Hey there, overlap podcast listeners. This is your cohost Joshua here.
If you just so happen to pick us up at this specific podcast,
this is part two of a two part podcast about the Powell memo.
If you wouldn't mind, go back to last week's episode, start at part one,
because otherwise it's going to feel very strange to be here.
You're not going to understand what's going on.
You're going to miss out on all of the backstory that led up to where we are now,
and we look forward to meeting you back here as soon as you're done with that one.
It's a short one. Thanks so much. Make sure to check out our socials. Fof.Foundation.
We're on Mastodon and blue sky, the overlap podcast.
Thanks so much for listening to the overlap.
This is the point at which everything up until this was kind of giving you context.
It's giving you a broad background of what America looked like in the first place.
This is the point at which everything up until this was kind of giving you context is giving
you a broad background of what America looked like in July 1971.
Ultimately, that leads to the memorandum we're actually talking about.
Will why don't you kick us off with that.
So the memorandum, I think it's such a funny word, but the diatribe as you described before
was titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System.
I mean, can you ask for anything more like, you know, just, I mean, he knew his audience,
right?
That's all I can say.
It's Alex Jones.
I mean, it's literally like an Alex Jones headline.
Right, right.
So on August 23, 1971, he sends this memorandum confidentially, right?
This is not a public playbook or it was not intended to be a public playbook, although
it was rather quickly released to the public.
And he sends this memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce.
And the US Chamber of Commerce, I mean, is basically like, it's an official sort of vision
of the big businesses that he's trying to protect, right?
This is where they gather together and talk about how to succeed in commerce.
It's commerce, literally the Chamber of Commerce.
It's literally just like your local Chamber of Commerce, just at a national level.
Exactly.
It's basically like, I mean, essentially, this is like the Ten Commandments moment or, you
know, the golden...
He comes down from the mountain with the tablet.
Exactly.
He's three, three golden tablets, two, two...
He's emerged from his tobacco haze with the guideline, the playbook for saving America,
or saving the free enterprise system from America, maybe, is the best way to put it.
It does sound apocalyptic, like he's talking the equivalent of Fire and Brimstone coming
down if we don't turn this around.
And he claims that the system is under a broad attack not just from communists and new leftists,
right?
Not just from the...
New leftists is my favorite one.
New leftists, as opposed to old leftists.
Right.
These are the ones who went farther left.
Yes.
But this is more than just the usual players, right?
This is not the ones that we know about, right?
The ones that were outed in all the trials, you know, the communists and the witch hunts
and all that kind of stuff, the McCarthyism.
This is a broader attack, right?
This is including perfectly respectable elements of society, which is kind of a shot at the
other side, right?
The usual suspects.
These are just the crazies.
These are the people you might run into at a dinner party.
Professors, journalists, clergy, politicians.
And these are real members of society that are stepping up and saying, "Hey, there's a
problem here."
This is you and me.
And ultimately, what he's saying is people that look like me are attacking the United
States in this way.
Right.
And then he sort of berates in a way his own people by saying that the business community,
these business leaders, although they're such brilliant minds, they know how to make money,
right?
They know how to squeeze every dollar out of everything, out of a business, but they
have no idea how to defend themselves in the court of public opinion.
And so he calls them passive weak conciliatory.
He basically just, you know...
Reads them.
Yeah, he eviscerates them and then says he bemoans their apathy and default of business
in the face of this existential threat, responding with appeasement and aptitude and ignoring
the problem.
He's basically just shooting straight at these guys saying, "Hey, look, you can't just keep
giving them what they're asking for because they're going to ask for more."
And sets up this slippery slope where people are going to just walk all over businesses,
which is of course in his mind the worst thing that could happen.
Basically, you could be forgiven for imagining that Nader is like the vice presidential candidate
that would drive around in the tank.
I'm blanking on his name right now.
Dan Quayle was... oh man, anyway... wasn't Ross Perot.
No, it wasn't Perot.
It'll come to me in a minute.
But basically, you can be imagining like Ralph Nader at the head of a tank division, like
right outside of DC, about to take over the way Powell is talking about this.
