Transcript
Darwin Kastle: Welcome Episode 5 of The Big Swing, Saving America. Part one, the carnival of corruption. The swamp just keeps getting worse.
Darwin Kastle: The Republican Party are known for many things, but their devotion to the rich donors is the linchpin of their politics. The reason this is so completely absolute is due to the astonishing level of corruption.
Darwin Kastle: Big donors are channeling money and gifts to politicians and justices to influence their decisions and their actions. Not exactly how the founders intended it, am I right? It would be great if all politicians were dedicated public servants choosing to run for office to make the world a better place and to help improve the lives of everyday Americans.
Darwin Kastle: That would also have the bonus of being the type of approach you would think would help win elections. So why do so many politicians, especially on the right, keep backing policies that benefit the ultra-rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans?
Darwin Kastle: primarily because of America's campaign finance system.
Darwin Kastle: Winning elections for national office or even statewide offices requires money, lots of money. Name recognition is a huge factor in a country with lots of low information voters.
Darwin Kastle: This requires advertising. Advertising is expensive, especially TV advertising. This not only allows you to get your name out there, but it's also an opportunity to tell people why they should vote for you and, just as important, why they shouldn't vote for your opponent.
Darwin Kastle: For over 60 years, conservatives have been fighting to loosen restrictions related to campaign donations to allow rich donors and corporations to give even greater amounts of money to candidates for office.
Darwin Kastle: They quickly realized that the key to making this happen was the Supreme Court. No matter what any other court in the land ruled, and almost regardless of what bills were passed in Congress, crucial rulings by the Supreme Court could, and did, open the door ever wider for funneling cash to candidates.
Darwin Kastle: From the perspective of democracy, this is a huge problem. When a blue-collar worker who donates $100 to a senator's campaign wants to ask that senator for something, their call gets ignored.
Darwin Kastle: But if the CEO of a company that donated $100,000 to a senator's super PAC wants chat, they get the red carpet treatment. That may make sense financially, but it also means that rich donors have way more influence over policy than normal voters do, even though they each only have one vote.
Darwin Kastle: If elections were publicly funded, or if there was an extremely low ceiling to how much financial support individuals could donate, especially if corporations were prevented from donating, things would be different.
Darwin Kastle: Then politicians would have strong incentives to create policies that were good for all Americans, not just the richest Americans. That's why wealthy conservatives spend so much time wining and dining conservative Supreme Court justices and taking them on luxury vacations on private jets.
Darwin Kastle: It's also why Republican politicians use any tactic to grab seats on the court for virulently conservative justices. Investigative reporter David Sirota has an entire podcast called The Master Plan, dedicated to the subject of conservative efforts to legalize corruption, which goes into detail in the efforts to capture the court.
Darwin Kastle: It manages to both inform and entertain, while, of course, horrifying listeners that aren't cheering for rich conservatives. I recommend it. Big corporations and wealthy individuals have been corruptly influencing the GOP for decades, but they aren't stupid enough to put all their eggs in one basket.
Darwin Kastle: They don't merely want to thrive during Republican administrations, only to have all their efforts completely thwart during Democratic ones. So they make big donations to lots of Democrats, too.
Darwin Kastle: Their influence over key Democrats becomes most obvious during crucial close votes in Congress. During the Biden administration, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were shining examples of Democrats doing the bidding of big business.
Darwin Kastle: The carnage they enabled on the behalf of the GOP-led Rich People First agenda was crushing. Despite being members of Biden's party, they worked with Republicans on several maneuvers to benefit their wealthy donors.
Darwin Kastle: For one thing, they forced Biden to massively scale back efforts to fight climate change and to make key economic reforms in his bills, Build Back Better Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Darwin Kastle: They also defended the Senate filibuster, which helped the Republican minority block key legislative efforts. And they blocked Biden's nominee for the National Labor Relations Board, which allowed the incoming Trump administration to have control of the board.
Darwin Kastle: Well, maybe they were just acting on their principles. But if so, what principles led them to choose big business over the health and well-being of average Americans over and over?
