Okay - I went DEEP on this - and I want everyone to PAY ATTENTION.

There will be a test.

So one network had two huge wins this week and the guy at the center of it isn't getting named in either story.

Have you heard of Leonard Leo? The Federalist Society guy. The one who helped build the current conservative Supreme Court majority and advised Trump on who to put on it, then went off to do bigger stuff.

On April 29 the conservative Supreme Court majority he helped build handed down what voting-rights advocates say is the biggest rollback of the Voting Rights Act in decades.

On May 4 the Department of Education opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith College for admitting trans women. Totally different fights. Totally different agencies. Totally different legal frameworks. Nobody putting them in the same story.

But the same $1.6 billion dark money network is sitting behind both of them.

I had to dig into this one because honestly when the Smith news dropped I thought it was just another Trump trans panic move. Standard culture war stuff. Then I saw the complaint came from a group called Defending Education, and the name rang a bell from the parental rights school board stuff a couple years ago, and I started pulling on the thread.

Defending Education is run by Nicole Neily. She's a Koch network lifer - Cato, FreedomWorks, Competitive Enterprise Institute, all the usual suspects. The group says it's grassroots moms, which, lol.

According to IRS filings summarized by SourceWatch, the group paid Leonard Leo's PR firm CRC Advisors $1,392,656 between 2021 and 2024 for "strategy" and "public relations." Their legal work runs through Consovoy McCarthy, a firm that has worked extensively on conservative civil rights cases. Neily's other nonprofit, Speech First, got $750,000 from Leo's 85 Fund.

So Leo's nonprofit hub gives money to one Neily group, and a different Neily group pays Leo's for-profit firm. The money goes in a circle. The "grassroots parents" are a pass-through.

So when "a parents group" filed the Smith complaint, that's not a parents group. That's a Leo-network-aligned operation using a friendlier brand name.

OK let me explain how the money actually works because once you see it you can't unsee it.

In 2022 an Illinois businessman named Barre Seid gave $1.6 billion to a Leo entity called Marble Freedom Trust. Largest political donation in American history.

That money flows from Marble through a donor-advised fund at Schwab Charitable, which then grants it to Leo's main funding hubs, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund.

Those funds then grant it out to all the nonprofits doing the actual fights - judicial groups, parents groups, election groups, "free speech" groups.

Schwab in the middle is the anonymity layer. When the 85 Fund's tax return says "we got our money from Schwab Charitable," nobody can trace it back to Marble, which means nobody can trace it back to Seid. The donors stay anonymous.

A significant amount of Leo-network nonprofit money has flowed back to Leo's own for-profit firm CRC Advisors - over $100 million since 2020, according to Court Accountability's Lisa Graves. He owns three houses now including a $3.3 million Tudor in Maine that he paid cash for in 2021. The network's nonprofit money also flows into his private consulting operation.

That's the machine. Now the wins.

Win one is Callais. The case was about a Louisiana map that restored a second majority-Black district and led to the election of a second Black representative. A group of "non-African American" voters sued to kill the map. Alito wrote the 6-3 opinion holding the map was unconstitutional and substantially narrowed how racial-gerrymandering claims can be brought going forward. Critics say the ruling shifts the fight toward proving intentional racial discrimination, making Section 2 claims much harder to win.

Kagan in the dissent said it makes Section 2 "all but a dead letter."

The conservative majority that wrote that opinion came through the judicial pipeline Leo helped build.

And the response was immediate.

Tennessee pulled off the most aggressive move. The day after Callais, Trump posted that Governor Bill Lee was going to redraw Tennessee's map. Lee called a special session two days later.

The session opened May 5. On May 7 the legislature repealed a 1972 state law that had banned mid-decade redistricting for fifty years, passed an entirely new congressional map that carves Memphis into three pieces, eliminates the state's only majority-Black district, and pushes toward a 9-0 Republican delegation.

Lee signed it all into law. Same day.

The NAACP filed a lawsuit within three hours.

