Bloomsbury presents Shadow Network by Anne Nelson, read by Katherine Fenton.

In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s election, a group of some 50 Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve centre for channelling money and mobilising votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese and Tim LaHaye in the council’s early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.

In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition’s key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy’s information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organisations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmanoeuvring the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.

In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential listening.