Billionaire legal activist Leonard Leo has had a role in placing all six conservative justices on the SCOTUS, and so therefore is in large part responsible for the overturning of Roe V Wade. But his right-wing activism isn’t even close to over, as he recently stated during a rare interview with The Daily Wire. Derek and Julian discuss Leo’s dark vision for the future.
Show Notes
Swamp Creatures 6: Leonard Leo, Judicial Kingmaker
Inside Leonard Leo’s Plan For Conservatives To ‘Crush Liberal Dominance’
We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority
Leonard Leo’s Extremely Revealing Letter to a Dark-Money Group
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In the medium term, what's perhaps even more important than elections is conservative movement building beachheads in areas like news, what's perhaps even more important than elections is conservative movement building beachheads in areas like news, entertainment,
institutions, private educational institutions, so that you can begin to have a much more level playing field within society and culture regarding traditional principles, Western ideas, traditional America-based values. Western ideas, traditional America-based values.
And if you can do that, if you can achieve that or begin to see some change, politics, public policy become easier, frankly.
That's the voice of Leonard Leo, who did a rare interview earlier this week with Daily Wire senior reporter Mary Margaret Olihan.
Olihan is the author of the book Detrans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, a topic that she slips in during this interview when citing the derogatory term transgenderism.
As we'll get to, though, Leo is a pretty disciplined and buttoned-up political operative, so he doesn't take the bait.
He doesn't even talk about transgender issues.
He has a lot else on his mind.
But I wanted to discuss this interview with you today, Julian.
First off, because Leo rarely talks to the press, and we've covered him, especially you, extensively.
let loose as he does in this interview.
And I want to highlight two things that intersect with our sort of political beat here on Conspirituality.
So first, we've covered Project 2025 extensively, but Leo is an architect of this project in terms of his longstanding tenure as VP of the Federal Society, which was a major backer and sort of influence of Project 2025.
He helped to create this ideological framework, which their agenda items come through with.
And second, and this is something we often see on our beat, he has this very polished way that he presents the victim narrative, the underdog.
And what we're going to hear is how much the left has won the culture war and how behind the conservative movement really is, when in reality, conservatives and the right have been winning legislatively for the most part since the New Deal.
So that's the framework with which I want to listen to these clips.
Now, as I said, you've done a lot of work on Leo in the last few years, and we'll include links in the show notes of your episodes.
But can you give a 101 on just how influential Leo has been in American politics and society?
Yeah, as you say, Derek, I did a very deep dive on Leonard Leo earlier this year in an episode titled Judicial Kingmaker as part of my Swamp Creatures series.
But here's like a brief summary.
This mild-mannered, bookish, bespectacled lawyer is at the center of the conservative Catholic takeover of our Supreme Court.
He's had a hand in all six of the justices in the current supermajority being appointed.
Oh, hold on, hold on.
Leo says himself that he wants to level the playing field so things aren't so tilted toward liberals.
Are you implying that liberals aren't actually in power here?
Yeah, that's all part of his elaborate smokescreen, right?
As you said, he likes to play the victim.
He's the underdog.
I mean, this has been the conservative strategy now for at least the last 10 years.
And we see him moving into the territory of the culture war, essentially, and outside of just being behind closed doors with these think tanks and these legal groups.
As a student, a law student, Leo was hugely influenced by Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork during the period when those men were advancing the legal perspective that would come to be broadly known as originalism.
And you can think of originalism as kind of a fundamentalist adherence to the Constitution.
At Cornell, Leo founded his own branch of the then fledgling Federalist Society that was already organizing small originalist groups of law students on campuses to push back against the liberal notions of progress and constitutional reinterpretation as evidenced by things like the New Deal and Brown v.
Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act.
He would work at Eventually, basically run and develop the Federalist Society into a political juggernaut.
And that reached its cultural pinnacle in 2016 when presidential candidate Donald Trump held up a piece of paper to the camera during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity saying, I came up with a list.
The Federalist Society was very much involved when he was asked about the potential two or three justices that he might get to appoint if he was elected.
And some analysts have said this was the key moment that helped to sway conservative evangelicals and Catholics, as well as Trump-skeptical rank-and-file Republicans, into getting on board with this kind of not-so-savory character.
