The barrage of devastating, precedent-setting Supreme Court rulings that has started to drop may have many Americans wondering how we arrived at such a dark moment. The answer is simple, even if it is rarely discussed in corporate media: it lies in a giant pile of anonymous cash that was deployed to buy Supreme Court seats, help determine justices’ caseload, and shape their decisions.

A secretive, well-financed dark money network helped build the Supreme Court’s radical conservative supermajority and has also been bankrolling many of the politicians and organizations involved in the most controversial cases now before the court. That includes the cases that could invalidate federal abortion rights and prevent the federal government from combating climate change.

The public will almost certainly never know the identities of the ultrawealthy individuals and interests who paid to stack this court and influence its decisions, but much of the credit should go to a man named Leonard Leo and his cadre of conservative activists.