Leonard Leo Pushed the Courts Right. Now He’s Aiming at American Society

The NYT has found a new boogeyman. Some of it may even be true

After leading efforts to put conservatives on the bench, the activist has quietly built a sprawling network and raised huge sums of money to challenge liberal values.

Millions of dollars in television advertisements blasting schools for teaching critical race theory and assailing corporations like BlackRock, Uber and American Airlines for catering to “woke politicians.”

A lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court to radically reshape how federal elections are conducted. Complaints against President Biden for violating election law and against school districts that allow information to be withheld from parents about children’s gender identities.

These initiatives were advanced in the past year or so by a handful of new or reconfigured conservative groups — each with their own leadership and mission.

Behind the scenes, though, these groups have something in common: They are part of an ambitious coalition developed in recent years by the conservative activist Leonard A. Leo, who until now has been best known for his role in pushing the appointments of conservative judges to the center of the Republican Party’s agenda.

Most of the initiatives were financially supported, or in some cases launched, by an opaque, sprawling network shaped by Mr. Leo and funded by wealthy patrons, usually through anonymous donations that critics call “dark money.”

An investigation by The New York Times of Mr. Leo’s activities reveals new details of how he has built that network, with relatively little public attention, into one of the best-funded and most sophisticated operations in American politics, giving him extraordinary influence as he pushes a broad array of hot-button conservative causes and seeks to counter what he sees as an increasing leftward tilt in society.

The network represents a dramatic expansion of tactics and focus for Mr. Leo, who spent nearly three decades working mostly behind the scenes to pull the judiciary to the right as an executive at the Federalist Society. His success in that effort, and expansion into other polarizing fights, is rapidly making him a leading target of criticism from the left.

His philosophy is defined by a belief that the federal government should play a smaller role in public life and religious values a larger one, and that institutions and individuals should be challenged for embracing what he sees as subversive liberal positions.

While his efforts to put conservatives on the courts found a powerful ally in President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Leo, an Ivy League-educated lawyer, has steered clear of the most virulent strains of Mr. Trump’s right-wing populism and he has navigated past most of the fissures in the Republican Party.

Among leading political figures, Mr. Leo is more aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who as Republican leader in the Senate has worked with him closely on judicial nominations and shares an animus for laws restricting the flow of money into politics.

Mr. Leo’s approach blends cutting-edge political financing techniques — some of which he says are copied from the left — with deep connections to the Republican establishment and a willingness to harness some of the culture-war issues animating the base.

Mr. Leo had begun quietly building the new operation in 2016, but its scope and intensity ramped up substantially when he stepped down in January 2020 from day-to-day leadership of the Federalist Society and shifted his attention to building the conservative advocacy and donor network full time.

The network is made up of a loosely affiliated and evolving set of nonprofit and for-profit entities, through which Mr. Leo helps raise huge sums of money from donors, steers the cash to groups promoting issues he supports and then shapes the resulting initiatives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/us/politics/leonard-leo-courts-dark-money.html

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The Menace of ‘Misinformation’

It’s a powerful weapon, misinformation. Properly executed, it’s a one-two punch that forces an opponent onto the defensive while deceptively redirecting the people’s attention. And the Left is infinitely better at deploying it than the Dudley Do-Rights on the Right.

Why might that be? Author and conservative commentator Dennis Prager puts it succinctly: “Truth is not a left-wing value.”

One the Left’s most recent and obvious manifestations of misinformation has been Joe Biden’s shameful charge that supporters of Donald Trump are “semi-fascists.” This is also known as the Big Lie, and it’s the reverse of the truth. It’s an attempt by Biden’s handlers to convince his gullible base that their political opponents are guilty of the bad behavior that they themselves are guilty of. The truth is that the Republican Party, whether being led by Donald Trump or someone else, has always been the party of liberty, lower taxes, smaller government, economic freedom, and individual accountability.

As for the Democrats and their leftist brethren, what could be more fascist than the government’s corporatist weaponization of Big Tech and Big Media in collusion with the Department of Justice and against their political opponents on the Right?

Here, blogger Glenn Greenwald offers a sobering assessment: “Stop being shocked when mainstream liberals express their desire to see their political adversaries not only censored by a union of state and corporate power but also imprisoned. The crux of American liberalism is authoritarianism.”

Think about how this cabal worked in concert to perpetuate the biggest of the Big Lies: that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. It was, for all intents and purposes, a quiet coup.