And Trump kept his promise.
And Leo and his allies got closer and closer to eventually grabbing the brass ring of overturning Roe versus Wade.
Wade, which they did.
When he was fresh out of law school, as a very young man, Leo met and befriended Clarence Thomas.
He actually delayed starting his career at the Federalist Society to work on Thomas' successful confirmation campaign, which went through a lot of trouble and scandal, as people will remember.
He's also been instrumental in the appointments of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett.
But the background to all of this is how Leo has actually been a kind of matchmaker between billionaire GOP donors and Supreme Court justices.
The scandal on the court that was getting a lot of attention roughly a year ago Involving Harlan Crow and his gifts to Clarence Thomas, luxury vacations, tuition for his nephew's private school, buying Thomas' mother's family home for her.
All of that tracks back to Leo as both a social and financial facilitator.
And so too with Samuel Alito's questionable relationship with another billionaire donor who had business before the court, and that man's name is Paul Singer.
In 2022, Leo was also a recipient of the largest political donation in American history when Barry Side donated all $1.6 billion of the stock in his triplight company to Leo's dark money group called Leo was also a recipient of the largest political donation in American history when
And the way that donation was structured allowed Barry Side to avoid around $400 million in taxes and ensure that Leo got the full amount.
Now, prior to that, Leo had facilitated the attendance of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas at private donor retreats hosted by the then Koch brothers.
And Marble Freedom Trust is just one of the shell companies that Leo has been shown by ProPublica and The Washington Post to use so as to move huge amounts of money around judicial and political campaigns.
You know, I'm getting a little choked up here.
I just got to say, it just always hits me in the heart when billionaire underdogs come up, you know, they really get their day.
That's really nice because they're so oppressed in our society.
Yeah, they have so little say in how things go.
And when someone comes along who can just introduce friends to friends in a way that could be for the common good, it's heartwarming.
One of the uses of Leonard Leo's financial war chest has to do with securing the appointments of Federalist Society judges, not just to the Supreme Court.
He's very explicit about this approach.
To that end, he brokered a $30 million donation to put Antonin Scalia's name on a Virginia University law school.
And that's one of the main incubators for these young judges that he's grooming.
We can see the enduring and evolving impact of his immense influence in the overturning of Roe versus Wade, but also the reinstatement of things like voter identification laws, which are really about suppressing the vote amongst minority communities.
The upholding of Ron DeSantis' Don't Say Gay Bill, the overturning of the Chevron Doctrine, which we've talked about with regard to Project 2025 and the kind of purview that agencies have over legislation, as well as the presidential immunity ruling, which has given Donald Trump free reign to do as well as the presidential immunity ruling, which has given Donald Trump free reign to do whatever if he should get there again.
Leo also funded, this is just to show how many pies he has his fingers in, he also funded the campaign of Will Scharf, who was one of Trump's lawyers for that immunity campaign when he was running for Missouri Attorney General, and thankfully he failed in that run.
You said a moment ago about the Don't Say Gay bill, and earlier I said Leo doesn't take the bait with the topic of transgender people, but that doesn't mean that he's for them.
So I want to be very clear on that because in that opening clip, he very clearly says Western traditional values, and that does not include transgender people or gay people.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
So that's a little background.
It's a lot to take in.
But let's return now to the talk that you are sharing with us, Derek.
And here, Mary asked Leonard about his plans to weaponize policies.
Now, last month in a much-discussed letter, you let your fund recipients know that you plan to focus on funding groups that are operationalizing and weaponizing ideas and policy rather than just developing ideas and policy.
I mean, obviously, as someone involved in philanthropy, I want to make sure that the conservative movement is as impactful as possible in doing things like defending the rule of law and improving our society and culture.
And that means that the participants in our movement and many organizations that are involved in trying to improve our society and our culture and the law and politics and public policy need to be as impactful and effective as possible.
What really pisses me off is we're recording this on Friday, so the day before it's going to be published.
And right before we started recording, I saw a story about how Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell have come out and sort of criticized Kamala Harris for talking violently about Donald Trump.
And they actually compared her Saying that he's a fascist with what one of the people who attempted to shoot Trump was saying before that all happened.
I believe the guy from Hawaii.
And yet they talk about weaponization openly all the time.
