Leonard Leo, the longtime Federalist Society vice president who played a key role in the Supreme Court confirmations of all six Republican justices, is probably the most influential conservative activist in America who does not wear a robe to work. If Leo’s recent comments to the Financial Times are any indication, he is also a Newsmax-pilled freak whose worldview overlaps to an alarming degree with the stupidest bigot on the internet: Elon Musk.
Leo became a household name back in 2017, when President Donald Trump more or less outsourced his judicial nominations agenda to Leo and the Federalist Society, thus preventing the race to replace Justice Antonin Scalia from coming down to Jeanine Pirro, Ghost Roy Cohn, and the most recent cop to go viral for using racial slurs in a Golden Corral buffet line. As an adviser to Trump, Leo hewed to a familiar set of talking points: He sought candidates who had “courage and independence of judgment,” he said, and would “interpret the Constitution the way the Framers meant it to be.” The fact that all three of his justices would eventually cast the votes necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 was, of course, a simple coincidence.
These days, Leo is working to inject the same strain of revanchist poison coursing through the federal judiciary into the private sector, too. His nonprofit, the Marble Freedom Trust, is launching a billion-dollar effort to, in Leo’s words, find “very leveraged, impactful ways” of building a society “premised on freedom and personal responsibility and the virtues of western civilization”—a euphemism that, as you find out if you read his comments a little further, just boils down to funding attacks on corporations with too much interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion for his liking.
Leonard Leo soliciting generous gifts from wealthy cryptofascists is not new. What’s newer and more unsettling is the rhetoric he uses when talking about his mission: In the place of the bone-dry rhetoric he used during the Trump administration is what sounds like a Lou Dobbs-inflected pregame speech delivered by a middling college football coach facing unspecified allegations of his school’s personal conduct policy. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” he told the Times, by investing in “news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident.” (In a pair of speeches in late 2022 and early 2023, Leo similarly warned of “barbarians” who are “determined to threaten and delegitimize individuals and institutions who refuse to pledge fealty to the woke idols of our age,” and compared today’s “progressive bigots” to the Ku Klux Klan.)
Now, Leo is revealing more about his plans for executing this two-pronged crush-dominate strategy: by providing more “support for organizations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus,” thus forcing them to “pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers.” According to the Financial Times, Leon says he plans to “invest in a U.S. local media company” at some point in the next year, because he is evidently under the impression that Sinclair Broadcasting beaming reactionary agitprop into millions of living rooms every night is not moving public opinion quickly enough.
Much like a $100,000 truck that cannot endure a car wash, the phrase “woke mind virus” is a creation of Elon Musk, the unnervingly lecherous Tesla founder who shares Leo’s contempt for the scourge of liberal media. (The Google Trends data for searches for “woke mind virus” tracks Musk’s tweets almost exactly.) Musk has never defined the phrase with any degree of precision—the closest he’s come to explaining its origins is expressing disdain for his estranged teenage daughter, who is transgender. But to date, he has deemed it responsible for (among other things) Netflix’s financial troubles, humanity’s failure to colonize Mars, and the eventual end of civilization as we know it.
Unless it is stopped, the woke mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reached Mars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 19, 2022
Like most conservatives, Musk now uses “woke mind virus” as a sort of dog-whistle catch-all to disparage the idea that people who do not look like him deserve to be treated with dignity and respect—which, in retrospect, makes it kind of surprising that the man who assembled the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority took this long to adopt it.
Over the past decade or so, a persistent narrative in American political coverage is that lawyers, committed as they are to the Rule Of Law, can be trusted to rein in the most dangerous excesses of the GOP’s lurch to the right. Under Leo’s watchful eye, after all, Trump picked three mainstream conservatives for the Supreme Court. Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court scuttled two Muslim bans before finally allowing a third to take effect. FedSoc-affiliated White House lawyers refused to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, a betrayal about which he reportedly remained bitter well after the fact.
Whether Leo’s invocation of the “woke mind virus” is a hamfisted attempt to solicit Musk’s attention (and money) or a coincidental manifestation of their extremist politics, the upshot is the same: To the extent that there was ever a distinction between well-credentialed Federalist Society types and the ideologues who control the modern Republican Party, it vanished some time ago. Look at the conservative legal movement’s intellectual leaders: Sam Alito is a Christian supremacist who cannot stop flying coup-adjacent flags in front of his homes. Clarence Thomas is a cancel-culture provocateur who is at once the Court’s most ardent conservative, and also not even the most unhinged Facebook user in his own house. Brett Kavanaugh, who once blamed credible allegations of sexual assault on an elaborate conspiracy to exact “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” is somehow the Court’s median vote.
(Photo by Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
The pattern is the same beneath the Supreme Court, where a set of younger and more fascist-curious judges are constantly auditioning for promotions under the next Republican president. The Fifth Circuit’s Kyle Duncan is calling Stanford Law students “appalling idiots” for asking critical questions about his transphobic jurisprudence. On the Ninth Circuit, Lawrence VanDyke is conducting a years-long experiment to see how much of an asshole he can be to his colleagues without goading one or more of them into saying so in public. In a 2021 opinion defending the sacred right of police officers to kill people without facing consequences, James Ho declared that a judge’s responsibility is to apply “our written Constitution, not a woke Constitution,” a turn of phrase I am sure Leo is furious he didn’t think of first.
Leo is not even the first Federalist Society luminary to dive headfirst into the murkier corners of conspiracy theory Reddit. Last year, Steven Calabresi, the organization’s co-founder and a self-described Never Trumper, excoriated Trump for, as president, fomenting the stolen-election lies that led to the January 6 insurrection. Today, Calabresi is churning out frantic blogs labeling the various criminal cases against Trump as “political witch hunts” and “Stalininst nightmares,” because he has since learned that if you are a conservative lawyer in 2024, you can criticize criticize violent extremism within your party, or you can be relevant, but you cannot be both.
Over the last four years, the Republican justices on the Supreme Court have reshaped American law, and transformed the conservative legal movement’s preferred history-and-tradition approach into the only acceptable method of constitutional interpretation. But elevating one jurisprudential philosophy over the other was never going to be enough for Leo, a man who, like Musk, believes the world should be a certain way, and is willing to spend (other people’s) money to make it so. The justices he picked are going to spend the next several decades on the front lines of the culture wars. Leo now gets the satisfaction of fighting alongside them.
