There have been a few great pieces lately chronicling the $1.6 billion donation that Leonard Leo got to spread conservative propaganda and disinfo.
This week, Nina Burleigh at The New Republic went deep on Barre Seid, the erstwhile billionaire who gave his $1.6 billion company to Leo, providing the most comprehensive history of Seid that we've seen to date. (We will just note that we flagged back in 2014 that Seid was funding climate denial!)
Earlier this month at Politico, Heidi Przybyla looked at how Leo met billionaire Barre Seid through the supposedly nonpartisan Federalist Society. Przybyla warns that "Leo appears to be planning to use Seid’s money to create a new ecosystem of conservative activism that he’s likening to a Federalist Society for cultural institutions from schools to boardrooms." Sure enough, Rebecca Davis O'Brien at The New York Times attempted to track where the $182.7 million Leo spent in 2021 went. And while tens of millions are getting tossed to and fro, unfortunately, "it is impossible to directly trace where" all the money ended up, thanks to deliberately opaque disclosure laws.
So what'd all that money buy? We know millions of dollars are changing hands, but what's Leo getting for all Seid's money?
By the looks of it, the money bought a revival of McCarthy-era communist witch hunts, only now the communists are supposedly in Wall Street as well as Hollywood. While we can't trace where the money went, we can see where the disinfo is coming from and connect some dots.
For example, on Tuesday and Wednesday, three successive stories broke in right-wing media about Republicans sending threatening anti-ESG letters.
We can't know for sure, but odds are, had a billionaire not dumped money into fighting against responsible investing that incorporates environmental, social, and governance risks into financial decisions, Fox News wouldn't be reporting that Republicans are sending a letter pressing the Federal Reserve to deny climate risks under the guise of the anti-ESG campaign that Seid's money seeded.
And we can probably assume that without Seid’s money, Republican state attorneys general would be doing something more helpful with their position as the state's top law enforcement officers than sending threatening letters to insurance companies for factoring in climate risk, again in keeping with the anti-ESG crusade.
And of course, the Seid/Leo-funded State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) wouldn't be pushing GOP state treasurers into sending threatening letters to major financial institutions — costing their states billions of dollars for their anti-ESG efforts — without billionaire backing.
But hey, who cares if the public's losing money, so long as Leonard Leo and friends are rolling in it? Apparently not the GOP!