In the previous episode, we decided that the modern use of the word “weaponize” took root in the 1950s, and that it actually dealt with weapons. For instance uranium was weaponized to produce nuclear bombs. Stalin weaponized propaganda to turn the citizens of his newly acquired territory against the West while in the West the authorities weaponized the same thing to turn its citizens against each other ― by making some believe that smoking a joint turned kids into sex hungry monsters.
The history of this word “weaponize,” as writer John Kelly describes it, “reveals the shifting anxieties of the past half-century. But in this violent metaphor, which has been bombarding our public discourse of late, there is actually something much more peaceful afoot.”
Like we said in the last episode, “weaponize” originated as military technical jargon. Hutler started it, but when the Cold War crept into our lives, the scientists we kidnapped from Germany completed the weaponization of rockets to be used to carry warheads.
In 1957, the Oxford English Dictionary was the first to add “weaponize” and its definition. That definition cited Wernher von Braun, who used the word in a New York Times piece. That same year, Aviation Week wrote of “weaponization” as “the latest of the coined words by missile scientists.”
“Nuclear weaponizing persisted through the arms races,” writes Kelly, “missile crises, and fears of mutually assured destruction of the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, weaponize has expanded into new frontiers. In the late 1960s and 1970s, we see biological and chemical agents weaponized thanks to the Vietnam War. The Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, weighed weaponizing space in the 1980s. During the 1990s, the geopolitical focus turned from Russia to the Middle East and Asia over concerns of growing weaponization there. After the post-9/11 anthrax attacks thrust weaponize back into the spotlight, the word has since geared up on two new fronts: drones and cyberwarfare. Now, some fear future weaponization in viruses, DNA, insects, robots, geoengineering, and even marijuana.”
It was perhaps inevitable that the word would soon find context in the world outside the military. Over the decades since 1950, the term has proliferated in our everyday speech. We’ve weaponized: women, architecture, Black suffering, anthropology, facts, femineity, text messaging, femininity, marketing, secularism, religion, ideology, traditional forms of dress, virtue, sadness, social constructions, iWatches, and fictional experiences in video games. The word, according to Kelly, “has enjoyed glibber applications: Writers have weaponized everything from flatulence to kale salads. This website appears, to some, to weaponize the narcissism of small differences.”
The 2015 campaign season and presidential election was a hotbed for weaponization. Jeb Bush’s campaign fundraising became weaponized. There were accusations of online harassment from Bernie Bros, and of grief at the Republican National Convention. Herr Drumpf weaponized the issue of trade while Putin weaponized WikiLeaks. On The Diane Rehm Show, psychologist William Doherty cautioned against “weaponizing diagnoses” of mental illness against Drumpf while on The Run-Up podcast, Charlie Sykes lamented how an “alternative reality has been weaponized” by the alt-right media. This weaponization has transformed just about every political act “into a powerful means of gaining advantage,” as Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark argue in their election glossary, Doubletalk.
Some of us thought that “weaponize” may have just a metaphor du jour, but it has gained staying power. Examples of the words broad usage are peppered all over the print and online news media. In the Atlantic we can find several examples. The headline writers there seem to really like the word. In a 2012 article, writer Whitney Phillips examined how internet trolls “weaponize existing tropes and cultural sensitivities.” In 2015, writer Megan Garber called out “the casual misogyny underlying the weaponized charm of the romantic comedy Hitch.” Weaponize made it into the headline, and thesis, of a November 2015 piece by Conor Friedersdorf: “It’s as if they’ve weaponized the concept of ‘safe space’,” he wrote of the 2015–16 University of Missouri protesters who, in duly exercising and fighting for civil liberties, stymied some of those selfsame rights for journalists.
In these Atlantic examples, we can observe contradictory forces of weaponize at work. On the one hand, everything is a weapon. We are attacking each other online with memes, in popular culture with sexist subtexts, on university campuses with safe spaces. On the other hand, nothing is an actual weapon. Nuclear warheads and chemical agents are the preoccupations of a bygone era. We don’t have trenches or gladiatorial arenas anymore; we have comments sections. How are we to disarm the paradoxical force of weaponize?
As Kelly says “We should first put weaponize in broader context. The word is on the linguistic battlefront of a larger cultural fight — a fight that’s easy to forget as we retreat to the political corners and sound off in the echo chambers of our digitally fragmented, ideologically segregated lives. We can see this fight waged between #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter, between transgender bathroom access and “Back in my day, boys were boys.” We see it between banning Native American headgear in Yale Halloween costumes and the epithet of “Pocahontas” for Elizabethan Warren. Brawling out on the turf of America’s changing demography and economy, weaponize is at the center of this fight between microaggressions and dog whistles, between trigger warnings and P.C. backlash, between the collective sacrifices required of pluralism and the conservatism of privilege, where nuance, complexity, and civil engagement are getting kicked in the ribs. As one tweeter epitomizes the conflict with painful irony: ‘The word racist was created specifically to trigger shame & guilt in white people. It is a weaponized word.”
