One of the trite amorphisms used by conservatives and others repeatedly is, ” We are not a democracy; we are a Republic.” As if the two terms are mutually exclusive when they are meant to be used together. The United States is a Constitutional Democratic Republic with its governing officials chosen through various democratic processes.
It used to be that way, at least. Now? Not so much. Between election gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics, minority governments are virtually assured in certain states. Furthermore, because of the country’s wide disparity in population density, the Senate is no longer an even representation of the country, with rural states having an outsized influence in voting for laws that disenfranchise millions of Americans.
And finally, in a development I am sure would have dismayed John Adams and many of the other founders, there is a fourth, shadowy force in government consisting of folks who will never stand for election, never have to give an account of themselves to ANY voters, and because of their access to dirty money – do far more damage to the average American than any elected representative will ever be able to do. These people are shaping the three designated branches of government and working in stealth to undermine the will of the majority of Americans.
These unelected souls are exceedingly dangerous, and they wield enormous power. These grifters work in the shadows, behind office doors, raising and profiting from tons of money from people equally as deranged as they are. The recent leak of the draft opinion came from Justices appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote, showing how genuinely destructive the power of dark money is.
This post will outline three individuals diligently working to destroy Constitutional democracy in America. These evil persons will never be on a ballot, and thanks to reporting failures by both media outlets and regulatory bodies are literally getting away with the subversion of the elected government.
The first on this list is John Eastman, a law professor. He lit the fuse of the treasonous efforts to overturn the election in 2020 by writing two memos that asserted — contrary to fact — that the election was stolen and that Vice President Mike Pence had secret constitutional superpowers to thwart the counting of the Electoral College vote. The country was lucky enough that people saw through this as the sham that it was, but it certainly was not for lack of effort on the part of a legion of traitors. He’s in a legal war against the January 6th committee to prevent them from accessing his records. It’s a holding action that is running out of options. If the Justice Department would get off its ass and unseal some indictments, it would be done with – but so far, Merrick Garland continues to be asleep on this issue. But others are nonetheless trying.
In a scathing late-March ruling, Judge Carter found that “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election”; that “the illegality of the plan was obvious”; and that their efforts amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.” Judge Carter asserted that the available evidence implicated Trump in serious crimes, and that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
Eastman is typical of the (mostly) men who are staffing this dark shadow government. He clerked for Clarence Thomas, argued cases at the Supreme Court, and made (unsuccessful) GOP bids for Congress and California attorney general. He’s also served in a leadership role with the Federalist Society and as chairman of the National Organization for Marriage board, which long fought to forbid same-sex marriage. ( You will find the hacks of the Federalist Society behind most of these movements – more on that further in the post).
John Eastman is an awful person who is entirely on board with Team Fascism’s efforts to take away your rights to privacy and electoral representation.
As is the second man in our rogue’s gallery here, Chris Rufo. For those who don’t know, Chris Rufo is the vile grifter who emerged from the shadows to stoke the fires of the effort to ban CRT (Critical Race Theory). in many states. Rufo is typical of the genre, subsisting on wingnut welfare serving as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo has lived on the welfare of “think tanks” since he graduated from Georgetown, allying himself with some truly disgusting people such as The Discovery Institute – a whack job Christian outfit mostly known for opposing the teaching of the theory of evolution. ( And here you thought this was settled in the Scopes Trial in 1925. Silly you.) Rufo does not like to be challenged on his beliefs as he is notorious for blocking folks on Twitter for calling him out as the worthless grifter that he is He’s made his name attacking critical race theory and has allied himself closely with Florida Governor “Death” Santis working hard on Florida’s abomination of a bill to ban CRT.
It’s important to note that what Rufo calls Critical Race Theory has nothing to do with the work of Derrick Bell and totally ignores the fact that CRT is nothing more than a means of analysis taught at the graduate school level – using race as a benchmark to examine statistical data. ( There is nothing wrong with doing so, and that variable has a lot of merits to use as a marker).