They use the rhetoric of war in all of their language and what they're trying to accomplish.
And then when someone on the left comes out and very accurately points out what they're doing, they turn it around.
It's so disingenuous, and yet it still proves effective with their base, which is really Yeah, it is absolutely blatantly dishonest.
It is gaslighting.
And it's not just people on the left who are pointing out that Trump has fascist leanings, right?
It's actually people from within his party.
It's people from within the military.
It's people who have worked with him as chief of staff.
And so the fact that they then turn around and say, calling us fascist is being a fascist, or saying that someone is dangerous is actually causing danger.
Yeah, but you know, Dick Cheney has always really kind of been a liberal.
Yeah, at heart.
We've always known he would eventually reveal his leftist credentials.
Leo is really good at just sitting there and presenting this kind of bland, wholesome, I'm a philanthropist working for the common good kind of style of communication.
But meanwhile, behind the scenes, He's a fearsome power broker.
He has enormous financial resources.
He's actually been fighting tirelessly for decades to change the face of America politically, socially, and legalistically.
And I find it interesting here that the interviewer uses the term weaponization because it's actually really accurate.
And I think she has no self-awareness about how that really comes across as telling the truth, a little bit of a mask off thing.
Well, he also says it later in the interview.
We'll hear that as well.
So they both use that term pretty freely here.
So I guess they embrace it.
I have to just say here, this is all in keeping with the secretive Catholic group Opus Dei that it turns out Leonard Leo has ties to.
And we'll cover that more in a few weeks' time when I interview the author of a new book about that organization.
But this desire to really figure out how to affect the structure of America's government and society is From actually a fairly extreme religious point of view, it's the norm these days.
So let's move on to hear Mary.
Well, she preempts what I'm going to play.
She asks Leo, what techniques the right should adapt from the left?
Well, a few of the strategies they've deployed, which I think were very smart and are things that we do to some extent right now, but should do more of, are things like, one, building talent pipelines and networks of activists.
So, again, it's all well and good to sort of educate people, but it's very important to take the best and brightest of your movement, the people who have the best strategic vision, The folks who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society, It's really important to find those people, to identify them, to recruit them, and then to make sure that they are a part of an effort that's implementing our philosophy and ideas.
So building those talent pipelines and networks.
And you're familiar, I'm sure, with some of them.
In the law, you have the Federalist Society.
In business and finance, you have the Teneo Network.
In entertainment, you have the Moving Picture Institute, for example.
In journalism, you have institutions like the Fund for American Studies, College Fix, the National Journalism Center that are building talent pipelines for journalists.
Yeah, as compared to all of these talent pipelines and organizations with strong ideological leanings on the left, like what is he even talking about?
He's laying out here how a coordinated network of conservative organizations, he just named several of them, is hard at work.
On what, by any other name, is the agenda of the Seven Mountain Mandate via culture war campaigns.
Anyone who might be wondering what a super-connected reactionary Catholic might do with over a billion dollars to spend should look into the Taneo network.
ProPublica did great investigative reporting from inside the Taneo network in 2023.
They got access to a bunch of internal documents and files that exposed their ambitious plans to, in their words, crush liberal dominance, as well as their private big money donors and members.
And in the mix, there were people like the founders, Evan Baer, Josh Hawley and Peter Thiel.
Those names will be familiar to many.
There are donors like Charles Koch, Paul Singer, the DeVos family and others.
And then there are members like Ben Shapiro.
Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, JD Vance.
And since being joined by Leonard Leo, since he came on board and his dark money reservoir became available to them, the Taneo Group's revenue has only soared.
I was yelling at my computer last night.
I actually texted you when it was happening because I was reading Good Energy by Casey and Callie Means, which we've been covering the Means a lot lately.
They're a big part of the Maha network now.
They are all in on demonizing food companies.
That's become their sort of call to action now.
They were on Tucker Carlson.
Kayleigh specifically helped Tucker convince RFK Jr.
who joined Trump's campaign in the first place.
And they're being presented as these health champions, just like Bobby Kennedy is.
But last night, as I was searching around and looking for other videos from them, I found a PragerU bio of Kaylee Means from a talk he gave a year and a half ago.
And I didn't know that he is part of the Teneo Network as well, as well as the Heritage Foundation.
