Much to the consternation of his Federalist Society colleagues,
#Leonard #Leo had also begun
cannibalizing the organization’s own deep-pocketed donors to help finance some of his more personal initiatives
— and those of his friends.

In 2010, he co-founded along with Ginni Thomas an organization called "Liberty Central";

Thomas was the wife of his good friend Justice Clarence Thomas and they used a $500,000 donation from Dallas real estate billionaire #Harlan #Crow,
also a donor to the Federalist Society.

The group billed itself as “America’s Public Square,” promising to preserve freedom and reaffirm the core principles of the Founding Fathers.

The following year, he joined the board of "Chicago Freedom Trust", which had been set up by manufacturing billionaire #Barre #Seid as a pass-through
to anonymously channel funds to initiatives he wished to support
and to take advantage of the recent #Citizens #United ruling shielding big donors from disclosure.

Leo met Seid through #Eugene #Meyer, president of the Federalist Society, who envisioned the wealthy manufacturing tycoon as a potential donor to the law society.

Instead, Leo cultivated him as a funder of his own dark-money network.

The move brought Leo into contact with other central figures of the conservative dark-money world
— like #Whitney #Ball and #Adam #Meyerson,
the main actors behind #DonorsTrust, who were responsible for anonymously funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to various conservative grassroot groups,
including some linked to the far right.

He also used his influence there to divert funds to Opus Dei, with the pass-through soon becoming a regular donor to the Oakcrest School.

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits.

Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005,

hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion.

As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the "Wellspring Committee" and the "Judicial Crisis Network".

Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death,
as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums.

In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia
and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy.

It was just the start.

Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes.

Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble
hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts
— on abortion,
on affirmative action,
and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

#Leonard #Leo’s status as the world’s third most powerful figure soon made him a rich man.

During his time at the Federalist Society,
he had hardly been a pauper,
bringing in around $400,000 a year.

But with six children attending The Heights and Oakcrest, the two Opus Dei schools that charged up to $30,000 tuition annually per student,
and a burgeoning taste for good food and expensive wines,
it didn’t take long to burn through his salary.

But his life had taken a lavish turn after Trump’s victory
and his appointment as an unpaid advisor to the president on judicial appointments.

The dramatic uptick in his personal fortune dovetailed with his joining a for-profit entity called "CRC Advisors", alongside another CIC board member #Greg #Mueller.

Mueller had spearheaded the "National Organization for Marriage" vitriolic public relations strategy,
and #CRC quickly established itself as the go-to advisory firm for the dark-money network of nonprofit entities that Leo had helped set up over the years.

Once again, the Corkery name was all over the money flow.

The majority of CRC’s income came from
"The 85 Fund",
a dark money non-profit that
Leo repurposed to fund conservative causes nationwide,
and
that fund paid $34 million in fees to his new advisory firm over a single two-year period.

As the money rolled in, Leo began to enjoy some of the same luxuries as the billionaires he had spent years courting.

For most of his three decades in Washington, Leo had led a modest home life,
living for years in a small apartment in the Randolph Towers complex in downtown Arlington,
before moving to a single-story five-bedroom family home in suburban McLean in 2010.

But in the years since 2016, he had spent millions of dollars on two new mansions in Maine,
bought four new cars,
and hired a wine buyer and locker at Morton’s, an upscale steakhouse three blocks from the Catholic Information Center.

It was only a foretaste of what was to come.

In 2020, Leo stepped back from his duties at the Federalist Society to focus on the
dark-money network he had fostered as a side hustle during his time there.

With him, he took one of the Federalist Society’s biggest donors:
a manufacturing billionaire from Chicago called
#Barre #Seid, who was Jewish by heritage but who shared many of Leo’s conservative views.

Over two decades, Seid had pumped at least $775 million into campaigns for libertarian and conservative causes,
quietly transforming himself into one of the most important donors on the political right.

Almost ninety, Seid had decided to leave his money continuing that work
— and concluded that Leo was the man to oversee that largesse.

Leo had betrayed his bosses, who had tasked him with wooing the billionaire as a potential donor for the Federalist Society.

Instead, Leo had cultivated him for his own network.

Seid signed his business over to Leo, giving him control over a
$1.6 billion war chest and
transforming him from a proxy for
dark-money donors into a donor himself.