They repealed a fifty-year-old law and passed a brand new map in three days. You don't draw a map like that in a weekend. You don't repeal a fifty-year-old statute in a weekend. Somebody had this ready.

Alabama filed an emergency request the day after Callais to bring back maps a lower court had already thrown out for being racially gerrymandered. Florida started redistricting immediately. Three Republican states moving in the same week, with more lining up behind them.

Win two is Smith.

Smith College is a 155-year-old women's college in western Massachusetts. The kind of place that shows up in old movies as a stand-in for "smart, slightly intimidating young women in cardigans." They've been admitting trans women since 2015, which is to say, for over a decade, on the simple logic that a women's college admits people who identify as women. Nobody outside the school cared. It wasn't a fight.

Then last spring Smith handed an honorary degree to Rachel Levine. You might remember Levine. She's the trans former Assistant Secretary for Health under Biden, the first openly trans federal official ever confirmed by the Senate, and basically Trumpworld's favorite person to put in attack ads. The Trump campaign featured her face in ads going after Kamala in 2024. Right's been obsessed with her for years.

Smith invited her to commencement. Gave her a degree. That was the trigger.

Defending Education - Nicole Neily's group, the one running money in a circle with Leonard Leo - filed a complaint with the Department of Education. On May 4, the Trump administration opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith for, and I'm quoting here, "admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams."

The "victims" in the complaint are "biological women" who somehow got harmed by Smith admitting trans women. There are no actual women being denied admission. Smith takes any applicant who identifies as a woman, period. There's no named student who came forward saying their rights were violated. No incident. No event. Just a policy that exists, and the possibility that someday, maybe, somebody could feel like their rights got taken away.

That's the move. Sue over something that has not happened to anyone. Get the precedent before the harm exists, so by the time anyone could have actually been harmed, the door is already closed.

We've seen this play before. The clearest example is 303 Creative, the Colorado web designer who sued for the right to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. She had never been asked to make a wedding website for a same-sex couple. She did not have a wedding website business. The "request" she cited in her court filing turned out to be from a guy who was straight, already married to a woman, and had never contacted her.

The Supreme Court ruled in her favor anyway, 6-3, and carved a First Amendment loophole into public accommodations law over a customer who did not exist.

Now look at what the Trump administration is doing with executive orders. Designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization with no specific act tied to a specific person. Deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act based on tattoos that might indicate gang membership. The whole pre-crime architecture, where you get punished for what the government thinks you might do, not what you did.

The Smith investigation is the same logic applied to civil rights enforcement. Stop waiting for harm. Open the case on the possibility of harm. Let the threat of losing federal funding do the work of forcing the school to change its policy before anyone has actually been hurt by anything.

Listen. I've written about Leo before, mostly the climate cases - his network funds the lawsuits while ProPublica documents him paying for the justices' vacations. The Smith case is the same playbook in a new costume. The lawyers are there. The plaintiffs are pre-built. The PR is pre-positioned. The federal agencies are now staffed by people from the same conservative legal world.

Leo's network isn't waiting for harm. They're manufacturing the precedent in advance. Callais was queued for years. The Smith complaint sat at the DOE for ten months. Tennessee passed a brand new map and repealed a fifty-year-old law in three days. Alabama filed the day after Callais. None of this was improvised. They're firing on all cylinders.

The press will cover Callais as a voting rights story and Smith as a trans story and nobody is going to put them in the same paragraph. But the donor map does. The money runs in a circle and the circle includes both fights.

If you're a Black voter in Louisiana watching your district disappear, and you're a trans student at Smith watching the federal government try to throw you out of your school, you don't have the same enemy on paper. You have the exact same enemy on the bank statements.

And if you're on the left and you've been watching this from the sidelines wondering why we keep losing, the answer is simple.

They've been planning all of this for decades. Now, they show up to every fight with the lawyers, the plaintiffs, the PR, the donors, and the federal agencies already lined up.

Time to stop watching and start taking notes.

#ratcclips