Welcome to Americastan

Elaine Gilmartin
5 min readSep 24, 2023

Land of the Bought and Home of the Easily Deluded

By Elaine Gilmartin

Monstera-pixabay

What do insane amounts of money and gullibility have in common?

Fertile ground in America.

It seems there is no bottom to the ongoing revelations of certain Supreme Court justices being influenced by lavish gifts from the billionaire class, but the recognition of precisely how concerted this decades-long effort to buy the votes of conservative justices has been is stunning.

The Federalists and Leo seem to have an inexhaustible supply of that corrupting commodity from conservative businesses and individuals.Between 2014 and 2017 alone, Leo collected more than $250 million in dark money for the Federalists and their affiliates. It was reported last year that a trust linked to Leo had been gifted 1.6 billion for his work, thanks to a Federalist contact.

This flow of cash has greased the wheels of Leo’s efforts to place judges on the federal bench who will see things much like his cadre of pro-business, anti-tax, ultra-conservative donors. Thus, we have seen the voting rights of minorities curtailed, America’s streets saturated with guns, mounds of dark money pouring into political campaigns across the country, chaos in red-state maternal care and voiding of curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, all to the great

--

--

Elaine Gilmartin

A therapist by profession, a runner by passion, a writer by necessity.