After spending $290 million to buy the Presidency, Elon Musk is looking to acquire the Wisconsin Supreme Court as the first stop in capturing state courts nationwide. For several years, the battle-ground swing state of Wisconsin has been a GOP laboratory for its anti-democratic experiments to enact minority rule at the expense of the majority. They have successfully experimented with severe gerrymandering, Voter ID laws, and weakening elected Democrats.
If Florida and Texas are the laboratories of the GOP’s successful and cynical culture wars, imagine Wisconsin as a dangerous testing ground for how Republicans want to capture the courts nationwide to deny free and fair elections and neuter the voting rights of an anti-MAGA majority. With dark money and super PACS (thank you, Citizens United!), Musk is spending millions to back Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, a Trump acolyte, who is eagerly courting outside interference to become a willing reek of MAGA.
The April election will decide if Wisconsin’s court will be controlled by conservatives, who want to take women’s rights back to the 19th century, gut unions, and weaken election integrity, or progressives who want to give people, you know, freedoms. The Musk-MAGA strategy is to “nationalize the race” with the ultimate goal of seeing if they can successfully copy and paste their anti-democratic measures across the nation.
Thankfully, we still have time to fight back. Mother Jones’ reporter Ari Berman joins Chai Talk again to connect the dots and break down how Musk, dark money, and Republicans are using Wisconsin to cement minority rule and what Democrats and the people can do to resist.
Give us a listen and please share if you care about protecting women’s rights, voting rights, and the integrity of our courts and our elections.
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