Leonard Leo Says He's Shifting Grant Money From Ideas to Action

Federalist Society leader says he wants to "crush liberal dominance" in American culture.

Federalist Society Chairman Leonard Leo says that he is shifting his strategy of bankrolling people and organizations largely focused on developing conservative policy and ideas to those who are “operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies." 

The man who is best known as the gatekeeper for Republican judicial appointments also shells out hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money to fund right-wing think tanks and organizations. But he says that it is now time for him to shift his priorities from funding ideas to action. He says one of the the best ways to accomplish some of this is by "infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment" with right-wing culture warriors, financed by Leo.

In an extensive new interview to right-wing Daily Caller, Leo said that it is now time to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power” by “operationalizing and weaponizing" the policy ideas he helped cultivate in the past. Leo sent a letter to grant applicants this past September to emphasize that he will be looking for different criteria this year them:

“Vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies. When you get to a certain point in a movement’s history, while you always have to continue to develop ideas and to educate, what becomes even more important is operationalizing those ideas, taking the principles and philosophy that you’ve developed, and finding ways to make those a reality in our culture. The Left has been very effective at this over the past couple of decades, and it’s time for the conservative movement to be much more leveraged in the way it tries to implement its beliefs.”

Leo told Daily Caller that what the Left has done tactically is something he wants right-wingers to emulate:

“They’ve mobilized people. They’ve created infrastructure to get the word out, to train people to be leaders, and for those leaders then to have the resources they need to create communities of people who will go out and do everything from protesting and demonstrating, to writing in the popular press, influencing the entertainment industry, putting pressure on academic institutions, sometimes even litigating, and sometimes working in various international organizations like the UN to effect change.” 

Leo said from this point forward what he is looking for is to back people "who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society, it’s really important to find those people, to identify them, to recruit them ..." He then gave some examples of the kinds of things he wants them to do:

“It could be challenging government actions so that you can reinvigorate things like the separation of powers and checks and balances and federalism ... It could be challenges to government policies that relate to DEI or other parts of the woke cultural agenda ... it’s time to take what you already know, and to operationalize it, and that means being at the tip of the spear, filing those lawsuits, building those talent pipelines, placing personnel in positions of influence in culture, society, and government, launching campaign-style tactics to beat back things like ESG and DEI. That’s the kind of thing that needs to be done.”

Leo concluded his interview by saying that although this presidential election is important to him, it is not the most important thing to accomplish his long-term objectives:

"Yes, very important what happens in November, I don’t want to undercut that, but in the medium term, what’s perhaps even more important than elections is the conservative movement building beachheads in areas like news, entertainment, business and finance, corporate C-suites, educational institutions."

People like Leo prefer to operate in the shadows behind the scenes, but are more effective at moving the needle on policy and culture than elected politicians. They are awash in dark money and know how to target it to greatest effect. Leo has been the single most influential voice behind the reshaping of the Supreme Court into an instrument of power to undo decades of progress in civil rights, liberties, and government regulations across a wide spectrum of issues.

Now he has his sights set on other institutions, and Democrats need to pay attention.