Darwin Kastle: What principle led them to frequently team up with the GOP rather than their own party? Is it a coincidence that Sinema's campaign racked in millions from Wall Street, hedge funds,
Darwin Kastle: and venture capitalists while she helped block tax increases on wealthy investors? Is it a coincidence that Joe Manchin is worth millions from a coal brokerage firm he founded and he fought for fossil fuels over green energy?
Darwin Kastle: No. This is an example of politicians putting their own interests ahead of everyday Americans, even in this case if they were Democrats. That's one of the reasons why we need campaign funding reforms.
Darwin Kastle: It's also a reason not to elect people with obvious ties to big business. In the short term, it's a reason to vote for candidates that only take small-dollar donations whenever possible, something I'll return to in the future.
Darwin Kastle: Part 2. Eruption of Corruption. President Trump's Astonishing Level of Corruption. There's a type of legalized corruption that Republican politicians have begun to take for granted.
Darwin Kastle: Big corporations and wealthy donors pour money into GOP super PACs to ensure the election of Republicans wherever possible. Then, when it comes to lawmaking, those conservative politicians are expected to deliver policies that favor the super rich and big corporations, whether the donors have had sit-down meetings with the officials or not.
Darwin Kastle: Similarly, conservative members of the Supreme Court are expected to suddenly become bosom buddies with billionaires whenever they get on the court. It's only natural that those new personal friends spend millions of dollars taking them on luxury vacations.
Darwin Kastle: Then they have plenty of quality time to chat before those billionaires inevitably have cases come up before the Supreme Court where they inevitably expect favorable rulings. These sources of activity are corrupt and deplorable, but unfortunately, probably not the type of thing that will lead to legal punishment. I mean, I'm not a lawyer.
Darwin Kastle: But much like his avalanche of untruths, Donald Trump has taken corruption to another level beyond even his fellow Republicans. Trump isn't content with just having large donations made to super PACs that help him and his allies win elections.
Darwin Kastle: He wants direct financial rewards while he's in office in connection with almost every action he takes. His corruption is obvious and transparent, but sometimes he does use some fig leaves to give his allies a tiny bit of cover while defending his actions.
Darwin Kastle: One such fig leaf is family. You're not lavishing wealth directly on the president of the States. You're just making lucrative business deals that directly involve members of his immediate family making millions and millions of dollars from deals with the federal government.
Darwin Kastle: And of course, it's just a happy coincidence, really. I mean, just because they only make this kind of money when Donald is president? Just a coincidence. I mean, everyone in the Trump family is a business genius, after all.
Darwin Kastle: They'd be making this kind of money even if Trump wasn't president, right? Right? Well, perhaps the most profitable of these schemes is the Trump family's venture into cryptocurrency.
Darwin Kastle: According to President Trump's own financial disclosures, during his first year in office, a joint venture between Trump's real estate buddy Steve Witkoff and the Trump family brought in over $500 million dollars in sales of crypto tokens.
Darwin Kastle: In addition, the Trump family made over $600 million dollars from selling Trump-branded meme coins. The people who bought the coins and tokens lost an amount of money equal to those profits.
Darwin Kastle: It's bad enough that foreign governments and rich businessmen can essentially bribe the president by spending millions of dollars on his crypto. But loads of everyday Americans are losing their savings because they believe Trump's claims that buying his crypto would benefit them.
Darwin Kastle: Another obvious grift of the President's family is when big companies want to get big investments from the government, often with little oversight or competition. They just have to add a Trump family member to their board or as some sort of invested advisor.
Darwin Kastle: A good example of this is a company called Unusual Machines. This is a newly created company that is working to make drones. With Donald Trump Jr. on their board and as a shareholder, they secured multi-million dollar contracts with the Pentagon, despite just being a startup.
Darwin Kastle: This is one of many defense-related companies that are suddenly adding Trump family members to their companies before getting lucrative contracts. During Trump's first turn in office, he owned a hotel in Washington, D.C. called the Trump International Hotel.
