INTRODUCTION
To the uninitiated, the flurry of landmark Supreme Court rulings in the last decade might seem like the result of either really bad luck or really excellent timing, depending on one’s politics: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the end of affirmative action and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the dawn of unfettered executive power and the championing of the Second Amendment in the face of unprecedented and extreme gun violence, among other landmark decisions. The vacancies that led to this conservative majority—Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg—were at once inevitable and utterly random, coming one after another like a series of falling dominoes. Conservatives, you might think, just got the better end of the pendulum swing of fate. After all, you can bet on the corporeal body giving way, but who can know when? (The fact that so much of our path forward as a nation depends on the coronary arteries of seventy-nine-year-olds is the topic of another book, at another time.)
But to suggest that the conservative dominance on the highest court in the land is merely a function of timing is to ignore the formidable organization and decades-long strategy that led to this extraordinary rightward swing, one that has forever changed the course of history. From race to gender to religion, the Roberts Court has done more to reshape American life than any institution in the last half century. And indeed, its work warrants thinking in centuries, not decades, because the conservative movement has been fighting this war since the civil rights era, and perhaps even before that.
This book is the story of the men from the shadows who brought our country and its courts this moment, a group of unlikely brothers-in-arms who came from points east, west, and in between, in a harebrained plot to retake the country. It chronicles a ragtag group of outliers who really had no business thinking, in the last days of disco, that America was headed anywhere but a place with more freedom and fewer strictures. They were at times deluded and irrational, they made massive mistakes and very big bets. They were selfish, they ignored culture and even the sentiments of their own party to continue their work, undeterred. In the end, they were staggeringly successful, even though most of them never lived to see their own victories.
I wrote this book to better understand how it is, at the end of the first quarter of this century, that we find America in reverse: unwinding not just the progress of the 1960s and 1970s, but the very embrace of liberalism that championed a more equitable society. How did this happen? There are, arguably, several places to start looking for the seeds of this particular harvest, but the courts—with their unilateral power so fundamentally at odds with democracy itself—to me seemed the most relevant. What follows is a recounting of the strange personalities and discreet decisions that led the country to a political reckoning that most everyone never saw coming.
1
Election Day in California, November 8, 1966, was the beginning of something. A Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan had claimed victory against the rising liberal tide. Reagan spoke to conservatives all over the Golden State, brought them out in droves, and led them en masse to elect him the governor of California, with more than 57 percent of the vote. It was an absolute rout. People would tell you a story about the direction of this country, the inexorable drift toward a more pluralistic society, where the strictures of the past—traditions, to people like Joe Coors and Ronald Reagan—were falling away, in favor of equity and inclusion.
But a different story was being written by these men. For a time, it was merely a fantasy about what this country might become if it didn’t abandon the things that had made it great. An alternative, conservative America where rules and institutions—the norms they believed had built this country—were preserved, even strengthened. An America that embraced Christian values as central to its existence. But first, the country would have to be steered away from the precipice toward which she was heading. And so, over the next two decades, Coors and his allies would expend energy and power and money—so much money—making sure this fantasy, their vision for the country, became reality.
* * *
At the end of the decade, in 1969, Joe Coors gave a commencement address at the Colorado School of Mines (where he served as director) and railed against those who had deemed America some kind of “sick society.” In particular, he focused on “the vocal minority among the youth, the educators, and the news media.” Collectively, he asserted, it was these people who were the sick ones—“promoting obscenity, drug use, atheism, and unrestricted freedom from any kind of control or order.”
Coors was not alone in believing that the country was at a crossroads and that liberal elites, journalists, and young people were agents of destruction. It was why Coors would run for a spot on the board of regents at the University of Colorado. But the seed of this paranoia was planted earlier—back in California. The student-led sit-ins and faculty support of the nascent Free Speech Movement that had taken place five years prior—at Berkeley—were a signal moment for conservatives fearful of institutional decline at the hands of radical liberal elites. The demonstrations became a Rosetta stone for the right-wing movement that would coalesce two decades later.
On December 2, 1964, nearly two thousand students at the University of California, Berkeley, organized as the Free Speech Movement and staged a sit-in at Sproul Hall, demanding greater freedom for political speech and organization on campus. It was a largely peaceful protest: There were folk songs, a special Hannukah service, and teaching assistants held “freedom classes.” A socialist riot this was not.
But if you were a man like Coors, this takeover was anarchy. It was what he would later term “unrestricted freedom from any kind of control or order.” Berkeley represented the degradation of American society, and it demanded a powerful response. For Ed Meese and Joe Coors alike, Berkeley was an expression of the restive liberalism that was destroying the America they knew—and that needed to be quelled at all costs.
