist asking you this because its not in the book but sorry, whats happening now . Who are they back and now . Ive been and just in the couple of essential candidates currently but they have not dropped out. So im kind of curious. Im not seeing anyone obviously noting this im curious what the answer is. So far they have his war chest of potential date 889 million. Some of it will be spent on efficacy and is sitting there. They are on the sidelines waiting to see which candidate emerges as the best chance of knocking off Hillary Clinton basic ways and so while they been waiting there though a couple of the candidates they have liked scott walker and have chopped out of most of the major republican president ial contenders have come to their donor group indict for the money and are dishing for it. Pretty much any of the candidates will do with one exception though who must be very perplexing to them and thats donald trump. He makes a great point of saying hes a billionaire in his own right and doesnt need other billionaires backing and you see them rookie describing the other contenders whove gone to the donor summits to bed for the koch this and they described them as puppets. Part of his appeal to the public is people think hes not owned by these private interests. He is on by his own interest but not by some other interests. So they have discussed now whether or not they should use some of this money to try to knock out trump but of course thats problematic as well because there could be about from the voting public that the small group of billionaires and multimillionaires are trying to do prove deprive them of a candidate that they want. They are kind of in the corner right now and trying to figure it out. Thats somewhat delicious i think. I would like to say inevitably people would say they dont have that much influence with their money and i have to say what you have to look at with the kochs is sometimes they have won elections and sometimes they have lost elections but elections are just one sphere of what they are involved in. They poured money into trying to have the republicans take over the house of representatives which they were instrumental in making happen in 2010. They poured money into the 2014 race to try to have republicans take over the senate which again they were instrumental and affecting. More than that even if you look at trump, say hes the outlier. Take a look at some of his positions. He is espousing the same orthodoxies of Climate Change that the rest of the republican candidates are establishing which is he denies that is happening or that its real. Its quite amazing. The entire Republican Party is taking the position is going in the opposite direction of science and the rest of the world and being only explanation to that according to be later viewed with the money thats been involved in pushing the fossil youll interest that are so important in pushing the Republican Party in that direction. The other part is that legislatures in the states between the gerrymandering between what goes on. Havent just worried about washington or one or both houses of congress or president. They have done it at a grassroots things which is quite extraordinary also. They have formed unusual alliances like criminal Justice Reform and they have recast their own ideology, they have described it very purposefully, not just as libertarianism and not just about prosperity. And so you will see that there is a new sort of initiative that the Coke Foundation has about wellbeing. If you drill down into it, what you find is that the definition of wellbeing is the free market from their stand point. So it gets you to the same place. But it has a new branding effort. Meanwhile they have put 50 million or so per year into fixing up the corporate ads and that is a new thing for them as well. And that is something that they have not done for many years. It reminds me of Richard Nixon when they packaged in a different way. We are thinking of it is the new Koch Brothers. [laughter] we can talk about this for several days on the subject. We have a lot of students in the audience. And also those students the students that will be watching later some point on the stand. What advice would you give . Clearly were inspired and that is so last century. And so what would you recommend to some of our budding investigative journalist in the audience in terms of trajectory and a dedication to the profession and all of those things. I think this whole thing of Holding People is an important part of democracy and so i would also emphasize the importance even when you are getting all of the complicated data to tell stories. At the end of the day it is about real people doing things that affect everyones lives. So you have to remember that if people cannot read it, they will not be able to get your story. You have to tell it as a story. And so if you can try to take that information and make it readable, it is a gift to people. That is great. Despite all of the facts with every single sentence in every single number, it reads exceptionally well. So many i was looking at this morning. That i will need to still have them. The dust bunnies in my house are out of control. On that note, any questions as we wait for the microphone, they are standing by. But just temporarily. This gentleman has been part of a team that just won the award. Hello, i am a grad student. As you mentioned and as you know firsthand that they have a history of going after their opponents with his vengeance and i am wondering what you think makes them so vindictive. That is a really good question. I think that you are in the right line of work, definitely. And