Much to the consternation of his Federalist Society colleagues,
#Leonard #Leo had also begun
cannibalizing the organization’s own deep-pocketed donors to help finance some of his more personal initiatives
— and those of his friends.

In 2010, he co-founded along with Ginni Thomas an organization called "Liberty Central";

Thomas was the wife of his good friend Justice Clarence Thomas and they used a $500,000 donation from Dallas real estate billionaire #Harlan #Crow,
also a donor to the Federalist Society.

The group billed itself as “America’s Public Square,” promising to preserve freedom and reaffirm the core principles of the Founding Fathers.

The following year, he joined the board of "Chicago Freedom Trust", which had been set up by manufacturing billionaire #Barre #Seid as a pass-through
to anonymously channel funds to initiatives he wished to support
and to take advantage of the recent #Citizens #United ruling shielding big donors from disclosure.

Leo met Seid through #Eugene #Meyer, president of the Federalist Society, who envisioned the wealthy manufacturing tycoon as a potential donor to the law society.

Instead, Leo cultivated him as a funder of his own dark-money network.

The move brought Leo into contact with other central figures of the conservative dark-money world
— like #Whitney #Ball and #Adam #Meyerson,
the main actors behind #DonorsTrust, who were responsible for anonymously funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to various conservative grassroot groups,
including some linked to the far right.

He also used his influence there to divert funds to Opus Dei, with the pass-through soon becoming a regular donor to the Oakcrest School.

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits.

Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005,

hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion.

As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the "Wellspring Committee" and the "Judicial Crisis Network".

Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death,
as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums.

In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia
and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy.

It was just the start.

Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes.

Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble
hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts
— on abortion,
on affirmative action,
and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

Through his role in securing the nominations of Clarence #Thomas, John #Roberts, and Samuel #Alito to the Supreme Court,
#Leonard #Leo’s political cachet began to grow.

An avid networker, he cultivated friendships with other members of the court,
spending a weekend in Colorado hunting with Judge Antonin #Scalia
— himself a devout Catholic and, like the Corkerys, close to #Opus #Dei.

Surrounded by such religious zeal, it didn’t take long for their example to reawaken his own Catholic faith, and Leo soon began tapping his network of #darkmoney #backers to support religious causes.

He twice bailed out the #Becket #Fund, a nonprofit named after a twelfth-century English martyr, that officially worked to protect religious freedoms,
especially those that were important to conservative Catholics.

He reveled in his reputation as the financial savior of this important community.

Soon afterwards, President Bush picked Leo as his representative to the "United States Commission on International Religious Freedom,"
a federal agency set up to police religious freedom around the world.

Despite its lofty aims, the commission had a tiny budget and its commissioners were unpaid.

Within Washington circles, many saw it as nothing more than an office for amateurs who meddled in foreign policy.

Undeterred by the skeptics, Leo made the most of his time at the commission to push his own Catholic agenda
— traveling to places like Iraq, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, and Vietnam to investigate allegations of religious persecution.

His own faith seemed to grow during that time,
with Leo occasionally reprimanding his staff for putting him in a hotel too far from a church,
making it difficult for him to attend Mass.

Some colleagues began to note a particular bias in the way he carried out a role that conflicted with the commission’s stated aim of championing the freedom of all religions.

He became embroiled in a lawsuit after one former colleague accused him of firing her because she was Muslim.

Several staff members resigned because of the controversy,
and Leo was fired not long after.

Despite the scandal, his time at the commission deepened Leo’s faith and helped him cultivate his image as a serious political figure.

By the time of the #Federalist #Society’s twenty-fifth anniversary dinner in November 2007,
his influence was clear.

Leo shared the stage with the president and three sitting Supreme Court Justices
— Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

Chief Justice John Roberts sent a video message.

“Thanks in part to your efforts, a new generation of lawyers is rising,” President Bush told the assembled members.

At the time of this dinner, Leo was still recovering from the sudden death of his daughter Margaret just a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday
— an event that had a profound impact on him.

Margaret had been born with spina bifida and used a wheelchair.

Events around her death had reinforced Leo’s faith.

The previous summer, during a family vacation, Leo had promised Margaret that he would try to go to Mass more regularly.

Over the years, Margaret had developed an obsession with anything religious, and would nag her parents to take her to Mass.