Meese was a product of California before it became California. Before it was the Beach Boys and Haight-Ashbury and Joan Didion, before it was Bikram and beatniks and Dog Town. Before Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. In Meese’s childhood, Oakland was still White. Meese’s Glenview neighborhood was a close-knit community of German immigrants, many of them members of the Zion Lutheran Church, where Meese’s great-grandfather had been the first president of the congregation. The church, like the neighborhood, was known for its insularity—an institution that was characterized by its strict adherence to the Bible and a rigid religious hierarchy.
Generations of Meeses had attended this church, and generations of Meeses had lived in its neighborhood. Theirs was a circumscribed existence where Meese’s great-grandparents lived within a six-block radius of his grandparents—who, in turn, lived next door to their children. But this life, a closed loop of limited frontiers and homogeneous characters, wasn’t something to be fixed or rebelled against. White monoculture was their source of strength.
And so, when a wave of Black migration—what came to be known as the Second Great Migration—began in the 1940s and saw nearly three million Black Americans flee the brutality and inequities of Jim Crow for points North, East, and West, the Meese homestead was rocked. Their Oakland, once snugly the home of White, German American Meeses who ran the Mayonnaise Department at Durkee’s, was becoming something else—quickly.
Black men began to arrive in Oakland in large numbers during World War II, working at the Naval Air Station Alameda. And when they weren’t assisting in America’s war effort, building war machines to defeat fascism, they—and their families—went to worship. The flock of the Zion Lutheran Church grew—and it changed.
Initially, the church accommodated its new members of color by holding segregated services. Black parishioners attended in the morning, and Whites went later in the afternoon, “after they’d aired the church out,” according to Bishop Will Herzfeld, whose Bethlehem church eventually came to occupy the Zion Lutheran plot. But there was a wartime labor shortage, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order directing federal contractors to integrate their workforces—which meant tens of thousands of new jobs for people who didn’t necessarily have to be White.
Oakland was growing darker: Middle-class Whites like the Meeses now lived alongside middle-class Blacks. And while in other parts of the country, in other times, this might be considered progress—if not the explicit goal of a pluralistic society—in the insular world of the Mayonnaise Department–managing, third-generation White German Meeses … it was not. The church could not abide this kind of change, no matter how many hours you scheduled for the pews to air out. So the Zion Lutheran Church closed its doors and moved up … and away. Away from the Black people, the urban chaos, from what might otherwise be called progress.
The church reestablished itself in the smaller, “closely-knit” White community of Piedmont, which was, incidentally, closer to where the Meese family now lived. The Los Angeles Times described this new location as “perched on a scarred rocky hillside like a small medieval cloister,” which gives you a good idea how interested the parish was in integration. The values of the church were the values of its worshippers, and this is how Ed Meese grew up: honoring tradition and fearing change.
By the time Meese finished law school at the University of California, Berkeley, he had already completed two years of military service, mostly working in intelligence. Though he would eventually become the country’s top lawyer in the Reagan administration, Meese’s infatuation with law enforcement would be lifelong. Meese collected miniature squad cars and action figures in the shape of pigs—a proto-troll of the sixties longhairs. When he married his high school sweetheart, Ursula (herself a deputy probation officer), the two abandoned their planned honeymoon at Lake Tahoe and headed down to Los Angeles where—according to his own biography, Ed and Ursie “checked out the new police station.”
This gave rise to a myth that Ed Meese had spent his honeymoon in an LAPD squad car—which, in the end, wasn’t so far from the truth.
Meese, by constitution, was not a threatening presence. He was, according to Ethan Bronner in Battle for Justice, “genuinely liked by those around him. He was, in fact, felt to be an unusually dear and gentle man,” the kind of guy who engaged equally with drivers and secretaries, FBI agents and presidents. But Meese’s gentility did not extend to his professional strategies.
As the 1964 Berkeley protests unfolded, Meese was serving as the deputy district attorney for Alameda County and had positioned himself as a close ally of the county’s police department. If he wasn’t collecting pig figurines and miniature squad cars, Meese fed his police obsession by joining officers for their area ride-arounds. Not surprisingly, Meese was early to the scene of the Berkeley protests and very quickly advised the governor, Pat Brown (father to Jerry), that “the people in the building should be arrested and taken out of there” and that “if they were allowed to stay, there would be another mob scene, even bigger, the next day.”
Meese made sure that the police response to the hippies was swift, tactical, and unforgiving. Credit this to his background in military intelligence or his zeal for the “hands-on” part of law enforcement, or simply just to his profound aversion to counterculture happenings, but with Ed Meese involved, the protest movement was going to be crushed.
