Dangerously Informed Evie
video overview 7 26 channel: Dangerously Informed with Evie
We Found The Invisible Billionaire Family That Controls America
The Koch Brothers Are Way Sicker Than We Thought
Jul 14, 2026
Charles and his brother David are some of the wealthiest people alive. Worth over 70 billion dollars and 50 billion dollars respectively. But just money, by itself, was never the destination. It was simply a tool. A means of building something much bigger than a business. Because if you genuinely believed, as Charles Koch did, that America was drifting in the wrong direction, buying a few politicians every election cycle was never going to be enough. Charles Koch wanted something more permanent. He wanted to build an entire system that could outlast all of them. And this is where the story of America's dark money empire really begins.
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with a darker side. Over the decades, Coke Industries accumulated one of the most controversial legal and environmental records of any major
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American corporation. The company paid what were at the time record civil and criminal environmental penalties after
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hundreds of oil spills across multiple states. This is a company that too often treated regulation as an obstacle rather
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than a safeguard. Now, this is where Charles Ko becomes such a fascinating and legitimately frightening figure. To
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be fair, he genuinely does seem to believe what he's saying.
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I want the power to go back to people making decisions over their own lives rather than some experts making it.
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His commitment to free markets and limited government and deregulation wasn't something he invented after becoming a billionaire. Those beliefs go
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all the way back to his upbringing. Ko's father left his sons a bit of money upon his death along with one final piece of advice.
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If you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence, then it will be a curse to you and my
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action and giving it to you will have been a mistake.
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The problem is they also happen to benefit CO industries at almost every turn. Charles opposed stronger
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environmental regulation while running one of America's largest fossil fuel companies. Charles has always insisted these positions are matters of
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principle, but wow, they're also remarkably good for business. And that's what makes this story so much bigger
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than just one FCO oil baron old money billionaire. Charles Ko didn't just accumulate one of the largest fortunes
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in America. He accumulated the resources to turn his personal philosophy into political influence on a scale that
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almost nobody had attempted before. So this whole thing is beyond what they can buy with all this money they have. It's what kind of country they could build.
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Win the argument first. But like honestly, if Charles Ko had simply wanted to lower taxes for his company, there were much easier ways to go about
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it. This is bigger than that. Charles believed elections were the end of politics, not the beginning. By the time Congress votes on a bill, the research
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has already been written, the experts have already been interviewed, and the arguments have already been made. Rather than talking about electing Republicans
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or defeating Democrats, he argued for the development of a well financed Carter of sound proponents of the free
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enterprise philosophy. Okay. So he started funding them through donations through the Charles Koch Foundation and
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other similar organizations. He has spent hundreds of millions of dollars pushing his own political ideals. Take
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the Merkus Center at George Mason University. It's one of the flagship institutions funded by Charles and his
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foundations. On paper, it's an academic research institute dedicated to studying how markets work and how governments regulate them. You know, it sounds
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fairly innocuous until you look at what it actually became. Jay argues that it became one of the KO network's most
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valuable investments. It was producing experts who advise governments, testified before Congress, and helped shape the national conversation around
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regulation itself. During Republican administrations, particularly under Donald Trump, people connected to it moved into positions where they could
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help reshape federal regulation. Then there's the KO Institute, one of Washington's most influential libertarian think tanks and an
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organization Charles helped found. Kato became enormously influential in debates around taxation, regulation, and the
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size of government. In 1991, as scientific consensus around climate change was becoming increasingly clear and President George HW Bush was
considering international agreements to reduce carbon emissions, Kato hosted one of the earliest organized conferences dedicating to challenging the emerging
climate consensus. Koch funded organizations became central players in building what is called the climate denial infrastructure that would delay
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political action for decades through the Atlas Network. Go watch my video on the Atlas Network. Millions of dollars from
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the Charles Ko Foundation and Charles Ko Institute help support an organization dedicated to building free market think tanks across the globe. Atlas trains
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organizations that could influence policy inside their own countries, helping spread ideas about privatization, deregulation, limited
...
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someway if you trace it back was funded by Charles There's an old saying that if you want to understand power,
don't ask who gives the speeches. Ask who built the stage. Cuz in the early 2000s, Charles had built this right-wing
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libertarian think tank pipeline. It already exists. But ideas sitting in policy journals don't change the law.
