How Leonard Leo and Peter Thiel Handed Trump to the Heritage FoundationInside the billionaire pipeline that turned a think tank
Leonard Leo is the man who handpicked half the Supreme Court. The other half he helped. Starting with his friendship with SCOTUS Judge Clarence Thomas in the 1990s. Leo has never argued a case, never worn a robe, and never held public office. But his fingerprints are all over the death of Roe, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the rise of a court infiltrated by Trump loyalists.
Peter Thiel, meanwhile, is Silicon Valley’s vampire libertarian.. the billionaire who funds AI surveillance for ICE, bankrolls neo-reactionary Senate candidates, and dreams of a world where democracy is optional and oligarchy is optimized. The same man who helped place JD — a man who once referred to Trump as Hitler — as Vice President.
Together, they are not just players in the American collapse. They are co-authors, and the Heritage Foundation is the bridge that turned far-right fantasy into federal reality.
So, Who Is Leonard Leo?
Leonard Leo was born in Long Island in 1965, and from the beginning, he seemed to embody the myth of the all-American overachiever.
His father died when he was a toddler. His mother remarried, and Leo was raised in the bland suburbs of New Jersey. He wore ties to school, spoke in polished phrases, and built his identity around Catholic conservatism and raw ambition. His classmates called him the "Moneybags Kid" because even as a teenager, he knew how to raise cash, curry favor, and run a room.
But this was no harmless prep school hustle. That reputation for fundraising and calculated charm would become the foundation of one of the most powerful political influence operations in modern American history.
He went on to Cornell University and then Cornell Law School, and when he realized Cornell didn’t have a chapter of the new Federalist Society, he started one. One that he briefly put on pause to help his friend, SCOTUS Judge Clarence Thomas, secure his seat on the Supreme Court in 1991.
That experience was a turning point. It showed Leo how judicial politics could be waged like a campaign.
Shortly after, while interning in D.C., Leonard Leo heard Reagan’s Attorney General, Ed Meese, preach the gospel of originalism a legal philosophy that would become Leo’s holy text.
Originalism, at its rotten core says, “Let’s interpret the original Constitution based only on how it was understood when it was written in the 1700’s.”
Why does every power-hungry white guy use a half-baked cult doctrine to justify their empire of evil?
It’s kind of ironic because originalists don’t even follow just one “original” Constitution. They cherry pick which amendments they believe in.
One day it’s 1789 to limit voting rights. Another day it’s 1791 to protect guns. They say it's about the Founders, but it’s really about keeping power out of your hands and in the hands of white, rich men. They treat gun rights as sacred because people in 1791 had muskets but abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and voting protections don’t count, because those didn’t exist in 1868. They think the EPA and CDC are unconstitutional, but billionaires pouring money into elections is just “free speech.”
Even birthright citizenship is up for grabs if it involves immigrant families.
With early funding from billionaire families with foundations like the Olins, Bradleys, and Scaife, Leonard Leo transformed the Federalist Society from a debate club into a judicial insurgency. It was more than just a pipeline for judges. It was a breeding ground for conservative ideology.
This lead to him being known as the “judicial kingmaker.”
Although never sitting on the bench himself, Leo handpicked Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he’d helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
Leonard Leo, much like the Heritage Foundation, has been playing the long-game of conservative politics. Using “boring” lawfare to rise to the top, and Peter Thiel became one of his ideological foot soldiers during his college years when he joined Stanford’s Federalist Society branch.
Who Is Peter Thiel?
Thiel is the PayPal Mafia billionaire who originally left Stanford with a J.D. in 1992, but what Thiel really took with him was a worldview. As a member of the Federalist Society, he wasn’t just taught how to interpret the Constitution. He was taught how to weaponize it. Not to serve the people but to subdue them.
Long before the blood money from the U.S. military and ICE, before Palantir and Palaces of Surveillance, Thiel was already studying how power works not how to share it, but how to concentrate it in ways to benefit himself.
