Tag: leonard leo
With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

On Roman streets and the worldwide web, a half-joke was making the rounds yesterday: Catholic convert JD Vance, emissary of America’s empathy-challenged hard right, was the last visitor to Pope Francis before he died and somehow… did him in.

Here at the Freakshow, we disregard conspiracy theories like these until shown hard proof. But it is a fact that a cabal of powerful right-wing American Catholics is not at all sorry to see Francis pass away – on Easter Monday, no less. These men have been licking their chops for more than a decade for a chance to conclave and install a man more of their ilk, someone who might help persuade millions of Catholics that Jesus was really a social Darwinist.

“The ultra-conservative wing of the US Catholic Church – a group made up of cardinals, bishops, priests and wealthy individuals – has spent years preparing for this precise moment,” says British investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who last year published a book on the strange and secretive Opus Dei cult, including its growing power in the heart of Washington. (I covered it for New York Magazine).

Pope Francis was one of the more progressive church leaders in recent Catholic church history. He acknowledged the effects of manmade climate change and made small – but, to the far right, significant and alarming – statements about market capitalism and the poor. Those positions are clearly aligned with Jesus’ actual teachings, but ultra conservatives have abandoned them in favor of the prosperity gospel and drill baby drill.

Francis’s support of social justice made him anathema to hard-right American Catholics like Leonard Leo and billionaires like California real estate attorney Tim Busch. Busch’s Trinitas Cellars produces red wines named after the Virgin Mary. Many Opus Dei-affiliated and other hard-right Catholics in Washington (JD Vance and Leonard Leo among them) have boarded jets west to attend gatherings at Busch’s Napa Institute School of Business.

Last year, Busch hosted a conference on “woke capitalism,” and in the past, he’s invited speakers questioning the authenticity of the civil rights movement. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops cut ties with Busch’s Napa School in part because event agendas include praying the Patriotic Rosary, a devotion invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – that specific cause, of course, being the perpetuation of slavery.

In addition to annoying rich MAGA extremists, Francis had asked church officials to live more modestly. “We pastors must not be men with a ‘princely mindset.’” he once said. This did not sit well with rightist clergy who live for cosplaying royalty. American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke was among them. He insisted on continuing to wear trains of watered silk, scarlet gloves, and jeweled red hats – all while calling gay marriage Satanic and accusing Obama of being a totalitarian because of the ACA.

Some of the kookiest hard-right Catholic clergy are American or are operating in this country. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former pontifical vicar to the U.S. under the arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a wildly nutty letter in support of Trump in 2020, calling the election a battle between the forces of light and darkness. He also publicly called Pope Francis a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan.”

Cardinal Burke, discussed above, defied the Pope and refused to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. He had considered serving as honorary president of a “gladiator school” for white religious nationalists that Steve Bannon was building in Europe. (He backed off when Bannon said he might make a documentary about pedophile priests.)

During his tenure, Francis demoted Opus Dei and expelled some of the more extreme bishops aligned with Christian nationalism and alt-right conspiracy theorists. Last year, the Pope excommunicated Vigano for “schism” citing his "refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff.” Francis had removed Burke from the Vatican’s highest court and then revoked his salary and Vatican quarters.

Gareth Gore has reported that a secret cabal long schemed to get rid of Pope Francis. They used some of the same opposition research tactics to investigate rising left-leaning leaders within the church that (Opus Dei-affiliated Catholic) Leonard Leo and his Judicial Crisis Network have applied in media and influence campaigns to stack the Supreme Court with far-right Catholics.

“While Francis was alive, the [right-wing Catholic billionaires and clergy] actively sought to discredit his papacy with smear campaigns, leaking unfounded accusations that the late Pope had covered up cases of sexual abuse – and then using the right-wing Catholic media to spread those rumours far and wide,” Gareth Gore told me. “At the same time, they were financing a campaign to influence the next Conclave, hiring former CIA and FBI agents to dig up kompromat on liberal cardinals who might follow him. Their aim was clear: to discredit Francis and his progressive agenda, and to ensure that the next Pope is a man aligned with their world view - someone who agrees with their ultra-conservative reading of the Bible. That plan is now cranking into action.”

These same men are busy today and in the weeks to come, plotting to ensure the Catholic Church gets back to the business of the Inquisition and witch burning.

Ok, I jest.

