The Powell memorandum impacted law, media, business, politics and education, in many ways.

The groups had meetings where issues of all kinds that were important to those on the right could be discussed. The issues ranged from fur trade commission, restricting rights of gays and lesbians and their ilk, de-regulation of businesses, gun deregulation, anti-tax, anti-immigrants, pro-lifers, evangelicals and many more.  Many of those issues are still important issues, except perhaps the fur trade. The genius of the meetings was that they provided a broad tent where all kinds of people appeared who often did not agree with each other on much, but they learned to like each and spread their respective gospels. These meetings benefited many right-wing groups.

Conservative think tanks exploded around the country. The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973, 2 years after the Powell memorandum was created.

One thing these groups established was balance in the media.  In other words, media need no longer be objective, as had always been the goal, now instead, media would be balanced. For example, if a newspaper wanted to cover the issue of climate change it must give an opportunity to both sides of the debate to be heard. This sounds pretty good, but it had flaws. For example, even if 99% of scientists agreed that climate change was real and was caused by activities of humans, if a media outlet wanted to report on the issue it had to give a platform for both sides. This gave far too much weight to crackpot ideas often funded by industries affected, such as the oil and gas sector. They managed to have their minority views get equal time with independent science. As a result these views received much more attention than they should have received. “Balance” really did not work well in practice.

In fact, this helped to establish the age of extremism and polarization in which we now live.

There was a large group of meetings led by Grover Norquist who founded Americans for Tax Reform and The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation to lobby governments to reduced taxes on wealthy business people and provided education opportunities for people with the right views.

When Hillary Clinton complained about “a vast right-wing conspiracy” she actually had a point. When you look at the vast number of right-wing organizations from legal foundations to media organizations, to think tanks, to advocacy groups, and many others, the network was indeed vast. Some called the Norquist Meetings the headquarters of the right-wing conspiracy. Personally, I don’t like to call this movement a conspiracy, but it was clearly a growing movement, well-funded and supported by American business interests.