Darwin Kastle: When foreign dignitaries want to get favorable attention from the president, it was common to see them buy out massive quantities of rooms at the hotel at incredibly high nightly rates. Trump found ways to milk money from taxpayers too.
Darwin Kastle: He spent about one in three days of his first term at his private clubs and resorts. Instead of allowing his massive security detail to stay at his properties for free, the government had to pay for expensive rooms at overmarket rates.
Darwin Kastle: These glaring grifts do, however, seem almost quaint compared to the eruption of corruption in his second term. According to the new York Times, presidential pardons can now be had for around $2 million. dollars Trump's second term isn't even half over, and he's already pardoned over 40 wealthy executives and politicians. So far this term, Trump's net worth has tripled to over $6 billion. dollars That's all while bragging about not taking the $400,000 presidential salary.
Darwin Kastle: What is it about being president of United States for a year that makes Donald Trump make more money than the entire rest of his life, I wonder? Hmm, one. Members of the U.S. State Department can't even let a foreign dignitary give them a small gift.
Darwin Kastle: But Trump asked Qatar for a $400 million dollars jet, and they gave it to him as a gift. President Trump even sued the IRS for $10 billion dollars for a leak of a tax return. Imagine if everyone did that.
Darwin Kastle: A federal judge said the case was improper because the president was essentially suing himself for potential monetary gain from the taxpayers. Despite that setback, sketchy lawsuits have become a big earner for President Trump.
Darwin Kastle: He sues companies that want to please him because he's president, and rather than fight back in court, they settle the cases. Some examples. Meta, $22 million. dollars ABC, $15 million. dollars Paramount, $16 million. dollars YouTube, $22 million. dollars SoftBank, $50 million. dollars You get the idea.
Darwin Kastle: According to the Wall Street Journal, the settlement money isn't going to the U.S. Treasury either. It's all being funneled to bank accounts controlled by Trump. While all this corruption is appalling, some of it is especially concerning.
Darwin Kastle: For example, one of Trump's main super PACs is called MAGA Incorporated. It currently has over $380 million, dollars according to the journal.
Darwin Kastle: Not only is it a huge sum of money, but when you consider the fact that Trump is term-limited and can't run for re-election, it leads to concerning questions about what that money is for and what will be done with it.
Darwin Kastle: I could go on, but you see the pattern. With conservatives in control of all three branches of government, There's nothing preventing them from tying every policy decision and every official action to direct monetary compensation.
Darwin Kastle: And who benefits when the government is making its decisions based on what people are willing to pay? whoever has the most money. This is what I mean when I say that politics may seem like a matter of left versus right, but actually, it's a conflict of right versus wrong and up versus down.
Darwin Kastle: The super rich are on one side of the conflict and everybody else is on the other. Unfortunately, too many voters don't realize when they choose the super rich over themselves.
Darwin Kastle: Part three, in plain sight. the blatant bigotry of the GOP. When you're unwilling to govern in a way that helps everyday Americans because you're locked into making policies that put rich people first, it's hard to win elections.
Darwin Kastle: You need a strategy that takes the focus off of policy while giving people a different reason to vote for your party. For Republicans, the not-so-secret ingredient is bigotry.
Darwin Kastle: Racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism. You get the idea. If there is a way to get their voters scared and angry about something other than their donors that are plundering the country, they're going to use it.
Darwin Kastle: The GOP drive their voters to the polls using strong negative emotions rather than appealing to reason. The racism might be the most obvious. There's only one party whose political rallies draw followers with Confederate flags and Nazi symbols.
Darwin Kastle: At the Unite the Right rally, they literally had people in the crowd holding Nazi flags and Confederate flags. While some conservative voters may reject the ideology of the people carrying these flags, it's obvious the people carrying the flags feel that the right is their political home.
Darwin Kastle: After all, it's not like Republican politicians take time their speeches to tell these hateful people that they and their votes are unwelcome. I've heard it said multiple times.