The Federalist Society didn’t just shape his legal views. It gave him the script. He just rewrote it for the digital age. That worldview didn’t fade after law school but instead it grew.
Over time, Thiel stopped pretending the Constitution mattered at all:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” — Peter Thiel, 2009
Now, while Thiel was a member of the Federalist Society, it was never his holy text. Unlike like Leonard Leo, Thiel’s guiding philosophy wasn’t originalism.
It was the Dark Enlightenment.
A techno-feudalist fever dream hatched by Curtis Yarvin, a racist blogger turned pseudo-intellectual who believes civil rights turned America into “absolute human garbage.”
This is not surprising as Peter Thiel was raised in Apartheid Africa, where they followed the racist beliefs of Nazi Germany until the regime collapsed under global pressure in the early 1990s… decades after the Third Reich fell.
Thiel truly believes that democracy is “slowing down innovation” and empowering what he saw as weak-minded majorities. He openly calls for a society ruled by smart, wealthy elites and of course, he assumes he is one of the elite.
As if getting rich off PayPal and hiding behind Palantir made him Plato. In reality, he’s just a billionaire with a God complex and a surveillance fetish, mistaking power for wisdom and control for brilliance.
You can read more about Peter Thiel in my three-part investigative series you can find by clicking here. I published this shortly after launching this SubStack. It covers his ideology, influence, and the disturbing blueprint he’s helping to build.
But Thiel isn’t just building the technology. He’s also shaping the politics. He bankrolled the campaign of Vance and Trump. He personally placed JD “Never Trump Guy” Vance in the Oval Office.
Perhaps a favor for Leonard Leo?
Thiel also funds the Claremont Institute, a far-right “think tank” that promotes the idea that America is already in a state of civil war. Claremont writers helped justify the January 6 insurrection and continue to push theories that would give state legislatures the power to override election results if they didn’t like who won.
Enter The Heritage Foundation
No, Leonard Leo and Peter Thiel didn’t build it. They just knew exactly how to use it.
Heritage was originally born in 1973, created by reactionary businessmen and Beltway ideologues as a factory for conservative policy. It was never grassroots. It was engineered from the top down to weaponize research, polish up extremism, and sell corporate theology as intellectual rigor. By the time Reagan took office, Heritage had moved from the margins to the motor. They ghostwrote speeches. They staffed agencies. They drafted executive orders and treated them like scripture.
Reagan was the face. Heritage was the hand on the pen and when the Cold War ended, and the world moved on, Heritage stayed. It burrowed deeper.
Then came Trump.
Heritage saw in Trump what Leo and Thiel did. Not a thinker or a planner but a weapon. An empty vessel for a full agenda. Trump is the figurehead. The Heritage Foundation is who is really in control.
In 2023, Heritage first published Project 2025. Another in their series of “plans” for presidents. A document almost a thousand pages long.
It wasn’t something that contained theories but instead was a manual for seizing the federal government from the inside. Fire the civil servants. Strip agencies of independence. It called to centralize power under the presidency while they eliminate regulatory protections, criminalize disobedience, and replace law with loyalty and rule with “Christian values.”
It read like a fantasy. A 4Chan-ers wet dream. Then it actually started happening.
By spring 2025, over 40 percent of Trump’s executive orders mirrored Project 2025 word for word. Whole paragraphs lifted. Names and agencies swapped like variables in code.
We’re in July now, and I’m sure that number has increased as they re-write the government record fast speeds.
Executive Order 14151 killed every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across federal government.
Executive Order 14173 expanded the purge to federal contractors.
Executive Order 14215 gave Trump veto power over any regulation, no matter how minor.
Executive Order 14158 created a new department called the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE. A joke of a name for a real internal surveillance mechanism.
DOGE’s real job was similar to the job of the The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 1933) in Nazi Germany. The real job was to monitor, report, and remove anyone disloyal to the administration while shrinking the federal government, leaving only loyalists, turning it into something they could control.
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