He paints this picture of imminent invasion and attacks by all these people who are really,
like, again, just keep in mind, asking for like seatbelt laws and not having poison in
their food.
Right.
Like we're not talking crazy things like "Let's shut down all factories."
Like no, just like, "Hey, maybe don't dump toxic chemicals into water reservoirs."
Maybe don't set our rivers on fire because we kind of need them.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So, he's all fired up about the fact that they're not responding with a heavy enough
hand and doesn't like these weak CEOs and he basically says, "All right, it's time to
pony up.
We need to get together.
We need to fix this.
And this is how we're going to do it."
And then he lays out his strategy, which I, do you want to take over on the forefronts
of his strategy?
Yeah, yeah.
For sure.
So, basically he said that we have to attack this from all four fronts.
Right?
We can't just come at this like a typical army head to head.
He says that it's got to be a detailed, long range strategic plan on all four fronts at
one time.
So, he laid out this kind of all-encompassing counteroffensive that needed to be waged across
four key parts of American society.
A commercial manifesto, if you will.
Yes.
And look, this is where you could really start to see the shaping of what we're dealing with
right now today.
First, the campus.
He called for re-education of the youth.
So, he kind of identified the university as the single most dynamic source of anti-business
sentiment.
Right?
So, he was saying, "Colleges are the place where all anti-business sentiment starts."
So, how did he suggest solving this?
Well, with fire, of course.
He called for the US Chamber of Commerce to create and fund its own staff of scholars
to produce a stream of pro-business research, publications, and even propose creating what
he called the Speaker's Bureau with polished executives to get the good corporate message
into campuses to demand equal time to counter critics.
And also, he called for the evaluation of textbooks in economic, sociology, and political
science to make sure that the balance was there and that there were fair and factual treatment
of the free enterprise system.
Now, his goal was obviously to build a parallel intellectual infrastructure, what do we say,
alternative black box of creation, and an infrastructure to create an academic counter-establishment
loyal to corporate interests, not to people's interests.
Number two, the media.
He suggested that the US Chamber of Commerce start policing narratives by...and look,
Powell was obsessed with the news, anything with the media specifically, but especially
television.
He saw television as a completely hostile force, completely anti-business, completely
anti-corporate, completely anti-free market.
He actually asked and advocated for a "constant surveillance" of the national media and for
mounting aggressive campaigns to challenge any reporting deemed "unfair to business,"
but his plan went further than that.
He wasn't just complaining about it.
He wanted businesses, again, to fund scholars, to create their own magazines, to publish their
own books and pamphlets, all which had to meet the "most exciting standards of accuracy
and professional excellence in order to build credibility and shape public opinion directly."
This is very much where we have the corporations funding their own research studies and things
like that.
This is all where this originated.
And this links directly back to Philip Morris.
Exactly.
Let's find nine out of 10 doctors that agree that Marlboro cigarettes or camels are the
best, you know.
The other guy doesn't smoke.
Yes.
But the tenth doctor is still alive.
The next outlet we'll take since it's his specialty, the courthouse.
Sure.
So we've got to weaponize the judiciary, says Powell.
This is where we can see it pay off in spades, right?
As we're seeing it now that basically he's saying, "We've got to reshape the judiciary.
We've got to create the candidates.
We've got to appoint the judges.
We've got to control the courthouse because that's where these battles are going to be
fought."
Right?
Again, coming off of Big Tobacco, he knows where the battles are going to be, where the
battle lines are drawn.
And he sees that liberal and civil rights groups like the ACLU, he calls out by name,
are far more astute in exploiting judicial action than his own side, right?
So he sees they've got all the practice, they know how to do this.
We're failing in this area.
And so he urges the Chamber of Commerce to create its own legal arm, its own ACLU, counter-ACLU,
with the stated goal of stop seeing the courts as neutral referees, right?
So he's basically literally advocating the politicization of the courthouse.
He's basically saying, "Look, and to be fair..."
"Pack the courts."
Right.
And I don't know if this is being fair to him.
I think it's being more than fair, but he's a true believer, right?
When you read the memo, he's not just saying this.
He really thinks that this is what needs to happen.
He's convinced.
A hundred percent.
Just this reads like his autobiography.