Very little of what Rufo calls out as CRT is, in fact, critical race theory. But it provides a convenient smokescreen for his real agenda, which is nothing less than the destruction of public education in the United States. Christopher Rufo used “critical race theory” as a Trojan horse. He has used it to encompass anything conservatives hate- and as a result. In April, he unmasked his current plan, and thanks to the willing propaganda outlet of Fox News; he has been able to publicize truly dangerous ideas:
Earlier this week, the man who’s been widely credited with single-handedly willing the “critical race theory” panic into existence (even if the truth is a bit more complex), laid out a new set of marching orders for the right: Defund public universities, discard academic freedom, remove credentialing requirements for K-12 teachers and generally foster so much anger against public schools that it drives a nationwide popular movement to privatize education. …..In the spring of 2021, he famously crowed on social media that he’d “successfully frozen” the CRT “brand” as the overarching ideology behind almost everything conservatives dislike. This January he tweeted about his new goal to “bait the Left into opposing [curriculum] ‘transparency,'” in order to trigger conservative suspicions that public schools have something to hide.
Now, speaking to a school organized around the idea that the political war will be won in education, Rufo issued a new strategy he called “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” This means waging a “narrative and symbolic war” against both publicly-funded entities like K-12 schools and government agencies, as well as private corporations and the concept of academic freedom itself.
It is a deliberate and dangerous agenda that, in turn, lays the groundwork for undermining the basis of a sound democracy, namely a properly educated electorate. As I noted yesterday, it is also part of a shift of emphasis, so-called “Christians” are turning away from preaching the Gospel through persuasion to imposing the Gospel through anti-democratic legislation. If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a familiar tactic of fascism – as practiced in the 1930s and now being resurrected in Viktor Orban’s one-party state of Hungary. Rufo is an extremist of the worst sort, but he is a well-funded extremist, making his seditious work all the more dangerous.
And finally, we come to the fundamental enabler of all of this disgusting and depressing activity to destroy the United States, the Federalist Society, and its long-time vice president, Leonard Leo. Recently Greg Olear wrote a pretty in-depth description of Leo that lays out most of the points I want to make. So I have transcribed his Twitter thread here. It is worth your time to read:
QUOTED TEXT FOLLOWS:
WHAT LEONARD LEO wants you to know about Leonard Leo, first and foremost, is that he is a Knight of Malta. It’s an extremely selective group. Of the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, only 13,000 are Knights of Malta—although most of them don’t go around bragging about it.
Leo, I’m told, is very proud of this honor. First, because it demonstrates just how radically Catholic his radical Catholicism runs. And second, because it speaks to his importance. Knight of Malta membership is the sort of status symbol that eluded Leo, growing up middle-class in the suburbs of central New Jersey, where his Monroe Township (public) High School classmates derisively nicknamed him “Moneybags.” Leo’s mother and step-father weren’t blue bloods. He wasn’t some wealthy boarding school kid. Poor guy had to make do with CORNELL instead of Harvard or Yale. He was a nobody.
But look at him now! Leo, 57, has made himself one of the most powerful figures in the country. He’s put five—count ‘em, FIVE!—justices on the Supreme Court: Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, Leo quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals).
In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. Leo’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really IS the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. Leonard Leo is a short, foppish, pear-shaped man, in wire-rimmed glasses and pricey suits. Think a dandier George Constanza, or if The Penguin worked at Jones Day.
How does he wield so much power? Networking. Like invasive cancer, Leo’s metastasized from the Federalist Society to the broader conservative legal community. Leo knows anyone & everyone, from CJ Roberts to Mick Mulvaney to the sommelier at Morton’s who pours out the vino. But it’s the financial networking that moves the needle. Leo sits like a giant spider at the center of a complicated web of non-profits and PACs and 501-whatevers.
The Federalist Society, which identifies, develops and grooms future conservative judges. The Judicial Crisis Network, the PR arm of the operation. The Becket Fund, a legal outfit that does pro bono work for religious freedom cases. The Freedom and Opportunity Fund, which helped bankroll the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hoo-ha. Reclaim New York, a charity Leo set up in 2013 with Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon. The Council for National Policy, the Christian coalition group. And God knows how many others.
For non-profits, these entities sure do rake in the cash. Leo’s association with Mercer and Bannon has been a veritable gold mine. Between 2014-17, they collected A QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS in dark money donations—an almost unfathomable pile of cash. That vast pool of dough sloshes around from one dark money org to the next, where it can best be deployed. Leo plants op-eds in newspapers, and he buys ads, and he hires PR outfits to do marketing campaigns……and he lobbies, and he does it in such a way that no one can see the radical Catholic Oz behind the curtain, with his gold fob and his decanter of Château Lafite. The strain of radical Catholicism practiced by Leo and his ilk bears little resemblance to the Catholic Church in my own New Jersey hometown, where I was confirmed, or the one I encountered among the joyful Jesuits at Georgetown University, where I went to school. As I understand it, the Church is about helping those less fortunate. That’s supposed to be the primary focus. Plenty of Catholic charities, and plenty of good Catholics, understand this and behave accordingly.