Darwin Kastle: If you're a Republican, you may be opposed to racism, but apparently it's not a deal breaker to you. And that's pretty close to being a racist because it should be a deal breaker.
Darwin Kastle: It's not hard to figure out why Confederate and Nazi supporters might find Republicans more appealing than Democrats. While the GOP have made appeals to racism part of their brand for decades, Donald Trump has become an avatar for it.
Darwin Kastle: He didn't become racist just for politics either. It's just who he is. In 1973, Trump was sued by the US government for discriminating against black renters. In 1989, Trump took out full page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for black teens accused of assaulting a jogger.
Darwin Kastle: The teens were later exonerated, but Trump showed no remorse. Starting in 2011, Trump led a movement that falsely accused then-President Obama of being born in Kenya, but he never presented any evidence.
Darwin Kastle: Not only did this not prevent Trump from being a viable candidate for the GOP nominee for president, it actually helped him get more positive attention from conservative voters.
Darwin Kastle: Trump also describes Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He called for all Muslims to be banned from entering the country. and he describes several black majority nations as shithole countries.
Darwin Kastle: Despite Trump's efforts to stop immigration from non-white majority countries, he's often complained that there isn't enough immigration from whiter countries like the Scandinavian nations. While blocking asylum seekers from non-white majority countries during his second term, at the same time, he's ensured that rich white farmers from South Africa are welcome to get asylum here.
Darwin Kastle: But keep in mind, Only the white ones. I could imagine a credulous person making an argument that one of these things might be a coincidence. Perhaps in one of these cases, Trump could have been making a colorblind decision, just happened to break on these particular racial lines. But Trump's consistency on race is breathtaking. His racism isn't subtle, and for many conservative voters, it's what gets him their political support, even if his actual policies make their lives worse.
Darwin Kastle: Racism isn't some isolated glitch in Republican politics either. Bigotry is a huge part of their brand. Misogyny, for example, is built into conservative politics. Republicans believe in being able to legislate medical decisions for women, but not for men.
Darwin Kastle: Most red states fully outlaw abortions, even if the life of the mother is in danger without one. Republicans even talk about their desire to outlaw contraceptives.
Darwin Kastle: If they cared as much about the individual freedoms of women as they do men, why wouldn't they let women make decisions about their own bodies? If the Jew P respect women as much as men, why they show so little concern when members of their party are facing credible claims of assaulting women?
Darwin Kastle: Why do they support a president who was determined to have raped E. Jean Carroll? Why is it so common for conservative influencers to suggest that women should be focused on marriage, kids, and cooking and cleaning for their husbands?
Darwin Kastle: In 2018, 31 new Republicans were elected to Congress. 30 of the 31 were white men. In the case of the Democrats, they had 22 women and 18 men.
Darwin Kastle: And of those, about a third of which were non-white. So that brings me the question, why does one delegation look like a cross-section America while the other is just a bunch of white dudes?
Darwin Kastle: Don't get me wrong. i have nothing against white dudes. I am one. But the pattern here is undeniable and not a coincidence. While I'm barely scratching the surface of the examples of conservative racism and misogyny, neither of those things are the current headliner of GOP bigotry.
Darwin Kastle: That deplorable title goes to transgender rights. While Republicans still spend quite a bit of time trying to make you scared of black people and non-white immigrants, transgender people are their new favorite target.
Darwin Kastle: Many people either don't know anyone who is transgender or don't realize that they do. This makes transgender people better targets for the GOP. We often fear things we don't understand and can't relate to, and fear can easily turn to hate or disgust.
Darwin Kastle: The GOP are great at taking advantage of this. They tell us to be afraid of transgender women in bathrooms because they might be predators. Yet anyone could be a predator.
Darwin Kastle: So we have laws against assault and laws against harassment in bathrooms or anywhere by anyone. We don't need it just for a specific category of humans. Conservatives want us to believe that caring about pronouns is somehow more dangerous than caring about the Confederacy.
