Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

A supporter of the John Birch Society, Joe Coors regarded organized labor, the civil rights movement, federal social programs, and the counterculture of the 1960s as existential threats to the way of life that had enabled him and his forebears to succeed. The Coors Brewing Company, founded in 1873 by Adolph Coors, a Prussian immigrant, was famously hostile to unions and had repeated run-ins with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which accused the company of discriminating against minority employees. Convinced that radical leftists had overrun the country, Joe Coors, the youngest grandson of the founder, became the center of controversy when as a regent at the University of Colorado he had tried to bar left-wing speakers, faculty, and students on campus. His attempt to require faculty to take a pro-American loyalty oath was defeated by the other regents. Enraged that his own son had become a hippie at the school, he railed during a commencement address against “pleasure-minded parasites…living off the state dole.” By the time he connected with Weyrich, he already believed that the Right needed new and more militant national institutions of the kind Weyrich described.