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Someone still has to take those ideas to voters and pressure politicians to turn philosophy into legislation. So Charles
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built the next piece of the machine, dark money. He built a bunch of different little things, but the most important was Americans for Prosperity
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or AFP. This was founded in 2004 and it was heavily financed by Charles and David Ko. AFP became the public campaigning arm of the Koch network.
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They have offices in 50 states, more than 100 field officers, and by its own figures, around 4 million activists who
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have knocked on more than 27 million doors since 2022. AFP became one of the country's loudest opponents of the
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Affordable Care Act, organized nationwide campaigns against expanding Medicaid. They fought efforts to raise the federal minimum wage. They backed
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right to work laws that weakened labor unions and poured millions of dollars into lobbying for the Trump tax cuts.
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Now, most campaign organizations exist to get someone elected. AFP existed to make sure that politicians, whoever they happen to be, supported the same agenda.
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If a Republican drifted away from that agenda, AFP was just as willing to pressure them as it was to campaign
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against a Democrat. they will simply use their money to replace you with someone who does agree with them. Now, investigations by ProPublica, Open
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Secrets, and Jane Mayer describe a financial architecture that became the blueprint for modern dark money. Rather
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than Charles Cop writing a check directly to every advocacy group, money frequently moved through foundations,
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nonprofit organizations, and donor vehicles before eventually reaching the organizations carrying out the real political work. Much of that activity
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took place through taxexempt organizations organized under sections of the US tax code, particularly 501c3
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charities and 501c4 social welfare organizations, which means in many cases organizations were not required to
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publicly disclose the identities of their donors. That's what people mean when they talk about dark money. It
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means political money where the original source becomes difficult or sometimes impossible for the public to identify.
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One of the smartest pieces of that system was Freedom Partners, which ProPublica described as the financial hub of the Koch Network. Rather than
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dozens of wealthy conservatives and right-wing psychos all donating independently, Freedom Partners collected hundreds of millions of
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dollars and directed it across the wider network, funding whichever organizations were best placed to fight the next political battle anonymously. Of course,
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it's like less like a traditional political donor and more like the control room for one of the most sophisticated dark money operations in
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the history of ever. Jade Mayer describes Charles's private donor summits as something resembling a parallel political convention for America's wealthiest conservatives.
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Several times a year, invited guests gathered behind closed doors at luxury resorts to hear presentations, compare political priorities, and commit funding
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for future campaigns. So, I guess that's the real election, right? Individual fundraising goals eventually climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars
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with the wider donor network at times rivaling or even exceeding the financial resources of the Republican party
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itself. By convincing other billionaires to invest alongside him, Charles built something far bigger than one family's
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political project. This is one of America's most powerful influencer networks, if not the most powerful influencer network. But then things got
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even better for them because the rules changed. In 2010, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens
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United verse FEC, followed shortly afterwards by speechowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowow.org verse FEC. Together these rulings
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allowed outside organizations to raise and spend virtually unlimited amounts of money trying to influence elections so long as they weren't coordinating
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directly with political candidates, which is crazy. This made dark money way
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more powerful. Dark money spending exploded in the years that followed, growing from less than 5 million in 2006
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to well over 1 billion during the 2024 election cycle. Christopher Leonard makes an observation in Kland that I
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think perfectly captures Charles's approach. He really built organizations for today's political battles. He built them so that they'd be ready for
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tomorrow's. And within just a few years, Charles himself believed he was finally seeing the return on investment.
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Speaking to donors back in 2018, he reflected on everything the network had achieved with what is perhaps, you know,
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scariest quote that we've seen. We've made more progress in the last 5 years than I had in the previous 50. But what
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exactly had Charles Ko spent half a century trying to accomplish? And perhaps more importantly, did ordinary
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Americans benefit from any of it? The return on investment. So, what has this actually achieved? How has it affected
atlas
We Found the Secret Network Controlling Your Government
Peter Thiel's Master Plan to Destroy the World (And Escape It)
Peter Thiel's Master Plan to Destroy the World (And Escape It)
Jun 23, 2026
Some of the richest people in the world are preparing for something. They’re buying land. Building bunkers. Securing access to remote, stable countries. And one place keeps coming up. Aotearoa, New Zealand. Peter Thiel was one of the first to get in - securing himself citizenship… somehow. Since then, there’s been a steady flow of billionaires quietly making their way in. Buying land. Building infrastructure. Planning ahead. So what is it about New Zealand that makes it look like somewhere worth escaping to? And why do the people in charge seem so convinced we need to prepare for the end?
griffin@dontbuymedia.com