Leonard Leo, who financed and directed the rightwing takeover of the US supreme court, admitted he wants to “crush liberal dominance” across American society.
“I want to crush liberal dominance,” the dark money impresario told NPR, in an interview published three weeks after Donald Trump’s stunning election win.
Leo added that he wanted to “make sure that there’s a level playing field for the American people to make choices about the lives that they want to have in their country”.
“I’m perfectly happy having a world where people can make choices between various kinds of things. But what I don’t want is a system where our entertainment system or our world of news media or our business and finance worlds are heavily dominated by left ideology that either chokes out other ways of thinking about things, or that just creates a system where sort of inappropriate political and policy decisions are being made in places where politics and policy don’t really have a proper place,” he said.
Leo had a prominent role in installing to the nominally apolitical US supreme court three hardline rightwingers who have helped hand down epochal rulings on abortion rights, presidential immunity, corporate regulation and more.
Leo is a Catholic rightwinger from New Jersey who came to prominence with the Federalist Society as it helped transform US courts over the past 30 years. Funds at Leo’s fingertips include a record $1.6bn donation from Barre Seid, a Chicago billionaire – the sort of deal that saw one Leo-linked group, Donors Trust, called “the dark money ATM of the right”.
NPR asked Leo about Teneo, a group that in its own words seeks to “recruit, connect, and deploy talented conservatives who lead opinion and shape the industries that shape society”.
Last year, ProPublica reported a “slick but private video” in which Leo told potential Teneo donors he wanted to “crush liberal dominance”, adding: “I just said to myself: ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’”
Leo told NPR he expected quicker results than in his campaign to transform the American justice system.
“I have to say I am impressed by how quickly the Teneo Network has been able to build pipelines of talent,” he said. “And I am also very impressed with how quickly you’re seeing efforts, for example, in the journalism and entertainment spaces, the standing up of new production studios and news platforms. Very impressed with the speed with which the debate about ESG [environmental, social and governance corporate policies] has kind of flipped and changed.
“And so, yes, these things do take a long time. But I am struck by the speed with which some of this has occurred in the past two or three years. And I can’t explain why it is. But it does seem to be faster than what I saw in the law.”
Asked if he expected to help install new supreme court justices, either to reinforce the current 6-3 rightwing slant or to take the court even further right, Leo played coy.
“I think it’s probably unlikely” that a senior rightwinger such as Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito will retire in the next four years, Leonard said. “But you never know. It’s always a possibility. And every administration I’ve ever known has always prepared for that contingency just to make sure.”
• The subheading of this article was amended on 26 November 2024 to correct a misspelling of Leonard Leo’s first name.
