A billionaire legal activist who had a major role in crafting the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority, ultimately leading to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, has big plans to reshape American culture.
Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo, who advised President-elect Donald Trump during his first term, is responsible for one-third of the justices on the Supreme Court. He's been linked to Project 2025 and works with a network of powerful nonprofits that promote "traditional values." He also "anticipates to exert more conservative influence" under a second Trump presidency, NPR reported.
Want to get caught up on what's happening in SoCal every weekday afternoon? Click to follow The L.A. Local wherever you get podcasts.
Specifically, Leo plans to "crush liberal dominance" of American culture.
It's a claim he previously made in a private video for donors of the Teneo Network, which aims to "recruit, connect, and deploy talented conservatives who lead opinion and shape the industries that shape society." According to ProPublica, Leo is building "networks of conservatives that can roll back" liberal influence and fight the "woke-ism" in Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
And he's not backing down, telling NPR that it's "very important" to create networks of driven, strategic people in all sectors of American life "who are looking for opportunities to inject their traditional values and the Western cultural tradition into other aspects of American social and cultural life."
"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," Leo told NPR's Steve Inskeep.
"I'm perfectly happy having a world where people can make choices between various kinds of things," Leo added. "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."
Although he didn't go into details as to how he and others plan to crush liberal dominance, Leo told NPR he expects to see results faster than his campaign to transform the Supreme Court.
"I have to say I am impressed by how quickly the Teneo Network has been able to build pipelines of talent," he said. "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 [environmental, social and governance corporate investing] has kind of flipped and changed."
"And so, yes, these things do take a long time. But I am struck by the speed with which some of this has occurred in the past two or three years," Leo added. "And I can't explain why it is. But it does seem to be faster than what I saw in the law."
Trump's team has not commented on any reports regarding Leo and any potential influence on the president-elect's second term.
Follow KNX News 97.1 FM
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok