The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in a lawsuit that sought to restrict access to abortion medication nationwide. The consensus among court observers and legal analysts seems to be that the court will uphold the FDA’s current rules on Mifepristone, keeping it broadly available — at least for now.
However, a rare interview and newly unearthed speeches given by Leonard Leo, the far-right’s legal ringleader, shed some light on the radical oligarchy’s developing plan to not only end access to that medication, but also strip away many of our most cherished freedoms and use bottomless wealth to stage a hostile takeover of secular society.
They also underscore Leo’s deep antipathy for people who aren’t conservative Christians or align with his medieval morals, and how he wants that t shape the law going forward.
A Temporary Setback
A majority of the justices asked pointed questions of Erin Hawley, lead attorney for the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF is a far-right Christian law firm that has scored several major victories in front of this philosophically aligned court, including the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade.
This time, though, the plaintiffs had no real standing to sue. Yet it’s a minor setback, because by restricting the hearing’s scope, the conservative justices ensured that this will not be the last attempt to throttle abortion access.
The conservative legal apparatus is like a viral breeding ground, attacking healthy precedents, adjusting to defenses, and then evolving new ways to destroy its target. Indeed, questions that Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito asked about the Comstock Act on Tuesday offered a roadmap to future challenges.
Leo has long been fixated on disabling the federal government through the decimation of the administrative state. He’s set up several pathways to crippling government’s ability to function, some of which are already in motion.
Speaking last week during a podcast interview with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of the evil surveillance firm Palantir and founder of the far-right Cicero Institute, Leo explained that he intends to use lawsuits, like those currently in progress against the SEC and NLRB, to hollow out government.
“There are many more of those cases that are going to be brought over the next three to five years,” Leo teased, “and it's really, really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress.”
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A Holy War is Brewing
Though Leo couches this fantasy in the conservative language of freedom and personal responsibility, it didn’t take long for him to reveal himself to be less a genius than a typical moralizing right-wing fanatic with a law degree and unfathomably rich friends.
Leo has long pushed Christian nationalist grievance politics through the legal system and is a chief architect of the right’s increasingly successful campaign to shift the court’s interpretation of religious liberty into carte blanche for zealots.
And it’s clear that Leo and the broader conservative movement view this newly fabricated right to impose archaic views on society at the expense of others to be largely the domain of Christian conservatives.
In an address made last year at Benedictine College, a tiny Catholic school in Kansas where he was receiving an honorary degree, Leo unleashed a disturbing and violent condemnation of secular society and its tolerance for lifestyles and beliefs that scare him. (see above)
“The barbarians are determined to threaten and delegitimize individuals and institutions who refuse to pledge fealty to the woke idols of our age,” Leo boomed. “The secularists are fine with Catholics in the public square so long as we don't, you know, practice our faith. They want us to draw the curtains at home and keep it in the pews, and it remains to be seen how long they'll accept even that.”
He had even harsher words for progressives, casting himself as a victim of the people whose rights continue to be stripped away at his behest.
“The progressive bigots distort who we are and what we believe in,” Leo whined, “and will go so far as to intimidate or harass us in public in an effort to drive us into professional and social exile.”
Only somebody who has spent decades cultivating the wealthy from within the marble halls of DC’s elite debate societies and steeped in the grievance rhetoric of the religious right could look at the United States and see a place where conservative Christians constitute a marginalized and persecuted minority. It’s ludicrous, but deeply felt enough that Leo wants to bend our most heathen traditions and sectors to his own archaic worldview.
Frighteningly, he’s got the means to really make a run at it.
Armed with a $1.6 billion fund devoted to making Americans’ lives worse, the 58-year-old devout Catholic plans on expanding his mission from loading the judiciary with religious conservatives to mounting an aggressive, multi-front culture war aimed at seizing other parts of society, starting with churches themselves.
“The whole issue of clergy… my own perspective is that God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him,” Leo said. “I think our religious leaders need to center more on that and less on knowing and loving and serving ourselves and whatever personal desires or affections we may have.”
Lonsdale’s fawning during the interview got Leo comfortable enough to divulge a list of his targets. The entertainment industry, he said, could be fertile ground for anti-government conservatives, and he wants to continue to support conservative candidates in state and local school board races. Leo also is also plotting “pipelines of talent” that train new armies of true believers for careers as teachers and C-suite executives.
That he sees token diversity initiatives as evidence that corporations have become too liberal, even as they donate generously to his organizations, should give some indication of the depths of his delusion and the challenge that lies ahead.
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