I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump actually is a pretty big-government conservative. He doesn't see eye-to-eye with them [the Kochs] on trade.

What these memos do is they make legal acts that were criminal prior to these memos.

The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves.

The Kochs have been activists since the 1970s. You can go back and look at the platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 and see what they really believe in. They wanted to abolish huge swaths of the U.S. government, including the Internal Revenue Service. They want to get rid of Social Security. They'd like to get rid of Medicare. They'd like to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, which directly affects their business.

It's quite amazingly radical, what their [the Kochs] vision of America would be.

What I write about is how much influence it's had in things like state legislatures and governorships and congressional races. The other thing that's even more important in the long run is that very extreme money has affected the ecosystem of ideology in the country.