It doesn't read like a story he wrote.
Right.
He's legitimately all in on this.
And he sees the judiciary as the most important instrument for social, economic, and political
change.
And so he says the goal is to stop seeing them as neutral referees, right?
The vision you have...
I think most people starting out in law school who aren't already in this world think, "Okay,
the judge is the neutral referee, right?
The judge is there to control, to make sure the right evidence gets in.
They're not there to lean one way or the other.
They're there to make sure that the case is heard fairly."
And that's what you think a judge is supposed to do until you actually end up in the courtroom
in front of one who's been politicized and then you realize, "Oh, wait, we're not playing
the same game here."
Suddenly, by evidence, although it fits all the rules of evidence, it's not getting in.
And the other side, some made-up garbage is coming in by the truckload.
And I can't imagine why the jury would not want to take my side, right?
Right.
It's ridiculous.
But yeah, so he says, "Let's give up this idea of neutral courts.
Let's not try to rebalance or make them objectively fair again.
Let's just do what they're doing and stack the courts."
And so that's what he said to them about to do and it's paid off.
And it's because he thought and believed that that's already what was happening from the
side of the ACLU, that somehow the left was so good at lobbying that they were able to
get Republican president Richard Nixon to appoint anti-business Democrat leftist judges
who would oppose business into office.
It simply wasn't true.
But he figured, "Let's fight fire with fire.
Since they're already doing it, we have to do it back."
But really what it was, it was just a natural occurrence of a progressive system progressing.
Right.
Much like it couldn't be true that...
And he saw that as the threat.
Yeah.
It couldn't be true that Nader was actually pointing out all these safety issues and things
like that.
It couldn't be the case that the environment was actually being destroyed.
So it must be leftist judges and people being smuggled in and it's just crazy.
Exactly.
Because his backyard was perfectly fine.
Exactly.
It was the paranoia that seeks...
The pond on his family property wasn't polluted.
Yeah, it was.
It was just clean.
There's no way.
Yeah.
And lastly, from the Capitol.
Basically, from appeasement to domination.
Finally, he argued that kind of business had been politically naive and outmaneuvered.
Capital power, he wrote, for clarity is necessary to be assiduously cultivated and it must be
used aggressively and with determination.
He called for a gigantic, coordinated, relentless lobbying effort.
So he understood that piecemeal efforts by individual companies were just not enough.
Strength, he said, lies in organization in careful, long-range planning and implementation,
in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing
available only through joint effort and in the political power available only through
united action and national organizations.
So power wants the government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.
For the corporations.
Exactly.
And wants corporations to be able to use the earth and its resources and all of the things
that the planet gives us as they see fit without any regard for individual liberty, individual
freedom.
And look, the genius of this memo, right, this diatribe, is in its own dark and evil
way, it's kind of brilliant.
Oh yeah.
Because it takes the language of liberalism that essentially was winning hand over fist
and re-maneuvers it.
Where do you see that happening today?
You know, it takes the language and literally uses it to mean the opposite but then puts
out such a cultural push to reverse it.
Almost like a dark enlightenment of some sort.
Almost.
I think we have some posts about that.
About that.
One or two.
Who knows.
But so, he wasn't calling for censorship, right?
Just like the left wasn't calling for censorship.
The left was calling for balance.
So Powell asked for balance.
He didn't demand that there be propaganda.
He was just asking for fairness and equal time.
Fairness and balance?
I wonder where we're going to find that.
Fair and balanced.
Especially in news sources.
He knew that a naked call for corporate domination of these American institutions would be rejected
out of hand and should have been, right?
Instead, he frames this project as a defensive measure.
It's just an effort to create a level playing field for business in an anti-business world.
So this sort of rhetorical ninja move was really effective, honestly.
It gave sort of a respectable, almost like civic minded public face to a terrible plan
to build a parallel ecosystem of ideas, media, legal power, designed not to create a healthy
debate, but to win the debate by overwhelming the opposition with a tidal wave of well-funded,
highly coordinated messaging, and a whole lot of propaganda shared through social media
by Boomer.
Maybe that last part was my own editorial comment.
Now, give equal time to the other side.
Exactly.
Got to give equal time.
