Leonard Leo Interview About As Hard-Hitting As A Whiffle Bat
Man behind the rise of the Federalist Society sat for an interview that gives softball a bad name.
Leonard Leo (Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
When NPR Morning Edition announced yesterday that they would have a “long talk with Leonard Leo” this morning, my first thought was that it would be incredibly superficial and bad. As it happens, it was incredibly superficial and bad.
The architect of the Federalist Society’s infiltration of the judiciary and bag man for Ginni Thomas is riding high with a Supreme Court willing to rewrite history willy-nilly to reverse engineer contemporary right-wing political preferences. Leo calls this “interpreting the Constitution as it’s written and it was understood by the founding fathers,” which isn’t even the dominant definition of Originalism (which is “as it would’ve been understood by the public at time”), but Originalism is just PR fluff devoid of real meaning anyway.
Luxury, Lies, And A $10 Million Embezzlement
The “long talk,” defined as seven and a half minutes, began with host Steve Inskeep asking about the federal judiciary. With an incoming administration openly bragging about using the Justice Department to retaliate against the president’s critics, Inskeep explicitly asked Leo if he’s “concerned about the rule of law in this moment?” Leo’s response amounts to mealy-mouthed doublespeak, but the NPR ad placement algorithm earns an A+ on this one.
Sadly, the juxtaposition of Leo’s “the rule of law is FINE, stop asking” response with “Donald Trump plans to give free passes to the guys trying to hang Mike Pence” would be the edgiest the interview gets.
“Protects against any rash or hasty action by presidents…”? My brother in Christ, Trump took the legal position that a president could order Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival and the Supreme Court affirmed that position. What guardrails does Leo envision in light of that opinion? Too bad we’re not graced with any specifics from Leo. Because it’s certainly not impeachment in a world where they couldn’t even scrounge up the necessary supermajority among Senators who had literally just fled for their lives.
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While touching on the courts, the predominant topic for the interview was Leo’s new initiative to carry his judicial takeover over to the rest of American society. Or to use the precise language from the interview “to bring conservative influence to businesses Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, in the same way that you brought more conservative influences to the judiciary.”
Promoting subpar talent to high positions based on ideology? Who’s against affirmative action again?
Leo agreed with the Inskeep’s assessment and said they’re looking to promote more professionals to produce “family-centered entertainment, where there’s a high demand” as he unironically described every project that you quickly blow past on your way to literally anything else on streaming.
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Luxury, Lies, And A $10 Million Embezzlement
And there are a lot of young professionals in entertainment and in journalism and in business and finance who are looking for opportunities to inject their traditional values and the Western cultural tradition into other aspects of American social and cultural life.
The only appropriate journalistic follow-up whenever one of these people uses “Western cultural tradition” is to ask them to define what that means in a way that isn’t just flagrantly bigoted. It’s a Pepsi challenge that doesn’t get invoked nearly enough. When someone finally asked Penn Law’s Amy Wax to flesh out what she meant by white cultural tradition she said she wasn’t shying away from the word “superior” and then started explaining that she thought Black law students weren’t intellectual capable and that the country needed fewer Asian people.
It’s wild what comes out when you pull that thread with these folks.
At this point, the interview asked him to react to a quote he made in a video obtained by ProPublica that his goal is to “crush liberal dominance.”
Leo: Yes! And the reason Steve – and I would really call your attention to the words I used: I want to crush liberal dominance. In other words, I want 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.
Florida passed a law against saying “gay” and then engaged in government retaliation against companies with executives who chose to exercise free speech rights to criticize it! Texas is actively banning books! Louisiana is trying to make public schools display the Ten Commandments!
When Leo says, “I’m perfectly happy having a world where people can make choices between various kinds of things,” the proper follow-up is “so are you prepared here today to denounce Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott?” The answer would almost certainly be a cowardly dodge, but if not it’s an interesting quote to have on the record.
Alas, that was not the follow-up.
Also, did Leo just suggest that the problem is a world “where news media or our business and finance worlds” contribute to “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”? A Fox News personality is nominated to head the Pentagon and Elon Musk is the shadow president. Isn’t this indicative that the cultural break he’s describing is at least as bad if not much, much more pronounced on the right?
Anything on this? No?
Look, in NPR’s defense, I think they may be so deep in the weeds that they think someone saying “yes, I intend to circumvent the free marketplace of ideas to give affirmative action to conservatives who otherwise couldn’t get hired” sounds batshit crazy enough. Unfortunately, the era of audiences appreciating subtlety has passed.
While Leo imagines that they might be in for a long-haul with some of these changes, he took delight in some recent developments:
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 has kind of flipped and changed.
Well, Leonard, doesn’t it seem a bit hypocritical to say that you need to invest tons of dark money to astroturf conservative influence into cultural institutions while simultaneously slagging ESG initiatives? I mean, isn’t the basis of your beef with ESG that companies have artificially advanced liberal causes that would crumble on their own merits otherwise?
And despite the general level of criticism above, Inskeep really does try to get an answer out of Leo on this point.
Inskeep: ESG – environmental, social and governance – the idea of having socially responsible investing. That’s a thing you want to change, you’re saying.
Leo: Yeah. That’s the other area where we’ve seen some really quick changes. Right. You know, we’ll walk back from companies and finance firms for doing and again, it’s a speed of change that we really didn’t see in the law. Again, I can’t explain why that is, but it does seem to be that there’s a slightly different dynamic in play when you see these other networks building up in these other sectors of American life.
That’s not responsive to the question. He asked if you supported getting rid of ESG and you said it was happening fast.
And then the interview ended.
NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson joined after the interview to list all the disturbing opportunities Trump has to abuse a pliant federal judiciary going forward. But when Leo was on the line, he avoided all these difficult questions.
After Judge Edith Jones used the Federalist Society convention to launch unhinged attacks on Steve Vladeck, a lot of media coverage tried to deliver a matter-of-fact account that would woefully mislead anyone trying to figure out what actually happened from the article. As Hunter S. Thompson put it decades ago:
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism—which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly.
Chaos is a ladder in the game of thrones and objective journalism is a ladder in a democracy. You can’t cover guys like Leo — or Trump or Judge Jones — with all the niceties of “objective” journalism. They depend on the journalistic impulse to stay “balanced” to paper over their outrageousness. Trust that they know that they’re winning this exchange in the mainstream media. And it’s going to get a lot worse and the media just isn’t ready.
The man who helped roll back abortion rights now wants to ‘crush liberal dominance’ [NPR]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
