The Conservative Trying to Shift America Rightward... One Movie at a Time
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A new TV show broke through this year. Can one stone change the course of history? And it's a story that many people are pretty familiar with. The biblical tale of David and Goliath. House of David is an eight-part series airing on Amazon Prime Video. It follows the story of King David, from his early days as a shepherd to his epic fight with Goliath. After hitting the top rankings on Amazon this spring, the show has been greenlit for a second season.

What's interesting about House of David is that it's aspiring to be an HBO-style prestige TV show, right? It's a show that they're shooting in Greece on this desert land, and there are these wide shots of landscapes. And it's different from what you would expect if you were trying to think about a biblical series.

That's our colleague Maggie Severns. She covers corporate influence, and she's been looking into the people who've secretly been helping to bankroll this series. One of the funders we uncovered in our reporting is Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo isn't a name typically associated with Hollywood. He's better known for his influence in Washington, where he's long been involved in causes important to the political right.

You know, he wears a suit and he looks very academic, you know, pocket square wearing, conservative, legal guy. So he is someone who spent money on big political races. He's been very influential in politics. But these days, Leonard Leo has turned his influence toward changing American culture more broadly.

In the eyes of Leonard Leo, the left of center has come to dominate way too many spaces in America, right? Like not just entertainment, but, you know, in finance and Silicon Valley. But he wants to get rid of that and create a lasting strain of conservatism that's stronger. And he would say, and people around him would say, is politics is downstream of culture. He has come to a belief that if you can affect politics,

corporate culture, if you can affect entertainment culture, that elections will flow because America will look different and people will see things differently, right? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, June 12th. Coming up on the show, the powerful conservative trying to push American culture to the right. This episode is brought to you by U.S. Bank.

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For decades, Leonard Leo led the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal organization. And one of its biggest concerns is the makeup of the courts. Here's Leonard Leo being interviewed on PBS. Well, for one thing, I think we have to remember that judges wear black robes for a reason. They wear them because their identity is meaningless in the work that they do.

Leo advised Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and he helped pick most of the conservative justices now on the Supreme Court. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts was gliding through confirmation hearings. Neil Gorsuch was confirmed by the U.S. Senate yesterday afternoon. Senators voted 50 to 48 to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is official. Amy Coney Barrett sworn in tonight on the South Lawn of the White House.

What kind of role did Leonard Leo play in getting those justices actually onto the bench? So with Roberts, as well as other Supreme Court justices, there are several roles that need to be played, right? There are kind of what they would call sherpas, people who kind of advise the nominee through the process. Leo and people close to Leo have had played that role with

several Supreme Court justices. There are also outside ad campaigns these days. They can be tens and tens of millions of dollars where you raise money from donors and you run ads that promote that person on the court. So he's both kind of connected to, at times, choosing or advising on choosing judges, helping them through the process, and then being this kind of public voice and support.

It sounds like Leonard Leo achieved a lot during the first Trump administration. Three Supreme Court justices in one administration is nothing to sniff at. Were he and President Trump close? Leonard and President Trump, my understanding is, yeah, they were close. And he was someone who was sometimes at the White House. You know, he was advising on these court picks. That changed around 2020.

There was a sense by Trump that Leonard had taken too much credit, as if Leonard was the person who had made all the decisions and gotten these people onto the Supreme Court when they were Trump's nominees. So Leonard Leo was becoming more high profile. And as we've seen with people in Trump world, when you appear to be taking too much credit, you can get kind of cast out. And that's what happened with Leo. They haven't talked in years, is our understanding.

After a series of judicial rulings against his policies, including from judges he appointed, Trump lashed out at Leo on Truth Social. In a post last month, the president called him a sleazebag who, quote, "probably hates America." In response, Leo said that there's more work to be done, but that, quote, "the federal judiciary is better than it's ever been in modern history."

For many conservatives, being in Trump's inner circle, or at least having his approval, is a must. But apparently, not Leonard Leo. Most people don't have $1.6 billion that they're trying to spend, and Leonard Leo does have all that money. Leo now has a virtually unlimited war chest to back candidates, support causes, and tip the political scales. A mogul has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts, the largest...

That $1.6 billion donation was to a nonprofit that Leo controlled. It's believed to be one of the largest single contributions to any politically active group in U.S. history. The man behind the money is Barry Side, a businessman who founded a successful company that makes electrical products. He's 93 years old. He's been very secretive. But he had known Leonard Leo for a while. He seems to lean libertarian.

And he basically donated his company to a trust that Leonard had created. And then the company was sold and all the money that it was sold for went into that trust. So Leonard now controls this $1.6 billion trust that is going to, he says, disperse all that money. So far, Leo has given millions to nonprofits and corporations to advance a conservative agenda.

