American lawyer and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo wants the conservative movement to become as “impactful and effective as possible.”And he plans to do this by financially backing conservative groups that are focused on more than just ideas and policy, but on“operationalizing and weaponizing” those ideas to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power.”
Leo is one of the most prolific fundraisers in American politics. He’s also one of the most consequential figures on the American Right. As a leader of the Federalist Society, he has worked for decades to foster strong judicial and legal appointments, and as an advisor to former President Donald Trump on judicial selections, he helped Trump choose the three conservative Supreme Court justices instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade.
After Trump, Leo is quite possibly the man most hated by the Left. And with an estimated $1 billion to spend on aligned groups, the conservative activist holds the attention of both sides of the aisle. In a rare interview with The Daily Wire, published Sunday on the Morning Wire podcast, Leo laid out his vision for how he can use his influence in the movement to empower the types of work that will be necessary to compete with the Left, and win.
“As someone involved in philanthropy, I want to make sure that the conservative movement is as impactful as possible in doing things like defending the rule of law, and improving our society and culture,” he shared with The Daily Wire. “That means that the participants in our movement, the many organizations that are involved in trying to improve our society and our culture and the law and politics and public policy, need to be as impactful and effective as possible.”
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Leo informed recipients of his 85 Fund in September that the fund is conducting a review of where its dollars are going — and in the future, he’ll be focused on funding groups that are doing far more than just research. “Vastly insufficient funds are going toward operationalizing and weaponizing those ideas and policies,” he wrote in the letter, prompting a slew of dramatic headlines from liberal media.
“When you get to a certain point in a movement’s history, while you always have to continue to develop ideas and to educate, what becomes even more important is operationalizing those ideas, taking the principles and philosophy that you’ve developed, and finding ways to make those a reality in our culture,” Leo continued. “The Left has been very effective at this over the past couple of decades, and it’s time for the conservative movement to be much more leveraged in the way it tries to implement its beliefs.”
Part of the Left’s strategy has been to build different kinds of layered institutions and structures, Leo explained to The Daily Wire. First, they developed ideas and philosophies to educate societal influencers and coming generations of academics and professionals. Then they created institutions that could mobilize the people behind those ideas, and created networks that could generate calls to action, protests, and philanthropy.
“They’ve mobilized people,” Leo said. “They’ve created infrastructure to get the word out, to train people to be leaders, and for those leaders then to have the resources they need to create communities of people who will go out and do everything from protesting and demonstrating, to writing in the popular press, influencing the entertainment industry, putting pressure on academic institutions, sometimes even litigating, and sometimes working in various international organizations like the United Nations to effect change.”
Leo’s letter to grant recipients describes how activists on the Left have created “large funding engines,” both 501(c)(4) as well as 501(c)(3), that push litigation, launch aggressive campaigns, and build extensive networks and talent pipelines. Two of the most prominent leftist funding engines are the “constellation of groups” run by the influential left-wing consulting organizations Arabella Advisors and Tides Network Foundation, which spend over $1 billion a year furthering leftist goals.
Students for Justice In Palestine activists protest in Los Angeles, California (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Leftist groups have been very effective in driving anti-Semitism on college campuses through Students for Justice in Palestine, a 501(c)(3) that has politicized an entire “generation on Palestine,” Leo noted, quoting the New Yorker. He also pointed to the Voter Registration Project, another 501(c)(3) that Leo says has poured over $120 million into groups in swing states to “register Democratic-leaning demographics.”
And he mentioned how the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, a 501(c)(3) functioning as a “trade group for activists and healthcare providers who profit from radical transgender policies,” pushes ideological “Standards of Care” used by activists to “strong-arm existing trade groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and British Medical Association into supporting WPATH’s agenda.”
Leo wants the conservative movement to be as effective and aggressive, especially given the fights on the horizon. He says the Right will need to build talent pipelines, leverage litigation, and launch “campaign-style tactics to beat back things like ESG and DEI.” And particularly at this moment in time, he argued, after a major Supreme Court case that dealt with how federal agencies interpret the law, the conservative movement is well-positioned to challenge the administrative state.
“The regulatory state is now something that’s very much in play,” he said. “Those are very leveraged activities where there’s been some real entrepreneurial spirit by conservatives, but that needs to happen more than it does. And that’s something that we’re just really trying to stress test the movement about, really.”
Leo mentioned examples of those talent pipelines and networks on the Right: in business and finance, the Teneo Network, in entertainment, the Moving Picture Institute, in journalism, the Fund for American Studies, the College Fix, and the National Journalism Center.
“You need to strengthen those networks,” he said, “and you need to build new networks like those where we don’t presently have them.”
“It’s all well and good to educate people,” he reflected. “But it’s very important to take the best and brightest of your movement, the people who have the best strategic vision, the folks who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society, it’s really important to find those people, to identify them, to recruit them, and then to make sure that they are part of an effort that’s implementing our philosophy and ideas.”
The Left has also leveraged litigation as a “tip of the spear strategy” for decades to pursue its ideological agendas in welfare reform, civil rights, and so forth, Leo said. He believes the right should do the same, using “operationalized litigation as a vehicle for affecting the social and cultural change it wants to see.”