And think about how, four years later, it rigged the 2020 election by shamelessly working the other end of the misinformation angle: by telling us that all the very real and damning materials found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were actually Russian disinformation. Indeed, they co-opted more than 50 “former senior intelligence officials” to co-sign and publish a letter saying as much. The laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” said high-level Trump-hating liars such as James Clapper and John Brennan and Mike Hayden.

But as columnist Aaron Kliegman points out, the laptop misinformation ruse is merely the most consequential of numerous versions of the same ploy. Indeed, Kliegman lists six other recent examples of the misinformation device being used by the Left against the Right. Among them:

The origins of COVID-19, whereby those who proposed that the virus had leaked from of virology lab in Wuhan, China, were labeled bigots and conspiracy theorists

The vaccine as panacea, whereby questions about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine were shut down as disinformation

The January 6 narrative, whereby suggestions that Nancy Pelosi knew in advance about the threats of a violent storming of the Capitol were dismissed but later revealed to be true

The integrity of the 2020 election, whereby claims of fraud and other irregularities were deemed false, misleading, or unsubstantiated

In all of these cases and others — such as the mistreatment of J6 defendants and the insistence that critical race theory wasn’t being taught in our schools — the truth eventually rolled out of bed and put its pants on … but not before the “misinformation” lie had traveled halfway around the globe.

And that’s the sad reality of our discourse today: When the truth is harmful to the Democrats’ agenda, they’ll do everything they can to hide it.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/92039-the-menace-of-misinformation-2022-10-13

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The Real Meaning of 'Diversity and Inclusion' at Microsoft CSPI

Jason Mansfield

From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division. I’ve been working in the software industry for over a decade, and while I’ve often encountered some combination of the words “diversity” and “inclusion,” how those words have been translated into culture and policy has varied dramatically over time and between companies. At Microsoft, I became concerned about diversity and inclusion policies that required me to sacrifice what I viewed as the best way to serve the company’s mission, particularly as it affected work prioritization, hiring, and promotions.

Large companies like Microsoft have a major impact on their billions of users. But they also influence other companies’ cultures and policies, since former employees move on to other firms and use what they learned, and some people view things being done at large successful corporations as “best practices.” How these cultural and policy issues manifest themselves at universities has received a lot of attention. My aim in writing this piece is to raise awareness of what’s going on inside one of the world’s most valuable companies.

I’m publishing this article pseudonymously because I fear I would be fired or many companies would in the future refuse to hire me for writing it.

Microsoft classifies its employees by race, gender, and other categories, and aims to increase the shares of employees in preferred groups. This is not a secret. Microsoft has publicly committed to racial equity, including an effort to “double the number of US Black and African American, and Hispanic and Latinx people managers, senior individual contributors, and senior leaders.” The company publishes an annual report on Diversity & Inclusion (hereafter shortened to “D&I”) in which it tracks its progress toward such goals. Some “gains” noted in the 2021 report include:

Amongst US employees, Hispanics increased from 6.5% to 7.0%.

Amongst all employees, women increased from 28.6% to 29.7%.

Amongst US executives, Blacks increased from 3.7% to 5.6%.

So how does Microsoft achieve this progress?

D&I Must be a Core Priority of Every Employee
Every Microsoft employee has to complete a “Connect” several times a year. As part of this process they must write out their priorities for the coming months, and how they plan to make progress on them (“critical indicators of success”). This text must be reviewed and approved by the employee’s manager.

You might think that a company that spent time writing a mission statement would ask employees to focus on its mission (Microsoft’s is “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”). But every Microsoft employee instead is told that D&I must be a “core priority,” and that they should write about that first, and then “briefly” discuss their own additional priorities. Below is the text shown to employees:

When I initially saw this, I thought I would just write something anodyne and get back to focusing on producing great software for our users. But I soon learned that there was more to Microsoft’s commitment to D&I than making me write some text that was only visible to my manager every few months. I received an email from my corporate vice president (2 hops below the CEO), requiring all managers and employees above a certain level to publicly share our personal D&I plans.

I soon learned that if I wanted to get promoted, visibly announcing my commitment to D&I wasn’t enough. The corporate vice president who sent that email had to approve all promotions within his organization above a certain level, and it was made clear to me that he weighed contributions to D&I very heavily when making those decisions, and that he encouraged lower levels of management to do the same.

To contribute to D&I, people did and were encouraged to do the following:

Hire “diverse” candidates (more on that below).

