10 SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 2, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | “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 mo- ments 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. Powell, a corporate attorney, former president of the American Bar Associa- tion 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 enter- prise 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 politi- cal and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better fi nanced, 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 join- ing the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of so- ciety: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sci- ences, 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 prolifi c in their writing and speaking. Moreover, much of the media — for vary- ing 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 ag- gressive, well-funded campaign for corpo- rate 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 infl uence of the Powell Memorandum, as it came to be commonly known, has been debated in the past; Powell projected a milque- toast 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 war- ranted 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 inter- ests, and it has effectively been implemented. “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 Memoran- dum. “Basically, the government has become too democratically responsive to the population. We, the business elite, don’t have an ad- vantage 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 Memoran- dum, 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 academ- ics 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 fi nancial infl uence on elections was as sacred as an individual’s free speech. But the Powell Memorandum had ten- tacles: 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 mother- ship was born right here in Colorado, directly inspired by the Powell Memorandum. “It’s easy for people to forget how signifi cant 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, fac- ing 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 is- sue with the leftists, too: His son, Grover, had become a hippie while attending the University of Denver, enraging his father. “[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 coun- try,” 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 Memoran- dum made its way to Joseph Coors in early 1972, and he was soon reach- ing 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 let- ter to Republican Colorado Sena- tor 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 the Heri- tage Foundation for years, and, until recently, the Adolph Coors Founda- tion website said that it supported Heritage efforts “mobilizing the conservative movement.” (The Master Plan team has not heard from either foundation; the founda- tions have not responded to West- word’s requests for comment.) When the far right’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency in 1980, the Heritage Foundation issued the fi rst in what would be a series of policy prescriptions for presidential admin- istrations, “Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administra- tion.” Reagan passed out copies at his fi rst cabinet meeting. Its authors claimed that nearly 60 percent of the document’s recom- mendations were adopted. In January 2018, the foundation announced on its website, “One year after taking offi ce, President Donald Trump and his administra- tion 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. Joe Coors wasn’t the only American oligarch infl uenced by the Powell Memorandum; industrialists such as News continued from page 9 continued on page 12 The Master Plan team of (from left) David Sirota, Jared Jacang Maher, producer Ron Doyle and producer Laura Krantz have been working on a podcast tracing the impact of the Powell Memorandum, written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell (right) in 1971. RON DOYLE WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