i think its hard to psychoanalyze people that you havent been able to interview. There are many people that are involved and they just have unfathomably large portions. They are used to getting their way. And they are used to controlling the circumstances around them and being told yes by the people that work for them. And the press can be and seem impertinent. We asked the questions that they dont want to answer and we examine the documents that they dont want to say. To some extent there is a sense of control and that that is why they think that they need to come at you so hard. They are used to controlling their image. Koch industries dont even have stockholders and so they dont have to answer many public questions at all. So the press is really, it is playing a role that they dont really wish to have to deal with, i think. I dont know if that helps. That sounds about right. Yes, Professor John sullivan and Senior Editor and Pulitzer Prize winner. To say one other thing or. I can say from having seen the things that they say about the press that they were shocked that they were getting tough coverage and they were regard themselves as private citizens and not public figures. I think i can also be part of the problem because people like me that cover politics it is so obvious that they are public figures claim huge public roles. But they had always regarded themselves as just ordinary citizens who happen to be billionaires. I was interested to hear you talk about how much money they have put into the election process in all these ways that they tried to influence thought leaders. And talking about what is the real result of that. You talk about real people and how it affects real people. Can you talk about how their influence over the past 20 years may have changed our daily lives . And secondly can you talk about how far into the future are they looking and are they playing a long game . And what is this kind of strategy Going Forward in that . They have been playing a long game since it goes back to at least 1976 with charles and earlier really because he was involved in things before that. They had a very long horizon. They are very committed to it. It is not something that they are conscious about. They really put thereve fortunes into this. So he is a very important force in american politics even though he has been under the surface for much of the time. One of the things that i think that they have worked hardest at is trying to convince americans that the government is evil. But it is not a force for good to have an activist government but that the government is in itself an evil influence. That is what investigative reporters do. [laughter] this whole issue of regulations. They define liberty as the lack of government in many ways. So Public Opinion has changed a lot about the government and they have talked about it. Its hard to measure how much is theyre doing. But if you boil down the message the message is government is bad and private industry is good and regulations are bad. They have been pushing to abolish the epa epa was started. They have been against Social Security since it was started. They have been against medicaid and medicare since it was started. So when you hear the current republican candidates say we should get rid of the irs, thats Something Else they have been pushing for, that is very much their way of thinking. And now they have been very good at injecting these into the mainstream of american politics. So how does that affect peoples everyday lives . When regulations are weekend, or nothing is done about Climate Change or congress is tied up in knots, this function in some ways is good from the standpoint of libertarians because they dont really want the government to do very much. And i have a call from someone saying that the gridlock is our best friend. So when you see congress tied up in knots that affects much of america. But it is also something that the koch family and libertarians have thought to have a Libertarian Program dont feel so bad about and they have had to push it there. Does that help . Yes. Way in the back. Hold on until we get the microphone. Whichever one you want to do. Im actually part of a student organization. It is a Grassroots Organization that we work to publicize ways that the charles koch foundation, as you have documented in your book, Fund Universities in ways that sort of help them achieve their fundamental strategies. Given that all of us in some ways tied to the American University community, i was wondering if you could speak to the responsibility that we have as participants in this community that is sort of in a way foundational with the funding and lobbying strategy. So what is the way that we can address this decision. As a reporter i am all in favor of transparency and i think its great to try to take a look at donations from donors that might be putting Strings Attached to the donations and what you want to do is the exposed to points of view. And so i think the most important thing is to get disclosure so that you can see who is funding will what and why and whether they putting strings on it. Recently in the last 10 years, you have looked at the academic programs carefully, they have really stepped up their funding of academic programs and they have regarded, they regard students is the future and they see them as the most important steppingstone to spreading the word and basically putting into effect the policies that they want to see you. And so the same tape that i described earlier, they talk about how they have a Talent Pipeline that starts in the university and they recruit the most Promising Students when they take