The Lever - “The recording is the smoking gun”

In every major investigation, there’s a story behind the story. Denver’s alt-weekly Westword has just published a profile of the story behind our hit podcast Master Plan — including a blow-by-blow account of how we dug up smoking-gun audio of a beer tycoon admitting the secret Powell Memo was the inspiration for funding ultra-conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation. You can read the Westword story at the bottom of this email.

Rock the boat.

The Master Plan team, from left: David Sirota, Jared Jacang Maher, editor Ron Doyle, and producer Laura Krantz (not pictured: Ula Kulpa). Credit: Ron Doyle

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Trump’s Project 2025 will give him unchecked political power with no guardrails, and it would take Black America backwards. Project 2025 would strip away our voting-rights protections, and it eliminates the Department of Education. It would also require states to monitor women’s pregnancies, it bans abortion, and would rip away health coverage for millions. — Harris/Walz 2024 television campaign ad

We are in the process of the second American Revolution. ... [It] will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. — Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, publisher of Project 2025

In mid-September, the crew behind Master Plan gathered in a small office in podcast editor Ron Doyle’s southeast Denver home. The three stared wearily at computer screens, quite apparently sleep-deprived. They’d been up late the night before, first doing an online Q&A with subscribers to the podcast, then working to address a newly discovered issue with an upcoming installment.

A closet door stood open, revealing a chair, a microphone and soundproofing foam on the wall – a makeshift recording booth, if they could just figure out what to record.

“I’m so utterly fucking over this episode,” David Sirota, the Denver-based journalist who founded The Lever, a national news outlet, as well as the Master Plan podcast, declared after hours of concentration. “Are we making this better? Are we sure?”

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But amid their frustration, writer and producer Jared Jacang Maher, a former Westword staff writer, has a nugget of good news. A Bay Area reporter for The Lever, Freddy Brewster, was driving to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University the next morning to procure a 1996 audio recording of an interview of Joseph Coors by historian Lee Edwards, chronicler of the “new right” in the late twentieth century.

Snippets of this interview — just phrases, really — in which Coors credited the Powell Memorandum, the focus of Master Plan, with his conservative political awakening, are referenced in an official Heritage Foundation history by Edwards published in 1997. But to the best of Maher’s knowledge, the full recording was left ignored in Edwards’s archive.

Until now.

The Untold History

Project 2025 is a 900-page policy manual published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, mapping out a hard-right overhaul of the federal government. It’s recently become the third rail of the 2024 presidential campaign, demonized by the left and so extreme that former president Donald Trump disavowed the document in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris: “I’m not going to read it!”

Project 2025 contains a litany of bogeymen for voters on the left. The term “Project 2025” itself has become election-season shorthand for far-right MAGA extremism.

Among its dictates, Project 2025 proposes preventing abortion access by reversing FDA approval of the drug mifepristone, implementing mass deportation for undocumented immigrants and ending birthright citizenship, expanding the use of warrantless surveillance, limiting voting access, censoring public school curricula, and removing protections for transgender people.

Master Plan traces the roots of the conservative movement that birthed Project 2025. The podcast is billed as “the untold history from the 1970s to today, showing how a small group of operatives and oligarchs used vast wealth to manipulate key U.S. government policies for personal gain at the expense of everyone else — a plan that’s coming to fruition in the 2024 election.”

Sirota and his team — Maher, Doyle, Laura Krantz, and Ula Kulpa — trace the roots of this corruption back to a document written in the early 1970s that spelled out a strategy for defending corporate interests in America.

That memo, authored in 1971 by corporate attorney Lewis J. Powell shortly before he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, provided a blueprint — a “master plan,” in Sirota’s telling — that was adopted by American oligarchs and provided the framework for the present political system fueled by business interests, dark money, shrewd policy tacticians and corruption.

Now halfway through its first season, Master Plan hit the podcast charts in its first week, charting second for politics and fourth for news; it’s been ranked in the top 20 of all podcasts worldwide. “The response to the podcast has been incredible, and has far exceeded my expectations,” Sirota says. “I was concerned that because we’re an independent outlet, we’d have trouble breaking through, but there’s so much interest in the topic that the show has gone viral. It tells me that in a media age of homogenized content and cheap mass-produced hot takes, there is a lot of pent-up demand for high-production journalism that takes a lot more time to report, and that focuses on taboo topics like corruption that bigger media outlets don’t regularly cover.”

In the course of their reporting, Sirota and his team reveal a straight, uninterrupted line between one of Colorado’s larger-than-life, twentieth-century captains of industry, Joseph Coors, and the extremist agenda of Heritage’s Project 2025. In its fourth episode, Master Plan illuminates the prominent role of the Rocky Mountain beer mogul in establishing the foundations of today’s hard-right conservative movement.

David Sirota recording a Master Plan segment. Credit: Ron Doyle

“My Innocence Was Gone”

Sirota launched The Lever in 2020, after a stint working as a campaign strategist and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders’s doomed presidential bid.

Formerly a progressive talk-radio host in Denver, Sirota has long worked at the intersection of national politics and journalism, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay after conceiving the story behind the Netflix climate-change blockbuster Don’t Look Up.

“[The Lever’s] mission is to hold accountable the people who are making decisions in the shadows,” Sirota says, “and hold power accountable in the hopes that the more people know who’s doing what, what decisions are being made in their name, the more they can help the country make a different set of decisions.”

Master Plan, which debuted on August 13, is an audio historical documentary tracing the roots of the dark money, shadowy PACs, lawfare and corruption that pervade modern politics. “I think our series illustrates that corruption became intensified and really captured our whole political system through a series of specific decisions by specific people with a specific agenda,” Sirota says.

In the first episode, Sirota recalls the moment he realized the extent to which big business had control over policy — despite appearances to the contrary. He was working as an aide to then-Representative Bernie Sanders during the Clinton administration, and a victory against high prescription drug prices was on the horizon. “The pressure campaign worked,” he thought. Until the plan was abandoned.

“The trickery was grotesque,” Sirota tells listeners. “Lawmakers issued their press releases touting the passage of a bill that promised to lower the cost of prescription drugs. But the pharmaceutical industry had been funneling millions of dollars to both political parties. And lobbyists got their allies in Congress to slip a loophole into the bill. Then the Clinton administration used that loophole to kill the program before it could ever go into effect. ...

“My innocence was gone,” Sirota says, describing himself at the time as “bitter, bruised and disgusted.”

The podcast has its roots in that disgust. It traces a more than half-century effort by the American oligarchy and the hard right to reconstitute the laws of the United States according to corporate interests. You only need look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — declaring that corporations are people and money is speech — to witness the results of these efforts.

This has literally been on [Sirota’s] mind for twenty years,” says Maher, who spent two years investigating the story.

Sirota started with an outline of Supreme Court cases that traced major legal moments when elements of corruption were enshrined, but as Maher worked to unravel the threads, an obscure document authored by a future Supreme Court justice just two months before his nomination to the court by Nixon seemed central to this story.

Willam Powell wrote the Powell Memorandum in 1971, two months before being nominated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Powell, a corporate attorney, former president of the American Bar Association and boardmember of the Philip Morris tobacco company, announced an “ATTACK ON AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM” in his memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Dated August 23, 1971, Powell’s missive bemoans attacks on enterprise and the shoddy reputation of the American businessman while naming his enemies:

They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern.

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Moreover, much of the media — for varying motives and in varying degrees — either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.

One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.

Powell recommends a multi-pronged response to these perceived attacks, an aggressive, well-funded campaign for corporate America to rebrand and ingratiate itself with the American public. The plan includes the formation of conservative think tanks and policy advocacy institutes, advancing conservative thought on campuses, a media outreach program and a strategy to remake the judiciary. (“Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change,” Powell wrote just two months before he was named to that court.)