He mailed this memo in August of 1971.
It quickly spread through the entirety of Congress and was leaked very, very quickly.
Two months later, actually, Nixon himself nominated him to the Supreme Court.
It sounds like Nixon not only read it, but loved it and was like, "We got to do this,"
ASAP, and immediately nominated him to the Supreme Court.
So the memo, it technically remained confidential.
What that meant was, the government couldn't put it out officially, but it was being leaked
through multiple sources.
And so it didn't actually come to light during the confirmation hearings because confirmation
hearings are public meetings.
If something is marked confidential, it cannot be revealed in open.
The judge can see it, but there is no judge in this case.
The judge, ultimately, is the Senate and is Congress.
So it wasn't until, actually, officially, September of 1972, that a journalist, Jack
Anderson, actually got hands on a physical copy and exposed it to the world.
He, Jack, called it, or Mr. Anderson, I don't know, whatever.
But Mr. Anderson sounds weird.
It sounds like I'm in the Matrix.
Mr. Anderson called it a blueprint for an assault by big business on its critics.
But surprisingly, and I don't know how this didn't happen, but this public exposure didn't
actually kill the plan.
It supercharged it.
It became a rallying cry in boardrooms across America immediately.
So phase one, the 70s, they mobilized.
Tell us about it, Will.
Well, by the end of 1973, there was a task force stacked with executives from companies
like GE and General Motors, public enemy number one of Ralph Nader.
They had translated it into a concrete action plan.
They basically filled in the bullet points.
The numbers tell you everything, from 1974 to 1980, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doubled
its membership and tripled its budget.
That's fast.
That's in the pre-internet days, folks.
I mean that's not a small thing.
In six years, that's 26 minutes in internet time.
That's right.
In 1972, they formed the Business Roundtable, which is a nice dressing for basically a lobbying
group entirely composed of CEOs from the largest companies, which is designed to bring maximum
pressure on Washington.
So basically, this is all the powerful heads of the most powerful companies all coming
together to get their stories aligned and basically pressure Washington to get on board
or get out of their way.
The number of corporations with their own registered lobbying offices in D.C. exploded.
Remember you were talking about lobbyists.
The days before this lobbying was that backroom kind of deal.
This is where lobbyists went mainstream.
Exactly.
This was sort of that pivotal moment where lobbying went from something you did through
protests and through civil action to "we pay people now to hound these elected leaders
relentlessly."
Right, and either make their lives miserable or make their lives so cushy they can't leave,
right, depending on which side they're on.
They went from 175 registered lobbying offices in 1971 to just one decade later, not 5x-ing,
not even 10x-ing, but up to 2,500 registered lobbying offices almost in just a decade.
It was an army of policy warriors, as one might put it.
That's what it was.
Powell mobilized an army.
The mobilization is exactly the right term.
These people were out there writing laws and submitting them to senators and congresspeople
for them to submit on their behalf by funding their campaigns, by giving them RVs if you're
a member of the Supreme Court, by giving them fancy dinners, huge vacations, you name it.
There's almost no limitation at this point because lobbying before then was really such
a grassroots kind of thing.
These people didn't have money.
They had time.
Now it's the businesses funding it.
They have the money.
And the time and the resources and everything else they need.
Exactly.
So, why don't you tell us about how this ecosystem of influence developed from there?
Yeah, so this wasn't just about adding lobbyists to Washington really.
Following the blueprint put out by this memo, the business community actually build this
giant interconnected megalith ecosystem of institutions and corporations and businesses
specifically designed to fight and win the war of ideas on every single front.
1973, the Heritage Foundation, our favorite new one, was directly born out of this new
business activist movement inspired by the Powell Memorandum.
It was created in 1973 by conservative activists, Paul Weirich and Edwin Fuehlner, with seed
money from the brewing magnet Joseph Coor and tens of millions more from billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife.
Their main goal was to create a conservative version of the respected Brookings Institution,
but with a crucial difference.
The Heritage Foundation didn't want to create these dense academic books and studies that
gathered dust on shelves.
They wanted to be marketers.
They were the first, I guess, admin of the political space.
