Elon Musk is not the first racist elite trying to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat
Elon Musk has always been noisy and inept. He’s a spoiled brat, born rich, made richer by government subsidies, and manipulating naive liberals in the media. In 2024, he leveraged his fortune against a professional grifter who desperately needed help to avoid accountability for mobilizing armed fascist paramilitary forces against the US government. Musk paid $290 million to exploit Trump, giving himself access to the US federal government. He then started running the government into the ground, at great personal financial gain.
Everyone can see that Elon Musk is robbing us, which is why people are bravely striking back against the richest man in the world wherever and however he’s vulnerable. Of course, Musk’s bought-and-paid for federal government is going to mobilize repression to protect him from popular chagrin, so direct action efforts are only going to get riskier. Here in Wisconsin, we have the good fortune of a safe, legal, and meaningful way to strike back against Elon Musk’s ambitions: the April 1 election.
What’s the total price tag up to now? $19 million. That’s what Elon Musk is putting into winning the first big election after he bought Trump. The whole world will be watching the election for Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCOWI). If we shut down Schimel, we will send a message that Musk can be defeated, and that money can’t buy everything.
Our task here is made easier by how terrible Brad Schimel is. He’s a forced birth, pro-pollution, anti-worker, anti-democracy conservative who wants to take away healthcare and restart gerrymandering. Vote against him, obviously. What can we at Milwaukee Beagle say about this race that isn’t already being said in breathless headlines, ubiquitous mailers, and almost constant 30 second ads?
We can point out that it is not new. Wisconsin’s business elites have been buying SCOWI races for going on two decades. Digging into that history we will see that conservatives use obviously corrupt, physically violent, and blatantly racist means to push their agenda. Defeating Schimel is not just about defeating Musk and Trump, it’s not just about returning rule of law and democracy to Wisconsin, it’s about taking the government away from Wisconsin’s own wealthy elites after decades of elite-backed minority rule.
Follow the money
Nonprofit watchdog, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign publishes campaign finance numbers for SCOWI elections going back to the 1990s. We combined those figures with ideological lean and vote share numbers to put most of the relevant data together in one place. It's not pretty. We are not graphic designers, but the data does outline a compelling story, which we can fill in with some historical facts.
Back in the 2000s, before Citizens United v FEC expanded dark money, Wisconsin’s rich bought supreme court races cheap, mostly by directly donating to conservative candidates. In the 1970s, business elites started coordinating their lobby efforts through the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC). In 1996, they started running ads attacking democrats, and in 2007 they shifted from partisan campaigns to dumping unprecedented piles of cash on SCOWI races. That year, they backed Annette Ziegler, a judge with a history of unethical conduct. This race really openly politicized the court. It’s when labor and progressive groups formed the Greater Wisconsin Committee (GWC) to counter the influence of conservative elites. WMC usually outspends them, but without GWC providing some counter-balance, rich fascists could probably buy just about every SCOWI race.
In 2008, WMC upped their game, backing Michael Gableman against Wisconsin’s first and only Black Supreme Court Justice, incumbent Louis Butler. Gableman’s racist and dishonest ads helped him unseat an incumbent for the first time in over 40 years. Gableman’s strategy was so aggressive it led to disciplinary charges against him, as did his refusal to recuse himself from a clear conflict of interest. Gableman dodged those charges because WMC had already filled the court with his conservative allies. In 2018, Gableman didn’t dare run again, but he did come back in 2020 to steal millions of taxpayer dollars running a fake investigation at the behest of Robin Vos and Donald Trump. What a cool guy.
From 2009 to 2016 there were three races with established incumbents (Abrahamson 2009, Roggensack 2013, Walsh Bradley 2015). Apparently in Wisconsin, racist attack ads work best against our too rare non-white incumbents, so these elections had wider margins. Both of the close races (Prosser 2011, and Bradley 2016) went to conservatives who massively outspent their opponents.
In 2011, anger at Scott Walker’s union-busting Act 10 helped liberals almost unseat a vile conservative incumbent, David Prosser, but his campaign spent one and half as much as Kloppenburg. A few months later, while arguing about Act 10, Prosser refused to leave liberal justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s office, leading to a physical fight that involved his hands around her neck. Another real cool guy.
Starting in 2018, liberals got serious about fighting back, and conservatives doubled down, leading to a truly disgusting arms race of campaign spending on gross and misleading ads during the record-breaking 2023 race between Janet Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly. This year’s race is currently obliterating that record.
As with any effort to defend ourselves against wealthy elites, it took a mass movement to help Protosewitz beat Kelly by more than 10 percentage points in 2023. Her campaign also took a lot of money, from PACs and rich donors outside of the state, but regular people showed up. Many working class people gave either volunteer time or the small dollar donations we can afford to her campaign. Moves made by regular people are not as well documented or reported as rich elites, but at Milwaukee Beagle, we believe that a large number of people, each making small efforts, still matters more than a few people with deep pockets.
The “objectivity” game
You cannot organize a mass movement behind closed doors. Conservatives have complained a lot about Protasiewicz’s strategy in 2023. The trouble is, Daniel Kelly was just as committed to conservative ideology, but because his backing comes from rich elites who privately vetted him, he played a game of faking objectivity. By being circumspect in public, he maintained an illusion of objective jurisprudence. The game of faking objectivity in public while giving rich elites private assurances is how most WMC-backed conservatives operate. It’s how they won so often in the last 20 years despite being obvious crooks and contemptible racists who choke the women who dare disagree with them. That’s why Kelly was so angry when Protasiewicz won by stating her values overtly and mobilizing the people against the elites. She broke their game.
Returning to this game is also the cornerstone of Brad Schimel’s messaging, but he’s bad at it. In his interview with Wisconsin Eye, he emphasized all the business groups urging him to “restore objectivity to the courts”. He used a lot of childish metaphors about sports umpires, invisible cloaks, and sci-fi memory wipe devices to proclaim his objectivity. Then he slipped, stating that he is running, “to flip the ideological balance on the court” (at 6 minutes 30 seconds). Meanwhile, in Crawford’s interview she upheld her values as a defender of reproductive freedom and responsive democratic governance, while describing her objectivity in terms of actual legal principles, citing real examples when she ruled against liberal causes.
This is a bad situation. Neither liberals from out of state, nor Wisconsin manufacturing elites, nor Elon Musk should own the people who interpret Wisconsin’s laws. Rather than throwing up our hands in disgust, or repeating dishonest “both sides” narratives, we need to recognize that it was conservatives who created this situation, and organize for their defeat. Conservative US Supreme Court Justices pushed Citizens United, and other cases that took the lid off campaign finance. Conservative Wisconsin politicians stripped back campaign finance limitations in 2015. It is liberals who are pushing to reinstate and expand campaign finance laws, both nationally and state-wide.
Liberals like Crawford and Protasiewicz resort to the same shady fundraising conservatives created and pioneered, but no candidate would have a chance if they didn’t. If we want to stop out-of-control spending, if we want popular sovereignty rather than elite control, if we want people to have a voice in our democracy, we must defeat the conservatives. We must institute protections against dark money and unlimited spending. Electing liberals to SCOWI is part of that fight.
