From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, September 19th.

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

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.

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