The film, The Brainwashing of My Dad, gave an extensive background on right-wing extremism in America.
During the 1960s the student movement in the US and the hippie’s movement, had achieved remarkable changes in American and Canadian youth. I must confess I was a part of that movement in a small way. This movement was highly successful at promoting opposition to the War in Vietnam and the hippy life of freedom, drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Some of my friends were amazingly successful at this while I was a sad sack hanger on. Poor me.
The corporate elites in North America were keen on fighting back. From their point of view, backlash was in order. They focused a lot on a memo created by a Richmond attorney who sent a confidential memo to his friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce decrying possible threats to the American free-market system by unruly mobs of miscreants. This has been called, Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s “manifesto” and it figured in prominently as the impetus behind big business lobbying in America’s money-fueled politics. Powell was a lawyer who later became a judge of the US Supreme Court.
The memo, which has become known as the “Powell Manifesto,” among other names, which he wrote before Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court and while he was still in private legal practice in Richmond Virginia.
In uncompromising words, Powell’s memorandum urged American business leaders to unite to defend their interests. As if they really needed defending. He felt that the “American economic system is under broad attack.” Powell also wrote. “ … The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” He decried this unfortunate circumstance and begged his fellow captains of industry to resist the left-wing hordes and unwashed masses.
He pointed to causes of this malaise that included environmental groups, consumer-rights organizations like those led by Ralph Nader, and a society that he feared was headed for socialism and away from free enterprise. He was also alarmed by acts of violence against business interests which he believed were on the rise.
Jeff Cohen, a former Fox broadcaster, interviewed by Jen Senko for the film, called this memo a symbol of the backlash. As Noam Chomsky also told her, about Powell, “he claimed that the whole country was being taken over by the radical left.” Exactly what Donald Trump has been doing since at least 2024.
Powell said in the memo that American businessmen had to support efforts to get conservative professors appointed in influential universities to teach the values of American business. He said we have to establish our own research organizations to promulgate our views. As a result, a vast array of American right-wing think tanks were born such as the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, the Center for the National Interest and many others, usually with innocuous sounding names that masked their true nature.
They also started journals and publishing houses to publish their views.
They also wanted to buy media to get out their views. This was probably the most effective part of that campaign. This led to the boom in right-wing talk radio nationally and across the country in every locale. Ultimately this led directly to the biggest media of them all—Fox News Channel.
The Powell Memo was extremely influential affecting politics, judicial law, and media and education. To a very significant extent it has helped to create our modern polarized world. For quite some time it was the political Bible of the extreme right in America.