Darwin Kastle: As usual, The data doesn't support GOP talking points. They want us to believe that undocumented immigrants are scary criminals. Yet according to house.gov, undocumented immigrants have significantly lower crime rates than native-born citizens.
Darwin Kastle: It even makes perfect sense. If you were undocumented, the last thing you'd want to do is draw police attention yourself. Conservatives want you to believe that we should be scared of being assaulted by transgender people, but it's exactly the other way around.
Darwin Kastle: According to the Williams Institute, transgender people are four times more likely to be victims of violence than the rest of us.
Darwin Kastle: Republicans will run entire political campaigns on keeping transgender girls out of high school and collegiate sports. Yet, less than half a percent of high school athletes are transgender.
Darwin Kastle: And out of more than half a million college athletes in the United States, less than 10 of them are transgender. That's right. You can count on your fingers how many transgender athletes there are in college sports.
Darwin Kastle: Why are we making entire campaigns about this? And it's not like transgender athletes are winning many competitions either. There is one glaring example, though, of a transgender athlete winning competitions.
Darwin Kastle: There's a transgender male, transgender boy in Texas who won consecutive high school state titles in 2017 and 2018. But that's because Texas law forced him to wrestle girls because he was assigned female at birth.
Darwin Kastle: So we had someone who had the hormones of male and looked like a male wrestling and defeating people who had the hormones of women and looked like women. And thus he went on to win these titles.
Darwin Kastle: He wanted to wrestle against men, but Texas laws that were, so scared transgender people forced it to be this way. So if anyone is winning competitions that they shouldn't be, it's because of these stupid laws that are overreacting.
Darwin Kastle: The policies don't have to make sense, and they don't have to be a good use of legislative time. They just have to garner support from voters that conservatives have managed to get worked up about a particular topic.
Darwin Kastle: If you've been following this story, none of this will be shocking. It should be, but it's not. Conservatives are used to not having the facts on their side, so they don't bother with facts.
Darwin Kastle: Instead, they rely on anecdotal evidence. If a single shooting is committed by an immigrant, they plaster it all over the media as proof that all immigrants are criminals.
Darwin Kastle: But when mass shooters are consistently white male citizens, you never hear them calling that a crisis. That's why we need to pay attention to facts and data, not what conservatives are telling us to believe.
Darwin Kastle: At this point, conservative politicians don't have zero credibility. They have negative credibility. Only believe things they say that are proven by other sources.
Darwin Kastle: The problem isn't just the Republican establishment, though. There is also the problem that so many voters are a receptive audience to messages of bigotry. That's why Republicans keep pushing hateful messaging.
Darwin Kastle: Because it keeps working for them.
Darwin Kastle: But why? Well, that brings us to part four, the empathy gap. How the GOP are weaponizing feelings. Since you've been following the story up to this point, you know that the Republican Party serves as the political party of big corporations and the ultra-wealthy.
Darwin Kastle: To get the votes of people who aren't wealthy, they use propaganda, media controlled by wealthy donors, lies, and bigotry. While harmful, falling for propaganda and lies can be relatively innocent.
Darwin Kastle: But there's still the question of why bigotry appeals to conservative voters so much. It would be easy to say that conservatives just lack empathy and compassion, But that's not quite accurate. Everybody has feelings, but how much they understand and care about the feelings of other people varies, and it doesn't remain static either.
Darwin Kastle: That's where the pervasive influence of conservative influencers and media comes in to manipulate and weaponize people's feelings. They want you to care. They want you to empathize.
Darwin Kastle: But only so they can use those feelings to create fear, anger, and hate that can be used to their advantage. The key is in how they frame information. If they make you care enough about certain people, they can make you angry with other people.
Darwin Kastle: Once they do this often enough and pervasively enough, then it becomes normalized and we stop questioning things that should horrify us. We're enraged if three American soldiers get killed in action.
Darwin Kastle: But if a U.S. missile kills over 100 Iranian schoolgirls, well, that's war. If a blonde woman gets murdered by a brown-skinned immigrant, the country's being invaded. But if immigrant children are dying from mistreatment in our detention centers, well, eh, shit happens. They shouldn't have been than the U.S. anyways.