Promote “diverse” employees (more on that below).

Participate in a “culture club,” which organized speakers, book clubs, and movie showings focusing on topics like allyship and discrimination.

“Diverse” Candidates are Preferred During Hiring and Promotion
An important and challenging part of my job was hiring people at a time when the labor market was tight and our competitors were offering better compensation, remote work policies, and higher levels of prestige (would you rather work at Google on Gmail or at Microsoft on Outlook?). But in addition to all of these challenges, the company also put in place additional constraints in the service of D&I.

As a hiring manager, I was told that for any position to be filled in the United States I had to interview:

At least 1 African-American, black, Hispanic, or Latin candidate, and At least 1 female candidate.

The slide below mentions a part of the company called “CELA” (Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs), but my impression was that it applied company-wide.

There weren’t any quotas around how many of these “diverse” candidates I had to actually hire, but I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good.

For one position I was trying to fill, dozens of people applied, and most of them seemed qualified based on their resumes, but I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their name or resume. Sadly, during these months I had many very qualified internal candidates applying for the role, but I couldn’t hire them. Unable to hire, my team became a bottleneck that delayed several projects integrating AI into Microsoft products.

You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with similar resumes do not get.

In my role as a manager, I recommended employees for promotion. About a week after submitting one set of recommendations, I got an instant message from someone in human resources along the lines of “Hi, did you consider recommending [one of my subordinates] for promotion?” I replied, “I think I’m missing some context, can we discuss this over video?”

During the video call, I was told that HR was reviewing employees from “diverse” groups and making sure they had been considered for promotion. I told HR that I had considered it and I believed my recommendation was correct. HR said “OK, then we don’t need to change anything. I just wanted to check that you had considered them.”

Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.

https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-means

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Quarantine madness

Another part of the generally disastrous response by governments to the pandemic

The Premiers might want to consider balancing their budgets by setting up a petting zoo for their endangered White Covid Elephants. Members of the public could come and visit the hundreds of millions of dollars they cost to purchase and upkeep and ask questions of the zoo keepers like, ‘Why the hell did we build quarantine camps for a seasonal flu that was almost over?’ and ‘Was it necessary to fit convict electronic ankle bracelets to people in quarantine?’

There’s a time and a place for quarantine camps. Australia used to have several historic facilities back when we were a young, fragile country unable to deal with the introduction of the world’s serious illnesses.

The flow of migration was tiny and tightly controlled through a series of ports. Many died in those facilities to protect the nation in conditions close to a living hell and, unlike Covid’s ‘re-imagined’ notion of quarantine, you could not buy your way out of historic quarantine or use your position and privilege to get around the rules.

Quarantine was a practice started in earnest (as far as we can tell) in Venice in the 14th Century where ships were forced to anchor in the harbour to see if anything terrible happened to the passengers and crew. Quaranta giorni or ‘forty days’ is where we get ‘quarantine’ from.

It was a good solution for the time, but that world is gone.

Globalisation, mass migration, and the continuous flow of human beings into Australia via air and sea makes it impossible to sustain human-based quarantine – for anything – unless a full shutdown of the nation is enforced. It is an unsustainable proposition that would only work for a handful of diseases. Certainly, it was never credible to believe that a highly transmissible respiratory illness like Covid could be contained via quarantine.

Once Covid entered the general population, quarantine went from an absurd hope to a nonsense. Quarantine facilities are designed to keep a disease out of a nation. If that nation already has a domestic outbreak – quarantine is no longer viable. To enforce isolation orders on travellers after Covid escaped into the community was always ridiculous – one may even argue that every cent taken from civilians by government departments for their forced quarantine was theft.

To be clear, hotel quarantine and police-enforced self-isolation offered no long-term value.

Think about it this way, with tens of thousands of cases spreading out of control through the community, what difference does it make if you spend nearly $10,000 getting one traveller into the country ‘clean’? The answer is none. It is the same medical absurdity as America’s current vaccination orders for travellers. Vaccination for Covid has no discernible impact on transmission or prevention from infection. America has millions of active cases. Their medical red tape at the airport is nothing but petty politics from an embarrassed regime that cannot and will not admit it lied for two years.

Australia’s National Cabinet (which has wrapped itself in protective layers of secrecy) claims to be advised by leading experts in the medical field, and yet laymen worked out all the way back in late 2020 that Covid would become an endemic virus that could not be stopped by tyranny.