According to Maggie's reporting, one firm he's tied to is looking to fund lawsuits against companies that embrace diversity and sustainability initiatives. Another group has targeted executives that sit on the boards of hospitals that perform gender reassignment surgeries. So you might see this out in the world and say, oh, that's interesting, but not know that it is connected to Leonard Leo's network. And there are a bunch of different groups like that. But for those who are looking, the most visible sign of Leo's influence isn't in corporations. It's in Hollywood.

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Over the past few decades, movies and TV shows with Christian or right-leaning themes have had limited mainstream success.

There have been these moments when conservative content broke through, something like The Passion of the Christ was big when it was big. There was Thank You for Smoking where Peter Thiel was involved with that movie, so was David Sachs, another Trump ally. So we've had these moments where movies with a conservative point of view have made it big.

The failure, if you talk to people in this space, has been that there wasn't really a great space for follow-ups. So like if a movie does well, Hollywood wants more of it. But there wasn't really an ecosystem of people for them to turn to and say, hey, make more of that. And the proposition from Leo and other people is, what if we can change that?

After the big donation, Leo's group started moving money around. It's a little murky, but according to Maggie's reporting, one of the groups funded through Sides Gifts was a networking club called Teneo. Can you tell us about Teneo? What is it?

So there are lawyers, but there are also people who work in corporate America, Silicon Valley. They very purposefully recruit people from different parts of industry and of society. And most of the people who they recruit are under 45 years old, so kind of young-ish to mid-career folks. Its membership is secret. People aren't supposed to talk about Teneo. It's got kind of the Fight Club thing going on. What happens? Exactly. What happens at Teneo stays at Teneo.

Before Leo's involvement, Teneo, founded in 2008, was raising less than a million dollars a year. By 2023, that figure had grown to $7 million a year. Neither Leo nor the companies and groups receiving money, including those outside of entertainment, would comment on the largely untraceable investments. In her reporting, Maggie found that under Leo's guidance, Teneo has recruited about 100 members who work in movies, podcasts, and entertainment financing.

Among them is the founder of the production studio behind House of David, the series we heard about earlier. The idea is to invest in studios rather than individual movies or shows, ultimately creating an ecosystem that makes content for audiences with conservative values.

What if we can, you know, have House of David and then there will be five more movies, you know, as streamers and movie theaters are looking to pick up movies, they can say, hey, we can offer this. We can offer this. You want biblical stories? We have these people making them. You want comedies? They're over here. Children's entertainment.

Because Maggie says Leo isn't looking to offer only religious stories. He's also interested in mainstreaming movies and shows that conservatives say are appropriate for children and families. So the makers of House of David are also in the process of making a comedy that features Nate Bergazzi, the famous stand-up comedian. And I think Colin Jost is supposed to have a part in a film. It's about a man trying to support his wife's career when it takes off.

But there is this idea that if you can make really good entertainment and make it of a high quality, you can draw in a mass audience who's just looking for TV that doesn't have progressive messages, right, or the liberal bent that we've come to see with a lot of Hollywood. Taneo's CEO said that they're, quote, excited about what appears to be many new successful ventures focused on high-quality family entertainment. And how successful would you say Leo's projects have been so far?

He feels like it's been very successful because I think that people thought that this was going to be an impossible thing, and they already have movie studios they funded. You know, another studio that's been around a while, it's called Moving Picture Institute. They also do, like, an education component, but...

Moving Picture Institute in recent years has made several movies that, like, went on the indie festival circuit and were accepted at different film shows, and they got streaming distribution, and, you know, increasingly there are real actors that want to be in these movies.

One of the films that made it on the festival circuit incorporated libertarian themes. A lot of the movies are about the evils of government overreach and onerous regulation, right? So, for example, they did this movie about 1970s New York and a GQ journalist, and he loves playing pinball on the side, and he learns that pinball has been banned in New York for decades. It never even occurred to me that the game was illegal.

And so he kind of goes on this journey to figure out how to overturn the pinball ban that culminates in him playing pinball at City Hall in New York. I want to show the city council members that they've had it wrong for all these years. It has a plot. It's based on a true story. But it's also it's about the overreach of the New York City government that had unfairly banned this game.

What do you find most interesting about him and his approach to spreading kind of conservative, libertarian influence? What Leonard Leroux is doing comes from a point of view that I hadn't seen before, right? And it is striking in its ambition. It's striking in this willingness to play a long game and invest in things that you can't necessarily measure, like the soft power element of it.

He has a different way of seeing the world and how power is exercised, and he's putting huge amounts of real money into that. We don't know if he will be successful or not, and that's the part that you watch and track over time. But I think that his level of ambition just is very striking to me.

In this space, is Leonard Leo a David or a Goliath right now? He's a very bullish David right now. He's a David with $1.6 billion to spend. He's taking on what I would call kind of this grand experiment in ways to shift culture and shift American life, entertainment being one of them. Yeah, he's currently a David in that space, making his way to becoming a Goliath. He's working on becoming a Goliath for sure.

That's all for today, Thursday, June 12th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Josh Dossi and John Jerkinson. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.