But the Catholic hard right and their allies in Washington are not too sad today. They have waited a while for this opportunity. When Gore interviewed Tim Busch for his book, the Californian was explicit about the far right outliving a progressive Pope. “I think something important is happening, something not so good,” Busch said. “I think he’s tightening the noose, but I don’t think he’s going to have enough time.”

But Gore also believes the rightists face an uphill struggle. “The ultra-conservatives, while wealthy and powerful, are a tiny proportion of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world,” he told me. “The Conclave to elect the next Pope will be largely made up of cardinals appointed by Francis himself. While they may not necessarily share all of his views, they will see the positive impact that his progressive agenda has had on the Church, and will likely want to build on his legacy.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.



Leonard Leo

GOP Lashes Out At D.C. Attorney General Probing Extremist Profiteer Leo

GOP activist Leonard Leo is co-chair of the influential Federalist Society, which has produced all six of the Supreme Court of the United States' (SCOTUS) conservative jurists — including Chief Justice John Roberts. And ever since the office of Washington, DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb started investigating the Federalist Society for alleged violations of its nonprofit status, Leo's allies have been attacking him every step of the way.

Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla wrote Saturday that Schwalb has been steadily battling an onslaught of GOP attacks that include conservative media, 12 Republican state attorneys general and even Congressional committee chairs. This assault began last August, after Schwalb announced he was investigating the Federalist Society for alleged self-dealing. Leo is accused of using millions of dollars in tax-exempt organization funds to prop up his private consulting firm, CRC Advisors.

According to the outlet, both Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chair the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, respectively, announced their own investigations into Schwalb on October 30 — shortly after Schwalb announced his own investigation into Leo's group. One of Leo's organizations is the Concord Fund (previously known as the Judicial Crisis Network), which has donated $20 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association since 2014. And Przybyla noted that 10 days before Comer and Jordan announced their investigation, Concord hired a Virginia-based lobbying firm to handle issues relating to "law enforcement" and "oversight."

"The decision to launch a probe was not influenced by the lobbying firm," a spokesperson for the House Judiciary Committee told Politico. "Any suggestion that it was is lazy, in bad faith, and completely ridiculous. It’s well-known that this probe is part of a broader portfolio the congressmen are pursuing related to the weaponization of the federal government."

While the suggestion that Leo's money and connections are influencing the attacks on the man investigating him makes Republicans bristle, it's difficult to ignore the timing of large sums of money changing hands. Just one day after both Comer and Jordan threatened to subpoena Schwalb, a House Republican leadership-aligned political action committee received a $250,000 contribution from the Concord Fund. Politico reported that it was Concord's first donation to a federal PAC in nine years.

Republicans' ferocity in attacking Schwalb could be attributed to Leo's outsized influence over today's GOP — particularly as it concerns the GOP's efforts to cement a conservative SCOTUS majority for decades.

"[Leo] has been called former President Donald Trump’s 'court whisperer' for helping to choose and advocate for his Supreme Court nominees," Przybyla wrote. "His aligned network of tax-exempt nonprofits is also a major contributor to Project 2025, an initiative seeking to create a 'government in waiting' for another Trump term."

Caroline Ciccone, who is president of anti-corruption watchdog group Accountability.US, directly attributed the various attacks on Schwalb to Leo's far-right organizational muscle.

"Leonard Leo is working to implement policies with a vision that’s far too extreme for most Americans," Ciccone said. "Now, members of Congress have weaponized their government power against his critics."

In addition to being investigated for self-dealing by Schwalb's office, Leo's group is also being investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee for its alleged facilitation of lavish gifts to far-right justices like Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. In late November, the committee sent subpoenas to both Leo and billionaire business magnate Harlan Crow, who took Justice Thomas and his family on several exceedingly expensive getaways.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Koch Billionaire Network Secretly Funding Legal Scheme To Gut Government

Koch Billionaire Network Secretly Funding Legal Scheme To Gut Government

Far-right judicial activist Leonard Leo, the force behind the Trump-packed Supreme Court, and billionaire megadonor Charles Koch have combined their networks to back yet another dark-money-fueled effort to gut the federal government. Bloomberg Law has uncovered their involvement in the New Civil Liberties Alliance, “a top US Supreme Court litigator” that’s behind the challenges the court heard last week to the federal government’s power to regulate corporate America.

