It's the Brian Laris Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. By now we've all heard about Project 2025, the 922 page agenda published by the Conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

It's full of policy proposals designed to empower the next Republican president, as they put it,

with a plan to enact on day one of their presidency.

And although Donald Trump has denied ties to Project 2025,

there are all kinds of ties that we've talked about

in the past. But here's what we're going to talk about today. Project 2025 did not

appear out of thin air. Our next guest argues that Project 2025 stems from a decades-long plan

by what he calls a cadre of oligarchs and operatives whose agenda could only

be implemented by deregulating the campaign finance system so that cash should

cash could short-circuit democracy. The goal, he writes, destroy the legacy of the New Deal

and the Great Society. So in a new podcast called

Master Plan from the Lever, David Serota, founder and editor-in-chief of the lever, host of the

podcast Master Plan, co-creator of the movie, Don't Look Up, as somebody may know, and former

presidential campaign speechwriter

for Bernie Sanders delves into the Powell memo written by former Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell,

some of you know that name, months before his nomination to the court. Some deny the significance

of the Powell memo on current policy

and even go so far as to say the letter reads as a conspiracy theory. David joins us now to share

why he thinks we should look back at this mostly forgotten document for answers to how we got

Project 2025 and more broadly, big money influence in politics. David Serota,

welcome back to WNYC. Thanks so much for having me. So the Powell memo. When was it? What was it?

So in 1971, Lewis Powell was at the pinnacle of the establishment in American politics, head of the American Bar Association.

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