So he has ties with them.
So when people are like, oh, they're speaking truth about our health.
Look where he comes from.
He comes from the same deregulation at all costs dark money groups that we're covering right now.
Yeah, and this is actually something that I'm itching to start digging into deeper myself.
Since the story came out a few weeks ago about how there was a huge amount of Russian influence in a particular sector of alternative right-wing media, I'm seeing more and more, just by scratching the surface a little bit, that behind some of the most influential alternative media digital influence groups, when you look into it, it's like, oh, their funding really is coming from these same think tanks.
The people who we talk about as doing the grift of moving from being heterodox into being nakedly right-wing...
Wouldn't you know it?
There's actually a lot of money available for making that transition.
And of course, this week, great reporting by the Wall Street Journal, of all people, came out about Elon Musk having numerous private conversations with Putin over the last couple of years.
We're starting to sound a little conspiratorial here, but this is all actual reporting.
And you can look at these links and understand why the messaging, from my perspective and what I cover, is so focused on individual health instead of public health policies.
It very much fits into the ethos of what people like Leonard Leo have been trying to accomplish for 50 years.
Yep.
So I just want to cover a couple other things Leo mentioned there before we move to the next clip.
So he mentioned the Moving Picture Institute.
This was founded in 2005, and they focus on documentary-style films about topics like individual freedoms, government waste, and corruption.
And they're very slick and well-produced.
So you have a recent story, that movie that came out just last month, called Freedom Hair, where It's about a black women's hair salon that's being threatened to be shut down by a local white cop.
It has that heartstrings mentality about black women deserve to earn a living.
That's something they say during this, which is absolutely true.
But the underlying message is free market capitalism without government intervention.
In 2020, they produced a film called A Piece of Cake, which talks about a father who's forced to import illegal confectionery candy in a liberal state of California for her daughter's birthday since that candy is banned by the state.
Oh, the tyranny of the left.
And then there's 2016's Mama Rwanda.
And this tells a story about how two mothers escape poverty, lift themselves up by their bootstraps, and they become entrepreneurs.
So that's just one of them.
So he also mentions the Fund for American Studies, and that was founded in 1967 to address the eroding trust in government.
And this organization preaches individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic freedom.
You have the College Fix, which is a conservative news website that was founded in 2011 with a mission of exposing liberal bias and abuse on college campuses.
They've recently published hard-hitting stories like Democrat professors outnumber Republicans 7 to 1 at the University of Florida.
And Harvard scholar refutes claim black babies get better care from black doctors.
So, behind all of these projects is this free market, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, focus on sovereignty and freedom.
So when Leo is like, they're creating talent pipelines, yeah, with a very specific message.
So let's listen to Leo's litigation strategy next.
So that was more how he wants to infiltrate popular media and entertainment.
But I'll preface this by noting that elsewhere during this talk, and there was so much, I mean, it was a 20-minute interview.
I could have honestly clipped the whole thing.
And we have eight clips total we're talking about here today.
But he outs DEI and woke agendas as being part of the left's litigation successes.
And this is how he's going to fight back.
Litigation is another really leveraged tip of the spear strategy that the left used decades and decades ago to sort of pursue its ideological agenda in areas like welfare reform, civil rights, and so forth.
And so now, you know, it's very important for conservatives to think carefully about how it can use, how it can operationalize litigation.
Yeah, I mean, he should go further back.
What about slavery?
They very successfully were able to use litigation.
Yeah, civil rights is the tip of the spear of liberal ideology, and so conservatives need to take a note from that because that was an area in which they lost, right?
Well, he would never go back to slavery because remember, Republicans like to say how the Republicans freed the slaves.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, then let's just go back to Jim Crow, shall we?
Okay, that's, yeah.
Well, they, no, that's...
Let's go to redlining.
We're in a post-racial society because Obama became president.
That's also their talking point.
So let's listen now to what Leo envisions for conservatives moving forward.
Being at the tip of the spear.
Filing those lawsuits, building those talent pipelines, placing personnel in positions of influence in culture, society, and government, launching campaign-style tactics to beat back things like ESG and DEI. That's the kind of thing that needs to be done.
And then, of course, also trying to influence social and cultural institutions, infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment.
