Billionaire Kingmaker Weaponizes 'Conservative Vision'

Sept. 13, 2024

“If others are not going to devote funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision, then the 85 Fund needs to weigh its support much more heavily in that direction.” —Leonard Leo, billionaire conservative activist and founder of the 85 Fund, in a letter to grantees

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has overturned the right to abortion access, dismantled federal gun laws, and stripped the government’s ability to enforce regulations, yet Leonard Leo is still unsatisfied with the current state of conservatism in America. In a newly published letter to conservative organizations, Leo demands they get more aggressive in their work to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society”—or he’ll deny them funding. undefined

Leo, a co-chairman of the Federalist Society who helped found the Judicial Crisis Network, has spent decades creating a network of organizations to reshape the judiciary and push an uncompromising conservative agenda steeped in the Catholic faith. He’s known for his prolific dark-money fundraising, which has allowed him to wield a lot of power in Republican politics while concealing much of his work from the public. As head of the Federalist Society, he continues to build a massive, lavishly funded network for conservative lawyers who share his vision for the courts and the country.

And his vision is pretty terrifying! Earlier this week, Leo told the Financial Times that “we need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious” and that he intends to call out companies that “bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers.”

A few days after that interview, he sent a letter informing all the grant recipients of his fund that he’s going to put his money where his mouth is. In it, Leo stresses that they all learn from Democrats’ example over the past several decades. “They invested in talent pipelines to populate the power centers inside government, where policy would be implemented,” he writes. Leo goes on to list examples of “the Left” successfully “weaponizing or operationalizing its ideas,” pointing to the Voter Registration Project, which mobilizes Black, Hispanic, and low-income voters to register to vote. (The group describes itself as nonpartisan.)

Leo has already donated over $50 million to groups that advised on Project 2025, which produced an ultraconservative policy manifesto, tailored exclusively to a future Trump administration, that recommends gutting federal agencies while also instituting a national abortion ban.

In fact, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed in the waning months of Trump’s presidency, has been a member of the Federalist Society—Leo’s organization—since 2005. She went on to be assigned to the federal government’s classified-documents prosecution against Donald Trump and consistently issued rulings sympathetic to the former president. And in July, she dismissed the entire case.

Leo also led the battle to shape the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. At just 25 years old, Leo was a researcher who worked alongside the George H.W. Bush White House to defend Justice Clarence Thomas against sexual-harassment allegations during his infamous confirmation hearings. Leo also supported Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination to the high court and served as a judicial adviser to the Trump administration, where he handpicked many of the former president’s judges. About 86 percent of Trump’s appointees to the federal courts of appeals are associated with the Federalist Society. Leo also suggested and vetted Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett as nominees to the Supreme Court.

The conservative kingmaker has an estimated $1 billion to spend on conservative groups whose agendas he likes, and his latest call to action “landed like a rocket,” according to Hans Nichols, a political reporter at Axios. Leo’s letter is expected to shake not just conservative organizations but Republican lawmakers. “There are a lot of groups that receive money from Leonard Leo, and this morning they had a wake-up call,” Nichols said. “When Leonard Leo speaks, the conservative movement and activists listen.”

[Top: Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Michael Robinson Chavez/the Washington Post via Getty Images and Getty Images Plus.]