It essentially legalizes bribery. While those who support Citizens United maintain that no money goes directly to the candidate, we know from the HB6 scandal that all that is done with a wink and a nod between super PACs and 501(c)(4)s and the candidates themselves. It’s kind of a mockery of a sham [laughs].

The scandal — or the crime, for which two people were convicted, Matt Borges and Larry Householder, plus others — went something like this: FirstEnergy dropped $60 million into a 501(c)(4), which was used at the direction of Larry Householder, first to get himself elected as   speaker of the house, then to ram through a bill called HB6, which had been written by FirstEnergy to subsidize FirstEnergy to the tune of over $1 billion. Then some of that money was also used to muscle people who were trying to come up with a referendum to repeal HB6.

It’s about what I’d call “an unholy alliance” between big business and evangelical Christians who are extremely antiabortion. The evangelical Christians had popular fervor, a very emotional issue, and some popular support. There was no popular support for what the big-business people wanted to do. But they had a lot of money.

Along comes into this unholy alliance a gentleman named Jim Bopp, an attorney, who was working very hard to try to overturn Roe v. Wade. He concluded that nothing was ever going to happen unless he could destroy the system of campaign finance restrictions that had been put in place by [Senators] John McCain and Russ Feingold. So he labored very hard through a number of decisions that led up to Citizens United, and he literally took it to the Supreme Court, where it was argued by somebody else.

Ultimately, Citizens United was decided, and henceforth there would be no limits on contributions to political campaigns by corporations and individuals. The only restriction was that money had to go into independent organizations like super PACs or 501(c)(4)s, and there was supposed to be no coordination with the candidate. Now we all know that’s a joke. Particularly we know it because of the events we show in Ohio Confidential.

Leonard Leo is a very interesting figure. He was always a money-raiser. You can go back to his yearbook and see that, I believe, he was called the “moneybags [kid].” In any event, Leonard Leo turns out to be a master of raising money. He has two agendas: one is an extreme deregulatory agenda, which is the ideological agenda of the Federalist Society, even though it bills itself as a grand debating society. Actually it’s deeply conservative and interested in basically tearing down the regulatory state.

The other thing about Leonard Leo is he’s a deeply devout Catholic, but a deeply conservative Catholic. One of the things he does is to raise enormous amounts of money to promote the campaigns of justices who share both his deregulatory fervor and his religious inclinations, so that when they form a majority on the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade comes up for consideration, it’s overturned — you have the Dobbs decision. Leonard Leo plays a very powerful role as a dark-money aggregator, one who’s responsible for funding a lot of extremely right-wing causes and also trying to enforce his vision of Catholicism on the rest of the nation.

When you give a candidate money, or effectively give a candidate money, and you ask for something in return, that’s corruption. That’s bribery. It’s simple; that’s quid pro quo. A long time ago, that was illegal. But over time the Supreme Court has eroded the statutes that were used to go after that kind of bribery. So much so that in a recent decision — involving the mayor of an Indiana town who gave a garbage truck contract to the Peterbilt [Motors] Company and was given a kickback — the Supreme Court said, “Well, because he got the kickback after the awarding of the contract, we can’t consider that to be a kickback at all; it’s a gratuity, therefore utterly legal.”

In effect. We see that Supreme Court justices get trips, favors, sometimes RVs from people who have business before the court. There’s no doubt about that, and that’s been well documented.

I don’t think so. But you can see the depth of fervor and anger that is rippling throughout this society by the number of people showing up for the demonstrations held by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders as they’re going cross-country. Even though the Supreme Court is clearly resistant to the idea of overturning Citizens United, I think you’re going to see rage and popular animus — you saw it a little bit in Wisconsin recently, where despite the millions of dollars spent by one oligarch, Elon Musk, the voters rose up and overturned the party of money [by electing liberal-leaning judge Susan Crawford to the state Supreme Court]. I think that’s what you’ll see. I don’t know if it’ll take outright revolution.

Depends on what you mean by socialism. If what we’re talking about is rules and regulations for capitalism, then yes, I do. We had them; we still have them somewhat. They’re being ripped apart. But these are the things that protect us as citizens from the excesses of capitalism. We need them. Things like Social Security, Medicare, pollution controls, environmental controls. These are national agendas. We don’t have good enough health care — but we should have nationalized healthcare. All of the things we need to combat the excesses of big business.

There’s no doubt that business can create enormous bounty and wealth. The question is, whom is that bounty and wealth for? Is it to be shared among all of us? Or is it for the benefit of a few oligarchs?

Elon Musk. I’m afraid I’m not going to talk too much about my Elon Musk film because it’s not made yet. But suffice it to say, we’re uncovering a lot of very interesting information.