So, yes, we’ve weaponized everything. We’ve even weaponized the word weaponize ― so let’s weaponize politics. To be clear, I mean that Democrats need to weaponize politics. Republicans have been doing it for years, and we’ve let them get by with it.
In 2016 and again in 2020 we saw unprecedented political campaigns. Over the past eight years we’ve witnessed police shootings by the scores, climatological devastation, terrorist attacks, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and now another presidential campaign like no other. Yet, on the flipside, we no longer talk about weaponizing missiles. We talk instead about the threat of a president who has promised to weaponize the entire U.S. government against the people. So, we need to turn our discussion in that direction.
First question: How did Drumpf get there the first time?
The answer to that may date back to ten years before that fateful election in 2016, and the actions of the Federalist Society puppet master, Leonard Leo. This is where we begin following the money.
In 2006, Leonard Leo, Vice President of the Federalist Society, hired a fellow by the name of Thomas Hofeller. This is the guy the would-be masters of the universe looked to, according to Katie Fahey, executive director of The People, “to study and operationalize the weaponization of gerrymandering into a national election strategy,” which resulted in “REDMAP Strategy 2010,” which then updated to 2020.
The world was Introduced to REDMAP in a WSJ op-ed on March 4, 2010, by none other than Bush’s Brain, Karl Rove. The REDMAP program had succeeded in ousting numerous Democrats and electing Republicans in their stead. It was two years later when, in 2012, the Freedom Caucus freshmen were sworn in, with teeth gnashing and mouths drooling, ready to be the bulls in the china shop of American democracy.
It worked, and just three years later, when 2015 rolled around, Herr Drumpf looked out his penthouse window upon an element of society “looking for a ‘leader’, and figured he was just the guy,” said Rove.
According to ProPublica’s by Andrea Bernstein and Andy Kroll, “Leonard Leo had a hand in essentially blackmailing the GOP leadership in 2009, then led by Michael Steele, to adopt REDMAP or lose the funding from Leo’s network of billionaires. Take this as a lesson, my fellow Democrats. Michael Steele may be a “never-trumper” now but in 2015 he was a GOPer willing to cheat to win. All of those GOPers who are standing against Drumpf now were willing to cheat for power, and once he's gone, they will still be the kind of people who supported REDMAP. They may be allies now, but they are not our friends.
Rove is a never-trumper who uses third-person to describe it well. “They knew it was a strategy that depended on the abuse of the apportionment privileges granted to legislators under the Constitution. It’s clearly a strategy to cheat voters out of their expectation to be represented in government for the purpose of accountability…for spending (of tax dollars). Being represented for the purpose of partisanship breaks that kind of accountability and replaces it with partisan accountability for partisanship.”
Now, let’s contrast this with Lyndon Johnson who in 1964 decided that pushing for passage of the Voting Rights Act was the right thing to do, despite knowing full well it would cost Democrats seats in the House and very likely throw the presidency into Nixon’s hands.
As you can well see, Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, and now the entire Republican Party no longer care what is right. They only care about power ― which they intend to have regardless of the cost to the United States and Democracy. Forty-five years after LBJ departed the White House, Democrats are still paying a price for their desire to play fair and do what was right for the nation ― and we haven’t changed, despite incessantly seeing that jack-o-lantern faced liar and hearing his voice, and knowing that everything Leo does is moving democracy a step closer to its demise.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am.
According to the Atlantic’s Russell Berman, “Democrats wanted to play fair, and they tried to lead by example. In the decade-long battle over who gets to draw the districts that determine control of Congress, the party even relinquished some of its power in the name of good government. Now Democrats are discovering the potential cost of that attempt at high-mindedness: their House majority and, perhaps, the presidency.”
“To rid the country of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats for years joined with election reformers to take the responsibility for redistricting away from politicians and hand it to independent, nonpartisan commissions,” Berman continued. “The effort did not begin as an entirely altruistic project; both parties gerrymandered where they could, but Democrats had more to gain by scrapping the practice. They won the argument in a number of places: Voters in states including California, Colorado, Arizona, Michigan, and Virginia have approved redistricting commissions over the past 15 years, protecting more than one in five congressional seats from the threat of extreme gerrymandering.”
Republicans, on the other hand, saw the commissions as a threat to conservatism, and in the 1980s ― the Reagan era, despite Reagan’s own condemnation of the practice, gerrymandering became the GOP watchword. From 1958 to 1994, the average number of seats the Republicans held was 170 — far from the 218 needed for a majority. In fact, going all the way back to the New Deal, Republicans controlled the House for only four years out of the 60 leading up to 1994. Leonard Leo and his billionaire backers were determined to change this ― by any means necessary.
This was the beginning of the Federalist Society, and it became its mission. Republicans refused to cede control of the redistricting process in the biggest red states (such as Texas) and fought commissions that could have cost them seats (as in Arizona) all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 2021 Congressional Republicans blocked legislation that would have created nonpartisan commissions across the country. The GOP’s reward for its defense of gerrymandering is a national map tilted further in its favor than it would have been if the Democratic push for independent commissions had flopped on its face.