The group’s purported goal is to protect individual rights from “the administrative state” which they see as “an especially serious threat to constitutional freedoms,” according to the group’s website. You know, that “deep state” that ensures we have clean water to drink and clean air to breathe, that ensures our food is safe to eat and our prescription medications won’t harm us.

Bloomberg notes that while the New Civil Liberties Alliance “identifies as nonpartisan,” it is “backed by groups tied to powerful sources of conservative funding, including billionaire Charles Koch and entities linked to legal activist Leonard Leo, who’s had direct influence over the court’s conservative makeup.”

The group received $2.06 million from Donors Trust Inc., a “community foundation for liberty,” from 2020 to 2022, according to Bloomberg. Donors Trust, in turn, received $175.6 million in those two years from The 85 Fund, yet another Leo group. In the same time period, the 85 Fund was also getting money back from Donors Trust “to help finance various conservative groups,” according to CNBC.

“The 85 Fund, which paid Leo’s public affairs firm CRC Advisors $21.4 million for services in 2022, is led by Carrie Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions on ad campaigns to get Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the bench,” Bloomberg reports.

That’s combined with the more than $5 million the New Civil Liberties Alliance has received since its beginning from the Charles Koch Institute and the Charles Koch Foundation. A nonprofit associated with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Cause of Action Institute, filed one of the challenges to federal rule-making, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. Cause of Action received $200,000 from Americans for Prosperity in 2022, according to records reviewed by Bloomberg.

This is all much less about individual rights than corporate rights. It’s about giving corporations free rein to gamble with public health and safety, dressed up as “liberty.” The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s efforts extend to bringing upcoming Supreme Court cases that would reverse the criminal ban on bump stocks—accessories that turn semi-automatic weapons into machine guns—and would prevent administration efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Ohio's Women Organize Against A Wealthy And Fanatical 'Knight Of Malta'

Ohio's Women Organize Against A Wealthy And Fanatical 'Knight Of Malta'

The Catholic Church does some good things around the world. Think of the nuns and priests murdered by death squads for supporting peasants in Central America. Or Pope Francis, reminding humanity to hold some compassion for the poor and downtrodden every Sunday from his Vatican balcony. Then there are its fanatics and extremists, men-without-women in red hats and red shoes, obsessed with controlling female reproductive organs and protecting pedophile priests. The descendants of Galileo’s jailers might be history’s longest running club of sick puppies. Increasingly, their medievalism is encroaching on Americans.

This week, Catholic extremism’s most high and efficient emissary in Washington, Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta Leonard Leo, will discover whether billions in anonymous donor money and a lifetime of DC networking will meet the limits of power in the voters of the state of Ohio.

On Tuesday, Ohio voters will decide whether to approve Issue 1, a ballot initiative that would establish an individual “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in their state constitution. The fact that the ballot initiative exists at all is a triumph. The Ohio legislature is captured by right-wing extremists engaged in an audacious experiment in despotism. They have ignored their own state courts and the will of the Ohio voters with respect to gerrymandering. They are bought and paid for by oligarchs and oil and gas interests for whom they have shut down environmental regulations and even legalized the sale of radioactive fracking waste as a road de-icer. (For more on this dirty business read David Pepper’s Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-up Call from Behind the Lines.)

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Ohio was one of the states that instantly became Handmaids Tale territory, with forced birth the actual law of the state. Other states had the same kind of ban on the books, just waiting for the SCOTUS green light, but Ohio made national news when a ten year old rape victim was impregnated, and the state refused to allow the child to get an abortion. Her trauma was compounded by having to travel out of state to get care.

Against great odds, prochoice forces in Ohio managed to get a constitutional right to abortion on the ballot. Ohio voters will now get to decide whether to follow states like Kansas and Michigan in returning bodily agency to women and girls.

The fight is ugly and expensive. Pro-choice forces have money and the wind at their backs with wins in other states. Desperate anti-choices in Ohio are flooding the zone with misinformation, claiming the amendment will lead to “abortion on demand” or “dismemberment of fully conscious children” if voters approve it. These lies are promoted on the official government website of the Republican-controlled Ohio Senate. (Issue 1’s text explicitly says “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability.”)