“It could be challenging government actions so that you can reinvigorate things like the separation of powers and checks and balances and federalism, those structural protections that really advance the dignity and worth of the human person by limiting government power,” he explained. “It could be challenges to government policies that relate to DEI or other parts of the woke cultural agenda.”
There’s nothing wrong with research, policy development, education, and the creation of ideas, Leo said, explaining that there will always be a place for such things in the conservative movement.
“Ideas constantly have to be tested,” he noted. “New situations always require new thinking and new education. But as a movement matures and evolves, which the conservative movement has done, it’s time to take what you already know, and to operationalize it, and that means being at the tip of the spear, filing those lawsuits, building those talent pipelines, placing personnel in positions of influence in culture, society, and government, launching campaign-style tactics to beat back things like ESG and DEI. That’s the kind of thing that needs to be done.”
And then, Leo argues, conservatives should be trying to influence social and cultural institutions.
“Infiltrating the press,” he said. “Infiltrating entertainment.”
“These are things that go beyond the normal policy research, white papers, conferences, seminars, educational programs that millions and millions and millions of dollars are spent on every year in the conservative space,” he explained. “And again, there’s a place for some amount of that, but it can’t be at the expense of bringing the conservative movement to the next level and really operationalizing its ideas.”
Leo isn’t arguing that the conservative movement is “prehistoric” or unsuccessful in its efforts to change culture. But he does believe conservatives are, to a certain extent, risk-averse by their nature. He described an independent streak amongst conservatives, compared to what he described as the Left’s more “collectivist” way of thinking and organizing.
“It’s hard to mobilize the conservative movement in the same way,” he said. “I think some of that does need to change. I think we need to band together more effectively and more frequently. I think we need to test new strategies a little bit more than we do.”
He also emphasized that conservatives have had some recent victories, pointing to changes in the legal space, such as the transformation of the federal judiciary and the”beginnings of the deconstruction of the administration state,” as a “huge victory and success.”
Liberal group Demand Justice projects “Stop The Steal” on the U.S. Supreme Court (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Demand Justice)
For decades, Leo argued, the conservative movement has talked about the structural constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. The conservative movement has educated the country about the importance of that structure, and it has demonstrated — “quite clearly,” according to Leo — that “those aren’t just antiquarian notions, but they’re very important in the here and now.”
“Those provisions in our Constitution, they’re what really ultimately protect the dignity and worth of the human person,” he said. “If you look at the course of human history, what has been the greatest threat to human dignity, it’s been the state. It’s been the government. It’s been overreach by the governing power.”
Now that the movement has educated the public about those issues and developed concrete theories and approaches, Leo believes conservatives can “operationalize” those ideas by supporting litigation projects that “beat back the administrative state using those constitutional tools, by demonstrating that this excessive power that the administrative state has impinges on the separation of powers.”
“It violates the checks and balances of our Constitution,” he argued. “It stops the states of the power that they have and their people have to make decisions. And in all of that, the point we’re making in that litigation is that if you really want to defend the freedom and the dignity and worth of ordinary people in this country, you need to make sure that the regulatory state comports with our Constitution.”
“Not surprisingly, the plaintiffs and a number of these different kinds of challenges to the administrative state are very average, ordinary, but wonderful people who produce great value in society,” he added. “They’re small lobstermen and fishermen, for example, from New England and from the Gulf Coast.”
Where is the conservative movement best positioned to weaponize its ideas? Leo says that’s in challenging the administrative state.
“We are very committed to supporting that enterprise, to as much of an extent as we can,” he said. “We know the ideas. We know how to communicate them. We know how to get people to embrace them. We know how to implement them. And so now it’s just a matter of operationalizing and weaponizing it by incubating litigation and by building talent pipelines of people who can pursue that.”
“And then of course,” he added, “when you have an opportunity, when you win elections, for example, you want to have talent pipelines of people who embrace those ideas who can enter into the administrative state and properly clip the wings of these agencies when they overreach.” 
Former President Donald Trump with Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and his family in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Pressed on how the 2024 election, and potentially another Donald Trump presidency could affect his plans, Leo declined to guess at any outcomes. He’s never been a good predictor when it comes to elections, he said.
“Elections obviously matter, but … politics and public policy is downstream from culture,” he argued. “It’s downstream from societal norms. And so if the conservative movement wants to ultimately be successful, it obviously has to be very engaged on issues of politics and public policy. It has to engage leveraged activity like litigation in the legal policy space.”
But at the end of the day, according to Leo, the movement needs to be focused on building those pipelines and infrastructure that affect the broader society and culture.
“In a way,” he said, “I think that’s even more important than what happens in a particular election cycle. So yes, very important what happens in November, I don’t want to undercut that, but in the medium term, what’s perhaps even more important than elections is the conservative movement building beachheads in areas like news, entertainment, business and finance, corporate C-suites, educational institutions, so that you can begin to have a much more level playing field within society and culture regarding traditional principles, western, traditional America based values.”
“Work hard at the politics,” he concluded, “but don’t lose sight of those other social and cultural institutions that do ultimately call the shots in our lives.”
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