Why did the world slit its economic throat in pursuit of Covid eradication? Was it just so that Big Pharma CEOs could raise billions from a mandated vaccine? Was Covid being used as an excuse to expand political power and collapse Western systems of government into something that looks more like authoritarianism? Was it simple fear and incompetence from political leaders prepared to break every rule of civilisation to hang on to power, making promises about safety they had no right to make? Whatever it was, it had very little to do with healthcare. Maybe idiocy, but not health.

While Premiers probably wish they could ‘move on’ from Covid and pretend that they didn’t act like tin-pot dictators – there is still a question about what to do with their white elephant quarantine stations and health apps…

Queensland’s ‘Wellcamp’ (which sounds like an Orwell theme park) outside of Toowoomba was proudly opened in mid-February 2021 by Annastacia Palaszczuk. It was built to house those pesky unvaccinated international travellers, holding them in small prison cells. Why only unvaccinated travellers? Quarantine is predicated on the notion of locking diseases in with excessive force. It’s not a quarantine facility if half the infected travellers take an Uber straight into the centre of town. Nobody in the press challenged Palaszczuk on the distinction.

Deputy Premier Steven Miles made it quite clear that this was a holding cell for the unvaccinated, not a genuine quarantine station.

‘We anticipate an ongoing number of arrivals, particularly from countries where their vaccines aren’t recognised by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and therefore will be required to quarantine. As well as farmers, refugees from other countries who haven’t been able to access vaccinations.’

At some point, every person held at Wellcamp should sue the Queensland government for being held under false pretences. It cost a shocking $3,220 for a single adult, $4,130 for two adults, and $5,040 for two adults and two children. How can this be seen as anything other than a mean-spirited, state-issued fine on the unvaccinated?

There was no competitive tender for Wellcamp’s construction by the Wagner Corporation which cost $200 million along with $9 million to Compass Group and $7.67 million to Aspen Medical in service fees. It is owned by the company, not Queensland, and is being leased. Now, it sits empty with everyone admitting the facility has no use whatsoever. It was a political construction – nothing more – and those in government responsible should have the amount docked from their public service budget.

‘I don’t regret anything about it,’ said Miles. He should regret everything, especially his comment that segregating the unvaccinated was about ‘rewards’.

The situation is nearly identical in Victoria, where Daniel Andrews has his own white elephant exhibit. Victoria’s $580 million quarantine facility in Mickleham is the most expensive of all the albino zoo animals. It was built by the federal government (why did you do that, Scott Morrison?) and operated by the Victorian Labor government.

‘There is no doubt in my mind that we will look back on this decision by the Commonwealth and the state government to invest in a special purpose-built quarantine facility as one of the best decisions we’ve made,’ said Police Minister Lisa Neville.

Oh, really?

Matthew (Matt?) Guy chipped in, ‘It’s a shame it wasn’t in place maybe a year or so ago when it was needed most. But it’s an important piece of armoury to ensure there are no more lockdowns.’ ‘You can see it from the moon,’ Neville added.

Wonderful. A failure so large it is visible from space.

The hub is already closed. These are same governments that cry poor and insist they ‘just have to increase taxes’ to salvage the economy. How about they start paying back, with their salaries as forfeit, the hubris of their careers?

It was the Liberals who facilitated this Southern failure and the Liberals that shared the information required to create vaccine passports, so I don’t want to hear any more garbage from the party elite about how ‘Labor is so much worse’. You’re both atrocious. That’s why ‘you betrayed us!’ was screamed at those on stage during CPAC.

The Howard Springs quarantine facility in the Northern Territory copped well-deserved flak for essentially forcing remote communities to relocate into it. While arguably the most successful of the facilities (in that a significant number of people moved through its doors), it was still a failure of concept. At the end of the day, for all its ‘success’ it served no purpose and made no difference to our final destination as a nation.

With the fully-vaccinated flying into Australia riddled with Covid at the same time as the unvaccinated were being carted off to live in prison facilities, Australia and its leaders openly practised discrimination and segregation despite the science (and basic ethics) being against them. At no point have they apologised for this, or sought to amend the legislation that allowed these violations in basic decency.

As a nation, we wasted a fortune and learned nothing except that our Premiers and medical bureaucracy harbour an insatiable lust for cruelty and cretinism in equal measure. If this is the quality of ‘expert’ on offer, we’d be better off with the village idiot – or a stray cat. And yes, your money is still being used to feed the elephants.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/australias-white-elephant-zoo

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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