It produced basically short, punchy, easy to read, easy to digest backgrounders that
they called them, and policy papers designed to be read by busy congressmen either on the
way to a floor vote or a quick gaze in the toilet room.
So it's masterpiece from the 1981 Mandate for Leadership.
Now, this is a 3000 page document, a 20 volume report.
So even though they said they didn't want to create these large academic texts, they did,
and they still do.
I did not read this 3000 page report, it's 20 volumes.
It has 2000 specific policy recommendations for the Reagan administration.
So again, where does this sound familiar?
1981 Mandate for Leadership was essentially Project 2025, but for Reagan.
So it was Project 1980.
I did have AI summarize it.
It is essentially every building block that led to Project 2025.
It's a playbook for the Reagan Revolution.
Reagan was so impressed that he actually had printed and bound a copy to every member of
his cabinet.
At the end of the first year in office, 60% of the proposals from that Mandate for Leadership
had been implemented or initiated.
This direct pipeline of influence continues right now in Project 2025.
That's incredible.
It's insane that Project 2025 started in 1971.
Right.
But really in 1981, with the Heritage Foundation making this happen and the right person and
the right amount of money to put this on the president's desk and the president to buy
it wholesale.
It was awful and it still is.
The next, the American Legislative Exchange Council called ALEC also in 1973.
This was a bill mill.
Literally exactly what it is.
The Heritage, you know, was the idea factory.
It was the marketing arm.
ALEC was an assembly line for turning those ideas into laws.
Right.
It was also co-founded by Paul Weirich in 1973.
ALEC's creation has actually been attributed also back to the MIMO's influence.
It operates as this undercover Black Ops pay to play operation where corporate lobbyists
and state senators meet behind closed doors away from the public to vote as equals on
pre-written model bills.
News paying corporations from fossil fuel giants, pharmaceutical companies, private prison operations,
they all get a seat at the table to draft legislation that serves their bottom line.
And these legislators then take these corporate approved bills back to their home states, introduce
them often word for word, copy for copy, verbatim as their own work.
I imagine they probably have a style guide.
This is even still happening today.
Oh, I'm sure.
It's like the APA guidelines is the new ALEC guide.
I'm sure hell.
I'm sure they've co-opted the tech billionaires, that it's basically just mad libs for horrible
causes.
Exactly.
You just plug in your tax breaks and your pork and you get a bill.
Exactly.
Good.
Done.
Basically, let's run through some of ALEC's worst, I guess, greatest hits.
Worst greatest hits.
Is that a thing?
If by hits you mean economic attacks, then yes, greatest hits.
The first they gave us is actually the Castle Doctrine.
You might know this as the Stand Your Ground laws.
This was pushed directly by the National Rifle Association and was adopted by-
Of course, how is it to stand your ground?
Exactly.
If you don't have a gun.
I mean-
Right.
Adopted in dozens of states.
It was to keep guns from being regulated.
So you can kill people willy-nilly as long as they're on your property.
I can remember when I was back in the day, when I was in my more conservative days, being
told that if a burglar is breaking into your house, shoot them and drag them across your
door and the police won't even ask.
Right.
I remember hearing also ideally, shoot them dead so that they don't have any-
They can't sue you.
They can't turn around and sue you.
Yeah, obviously, that-
I remember that burglar, it was because of that burglar that I don't even know if it's
urban legend, but a burglar broke into some lady's house through the skylight and-
Broke his leg.
Fell on a knife.
I see.
Yeah, okay.
It was.
It fell on a knife and it damaged his leg.
He ended up losing a portion of his leg and then sued the lady and won.
So, that was something that they used.
Also next, they wrote the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.
Now, this is actually a favorite of the fossil fuel industry that they've now rebranded,
I believe, as the energy industry that reclassifies peaceful pipeline protest as felonies with
draconian penalties.
Versions of that law have passed in at least 19 states.
I mean, you can guess who they are.
It's like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida,
it's all the ones you think.
They're also behind the very cleverly named Asbestos Transparency Act, which actually
makes it harder for dying mesothelioma patients to sue the corporations that poisoned them
by forcing them through a bureaucratic maze.
That's currently law in 12 states.