Meese personally joined the police in arresting protesters, which surely brought him some measure of personal satisfaction, given the fact that he decorated his office with a collection of toy squad cars and mini police pigs. He ordered police to target the leaders of the Free Speech Movement and arrest them first, leaving the movement directionless. Using the new technology of the day, Meese had officers take Polaroid photos of the protesters on-site, to obviate their defense claims at trial. He directed officers to focus arrests in the early morning hours, when there were fewer onlookers—as well as fewer reporters who might document what was happening.
When the student defendants finally reached the courtroom, Meese was unrelenting in his prosecution. Bettina Aptheker, one of the heads of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and a member of the Communist Party, recalls a brutal and extensive cross examination from Meese. “He was a McCarthyite,” she recalled, “a vicious anti-communist. He was hostile and aggressive.”
Aptheker was only twenty years old at the time and said that Meese “went after me incessantly.”
Meese’s disdain for the Free Speech Movement was profound: At one point during the trial, he described a sit-in as a “paramilitary operation.” Even the judge became impatient with Meese’s extended grilling sessions and told him just to move on. The district attorney at the time, Lowell Jensen, found the whole thing uncomfortable, according to Aptheker. Meese’s hostility to the liberals was unusual, even for the DA’s office.
But there was one figure who looked at the way in which the Berkeley liberals were rounded up and brought to heel … and saw something to admire: Ronald Reagan. In in his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, one of Reagan’s promises was to “clean up the mess in Berkeley.” And by 1969, he had just the man to do it: Ed Meese.
Meese was installed as Governor Reagan’s chief of staff when another wave of Berkeley protests erupted in People’s Park in May 1969. When thousands of students began protesting the takeover of a campus park, the scene erupted into violence. Under Meese’s direction, Governor Reagan ordered riot police to stamp out the uprising. According to Rolling Stone, Meese “called on the county to send in the reserves. Nearly 800 officers responded, dressed in riot gear, many with badges obscured to hide their identity, went after the protesters with nightsticks swinging.”
This time, the response turned deadly: As police opened fire with bird- and buckshot, one protester—James Rector—was killed, one blinded, and another nearly bled to death. Meese was later quoted as saying, “James Rector deserved to die.”
The protest would be known as Bloody Thursday.
Clearly, the collateral damage and loss of life did not dissuade Meese from believing that liberalism represented a grave threat to society—nor did it create any daylight between Meese and the man he worked for. In many ways, Berkeley—and all that it represented in terms of counterculture and the left—served to unify Reagan and Meese, their shared disdain a tie that would bind. Here was the place where one of the most fruitful political partnerships of the twentieth century would begin, between the highest office-holder in the country—Ronald Reagan—and the man who would help transform American society, decades after the death of the president he served.
2
Wham! and Pac-Man and the brick-sized cellphones would come later. Nineteen-eighty was still very much the late seventies, and that much was apparent nearly a decade later, on a different Election night, with much higher stakes. Patti Davis, Reagan’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter, wore a black halter dress with a gold lamé belt—a disco ensemble for the era’s last days. The expectation that this election would be close, that it would be a long night, was dead wrong: The Democrats were walloped. The Republican party, with Ronald Reagan at the helm, had won in a landslide.
By the time Governor Reagan took the podium in Los Angeles that evening at 8 p.m., Pacific Time, the results showed a decisive victory. At one point in the middle of his speech, campaign staffers brought out a replica of the United States that looked more like a sheet cake than any sort of informational tool. The states—not all of them, but most—were marked with flags for Reagan. It was a declaration as much as it was data: This was his country now.
Ed Meese, after working in the governor’s office, had become the Reagan campaign’s chief of staff, and it was Meese who led the transition, closing the proverbial door behind Carter’s shell-shocked Democrats and welcoming in the Reagan generation. This was not a small operation—what hostile takeover was? In his employ, Meese had over one thousand transition staffers: 311 of them on the federal payroll, 331 working for a symbolic one-dollar salary, the rest a volunteer army. Meese would need the manpower, because as far as the new Reagan agenda was concerned, there was no curbing expectations. Conservative activists and donors, the right wing that had been—for decades—marginalized for its fusty, retrograde agenda, had suddenly found themselves the apex predators, ready to grind to gristle anything that threatened its habitat or stood in its way.