Darwin Kastle: If an Israeli gets injured by rocket fire that slips past the Iron Dome, it's further proof that Palestinians need to be eradicated. But if thousands of Palestinians are locked in Israeli prisons without any charges, and many of them are being raped and tortured, well...
Darwin Kastle: They deserve it for being Palestinian. After all, other Palestinians have done terrible things. You see where I'm going with this. Wealthy people own the media that we consume and pay attention to. They use the power of that media to pick winners and losers. They determine who we should consider to be heroes and who we should consider to be villains.
Darwin Kastle: Besides the obvious problems with this, there's the fact that people who are the most vulnerable and the most need of our help are the ones constantly being cast as villains. Poor homeless people are annoying. Such an eyesore. Lock them up.
Darwin Kastle: Black and brown immigrants are invading our country because their country is a dangerous shithole. Send them back. That mother who can't afford food for her kids is stealing our tax dollars by using food stamps.
Darwin Kastle: She needs to get another job instead of being such a leech.
Darwin Kastle: It seems like the Rupert Murdoch cookie meme by Dennis Lush has never been more apt. In the meme, Murdoch hoards a plate stacked with cookies while sitting between an immigrant without any cookies and a working class fellow with a single cookie.
Darwin Kastle: Murdoch leans over and whispers to the worker, careful, mate, that foreigner wants your cookie. Yeah, about right. So why are we always persecuting the downtrodden while glorifying those who are rich and powerful?
Darwin Kastle: It's not natural. It's by design. Normally, humans see someone suffering and we feel bad for that person, probably even want to help that person. But if conservatives were to support or amplify this tendency, they would mess up their carefully planned world order.
Darwin Kastle: The constant drain of money away from everyday Americans into the pockets of the super rich is steadily making our lives harder. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are seeing their net worth soar to some so vast they could never possibly spend it in multiple lifetimes. They couldn't spend it all.
Darwin Kastle: At the same time, everyday Americans keep making less and less while the things they need to survive keep costing more and more. Now that's a recipe for misery.
Darwin Kastle: Misery could end up being dangerous for those causing and profiting off of the misery. So it's critical that they give people someone else to blame. None of this is new.
Darwin Kastle: It's been happening as long as the United States has been a country. Many rich people owned slaves when the United States gained its independence. But even back then, many people understood that slavery wasn't just.
Darwin Kastle: I mean, they themselves certainly didn't want to be enslaved. To protect their wealth, slave owners needed to create the impression that enslaved people weren't real people. They were savage animals.
Darwin Kastle: If we were allowed to view them as real people, we might feel enough empathy for them that we might try to end slavery. But if these people's lives were better off as slaves and freeing them would put real people in danger, well, I guess we better keep them in chains.
Darwin Kastle: Of course, we don't have to go that far back to see this kind of approach in action. As recently as his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump claimed crime was being committed by undocumented immigrants and said they were not human, they're animals.
Darwin Kastle: As is often the case with the Trump administration, this echoes rhetorical tactics of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Nazi regime referred to Jews as rats and parasites. Slavs and Soviets were called subhuman.
Darwin Kastle: Their goal was not just to make people stop caring about Jews and other minorities, but to actively hate those minorities. If we conclude that a group of people aren't really people, just animals that pose a danger to real people like us,
Darwin Kastle: then we don't need to feel compassion or empathy towards them. Those feelings are reserved only for the right people. To conservatives, people on the right are the right people.
Darwin Kastle: Everybody else is the enemy. Just pay no attention to the oligarchs counting their ever-growing piles of money while using their media companies to point your anger at struggling minorities.
Darwin Kastle: Subscribe for free today and join us next time as we talk about the steadily rightward moving political spectrum that has created the situation we find ourselves in. And even more important, what can people like us do to start making things better?
Darwin Kastle: The Big Swing Saving America is written and read for you by me, Darwin Castle.
