Trump's judicial guru declares holy war

He wants to take over everything — even churches

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight we take a rare look into the mind and machinations of the far-right’s most influential DC power broker. The mask comes off in these newly unearthed speeches and interviews, exposing the chilling plans and ideology that threatens to subsume the federal government.

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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.

A Temporary Setback

A majority of the justices asked pointed questions of Erin Hawley, lead attorney for the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the awkwardly named cabal of doctors who want to make it more difficult for women to obtain health care.

Hawley is a senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, the 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. The ADF has close ties to many of the right-wing justices on the court, but the obvious flaws with the lawsuit meant that ideology had to take a backseat on Tuesday.

In short, the plaintiffs — some of whom were dentists! — had no real standing to sue, no matter how far the Christian right’s favorite circuit court judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is willing to stretch the law to impose his religious fanaticism on us. It’s a setback, but hardly a decisive one, because by restricting the hearing’s scope, the conservative justices ensured that this will not be the last attempt to throttle abortion medication access.

In fact, a flurry of other approaches are already attacking access to the medication from a multitude of angles, with more to come. 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.

The $1.6 Billion Master Plan

Both justices were already ensconced on the court when Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo became Donald Trump’s judicial guru and chief architect of the reactionary billionaire hijacking of the judiciary, but Thomas and Alito each play a critical — and well-rewarded — role in his plans.

Leo’s 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, one of which is outlined in Project 2025, the right’s terrifying blueprint for establishing a corporate-Christofascist state.

It’ll require Trump back in the White House to implement those plans, but other plans 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.”

The abortion pill case fell into this category because it challenged the authority of the FDA to make unilateral decisions. Leo’s extreme version of originalism would put federal agencies in a straight jacket, unable to enforce rules or respond to significant developments unless expressly authorized by a Congress that is now essentially useless.

A Holy War is Brewing

Though Leo couches this fantasy in the conservative language of freedom and personal responsibility, it doesn’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.

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.”

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. While the ADF occasionally represents plaintiffs from other religions, 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.

“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.

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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