But as the incoming Reagan staffers sharpened their pencils, moved their desks into position, and hung their framed news clippings on the walls, a silent battle soon began playing out inside the party, one that would reverberate within the halls of the White House. If the Reagan Revolution brought Republicans into power in January 1981, it remained an open question as to what, exactly, they would do with it—what kind of conservatism would dominate this decade and beyond? The fight between establishment Republicans and a new breed of conservative warrior would dominate much of Reagan’s early tenure, and to stay alive—to ensure another term for both himself and the movement he ushered in—Reagan needed to make strategic choices to appease both wings of the Grand Old Party. This would be … complicated.
Meese was at one end of the Republican spectrum, and on the other was James Baker, the man who had run George H. W. Bush’s rival—and moderate—presidential campaign in 1980. There was a reason for this. Meese, rumpled but righteous, was seen by First Lady Nancy Reagan as too extreme to lead her Ronny’s White House. According to Michael Deaver, Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, the first lady thought Meese dangerously delusional about the crusade, a “jump-off-the-cliff-with-the-flag-flying conservative.”
Both Reagans were products of Hollywood, and they aimed to cast their staff accordingly. Meese and his collection of little piggies, his rat’s nest of an office (“papers on his chair, on the floor, everywhere,” according to future political consultant Stuart Spencer) would not do. Baker—a tennis-playing Princeton graduate with white-shoe law firm bona fides—looked the part, acted the part, and wasn’t a lunatic who was ready to take a flying leap in the name of the far right. So Baker rocketed to the top of the White House org chart, becoming the new president’s new chief of staff. Reagan’s loyal deputy Ed Meese, meanwhile, was named counselor to the president and given Henry Kissinger’s old corner office.
It was an awkward arrangement, and that was putting it mildly: Here was a physical manifestation of the tug-of-war between the two factions of the conservative movement. The establishment and the true believers would be forced to cohabitate under one roof at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and pretend to get along.
But if it seemed that Meese had been outmaneuvered inside the confines of the White House, if it appeared that Baker had one-upped Meese in both title and responsibilities, outside the White House, it was a different story. Meese had help. Men outside the administration who wielded considerable power in ensuring the conservative goalposts would not shift toward the center and in the direction of James Baker III and all that he represented. Deep-pocketed allies, shadowy tacticians, and commanding generals whose loyalty was to the cause that Meese called his own.
* * *
To begin with, it wasn’t just beer, it was an American legend. Brewed with water from the Rockies—the snowmelt from God’s hand that ran down through the mountains—it rushed straight into the plant in Golden, Colorado. That’s where Adolph Coors had the vision and built his business, an empire that would sustain a family fortune for generations to come. It had an origin story that was very nearly divine in its providence … because story mattered, here in America. Especially the story you told yourself—and everyone else—about how you made it.
Now by the mid-1950s, it was still a good beer, a beer that Adolph would have been proud to have his name on, and it was certainly better than the swill that the Busches were brewing. It might have gone on like that for some time—a large family brewery, shipping bottles throughout the middle west, a regional operation of some success, and not much more. But then Bill Coors introduced the aluminum can. It was lighter than the clunky steel and tin models that had been tested before the war, and it didn’t leave you with that vague taste of iron, like the old steel cans did. What’s more, the raw material itself was less expensive. And so now Coors could move—quickly and cheaply—across the United States. The company went national.
The beverage industry itself would never be the same, of course. But that was an understatement: Beer in an aluminum can was more than just new technology. It was a cultural reckoning. With it, Americans could have parties fueled by endless supplies of six-packs. Coolers could be carried around, stocked with a dozen, two dozen cans of beer, taken anywhere and kept cold until they were ready to be cracked open. Beer could be shotgunned at lightning speed, the cans piling up in the corner of a basement, or simply smashed on a forehead and thrown on the front lawn. This was America’s elixir, and the country would consume it with abandon.
So it went, the Coors legend—from mountain snowmelt to tailgate brew. Coors, in the process, made a lot of beer and a lot of money. And when it came time to spend that money, the millions made from those endless parties filled with countless aluminum cans, Joe Coors, Adolph’s grandson, knew what he wanted. The beer, after all, had an origin story that befit this great nation—with its waving wheatfields and fruited plains—and the Coors family would spend its profit off this country by trying to restore her greatness. By bringing back the American values that seemed so at odds with where this promised land appeared to be headed.
Joe Coors (sixty-two years old by the time Election night 1980 had rolled around) had witnessed the profound social change of the 1960s and he did not like it. Coors had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was not timid about trying to convince others—anyone and everyone—of its wrongness. On paydays, he and his brother, Bill, would make sure each Coors employee found literature from the John Birch Society (Joe Coors was a high-dollar donor to the organization) stuffed in an envelope, along with his check. Bill Coors urged his brew workers to call their elected representatives and voice their opposition to the destructive bill. And if this hoppy pedagogy wasn’t enough—the employer-sponsored civics lesson and free payday reading material—the Coors brothers weren’t afraid to get to the crux of the matter, to strike fear in their men’s hearts about what was to come if the liberals had their way. If you couldn’t make men fear their differences with a reasoned argument, you could always turn them against each other through naked self-interest. Warning his workers about the Civil Rights Act, Bill Coors said, “If it passes, I’m going to have to fire sixty of you and hire sixty blacks.”