For all those decades between the 1950s and the 1990s, Democrats won their battles, and gained power, by majority consent ― fairly at the ballot box. Leonard Leo and his cohorts used their immense wealth to cheat Americans at the ballot box to gain power, and used their influence to capture the SCOTUS to keep them there. In short, they had weaponized the vote and they aren’t done yet.
Let’s learn a little about just who Leonard Leo is and how he can wield such power.
He founded a chapter of the Federalist Society while still a student at Cornell. He earned a law degree but had never worked as a lawyer. His entire career has been as a Republican activist. He has been the Vice President at the Federalist Society for many years and has been the main fundraiser for the group. In 2022, the New York Times reported on how the Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit Leo created and controls, received a $1.6 billion contribution from conservative donor Barre Seid.
At this moment, according to the Financial Times, he has an estimated $1 billion left to his disposal and has sworn to use it all in a last-ditch effort to seize complete control of the government in the 2024 elections. He controls where the money goes and is threatening to withhold funding from the dozens of groups he supports unless they develop plans to "weaponize" their ideas.
As Hans Nichols writes, “Leo's call for conservative groups to get more aggressive will send shockwaves through the right-wing ecosystem he helped create.”
He wants to "crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society," he told the groups in a letter obtained by Axios. The goal should be to direct "funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision," and he told the organizations backed by his 85 Fund that he's undertaking a "comprehensive review" of his grant-making process.
This would involve groups such as:
Teneo, which according to Andy Kroll, “is building what Leo called in the video networks of conservatives that can roll back liberal influence in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, among authors and academics, with pro athletes and Hollywood producers.”
Honest Elections Project, which bills itself as an election monitoring organization. It “supports the implementation of election integrity laws to ensure election security, including removing invalid registrations from voter rolls and placing stricter requirements around mail-in voting.” This is the group responsible for removing thousands of voters’ names from the registration lists across the south.
Consumers' Research, which is an old organization founded in 1929 but all but ceased to exist in 2002. After eleven years without reportable funding, it suddenly arose from the ashes, resuming life as a vehicle for filing amicus briefs tied to lawsuits filed by GOP Attorneys General. They recently made a million-dollar ad buy against “woke” corporations that have taken a stand against rightwing measures to make it harder for Americans to vote, e.g. Coca Cola, American Airlines, and Nike.
Do No Harm is billed as a medical group which states its mission as “combating wokeism” in medicine, while in fact being little more than anti-transgender activists. The group has crafted model legislation to restrict gender-affirming care that has been enacted in at least two states. They are registered as a political lobbying group in nine states and share staff, contractors, and legal advisors with the Heritage Foundation.
Let’s be clear about something. Republicans don’t represent a plurality opinion and haven’t since Reconstruction. They represent a libertarian ideology, that is predatory and infused with Christian dominionism ― enabling and justifying a cheating strategy to win elections that if done fairly would have been lost. They use their wealth to gain power, and to create even more wealth for themselves at the expense of the people.
The GOP has become the party that has weaponized influence and privilege against the People.
We the People ― we common folk ― are the only stopgap in this election. Republicans have been stealing elections since the demise of the George H.W. Bush Administration, but the foundation was laid long before that. It began with Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” and the weaponization of southern racism. Reagan was no racist, nor do I believe that Pappy Bush was, but Bush was certainly a Christian Nationalist, and that is the real foundation to what Leonard Leo has built on.
Now we are faced with an end days conundrum. We are the only thing that can stop them from stealing another election ― maybe the last election. If we are successful ― and we had better be successful ― once in power we will need to move swiftly to mitigate the damage already done, and to place barriers to prevent further efforts of the GOP to wrest back control.
This will be difficult due to how well the Republicans planned for this day. We will be fighting our neighbors and our family. We will be fighting the product of anti-intellectualism and a determined effort to dumb down our education systems. A third or more of our number are bedazzled, low-information voters ― card carrying members of Cult-45. Another fifteen or so percent are apathetic, lazy, or just don’t think that voting does anything. That leave us a very narrow path to victory.
If we win, and we surely must win, then the ruling earlier this year that revealed this SCOTUS to be following something other than the Constitution ― the ruling that unconstitutionally placed the Executive above the law is a ruling that could be used to slam the door on Leonard Leo. It was an aberration of Leonard Leo’s creation that a Democratic president could use to squash the Federalist Society and mute the effect of \ seditionist Leo ― if Kamala Harris is a Democrat willing to buck the very reason that we are Democrats, and if Congress does not impede the efforts.
We need to turn this weaponization of the government to our own purpose and for once play the game by their rules. To return control of the nation, once again, to The People, we have little choice other than to fight them with their own rules.
Weaponization was intended to be a 3-part series, but this one covered it to the eventual end. I’ll take a day or two, maybe post something light, and ponder upon where to go next. Your comments help, so please feel free.