These are things that go beyond the normal policy research, white papers, conferences, seminars, educational programs that millions and millions and millions of dollars are spent on every year in the conservative space.
So we all know DEI, what that means, but he also mentions ESG there, and that stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance.
It was more popularly known about 15 years ago as the triple bottom line, the idea that corporations aren't only going to look at revenue or profits, but actually think about the broader picture.
Former Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was a big proponent of this at the time.
He's a communist.
Yeah.
And Leo outright says the conservatives need to beat it back because anything other than pure profits is a nonstarter in the conservative corporate world.
Yeah, one of the things I didn't say in my 101 about Leo is that...
A really significant change, a contribution, actually a visionary kind of project that he saw from the beginning and has been able to enact, is taking the appointment of Supreme Court justices and basically running campaigns for Supreme Court appointments as if they were election campaigns.
putting that level of money, that level of advertising, that level of organizational heft behind those sorts of campaigns.
And so you hear him talking about that too.
He wants to sort of bring this into multiple different spheres.
And the word infiltrate that he uses several times here, I think is really telling because he's talking about propaganda.
He's talking about culture war And he's also talking about Project 2025.
And really, culturally, it's like you were just saying about the movies from that organization that he mentioned.
It's about making inequality cool and edgy.
By manipulating every angle of the society that he can influence.
Yeah, I did say they were well produced.
I didn't mean that they were good, just to be clear.
I watched a bunch of the previews and clips from them, and they're shot well.
They have a Hollywood style.
And that's sort of been the Wright's playbook for a while, is to just recreate Hollywood, but with their messaging.
But it always falls flat, because it ends up being romanticized and sappy.
And I have not seen anything from the right and the Daily Wires producing movies that are able to tell stories through narrative and insinuation.
They beat you over the head with the messaging.
And whereas that anti-trans movie The Daily Wire recently put out, that was just like over the top, like Plandemic the musical.
These are so over the top with messaging.
I will say the Moving Picture Institute, they try a little bit more, but if you can understand a story, you immediately out it for what it actually is.
Yeah, I'm sure you've come across this.
It's actually something I remember hearing Joseph Campbell talk about.
I think he may have been quoting James Joyce, but he talks about the difference.
He talks about basically how the function of art is to create aesthetic arrest.
That real art stops you in your tracks and makes you reflect on the human condition essentially.
And on either side of that kind of authentic art, you have pornography and propaganda.
And propaganda can never rise to the level of actually being artistically satisfying because it is so hamstrung by its didactic need to force some ideological position down your throat.
Well, I will always be amazed by Campbell's love for Joyce.
I've tried to read Joyce.
I read Campbell's Skeleton's Key to Finnegan's Wake, and he He's just a little, maybe it's the time, but he did a good job at translating Joyce for me, I'll say that.
Now, this next part made me laugh, given all we know about Leo's organizing history.
While the left is much more collectivist in the way it thinks and organizes, conservatives tend to be a little bit more individualistic and a little bit more insular.
And so it's hard to mobilize the conservative movement in the same way.
Yeah, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
Oh, these conservatives, you know, they're islands of bootstrapped frontier loners.
Meanwhile, he's networked to the hilt, and he's enacting his agenda in the political, judicial, and financial domains for decades through these think tanks, these nonprofits, these dark money superhighways.
He's the most organized, connected person who has found his way into the most other organizations, whether we're talking about religious or academic or political.
This is just pure nonsense.
Yeah, I mean, he starts off with a correct assumption in that the left is generally more collectivist and the right is generally more individualistic.
This is why they're so against Marxism and all of that.
But then to say that they're not organized is just absolute nonsense.
To say they're insular, it gives the idea that they're very reflective.
He actually talks about this in other parts where he's like, the right, they're so wonky.
They're just focused on policy and Reading all of the time.
And we don't really go out into society at all and affect change like we should be doing.
Yeah, we show up to MAGA rallies where we want to debate the finer points of economic policy.
So I just finished reading the message by Tanahishi Coates, and he points out something that should be obvious to Americans.
The losers of the Civil War, going back to what we were just talking about, they were not victims.
And they weren't actually losers either, in terms of, like, they lost slave labor.
They didn't lose their status in society, however.
They didn't lose their social and cultural power in any way other than They could not enslave people.