Basically, funded a giant pool of money and you basically got to buy your way out of any
future lawsuits as long as you're willing to put up the right amount and then they divvy
it out.
And surprised there's not enough to go around.
Imagine.
That's just to start.
ALEC has actually produced thousands of model bills, including ones we're seeing passed
almost every day now by executive order to weaken unions, cut corporate taxes, privatize
public schools, rollback environmental protections, and restrict voting rights.
Do you want to tell us about the next one, Will?
I think Legal Foundation, these are the legal eagles of the movement.
Basically this is the counter to groups like the Sierra Club.
You're so familiar with their protests and their work in the courtrooms.
This is the counter to them.
This is their counterinsurgency, so to speak.
The first conservative public interest law firm created specifically an account of groups
like the Sierra Club and they basically explicitly quoted, they again took words right out of
Powell's memo at length as their founding doctrine.
And their mission is to use a pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda in the courtroom to
litigate that agenda in those courtrooms that we're trying to stack in the favor of business.
And it's actually won 18 of the 20 cases it's argued before the Supreme Court.
That's an amazing win rate, 18 out of 20.
That's 96%, right?
90% I think.
90%.
Wow, my math is terrible today.
That's just, they're crazy.
Of course, they're smart about how they choose their cases.
They're efficient, they're good at what they do, but they've been just stunningly successful
at moving forward with their pro-business agenda and establishing presidential cases.
Right, I mean when the Supreme Court says something that's binding on the lower courts.
And so they've established these presidents-
I wonder how many court cases the ACLU has won in the Supreme Court.
I don't think it's anywhere near 90% and they are careful.
They make the same kind of choices.
They don't just take any case to the Supreme Court.
They choose their resources, but-
Let me look it up real quick.
We'll see.
Let's see.
It's not specified, however, it is known the ACLU has played a significant role in approximately
80% of the landmark cases brought before the court since its founding in 1920.
So they don't actually, I mean, I'm sure it's in the records somewhere, but I don't think
the ACLU makes a public statement about it.
If it was 90% they probably would.
I know, exactly.
If it was 90%, they would be putting that out from the rooftops.
But they've also had way more cases in general, which kind of makes sense.
If you have a lucky strike playing pool, you might win nine out of 10 games, but if you
extrapolate it over time, that percentage of luck tends to drop.
But regardless, they still have.
So ultimately, the success of the Powell memo wasn't actually in creating the memo itself,
right?
It wasn't even in, it wasn't even in writing it.
It's really the fact that he fostered and integrated a self-reinforcing ecosystem for creating,
spreading and defending conservative policy throughout the U.S. since 1971.
A corporation like ExxonMobil, right, can completely fund a study at the Heritage Foundation
that questions climate science, period.
But Heritage will take that and turn it into a policy brief.
ALEC, funded by Exxon, uses the brief to draft a model bill repealing clean energy standards.
Then an ALEC legislator introduces the bill.
Then the Chamber of Commerce lobbies for the bill.
And if the law is challenged, the Pacific Legal Foundation steps in to defend it before
a judge from the Federalist Society who is philosophically inclined to oppose the regulatory
state.
It's literally a closed loop system for laundering corporate money and influence into public
policy.
This is automation before AI.
Exactly.
It's, I mean, give credit where credit is due.
It is the perfect execution of what Powell laid out in his diatribe of United Action.
It is an entire factory that just does this.
So the results of this now coming upon half of a century campaign has entirely reshaped
the American political landscape and more than just political, socioeconomic, the wealth
inequality, equality, civil rights.
So the rise of corporate speech, right?
Powell himself, from his seat on the Supreme Court, began protecting and redefining corporate
money as protected speech.
He authored the 1978 majority opinion in the First National Bank of Boston versus Bellotti,
who for the first time granted corporations First Amendment rights to spend money influencing
ballot initiatives.
So the next time you receive a phone call about the next ballot initiative, realize
that this is a direct result of this memo and this corporate speech case that he championed
on the Supreme Court while he was a justice.
It was the first legal step that created the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decisions
decades later.
So this is where Citizens United even comes from.
And we know, anybody who is, let's say a leftist, knows the Ronald Reagan thing, the Citizens
United thing.
