About Leonard Leo, the 3rd most powerful American, & the unholy trinity

At his Prevail substack, Greg Olear wrote at great length last Feb. about Leonard Leo, a truly rich and very powerful radical right American authoritarian. Here are key parts of his article:

Leonard Leo and the Unholy Trinity (with Tom Carter)

How the reactionary legal activist, radical Catholic zealot & dark money maestro built alliances to capture the Court and impose his extremist agenda on America

On these pages, I’ve written extensively about Leonard Leo. In February of 2021—three full years ago—I wrote a piece called “Leo the Cancer,” an introduction to a dark money maestro his BFF Clarence Thomas once called, without hyperbole, the third most powerful man in the country. Citing great investigative journalism by Jay Michelson at the Daily Beast, ProPublica, Heidi Przybyla at Politico, and Nina Burleigh at the New Republic, I’ve also detailed how Leonard Leo personally cashed in on his legal activism; how Leonard Leo wangled $1.6 billion—billion with a B—out of the reclusive nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Said, and the malefic effect that will have on our democracy; and how many powerful people exist in the network he’s built over the last three decades of activism.

Here is a synopsis of who Leo is, for those unfamiliar:

• He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. But most Americans, including many working in Washington, have never heard of him.

• Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful than he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden. 

• [He] is the individual most responsible for stripping away federal abortion rights. (The anniversary of the odious Dobbs decision was this past weekend.) As his admiring chum Ed Wheelan presciently wrote in 2016, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”

Tom Carter knows more about Leonard Leo than anyone not in the Federal Society co-founder’s inner circle. Tom worked in Washington for years, in journalism and then in PR. For three years, he handled media relations at USCIRF, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where his boss was—you guessed it—Leonard Leo. He soon realized that Leo was a zealot, whose ideas were incompatible with, among other things, religious freedom.

Over the subsequent decade and a half, Tom became a dedicated Leo watcher. He reads every article about him. He’s developed his own network of sources. And he warns everyone who will listen about how powerful Leonard Leo is—and how dangerous to our democracy.

Whenever I write about Leo, someone on social media will invariably bring up Jeff Sharlet and The Family, as if Leonard Leo and his crew are the same thing. They are not. Leo & Co. are radical Catholics; The Family are Protestants. Yes, both are Christians, but being Christian didn’t stop Catholics and Protestants from fighting each other in Europe for centuries. Conflating the two mischaracterizes who Leo is and what he ultimately wants.

Carter has a smart way of breaking down the relationship between 1) Leo and his radical Catholic cohorts; 2) Evangelical Christians; and 3) Mammon-worshipping rightwing billionaires. He calls it the “Unholy Trinity.” (Another name might be “The Devil’s Triangle,” if we felt like hat-tipping Leonard Leo’s penultimate SCOTUS appointment, the odious Brett Kavanaugh.)

“The libertarian billionaires want something,” Carter explains. “In 1980, one of the Koch brothers ran for vice president, got less than 2% of the vote—on a platform which is very much today’s MAGA platform. So it was not a popular platform. It’s never been a popular platform, but they knew [they didn’t] have the votes. So the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Uihleins, Paul Singer, Harlan Crow, Barre Said, all of these guys have different individual wants, but in general, what it boils down to is they want lower taxes on their multi-billion-dollar companies, and they want no federal regulation.”

Basically, these soulless gajillionaires, many of whom inherited their wealth, would rather spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in lobbying efforts—funding all manner of vile rightwing fuckery to make sure their hard-inherited cash doesn’t help the less fortunate—than pay their fair share.

“So where do we get the votes? Where do we get the votes?” Carter explains. “Well, Paul Weyrich, a very devout, hardcore Catholic, who has said the more people vote, the less people will like our positions,” had a planning sesh with Jerry Falwell—“a top Catholic meeting with a very, very top Evangelical.”

I keep posting this short video 

for good reasons

[Racism] is not going to sell in the [] late 1970s, early 1980s. ‘What do we want? What do we want? I know. Let’s get behind abortion. Let’s become anti-abortionists.’ So this was a political marriage between Paul Weyrich—conservative Catholics—and Jerry Falwell—conservative Evangelical Christians. And that’s how the anti-abortion movement really came about. It wasn’t Roe that started it. It was these two guys basically in a backroom deal.”

And that’s how the second prong of the Unholy Trinity fits into the picture. Falwell’s community, Carter explains, “are the votes. Those are the infantry. Those are the door knockers, the Evangelical Christian nationalists, which we’ve read so much about.

“At the same time, Leonard Leo and his Catholic cabal was beavering away in Washington trying to rig the judicial system. It’s been said if you want to create a fascist society, the first thing you do is get the judges, and that’s what Leonard was doing,” Carter tells me. “It’s what I call the Unholy Trinity. You’ve got the libertarian billionaires; you’ve got the Christian nationalist foot soldiers, the infantry; and you’ve got the extreme Catholic—Leonard Leo—cabal, driving the tanks, or to use a different analogy, kicking the goals. They’re the ones that are getting stuff done. They are putting the scores on the scoreboard.”

“There’s been a lot of stories, ink, books, articles on Christian nationalism and how there is no separation of church and state, and we want Jesus at the top of the heap, our version of Republican Jesus at the top of the heap. There’s been very little on the [radical] Catholics, and they’re actually the ones that are doing a lot of the lifting,” Carter says. The goal is to not just eliminate the separation of church and state, but to elevate the church to the dominant position—where it was in the Middle Ages, when the Pope crowned the emperors.

The thought leaders of this extremist Catholic movement are quite open about the necessity of force to get their way. “Force will be required,” Carter says, paraphrasing the thought process of these leaders. “Force is going to be needed, because not everybody is going to want to do what we say we want to want done. So if you’re Jewish, or Catholic [but don’t] believe in integralism, or an atheist, or anything else, you automatically become a second-class or third-class citizen in this Christofascist world. Think about the Spanish Inquisition or, more recently, think about Franco’s Spain or, today, Orbán’s Hungary. These are autocratic societies run according to religious principles, whoever happens to be at the top of the heap.”

If this unholy power grab is complete—which, if Trump wins re-election, it will be—it ain’t going to be pretty for the rest of us. Which is to say: most of us.

Carter sums up the situation succinctly—and ominously: “They’re bringing the Inquisition.”

Q1: Although Olear refers to the billionaire prong of the unholy trinity as libertarian (roughly the opposite of authoritarian), they support DJT and his authoritarianism, so is Olear using the wrong label for the unholy billionaires, who actually are authoritarian, not libertarian?

Q2: If they get enough power, is it more likely than not that one or both of the two Christian prongs of the unholy trinity, authoritarian (theocratic) Catholicism and Protestantism, will try to bring back old-fashioned Catholic inquisition tactics (like those shown below), or will they more likely try to impose a softer, more modern and woke variant, with less torture and murdering replaced by more subtle means of force, e.g., making people opposed into second-class or third-class citizens (like what modern China does today to its citizens who resist)?