Politics

Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society honcho who captured the SCOTUS and thereby set in motion fiat rule by unelected religious kooks and anti-regulation and anti-tax activists, isn’t content to rest on his laurels. According to a ProPublica investigation, Leo has taken an executive leadership role in an organization called Teneo that aims to be a “Federalist Society for everything.”

Having a SCOTUS supermajority and 28% of the federal judiciary in his pocket isn’t enough. Leo and his confederates want to remake the rest of society in the image of their brand of conservatism, including media, industry, technology, politics, education, sports, cultural institutions, etc.

Many Republican bigwigs are already on board, including DeSantis. It would be disastrous for democracy if they achieve even a tenth of the inroads into society more broadly that the Federalist Society did into the judiciary specifically. But I couldn’t help but smile at the delusional view of how “the left” functions to gain cultural hegemony, as described by Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr:

“Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in midtown Manhattan,” he said in a 2020 Teneo video: “a billionaire hedge funder,” “a film producer,” “a Harvard professor” and “a New York Times writer.”

“The billionaire says: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’” Baehr continued. “Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.’ ”

After a single lunch, Baehr concluded, elite liberals can “put different kinds of capital together” and “go out into the world” and “basically wreck shop.”

If only, dude. If only. Has he met elite liberals?

Anyhoo, inspired by this fantasy, Baehr moved to create a “counter-effort,” which Leo is now infusing with vast piles of donor cash so Teneo can set up secretive networks across multiple fronts. Weird how it never occurs to them to just try to persuade people with the power of their ideas. Maybe because their ideas are shitty and unpopular?

Next up, ambulatory unitard Jim Jordan’s “weaponization of government” committee interviewed Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger today about revelations in the so-called Twitter Files. Here’s Aaron Rupar’s supercut of Dems pushing back:

I particularly liked how Dem committee members referred to Taibbi and Shellenberger as Musk’s handpicked “scribes.” Back in the day, Taibbi produced some pretty righteous rants about corrupt, unaccountable plutocrats fucking the country. If he has any vestigial sense of shame behind the trademark smirk, being called a fat cat’s handmaiden might be embarrassing.

The Fox News supercut will be different, and producing that supercut is the point of these hearings. But I do question the effectiveness of these shit-shows. Carlson’s dishonest manipulation of the January 6th footage he received from Kevin McCarthy may backfire since they keep the Trump-fomented insurrection and Carlson’s duplicity as revealed by the Dominion lawsuit filings top of mind.

Speaking of the Dominion revelations, Josh Marshall at TPM calls out the superficial reporting on the Fox News lawsuit, specifically figures from alleged news organizations who are framing the story as a liberal vs. conservative media thing. Marshall says that shows they have zero understanding of the business of media or about the laws that govern the press:

Fox broadcasts deceptive, disingenuous and flat-out false claims all the time. But to get into legal trouble you have to defame some person or entity with legal standing. The “woke mob” can’t bring a case. American democracy can’t bring a lawsuit. Politicians are seldom able to do so for a mix of political and legal reasons. Finally, for a case to have any teeth, the reputational damage must have some significant financial impact. This is why the particular dynamics of the Big Lie represented a kind of legal perfect storm.

For months Fox broadcast a series of demonstrably false claims about a specific, profitable and large private company: Dominion. There’s little question those lies damaged the company’s reputation and ability to sell its services. The details included in its motion also leave little question that people up and down the chain of authority at Fox knew those claims were false and simply didn’t care. Their focus was ratings and money. Under Sullivan, no defamation case is a slam dunk. But this is about as close as you get to that. The meaning of “actual malice” has been litigated extensively over the years. And the set of facts set out above basically meet all the definition points.

How unsurprising that Fox News’s self-appointed sister media outlets would fall into lazy “both sides” framing. They are nothing but glorified gossip columnists.

Open thread.

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