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I realize many of you will not read this book, but I feel I should make you aware of it anyway: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind The Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.

This book is not about Donald Trump or Elon Musk. It was published before Trump’s election in November of 2016 but if I’d read it then, I would have understood a lot more about what has been happening to politics in our nation.

If you’re worried about our democracy, this book shows you have good reason to be alarmed. It is meticulously researched and annotated. For those who won’t take the time to read the book, at least check out some snippets from it which I share below (all emphasis provided by me):

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“Contrary to predictions, the Citizens United decision hadn’t triggered a tidal wave of corporate political spending. Instead, it had empowered a few extraordinarily rich individuals with extreme and often self-serving agendas.

‘Let’s call the system that Citizens United and other rulings and laws have created what it is: an oligarchy,” declared Mark McKinnon. ‘The system is controlled by a handful of ultra-wealthy people, most of whom got rich from the system and who will get richer from the system.’

It had long been the conceit in America that great economic inequality could coexist with great social and political equality. But a growing body of academic work suggested that this was changing.

As America grew more economically unequal, those at the top were purchasing the power needed to stay there.

State Republican legislators had redrawn ‘districts in North Carolina so artfully that despite getting fewer votes than the Democrats, they had won more congressional seats. The same pattern was repeated in enough other states that the Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, despite a bigger 2012 turnout nationwide for Democrats.

It was a strange anomaly but not an accidental one. For the Koch machine, North Carolina had become something of a test kitchen.

Gerrymandering was a bipartisan game as old as the Republic. What made it different after Citizens United was that the business of manipulating politics from the ground up was now heavily directed and funded by the unelected rich.

To get the job done, they used front groups claiming to be nonpartisan social welfare groups, funded by contributions from some of the world’s largest corporations and wealthy donors like the Kochs. The big outside money flowing into the most granular level of politics was transformative. The Kochs were instrumental in getting the GOP to take over state legislatures…

…a program called ‘Maptitude’…contained the population details of every neighbor-hood, including the residents’ racial makeup.

Once the Republicans won control of North Carolina’s general assembly, in a matter of months, they enacted conservative policies that private think tanks had been incubating for years.

The legislature slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy while cutting benefits and services for the middle class and the poor. It also gutted environmental programs, sharply limited women’s access to abortion, backed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, and legalized concealed guns in bars and on playgrounds and school campuses.

It also erected cumbersome new bureaucratic barriers to voting. Like the poll taxes and literacy tests of the segregated past, the new hurdles, critics said, were designed to discourage poor and minority voters, who leaned Democratic.

Political extremists now had no incentive to compromise, even with their own party’s leadership. To the contrary, the only threats faced by Republican members from the new, ultraconservative districts were primary challenges from even more conservative candidates.

Gerrymandering had made their districts far less ethnically diverse and further to the right than the country as a whole. They were anomalies…: but they were able to shut the entire government down despite representing less than 18% of the nation’s population.

By 2015, their (the Koch brothers) antigovernment lead was followed by much of Congress.

Addressing global warming was out of the question. Although economic inequality had reached record levels, raising taxes on the runaway rich and closing special loopholes that advantaged only them were also nonstarters.

Funding basic public services like the repair of America’s crumbling infrastructure was also seemingly beyond reach. A majority of the public supported an expansion of the social safety net. But leaders in both parties nevertheless embraced austerity measures popular with the affluent. Even though Americans overwhelmingly opposed cuts in Social Security, for instance, the Beltway consensus was that to save the program, it needed to be shrunk.

An overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans disapproved of the amount of money in politics and supported new spending restrictions.

Yet the Republican Party was now overrun by minority views, including opposition to virtually all limits on campaign spending, that seemed outlandish when the Kochs (first) expressed them (publicly) in 1980.”

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All of this was written before the rise of Trump, and Elon Musk’s unprecedented involvement in every part of our federal government.

If that doesn’t worry you, you probably haven’t read this far.