them and they help to get them internships and Summer Program jobs and then they place them in some of their political organizations and states around the country. The state that they have a policy think tanks for at the state level and its sort of like a farm Team Situation which they describe as an ununified network basically. Again, it is just kind of a systemic approach to change and recruiting students is very important to it. We knew that George Mason University and others had received tens of millions of dollars from the Coke Foundations. What we do not know is that American University had received some funding. And if you know the old cartoons that was our reaction and i guess teaching about Free Enterprise or Something Like that. It is not just their family, there are a number of organizations that focus on academia and that they need to change the elite Public Opinion in. So you have the Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation as well and there are quotes from people who were involved in them in this book where they talk about how if they were race cars going around the track they would all have the insignia of these foundations on them. And many of the books on the right that have changed american thinking and many of the more colorful spokesman that we see, they all got their start with funding from the foundation. While. So they have kind of created their own experts. Or as others have called it an echo chamber and its really interesting. It has been a 40 year project which is the thing that is so striking. And now your campus and others are the forefront of it. Honestly the other side than the democratic leaning folks do not think in fortyyear increments in terms of this. At least they are not known for that. But that poor gentleman backer has been very patient. So we could get a microphone back to him. Hello, im curious to hear more about getting people to talk to you throughout the last five years and also what links you went through. The wings that i went to were not too successful in terms of getting them to speak to me although i did manage in their absence to try to make up for them by reading pretty much everything that they have said and written and interviewing people and their families and everybody from kids that they grew up with, kids that they were the school to school with, the people that they like, anyone i could get my hands on who had an experience in some kind of information about them i would like to talk to. At the same time even more importantly it is real important not to give up the idea of just because something people want cooperate you cannot give them that type of control which story is worth telling because many people dont want to talk to their doing something the public needs to know about and be persistent. I am the senior undergrad and my question is the success of candidates better not spending that much money in not being successful and the impact of moving forward if has been interesting and Bernie Sanders has a different model and is raising a ton of money so it is another way to get a lot of money if you can buy your way into with just with money are not convinced, is pretty hard to you do at the president ial level. It is probably the hardest ive been to buy because president s not just that it is so expensive but they get so much free media and attention that whatever you can bite is a drop in the bucket compared to the attention that they have been anyway and the public sees the candidates it is hard to change peoples minds only with money. But with that said you could not be in that ballpark without a tremendous amount of money all the people were looking at now have huge amounts of money. And it isnt possible to read and write now without it. Whoever gets the nomination and is the next president will have raised in excess of 750 billion which is another record we have records every four years. So it is a arms race the two candidates from 2015 calendar year were jeb bush and Hillary Clinton. Every kennedy eligible for matching funds got the nomination without exception for a quartercentury with starting the first part of this century from 2000 on nbc a breakdown of matching funds people with hearing to limits and other issues and so we are at a place now we have not seen in decades with sheer amounts of money and these outside forces that are spending more than the parties and meanwhile have a congress where half of the members are millionaires and only 5 of the American People are millionaires we are increasingly skewed to the money in every department. I am under graduate freshman at American University. Realistically, are the Koch Brothers correct to say the only way to have change is to control the elite . Can we think that the masses can truly participate with keying ahead . I love American History. I would say looking over the recent american political history that mass movements can make a tremendous difference the elite donors that had far right views took the course because they could not convince the public of their pointed you to impose minority views of the majority but the public outpouring for obama was not something driven necessarily by the elite donors and there have been many movements in my lifetime i have seen the Antiwar Movement to have tremendous effect on the Environmental Movement and not necessarily funded by big donors. I relatively optimistic of the ability of the public to change politics. It takes activism end engagement in the public is getting so cynical and participation and voting was 36 percent and that is pathetic. It takes people being involved are disappearing right now. I wanted to ask you