Ohio Republicans have also used the levers of government they control to change the rules to make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot (they failed) and now, they’ve initiated last-minute voter purges. In a roundup on the Ohio tactics in Talking Points Memo yesterday, Kate Riga wrote, “The abortion rights supporters have money, polls and the recent history of other red-state abortion proposals on their side; the opponents have various schemes of essentially legalized cheating on theirs.”

Who helps pay for this effort to trick Ohio voters into privileging rapist sperm cells over 10-year old rape victims? The same strange little man behind the overturning of Roe, of course.

Leonard Leo -- the Knight-Errant in Italian loafers on a camel above -- is an ideological time traveler from the 11th Century, and he’s proud of it. He likes to include his status as a Knight of Malta in his official bios. The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta is a Roman Catholic organization founded in 1048 in Jerusalem as a monastic order that ran a hospital for Christian pilgrims, later tasked by Rome with military duties defending Christians from the local Muslim population. Ejected from Jerusalem when the Turks retook it, the order eventually settled on Malta, ruling it until Napoleon’s army dispersed them in 1798. They did not disband.

According to Foreign Policy magazine, the modern day Knights are a nonstate entity with 13,000 members, maintaining diplomatic relations with 104 countries. After centuries in which membership was restricted to European aristocrats, in 1956 a new rank, ''knights and dames of grace and devotion,'' was opened to commoners. The order operates out of a single building in Rome, with a famous “keyhole view” of the Vatican. Their leader is referred to as the prince and grand master, is elected for life in a secret conclave and must be approved by the pope.

Leo has enjoyed four decades of success in Washington, advising Republican presidents on conservative lawyers to fill the federal judiciary. He is responsible for the U.S. Supreme Court rightist quintet of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. As a young man, he helped Clarence Thomas through his nomination fight in 1991. Now he is using donor money to get extremists into state judgeships around the country.

The Knight mostly jousted in the K Street shadows. But since the overturning of Roe, and his historic $1.6 billion dark money treasure haul last year, which I covered for The New Republichere, reporters are paying more attention to him. He leads an increasingly lavish lifestyle in a coastal Maine palazzo (purchased from another Knight of Malta). I’ve been told he bought his own church, made his wife choirmaster and so has his own priest, like the Sicilian noble in Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo. His fans in the Catholic Church are pushing for sainthood for a deceased daughter.

Investigations at Pro Publica and Politico turned up accounting and other irregularities, prompting the DC attorney general to look into his networks. (In Ohio, anti-choice activists funded by his network have reportedly paid his consultancy some $2 million.) Shameless Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan recently announced he will investigate the Attorney General for opening that investigation.

Leo would clearly like to keep a low profile in Ohio. As recently as September, he was listed as President of Students for Life America, one of the most active anti-choice groups in Ohio. As the Issue 1 vote nears, his name disappeared off the website, where he has been on the board since 2008. Investigators at The Lever discovered one of Leo’s many pots of money, the Concord Fund, donated $18 million to an anti-choice outfit called Protect Women Ohio Action, with more than $6 million in the past two months.

Last year, the Catholic Information Center (CIC), with offices on K Street, gave Leo an award as a “champion of the rule of law.” The CIC describes itself on its website as "the closest tabernacle to the White House.” In his acceptance speech, which can be viewed on video, the Knight-Errant let loose: “Catholicism faces vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots. These barbarians can be known by their signs. They vandalized and burned our churches after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. … Our opponents are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of."

Calling pro-choice women devil-manipulated barbarians and bigots is both laughable and a kind of hate speech. Most American pro-choice women are like Thera Parks, 51, an Ohio insurance saleswoman, whom the Washington Post interviewed recently. Parks is a Republican who volunteered this spring to collect signatures to get the abortion amendment on the ballot.

Why would a Republican work to overturn her party’s signature achievement - the abrupt end of a right to privacy that women have enjoyed for 40 years? Here’s what she told the Post: “When reproductive rights are banned, parents don’t have a choice or say over their kids or their families or even their own bodies,” Parks said. “A little girl had to leave Ohio to receive care. A thought of forcing young girls to stay pregnant and carry to term is just terrible to me.”

Parks is one of the million points of democratic light around America who will prove to Washington’s Knight of Malta that medieval mores have no home here. As long as democracy exists in some form in the states of the United States, common sense will ultimately prevail over fanatical lunacy.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer, and publisher ofAmerican Political Freakshow, a Substack on politics. Her journalism has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Airmail, and New York. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

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