What HBO's 'The Dark Money Game' won't tell you about the left
"The Dark Money Game" – two new feature-length documentaries from Alex Gibney that debuted this week on HBO make it sound like the network’s initials stand for Helping Bernie on Oligarchy. Some leftist journalists and filmmakers have suggested Donald Trump represents the end of American democracy, but the bitterest socialists suggest democracy was ended by the Supreme Court in the 2010 Citizens United decision.
To paraphrase a famous bank commercial, it’s apparently the worst decision in the history of decisions.
Radical documentarian Gibney – dyspeptic enough that he told the Daily Beast in 2013 that Pope Benedict XVI was a "criminal" – made two films under the heading "The Dark Money Case." They debuted this week on HBO. In the two documentaries, he uncorked a large conspiracy theory, that religious conservatives and rapacious corporate capitalists have overthrown democracy since 2010. This conspiracy was realized with the help of those evil conservatives at the Federalist Society.
The first of the two Gibney documentaries, "Ohio Confidential," is about a bribery scheme within the Republican Party, but to Gibney the "corruption" in Ohio included the passage of a pro-life bill. "Flush with campaign cash from dark money donors, the anti-abortion side was all smiles, like a team that plays the game knowing the fix is in."
Gibney was inspired by leftist New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and her 2017 book "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right." She echoed the thought that a pro-life bill in Ohio represented "private interests" taking over politics. When the Left loses, the "public interest" loses.
Journalists should expose bribery when it happens in politics, of course, but Gibney and HBO proceed as if one side of the democracy is corrupt, and that "dark money" is somehow something that is never scandalous when employed on behalf of the Left. So, all the journalism exposing George Soros or Reid Hoffman or Arabella Advisors or Act Blue is never going to get a minute on HBO. Ohio’s scandal is presented as a national scandal for the GOP. But any local scandal for the Democrats is never national.
The second Gibney documentary, "Wealth of the Wicked," focuses on the origin of the Citizens United case, how the McCain-Feingold "campaign reform" bill made it illegal for the group Citizens United to air ads for its film "Hillary: The Movie" within 60 days of an election. "Campaign reform" was designed to prevent conservatives from going around the liberal media elite with critical films about Democrats. Now they try to suppress that information as a "misinformation" offense.
Mayer complained that in 90% of races, the candidate spending the most money is the winner. "And if you have so much more money than the other side has, you can completely drown out the other side."
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The problem with an argument like this is that many House and Senate races are not competitive. According to Ballotpedia, in 2024, 43 House and Senate candidates won an election by five percentage points or fewer, representing 9% of all congressional elections. Eighty candidates won an election by ten percentage points or fewer, representing 17% of all congressional elections. Candidates who aren’t expected to have a chance won’t get funded.
Then there’s the umbrage about "completely drowning out the other side." This is unintentionally hilarious, because these Gibney films for HBO always drown out the other side. In this case, Gibney offered "conservatives" like former pro-lifer Rob Schenck, who is now in favor of abortion. Hence, they are no longer conservatives.
Schenck underlined the Gibney thesis: "We have a little aphorism built on a Bible verse: ‘The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous.’ So, yeah, let’s baptize the billionaires’ money. We can do that and it eventually brought together this alliance."
The leftist critique of big money in politics, and their demands to somehow remove it, is utopian wishful thinking. Trying to take money out of politics is like trying to take the bark out of dogs. It can’t be done. It’s especially near-sighted because it doesn’t acknowledge the centrality of TV advertising and the news media in campaigns.
The Left complains that speech is money, but leftist journalists can propagandize on HBO and that somehow doesn’t count as "money in politics," which it certainly is. What’s the advertising equivalent of that kind of airtime? The Left doesn’t see it that way, because dominating the national discussion is what they define as democracy.
"Non-commercial" non-capitalist media outlets like PBS and NPR promote a lot of leftist messaging and drown out conservatives, which represents Gibney’s radical goal of "taking the money out." But they’re taking the money out of conservative pockets and using it to smear them. That’s somehow the antonym of "oligarchy." Documentaries like these imply the political system is unfair when conservatives win anything.