The Man Behind the Right-Wing Supreme Court Wants to "Crush" the Liberal Media

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/leonard-leo-liberal-media/

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https://archive.li/hKzq4

Leonard Leo, the main architect of the right-wing capture of the American judiciary, has a new target in his sights: the American media, which, in his view, is rife with bias and leftist agitprop. In an interview with the Financial Times, Leo—the founder and cochair of the Federalist Society—said he expects this initiative will take up $1 billion of the $1.6 billion that Chicago electronic device heir Barre Seid used to bankroll the Marble Freedom Trust, Leo’s ambitious new nonprofit foundation to spread right-wing influence across the cultural landscape. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” Leo told FT reporter Alex Rogers. “So we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident.”

It’s unclear whether Leo intends to marshal these capital investments behind a new media brand or seeks to have future right-wing commentators, editors and reporters matriculate in a Marble-branded ideological boot camp—something akin to Bari Weiss’s University of Austin for a new media elite. Leo indicated that he was thinking of purchasing a media property in a local market, but he’s not yet settled on one.

While $1 billion won’t get one very far toward establishing a game-changing media property on the scale of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News empire, it’s still a commitment that can wreak no small amount of havoc in a media industry that is starved for revenue and already routinely defers to right-wing actors and agendas. After all, the news just broke last week that enterprising Russian propagandists were able to line up a roster of obliging video and social media hacks—er, pardon me, influencers—for a comparatively modest $10 million outlay. No doubt Leonard Leo regards such flailing efforts as a personal challenge.

Besides, Leo’s proven MO is not to erect the foundations of a right-wing counter-establishment from scratch—rather, it’s to selectively target the creaking joists and load-bearing walls in a vulnerable property, in order to accelerate its demolition and reconstruction along strict new ideological lines. The Federalist Society’s successful decades-long infiltration of the court system—culminating with the appointment of Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neal Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh during the Trump administration—offers a grim playbook that would be easy to duplicate in America’s feckless and wayward news business. “The American news industry is so weakened right now that Leo could buy a conservative majority on the editorial board of The New York Times with less money than it cost him to keep Neal Gorsuch’s seat on the US Supreme Court warm for him,” says David Daley, whose recently published book Antidemocratic chronicles the long reach of the legal revolution Leo charted in American law and politics.

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