9 SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 2, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Masters of the Universe DAVID SIROTA’S NEW PODCAST TRACES THE ORIGINS OF PROJECT 2025 BACK TO JOSEPH COORS. BY BRENDAN JOEL KELLEY 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 cam- paign ad We are in the process of the second Ameri- can Revolution. ... [It] will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. — Kevin Roberts, president of the Heri- tage Foundation, publisher of Project 2025 In mid-September, the crew behind Master Plan gathered in a small offi ce in the podcast editor’s southeast Denver home. The three stared wearily at computer screens, quite apparently sleep-deprived. They’d been up late the night before, fi rst 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 soundproofi ng foam on the wall — a makeshift recording booth, if they could just fi gure 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?” 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 offi cial Heritage Foundation history by Edwards published in 1997. But to the best of Maher’s knowledge, the full re- cording was left ignored in Edwards’s archive. Until now. Project 2025 is a 900-page policy manual published in 2023 by the Heritage Founda- tion, a conservative think tank, mapping out a hard-right overhaul of the federal govern- ment. It’s recently become the third rail of the 2024 presidential campaign, demon- ized 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 bogey- men 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 undocu- mented immigrants and ending birthright citizenship, expanding the use of warrantless surveillance, limiting voting access, censor- ing public school curricula, and removing protections for transgender people. Master Plan traces the roots of the conser- vative 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 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 sys- tem fueled by business interests, dark money, shrewd policy tacticians and corruption. Now halfway through its first season, Master Plan has charted as high as fi fth place for history podcasts on Apple Podcasts, and has come close to cracking Apple’s Top 100 overall. “The response to the podcast has been incredible, and has far exceeded my expec- tations,” 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 estab- lishing the foundations of today’s hard-right conservative movement. 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 inter- section of national politics and journalism, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay after conceiving the story behind the Netfl ix climate-change blockbuster Don’t Look Up. “[The Lever’s] mission is to hold account- able 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 be- ing 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 intensifi ed and really captured our whole political system through a series of specific decisions by specific people with a specifi c agenda,” Sirota says. In the fi rst episode, Sirota recalls the moment he realized the extent to which big business had control over policy —despite appearances to the contrary. He was work- ing 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 re- leases touting the passage of a bill that prom- ised to lower the cost of prescription drugs. But the pharmaceutical industry had been funnel- ing 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 recon- stitute the laws of the United States according to corporate interests. You only need look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United deci- sion — declaring that corporations are people and money is speech — to witness the results of these efforts. NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS David Sirota recording an episode of his new podcast, Master Plan. RON DOYLE continued on page 10