But Leo’s is a dour, zero-sum faith—pure, inflexible, unswerving. Less inquisition, more Inquisition. And this is no act. He really believes this crap. When I asked if Leo’s faith was sincere, Tom Carter, who was communications director at USCIRF from 2009-2012, when Leo was the de facto chief, told me: “He believes he’s on a mission from God.” That mission is to mold the judicial branch to his liking, and in so doing, to do away with Roe and protections for the LGBTQ community. (SS-comment : And ultimately any rights to privacy under the 4th amendment). This is Leo’s holy war. He wants to foist his extremist religious beliefs on all of us, to annihilate the firewall between Church and State, to impose a medieval legal system that mirrors his radical Catholic faith—call it “Mari’a Law.”
Because this strain of radical Catholicism lacks a proper name, it is harder for non-Catholics to make the distinction. This also makes it easy for its critics to be accused of being prejudiced against Catholics (which is NOT the case). Along with former Attorney General Bill Barr, Leonard Leo served on the board of the Catholic Information Center, the Opus Dei stronghold on K Street in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. As such, he must have been influenced by the former head of that same Catholic Information Center, Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest. McCloskey was singlehandedly responsible for recruiting a number of powerful Washington insiders to…well, if not Opus Dei proper, then something decidedly un-American. Whatever eschatological hocus-pocus McCloskey may have subjected these individuals to, none of them seem like exemplary human beings to me—including McCloskey himself. The priest was removed from his position at the Catholic Information Center when he was accused of sexual misconduct by a woman involved with the Center—not the first time he was booted out of a plum job. Opus Dei paid almost a million bucks to settle the case, and insists that the former priestly powerbroker now “suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s…[and] has not had any pastoral assignments for a number of years and is no longer able to celebrate Mass, even privately.” The point is, that the moral leader of Leonard Leo’s little group is a handsy man of the cloth who cost Opus Dei $977,000 because he couldn’t keep his mitts off a parishioner, and who in the aftermath of the scandal wound up banished from public life.
Leo and his pals are proponents of what Bill Barr, in his controversial 2019 speech at Notre Dame, called “the traditional moral order,” which is a euphemism for “hatred of the LGBTQ community, atheists, agnostics, Muslims, immigrants, and women.” McCloskey spoke of a “relatively bloodless” civil war, because it’s “not possible” for people like him to peacefully coexist with the LGBTQ community.
Leo, as Jay Michaelson succinctly explains in The Daily Beast, believes that “most of the New Deal and administrative state are unconstitutional…[and] that women and LGBT people are not ‘protected classes’ under constitutional law.” The thing is, those are unpopular positions, reviled by a healthy majority of Americans. Given the demographic trends in the United States, the only way Leo & Co. can bring the country back to the pre-New Deal era is to establish a dictatorship—a radical Catholic caliphate.
THIS is who Sam Alito is. This is who placed him on the Court. This is who he answers to. (Same with Thomas, Roberts, ACB, Gorsuch, and Boof.) Ultimately, what these people want is inconsistent with democracy.
Leonard Leo is a demon who has taken possession of the body politic. Send for the exorcist. Cast him out. [END]
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Leo, Rufo, and Eastman. Along with a horde of underlings who donate to keep their evil crusades funded and the three “gentlemen” eating at the finest restaurants and sharing a $5,132.00 bottle of wine with Clarence Thomas and his seditionist wife. These folks have taken it upon themselves to rewrite the American Constitution through subterfuge, NOT by using the methods outlined in Article V of the document. It makes them literal domestic enemies of the Constitution because on every position they support, it undermines the majority will of the American people.
They will never be on a ballot and you will never be able to give consent to the evil work that they do.
Thanks to Citizens United and the destruction of campaign finance reform, they succeed in mainstreaming their efforts instead of being cast out as the extremists they are. But unfortunately, most Americans do not know who they are.
But you should because these people aim to destroy the America that I and many others served and grew up in. So they have to be stopped. Right now I despair as to how.