That would do it.
But the liberals weren’t just railroading through a political agenda—they had captured the minds of young America. Universities had become hotbeds of revolution, filled with long-haired students who despised tradition and scorned virtue. Braless counterculture zealots aided and abetted by elitist professors who, in turn, encouraged—fomented—cultural uprising. Coors had seen the students protesting at Berkeley in 1964 and was appalled at the disrespect, the chants, the drugs. They were a danger to America, a poison from within.
And so, in 1966, Joe Coors personally got involved in the fight. He offered himself as a candidate to serve on the board of regents at the University of Colorado, vowing to use his time and his power to move the pendulum back to the right, toward tradition and values. To the America that birthed Coors beer and away from the America that might actually be drinking it.
Specifically, Coors believed the University of Colorado had become a petri dish for socialism—filled with a generation of druggy liberals who needed to be freed from their slavish devotion to civil rights and women’s liberation. This would be the foundation of Coors’s campaign for a seat on the university’s board.
Just two years earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down so-called loyalty oaths—a grave mistake, in Joe Coors’s opinion. Professors no longer had to swear off political activities, which was an abomination in the eyes of Coors and other upstanding Colorado conservatives who believed this would throw open the doors of academia to all sorts of left-wing socialist activity. Coors vowed to prevent the sixties—and their anti-American vibrations—from infecting the campus of the University of Colorado. It was a herculean task.
On November 8, 1966, Coors won his seat on the board, the same year Reagan was elected governor of California. By the start of the 1970s, Coors hired a staffer dedicated to his (and his company’s) political activism—a man named Jack Wilson. A former broadcaster from Denver, Wilson was eventually given the task of running Coors’s right- wing television station, a proto–Fox News network called Television News, Inc., aka TVN. Wilson and Coors believed legendary newsmen like Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner were “leftists” who had steered the country toward liberalism, and TVN was Coors’s attempt to rebalance the scales. Wilson, now enlisted to monitor the coverage on the network, solicited story ideas from congressional conservatives and complained sharply to Coors about the network’s coverage of Hubert Humphrey, the ACLU, and Martin Luther King Jr., who Wilson called “an avowed Communist revolutionary.”
All that complaining got Wilson a promotion to head of the network, where he reportedly told his news director, “I hate Dan Rather. I hate all those network people. They’re destroying the country. We have to unify the country. TVN is the moral cement.”
The news director, maybe unsurprisingly, wasn’t long for the job (he and Wilson, among other things, got into a fistfight), and his former position was soon filled by an up-and-coming young political operative named Roger Ailes. TVN ultimately went under, but Roger Ailes—and the vision of a right-wing news outlet to save the country from moral turpitude—would live to see another day. Wilson’s relationship with Joe Coors, however, endured beyond TVN’s failure, and he was subsequently made the beer baron’s “personal lobbyist.”
In his capacity as Coors’s personal assistant for political affairs, Wilson had been dispatched to find worthwhile conservative investments for Coors’s largesse. As part of this research, Wilson sent out letters to prominent conservative lawmakers asking if they might help guide the beer magnate toward projects that could offer a meaningful boost to the right-wing movement.
One of these letters ended up in the inbox of Colorado’s senior senator, Republican Gordon Allott. Normally, office correspondence would have been opened by Allott’s assistant, Barbara Hughes—but on this particular day, Hughes was out sick with a fever. The task of reviewing the mail thus fell to Senator Allott’s press secretary, a self-described “movement conservative” named Paul Weyrich.
Weyrich, only twenty-seven at the time, was a devotee of Senator Strom Thurmond who generally found the right wing of the late sixties and early seventies somewhat rudderless. As a young staffer on the Hill, Weyrich had witnessed what The Washington Post described as “a liberal coven on the Hill”—a gathering hosted by Democratic aides to Senators Birch Bayh, Alan Cranston, and Charles Mathias. In attendance were representatives of the Congress for Racial Equality, the Brookings Institution, and a public-interest law firm. “They literally put together a battle plan before my eyes,” he told the National Journal. “I saw the interconnection between public policy, outside groups, religious organizations, political organizations, lobbyists and the passage of a particular position in Congress.”
Copyright © 2026 by Alex Wagner