She especially loved angels
— and priests, insisting on a hug every time she saw one.

The day after they returned from vacation, Leo got up early to go to Mass
— as promised — and looked in on Margaret.

As he was walking down the hall, she started gasping for breath and died shortly afterward.

“I will always think that she did her job,” he later said. “She did her job.”

Stephen Wolfe grew up in Napa, California,
and his father was an admirer of the right-wing pundit and erstwhile GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

After attending West Point and serving in the Army, Wolfe earned advanced degrees before leaving academia to
“do the Wendell Berry thing”
in North Carolina with his wife and four kids.

Over the summer, Wolfe, 41, agreed to speak with me on the condition that I refer to him as “Dr. Wolfe”
and call him an “expert on Christian nationalism.”

The Dr. Wolfe I spoke with was a more muted version of the firebrand I’d watched online.

He said his ideal version of America would be led by a Caesar figure.

Gay marriage would be strictly prohibited.

Women would not be allowed to vote
—instead, men would vote for their households.

When I brought up the bit from his book about heretics being killed, he grew annoyed.

“I do think it’s permissible, in principle, for a state to suppress theological heresy,
but that doesn’t mean that it’s prudent or proper,
suitable in every circumstance or every tradition or way of life.”

The Founding Fathers, he added, had encouraged religious liberty,
so killing heretics would not be appropriate in the United States that we inhabit.

We turned to remarks he had made at a recent conference convened by Brian Sauvé:
“I think we need to reflect on this idea of Judeo-Christianity,
or Judeo-Christian worldview,
or Judeo-Christian whatever,
and really eradicate that from our thinking.

Because if we say that America is a
Judeo-Christian country,
then it can’t be a Christian country, okay?”

What role, I asked him, would Jews play?

After a deep sigh, he told me that they would be allowed to “exercise their religion freely.”

We spoke a week before Vance’s RNC speech,
and Wolfe’s remarks helped me understand what the TheoBros heard in Vance’s phrase about
"America as a people".

The founders, Wolfe noted, intended for their country to be “Anglo-Protestant with an American inflection.”

America, he continued, is “a place of settlement and rootedness,
but it’s an open ethnicity in which people can become one of us.”

Which is to say that, like some others, Wolfe is not necessarily opposed to the idea of nonwhite people in America
—as long as they agree to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant dominant culture.

In this telling, America is not a pluralistic society at all,
but rather one in which there exists an uneasy truce between Christians and those they reluctantly tolerate.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Wolfe what motivated him.

“I want Christians to be more assertive and to recognize the Christian heritage of the American way of life,
and to seek to restore that,” he said.

“This is a Christian country, and we’ve got to work to restore it to what it once was"

In his keynote address at Sauvé’s conference, titled “Why Multicultural Pluralism Fails and What to Build Instead,”
Wolfe called the concept of America as a melting pot
“an early 20th-century idea cooked up by a Jew in New York who despised the confident Anglo-Protestant establishment.”

WASPs were the “distinct ethnicity” of America, he insisted,

and America should only welcome those who aspired to assimilate.

As he put it, “This is our homeland, and we welcome you on the condition of conformity.”

Or, in the words of JD Vance, America “is a group of people.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/theobros-jd-vance-christian-nationalism/

William Wolfe served in the Trump administration
both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense
and as director of House affairs at the Department of State.

He is also an alumnus of #Heritage #Action,
a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation,
the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025,
whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.”

A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists.

The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors
and Oklahoma Sen. #Dusty #Deevers as a co-author,
called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

The manifesto doesn’t specify exactly how Christian nationalists should achieve these goals.

As Tabachnick, the extremism researcher, interprets it, the TheoBros are imagining a utopia where “they are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses,
including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.”

The key, she said, is that authoritarianism “is required to have the utopian vision.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage.
There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says.

“If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

William Wolfe’s Christian nationalism manifesto made the rounds on social media,
but in mainstream conservative outlets,
it was #Stephen #Wolfe
(no relation to William)
who brought TheoBro ideas to the wider world.

In his book, which was praised by editors at the Federalist and the American Conservative,
Wolfe paints America as a “#gynocracy” whose government and culture have been feminized by unhappy women leaders.
(Sound familiar?)

He has stated on X that women should not have the right to vote, and that “interethnic” marriage can be “sinful.”