The influence of the Powell Memorandum, as it came to be commonly known, has been debated in the past; Powell projected a milquetoast centrism as a Supreme Court justice, and the document’s existence wasn’t publicly known until it was discovered by a Washington Post reporter a year after its creation.

But Maher’s reporting led him to recognize the centrality of the Powell Memorandum to the conservative movement going forward from 1971. A document that had initially warranted maybe one episode of the podcast was becoming its central thesis: There was a master plan to remake American governance according to corporate and conservative interests, and it has effectively been implemented.

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The Tentacles

“It’s this blueprint for what [Powell] thinks needs to be done for the business elites to take back power,” Sirota says of the Powell Memorandum. “Basically, the government has become too democratically responsive to the population. We, the business elite, don’t have an advantage in lots of votes, or people, but we do have an advantage in lots of resources. So we should spend our resources in a big way on all the things needed to take political power back, including a focus on the judiciary.

“Out of that comes a series of these secret meetings that had never been reported on before that we uncovered. There’d been kind of a debate: Was the Powell Memo real? Was it really important? Clearly it was, as evidenced by the documents we uncovered.”

Master Plan reveals a series of meetings held by America’s political and business elite in the wake of the Powell Memorandum, where strategy sessions were held to discuss implementation of the blueprint’s recommendations: pushing conservative thought to Americans via policy institutes and think tanks, countering liberal academics with neoliberal scholars and speakers on campuses, using television and media to change opinions, and forwarding its agenda via politicians and the courts.

Powell himself furthered the cause from the Supreme Court bench in opinions like First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the precursor to Citizens United, which declared that corporate financial influence on elections was as sacred as an individual’s free speech.

But the Powell Memorandum had tentacles: It was the manifesto the conservative new right movement needed to combat the Communists, academics, journalists and scientists who had amassed against them.

“What I was seeing amid all of these meetings and connections is that there was a movement of people in these groups that all came together, centralized around this plan, and from there spread out like spokes on a wheel into some of these different arenas that we all know well today, like conservative think tanks,” Maher explains.

Project 2025 projects out from one of those spokes, and the architect of its mothership was born right here in Colorado, directly inspired by the Powell Memorandum.

The Rocky Mountain Empire

“It’s easy for people to forget how significant Colorado has been as a location for the conservative movement,” Sirota notes. “It’s a blue state now, a Democratic state, but the Coors empire has been a powerhouse fueling this master plan for a long time.”

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the Coors Brewing Company was under attack, facing boycotts by a panoply of social groups: Hispanics and African Americans, women’s-rights groups, the LGBT community and labor unions. Joseph Coors, grandson of founder Adolph Coors, had a personal issue with the leftists, too: His son, Grover, had become a hippie while attending the University of Denver, enraging his father.

Colorado’s Joseph Coors was greatly impacted by the Powell Memorandum. Credit: Ronald Reagan Library

“[Joseph Coors was] very conservative, a right-wing fan of Barry Goldwater, and wanted to get more involved in this anti-liberal or anti-democratic movement that was rising up in D.C. and around the country,” Maher says.

“Those guys felt victimized. Culturally, they were treated as the worst people in the world. They weren’t getting any respect. They were the enemy when it came to the environmental movement, the consumer protection movement. And Coors is such an epitome of that.”

A copy of the Powell Memorandum made its way to Joseph Coors in early 1972, and he was soon reaching out to other powerful people to see where his money could best be spent in pursuit of this corporate-centric American makeover.

Amid Coors’s outreach, a letter to Republican Colorado Senator Gordon Allott ended up in the hands of Paul Weyrich, an aide to Allott who’d been plotting his own foray into policy manipulation.

“Weyrich had this whole thing ready: I want to start this conservative think tank, here’s what it’s going to do. So when he reads Coors’s letter, this is like a blank check from a wealthy businessman who’s basically going to fund the project,” Maher explains.

