What If Leonard Leo Became King of Hollywood?
HINT: Your entertainment choices are his next target (Scroll to the end to listen)
If Leonard Leo (the architect of the far-right takeover of our judicial branch)has his way, culture and entertainment are next on his theocratic agenda.
Source: ProPublica We Don’t Talk About Leonard by Andy Kroll
In late 2021, Leo took over as chairman of a “private and confidential” group called the Teneo Network. In a promotional video for the group, Leo sits on a couch in a charcoal jacket, no tie. Over upbeat music, Leo says: “I spent close to 30 years, if not more, helping to build the conservative legal movement. At some point or another, I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’” Leo went on to say his goal was to “roll back” or “crush liberal dominance.”
What other areas of American culture and American life might Leo be talking about? I speak this language. I KNOW WHAT HE’S GUNNING FOR. I’ve devoted months to how Christian Nationalists would define and ban anything they deem to be pornography.
For the majority of Americans, it’s hard to take someone who shrieks Christian Nationalists are going to ban your porn seriously. It’s even tougher when that person is female and not pedigreed and lists all the definitely-not-porny things Christian Nationalists deem to be pornographic.
Which is why I’ve had a devil of a time getting anyone to take Project 2025’s call to ban pornography seriously. It doesn’t matter that I grew up in a Christian Nationalist household where all of the following were forbidden:
All movies. I couldn’t see a Disney movie because some not-saved soul might see me in line and think I was going to see The Exorcist. What kind of Christian testimony would that be?
All secular music. My church hosted the propagandist who toured the country playing rock albums backwards and finding demonic messages everywhere. All secular music was demonic and Satanic. My pastor often claimed its evil beats came from devil-worshipping African jungle tribes (because that wasn’t racist at all.) While I was famously busted at summer church camp for having a Duran Duran tape and Walkman in my bag, I had to sneak listens to Tears for Fears and George Michael and Elton John and Talking Heads.
All books that included intimacy before marriage or endorsed ideas that were not Biblical (as defined by Christian Nationalists.) I wasn’t allowed to read VC Andrews. Or Judy Blume. Or any of the books on this Young Adult Book list from the 1980s. Christian Nationalists’ objection to any physical intimacy and non-prudish plot lines made the careers of “inspirational” romance writers like Janette Oke. I accidentally bought a modern version of one of these books several months ago. I almost threw it across the room after the tenth time the female protagonist thought about kissing a man to whom she was attracted and went to church instead to purge her lustful mind of dirty thoughts.
Video games. While my sibling had a basic Atari, we weren’t allowed to spend much time playing it. We couldn’t have certain versions of PacMan because they turned into ghosts and ghouls (aka demonic). And we weren’t allowed to go to arcades because they were dens of satanic science fiction, gratuitous violence, and nudity. If any area might get the attention of Gen Z men, it’s this one. Voting for Republicans is literally kissing your favorite online gaming sites goodbye.
All art. Museums are packed with naked paintings and sculptures, photographs and films that glorify the debauchery and depravity of their creators. A Florida school didn’t only ban images of Michelangelo’s David because it is nude; Michelangelo was also a rumored homosexual. They believe art is evil because the people who make it are craven and perverse.
All sex except for procreation between heterosexual married couples. I’ve written extensively about how I knew nothing about sex. My mother believed birth control pills caused abortions. I was told to abstain until my wedding night. Christian Nationalists deem any intimate act outside of heterosexual marriage for procreation to be pornography. When they talk about banning pornography, THIS IS HOW EXTREME THEY ARE.
(I have written a dozen or more newsletters about how Christian Nationalists will define and ban all information they deem to be pornographic. I link to one above, but readers can find more by using the search tab on this Substack with the keyword pornography.)
Still, many Americans roll their eyes and laugh and go They want to ban porn. Riiiiiiiiiiight. Good luck with that one!
Leonard Leo is counting on that blasé attitude, Americans. While the rest of us laugh and shrug and sleepwalk-surf through Netflix, he is amassing an army to control every entertainment choice you make.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Leo—the founder and cochair of the Federalist Society—said he expects this initiative will take up $1 billion of the $1.6 billion that Chicago electronic device heir Barre Seid used to bankroll the Marble Freedom Trust, Leo’s ambitious new nonprofit foundation to spread right-wing influence across the cultural landscape. “We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious,” Leo told FTreporter Alex Rogers. “So we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident.”
ENTERTAINMENT = HOLLYWOOD
ENTERTAINMENT = MUSIC
ENTERTAINMENT = STREAMING
ENTERTAINMENT = PUBLISHING
ENTERTAINMENT = GAMING
ENTERTAINMENT =THEATRE
ENTERTAINMENT = ART
Source: ProPublica We Don’t Talk About Leonard by Andy Kroll
Leo’s own rhetoric has grown more extreme. Late last year, he accepted an award from the Catholic Information Center previously given out to Scalia and Princeton scholar Robert George. Rather than strike a celebratory tone, he reminded his audience of Catholicism’s darkest days in history starting with the Siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in the 17th century. Today, he continued, Catholicism remained under threat from what he called “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who he calls “the progressive Ku Klux Klan.” These opponents, he said, “are not just uninformed or unchurched. They are often deeply wounded people whom the devil can easily take advantage of.” And after Dobbs, these barbarians were “conducting a coordinated and large-scale campaign to drive us from the communities they want to dominate.”
Who are these vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots?
Anyone who produces, writes, draws, paints, films, stars in, designs, or otherwise creates entertainment that goes against the Christian Nationalist interpretation of the Bible. AND anyone who consumes it.
If you value your right to freedom of expression, Creators…if you hold dear the privacy of your entertainment choices, Americans…it is beyond time to take this threat seriously. Look at everything Leonard Leo learned from corrupting our courts. It won’t take him several decades to strip our entertainment of anything interesting or varied or meaningful.
If Leonard Leo and his Christian Nationalist ilk become Kings of Hollywood, we are all screwed.
Does someone in your life need to hear about Christian Nationalist Republican plans to define what is pornographic and ban it? Hit the forward button in this newsletter to share by email.
Share this meme with your email contacts and social connections. Print it to distribute as you speak with people or canvass. It’s your bullet-pointed distillation of this newsletter, complete with a link for more detail.
The kicker is how full of obscenity the Bible is.
When I was recording the podcast last night I was talking about how to make your own online community television station. Relatively speaking the tech is all off the shelf stuff in cloud offerings that you can pay for. It isn’t as nicely integrated as Substack but with tools like owncast out there most of the heavy lifting is already done. The hard part to it wouldn’t be the tech but just the usual concern of actually producing content people would watch and paying for the whole enterprise.
Most of the media sector is on pretty shaky footing financially. The most lucrative ad dollars that bring in the most money are political ads as they have the highest charged rates. If Leonard Leo and company were to take over already right-leaning media firms like Sinclair Broadcast Group, Nexstar, and Gray Television they would capture a hefty portion of the domestic television broadcasting industry. Breaking their affiliation deals wouldn’t be too hard and consolidating them into a single Christian Nationalist TV network would be pretty easy to do on paper. Trinity Broadcasting Networking already exists with a very hefty broadcast footprint. TCT Broadcasting does much the same sort of programming as TBN but has a smaller footprint nationally.
This is a very, very likely scenario. Hopefully people are ready for it.