I haven't met one person in caulking that knows about the Powell memo and how all this
came to be, which is why I really, really felt passionate about this podcast today.
To be fair, I mean, there are some people who challenge the idea that the Powell memo
is the source of all of this.
People will say it was all in play, but nowhere is there articulated such a clear vision and
no other document is quoted at length in the founding documents of groups like Alec.
There's just so much evidence of it out there and nobody's talking about it.
And even if it is just a distillation of corporate thought that was happening at the time, it's
still a distillation versus random rumblings, right?
That could be directly action.
And all parts of it have been executed.
I mean, it really crossed the board.
Exactly.
The next one, deregulation, that was a big part of it.
The Powell network performed an act of jiu-jitsu politically in the 70s.
There was actually a bipartisan kind of left leaning movement to deregulate industries
like trucking and airlines.
And it was based on the argument that regulatory agencies had been captured by big business
to stifle competition.
But the conservative movement actually seized on this popular anti-government sentiment
and then cleverly shifted the target.
They conflated economic deregulation with a war on social regulation.
Basically the rules that protect public health, worker safety, and the environment, right?
Like reframing all government oversight as a drag on the economy because of the government
oversight on these two specific industries that seem to be stifling competition.
And that's why even today, I mean, it's part of the cultural zeitgeist of people born in
the 80s that government regulation has stifled businesses from doing what they needed to
be successful.
We constantly hear it promoted by Fox News, by Newsmax, by all these other organizations.
The ideas that were even promoted by this network, right, sort of created the beginnings
of the idea of supply side or trickle down economics, right?
Obviously, it became national policy under Reagan and we credit that to Reagan because
it led to massive tax cuts for corporations, and that led to massive tax cuts for the rich.
And it was a full-scale assault on labor, organized labor, and the beginning of the rise in economic
inequality, inequality, un equality, too.
Union membership, a key source of the kind of countervailing power to protect people
from corporations, plummeted 20% in the workforce in 1983 to 10.1% by 2022.
It halved in the last 40 years.
And that's not because things got so good for workers, they didn't feel like they needed
to do this anymore.
Exactly.
In the meantime, worker production was increasing exponentially because of innovation.
His judicial revolution to reshape judges and courts had the fruits of the rise of the
Federalist Society and the doctrine of originalism.
It was promoted heavily during the Reagan administration.
It was the idea that originalism provided the intellectual framework for appointing
a generation of conservative judges committed to rolling back the legacy of the Warren Court
and interpreting the Constitution in a way that is consistently favorable to corporate
power and hostile to regulation.
Where do you also see that?
They're starting to win, and we're seeing them win even now, the culture war.
Powell's fight for balance in textbooks and on campuses, it hasn't ended.
It hasn't gone anywhere.
And yeah, it sat beside in the wings for a little while during the 90s.
We all remember it.
We imagined a better world into the 2000s and then the dot com bubble.
But it evolved into this modern culture war over everything, everything, critical race
theory.
It was a war for LGBTQIA+ rights with organizations like the Heritage Foundation providing every
single talking point and policy proposal for this war on woke ideology in American education.
That's why if you turn to Fox News and you turn to Newsmax and you look at the boomers
on Facebook and the cesspool of Twitter, formerly known as Twitter X, it's the exact same points.
Like sometimes verbatim, right?
Sometimes bullet pointed verbatim as arguments because that's what they've heard.
They've heard it parroted at them time and time and time again.
But look, Lewis Powell is garbage, but he got his wish.
He got it.
Business organized together.
It has fought a long, patient, and brutally effective war on every front that Powell identified
in that original memo.
So the result is not a conspiracy.
It's a curriculum.
It's a business plan.
It's a framework.
It's a blueprint that succeeded beyond Powell's entire imagination.
We were never the target audience for the Powell memo, right?
Like it wasn't written for us, but we've all been subjected to it.
I'll try a different analogy or metaphor for this.
It's the DNA of a parasite that has been feeding off of the American people for the past few
decades and has now possibly done its host in and is now seeking to expand to the globe.
Because it was never going to be satisfied.
The parasite has grown larger than its host and its host is depleted.
Yeah.