That is it.
Everything else, they've remained.
And that is actually what critical race theory is talking about.
What structures came from that time and how has it affected society?
So it's no wonder they don't actually ever want to talk about that.
And Leo comes from the same tradition.
Every time the other gains some small victory, you have to beat them back in order to preserve tradition.
And I was also listening to former Conspirituality guest that you interviewed wonderfully a couple years ago now, Anand Gerard-Hardis, and he was on Morning Joe.
He's been on a couple times in the last two weeks, but he was talking earlier this week about how Trump could possibly potentially win again given everything we know about him and about history.
But then he said that most countries, especially European countries, but a lot of other countries, obsess about their past, but not America.
America's MO is perpetually looking into the future, but this ignorance blinds us to the very real possibilities of fascism.
So when we wonder how this is actually potentially happening here right now, it is because of that constant refusal to reflect and actually understand historical forces.
Now, Leo does concede that there have been some conservative wins.
The transformation of the federal judiciary, the beginnings of the deconstruction of the administrative state, right?
The regulatory state is now something that's very much in play.
Those are very leveraged activities.
Where there's been some real entrepreneurial spirit by conservatives, but that needs to happen more than it does.
And that's something that we're just really trying to stress test the movement about, really.
Yeah, I appreciate that he's honest about what he's really doing here.
This is straight out of the mouth of Steve Bannon, by the way, in his triumphant 2017 speech at CBAC after he helped Trump to win that 2016 election.
The dismantling of the administrative state Is nakedly about deregulation of any social protections, any consumer protections, any environmental protections, any resources and relief for those who need it most in the society.
And it's within this Trojan horse of an idea about freedom being, you know, you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and not have the government interfering by helping you in any way.
He contrasts those pesky agency regulations and programs with what he then refers to as entrepreneurial spirit.
I just hear as code for billionaires getting even richer and the poor getting even poorer with this carrot dangling in front of them.
If you work hard enough and you're a good enough entrepreneur, you can be a billionaire too.
That's why they would probably hate the $50,000 tax break that Kamala Harris is offering to small business owners.
That idea, that is socialism, that's communism.
The idea that you would actually help people out who are trying to actually Get some sort of leverage in the capitalist system in some way just by getting some sort of kickback.
It's not even a kickback.
It's just helping them actually start that business and that would never fly.
Actually supporting entrepreneurs as opposed to just saying, you could be an entrepreneur with the idea of freedom as your food and your sustenance.
So last clip, Leo lays out the networks here that are all contributing to his vision of America.
You have A judiciary that's receptive.
You have state AGs and other public officials around the country who are willing to challenge federal overreach in a way they never did before.
You have public interest litigating groups that have best-in-class talent that can do this work.
And we have networks of small business owners and farmers and ranchers and private educational institutions and religious institutions.
That are now prepared to sort of step up and say, we want to help beat this back because the administrative state is challenging our ability to sort of be who we want to be in this world.
And there he says it right there.
We have a judiciary that's receptive.
He has placed the members on the Supreme Court.
Donald Trump appointed more judges than I think any president in history or he was up there.
This is an intentional tactic.
He's saying it plainly here and we are seeing the consequences of it.
Yeah, and then just the list of people, the list of common folks that he has on his side.
He has both the farmers and the ranchers like he ever has had a conversation with any of those people.
He's such in a completely different class.
But yeah, there's this idea about the grand Middle American coalition around these ideas.
And the co-opting of this very wholesome, philanthropic activist language It's just appalling to me.
And I just have to say to him, Leonard, you mentioned people who want to be who they want to be in this world, and we have to beat back the liberal orthodoxy so they can.
Well, you know who wants to be who they want to be?
Poor kids who are academically gifted but have no opportunities.
And they could, who knows, end up curing cancer if there was some kind of program that helped them to develop their gifts further.
Gay and trans people who want equality and protection from discrimination.
Unplanned teenage mothers who want to be who they want to be but have neither access to reproductive freedom or a social safety net.
In the situation that they're in.
Preteen girls impregnated by their pedophile stepfather or their priest who may be forced to carry that child to term and have their lives even further devastated by the abuse of a man with authority and power.
Those people want to have opportunities to be who they're meant to be as well, right?