With Coors’s generous backing, Weyrich created what would shortly become the Heritage Foundation, the ultra-conservative policy think tank that published Project 2025. Coors’s money supported Heritage for years, and even today the Adolph Coors Foundation brags of being a longtime funder of Heritage, which it describes as “mobilizing the conservative movement.”

When the far right’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency in 1980, the Heritage Foundation issued the first in what would be a series of policy prescriptions for presidential administrations, “Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration.” Reagan passed out copies at his first cabinet meeting. Its authors claimed that nearly 60 percent of the document’s recommendations were adopted.

In January 2018, the foundation announced on its website, “One year after taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations from the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Mandate for Leadership.’”

Project 2025 is the most recent edition in Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership series.

Credit: Ben Clarkson

A True Believer

Joe Coors wasn’t the only American oligarch influenced by the Powell Memorandum; industrialists such as Charles and David Koch and Richard Mellon Scaife were also spurred to action.

But as Maher explains, “Coors is the one that really took the Powell Memo to heart. He truly wanted to branch out and really put his money in a bunch of different pots. He takes another paragraph from another section that Powell focused on, which was the media, and television specifically.”

In February 1973, Coors launched TVN, Television News Inc., a syndicated news service. Coors installed an ideological aide, Jack Wilson, at the company to ensure a conservative bent, and Weyrich also exercised influence over news operations. A slate of journalists initially rebelled against the conservative mandate — until TVN hired a new vice president for news operations at the start of 1975, a political television adviser named Roger Ailes.

Although TVN was shuttered later in 1975, Ailes would go on to found and lead Fox News, a reincarnation of what Coors and Ailes attempted with TVN, funded by another right-wing multi-millionaire, Rupert Murdoch.

And Coors wasn’t stopping there. Heeding the Powell Memorandum’s call to confront regulatory enemies in the courts, he established the Mountain States Legal Foundation. “[MSLF] followed the model of similar legal groups, but focused on the West,” Maher says. “Powell said you need to focus on the judiciary and create alternatives to what Ralph Nader had done with the Public Interest Research Group and Common Cause, who would go and use the courts to litigate, file lawsuits to really push regulators to enforce environmental regulations or enforce campaign finance law. Powell said, ‘We need this also, these legal groups that will advocate for what the Chamber of Commerce and the business community needs.’”

The Lakewood-based Mountain States Legal Foundation continues to advocate today. Its first president was James Watt, who went on to become Reagan’s controversial Secretary of the Interior; it was also headed by William Perry Pendley, a former director of the Bureau of Land Management who’s been credited with the section of Project 2025 that suggests selling off federal public lands.

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The Smoking Gun

Maher finally has the Coors recording in hand. Archival audio is priceless in the podcast world, so the team is already working on a special episode of Master Plan that will delve into this 1996 conversation in which Joseph Coors reveals the inspiration for the funding of ultra-conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation.

The recording is the smoking gun of the podcast’s premise — that the Powell Memorandum was the blueprint that oligarchs like Coors followed to create the modern conservative movement.

“This Powell, Powell Memorandum — you ever see that?” Coors asks Edwards on the tape.

“I don’t think so, no,” Edwards replies.

“Old Powell, uh, just before he was nominated to the Supreme Court, wrote this memorandum,” Coors says. “It’s called the Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. Written August of ’71.”

Pages rustle.

“And I’ll tell you, it had, it just, it stirred me up because of some of the things that it said. ‘No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack’ — things of that nature,” Coors tells Edwards, quoting Powell.

“‘The assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum.’ ‘The painfully sad truth is that business, including the boards of directors and top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels often have responded, if at all by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem.’

“That’s the type of thing that just set me thinking,” Coors says. “Good God, it’s about time, maybe, that business executives should get more involved. Do something proactive, as they call it these days.”

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