So what does a parasite do when that happens?
It moves on to a new host and guess who that's going to be?
It's still going to be us.
Until our husk is drained of all life-giving fluids.
All nutrients.
Yeah, all nutrient value.
Yes.
But there will be others and then we're starting to see that now, right?
The corporations that are outgrowing their countries are happening everywhere.
Unfortunately, this playbook was copied by others playing their own games, their own political
war games.
And it turned out to be successful.
It's happening now in Germany with AFD.
It's happening in Australia.
It's happening in Belgium.
I mean, with Ertistan, it's happening everywhere around the globe right now because they found
success.
They found a winning formula, but it's not over.
Not as long as we're here with a voice.
That's not really the conclusion of the podcast today is not, "Oh, look how horrible this is.
It sucks."
Here's what it is.
One guy... one guy wrote a 34 page letter to a group that proliferated it through society.
That's why you see all the pundits, all the commentators, all of the right wing media...
or left wing media saying, "We need someone.
We need someone to stand up, take a cohesive vision and share it and spread it."
I challenge if to... especially to all of the leftist people who are listening to our
podcast, I challenge you please, I understand the necessity to gatekeep, to keep people
because of whatever.
And look, I do it.
I'm guilty of it.
I'm not a fan of Gavin Newsom.
I think he is part of the corporate demagoguery that the left has essentially become or the
democratic party has essentially become.
I am a progressive period.
I think that if we have a person with... and look, we know on the left there's a whole
lot of really genius political minds out there that puts forward a plan, even if you don't
like the face of the plan or the person delivering it, let's put something together and take
action together and make a change that dismantles this utter machine of turds that the right
wing has put together over the last 40 years.
45 now, right?
Has it been 45?
No, not since...
I did my math earlier.
55.
55 years.
Yeah.
Will pre does his math.
I do it on the fly.
55 years.
55 years that they've had their way and have sat by.
We might be able to turn it around sooner because the left is better at what?
The internet.
We're better at almost everything dealing with communications because for us it happens
organically.
Anyway, that is where I hope we can find the overlap in our next venture from here.
Where do we go from here?
I really hope we can.
You think we can?
Well, I think we can.
I'm always the optimist.
I think we can do it.
It's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be fun, but it can be done.
Look, you're going to have to swallow things you don't like.
It sucks.
It's like medicine, right?
Like medicine tastes terrible, but we know it's going to make us better.
If we can find that plan, and maybe that's democratic socialism, maybe that's something
else that none of us have ever heard of before, but it takes us being open and receptive.
Then, jumping on it because it's left of where we are right now until a better one comes
along.
I've heard one of the best analogies for this, and I genuinely love this analogy because
I think it fits so well.
A political candidate is not a car to your destination.
It's a bus that's heading in the direction that you need to go in.
It's not a last mile service.
Well, it is a last mile service.
It's not a less step service.
It's a last mile service.
Find a bus that's going in your direction.
If that's democratic socialism, awesome.
If that's democracy, awesome.
If that's the Democratic party, great.
If that's the Republican party, you're listening to the wrong show.
I'm sure there's plenty of Charlie Kirk's out there that are happy to give you all of
the wins that you guys have been racking up.
Yeah.
I'm not going to give you equal time here.
You don't deserve the equal time.
You've had 55 years and it's not going great for the rest of us.
So is it going great for you?
I doubt it.
It's going great for a lot of rich people.
It's not going great for you.
As always, as I am required to do by the contract that we wrote ourselves and agreed to at the
beginning, please check out our social media sites.
Are available through Blue Sky.
We are available through Mastodon.
You can go to our website, fof.foundation@https://fof.foundation.
Make sure you check us out there.
You can send us an email to overlappodcast@fof.foundation.
We will get that email and be happy to return your email if you have questions, comments,
concerns.
Will, thank you for being here with me today.
Thank you for having me here today as always.
Of course.
We hope that you will like and subscribe, give us a rating, tell us what you think, share
us with a friend that you think would really benefit from this podcast if you specifically
connected with it.
Or we taught you something that you didn't know before.
That is the overlap for this week's episode and we wish you the best.
Have a good one.
See you next time.
Bye.
[Music]