After Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night, ABC tossed back to set. Chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl was already out of breath, ready to make sexy time, as his colleague Borat Sagdiev would say.

“This is probably the largest, if not one of the largest audiences President Biden will have before the election come November,” Karl began. No shit. Because they can’t risk letting him campaign before then. “Now our chief White House correspondent, Mary Bruce… I’m curious what you're hearing from your sources. Did he do what they wanted them to do?”

This is what Mary Bruce said:

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Walter Kirn and I will be doing a livestream review of Super Tuesday results tonight. Sarcasm levels may be high, but we’ll work to keep things in bounds. If Super Tuesday has ever sucked this much before, I can’t remember it, but it should at least be amusing.

You can catch the feeds:

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I’m writing from Amtrak, heading home from Loudoun County, where I got another head-scratching education into the difference between national perception and on-the-ground reality. (More on that later.) Visited a few polling stations there this morning that were, to quote Sir Sean Connery, deader than Julius Caesar. If there’s any suspense in today’s results it’ll be a miracle, but about a third of the delegates are being decided either way, so Walter and I may at least be able to talk general election, and make sport of election night coverage.

Please come join us, and if you have questions ahead of time, let us know in the comments. See you this evening!

In the fall of 2021, Loudoun County, Virginia became ground zero of the American culture war, thanks to an election surprise. One of the richest regions of the country, Loudoun in 2020 voted for Biden by an overwhelming 24-point margin, 61-37. A year later, in the wake of a complex school controversy, Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe won there by just ten points over Republican Glenn Youngkin, who gained 15 points over Trump and ended up carrying the rest of the state.

I visited Loudoun before and after the vote and found the on-the-ground reality was so different from what had been reported, it was disorienting. I ended up writing a four-part series in an effort to describe even a summary version of what actually happened. Loudoun was fascinating, so I decided to come back and do some re-interviewing in advance of the primary on Super Tuesday. If you live in the area and have time for a coffee to help update things, please note in the comments or write to taibbi@substack.com, I’d love to hear.

After 2021, what happened in Loudoun was pitched as a racist revolt. “It’s about white supremacy,” declared Jeffrey “Zoomin’” Toobin on CNN, echoing the near-universal consensus of national media that the onetime “hotbed of Confederate resistance,” as the Washington Post dubbed Loudoun, suddenly awoke, zombie-like, to reassert its separatist leanings. Echoing a messaging tactic usually seen in the wake of anti-police protests, local leaders and pundits also claimed unrest about local school policies was an import, the product of a “loud, out-of-county minority” and a conservative media “scaremongering” campaign.

Again, I found something a lot more interesting and idiosyncratic, nearly opposite to what papers like the Post were saying. I’m curious to see what if anything has changed since. Watch this space for Super Tuesday coverage, and hope to see you soon.

After former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s primary loss this weekend, NBC News served up the numerical picture:

The NBC exit poll shows Trump and Haley fighting to a near-draw among Republican voters with college degrees: Trump with 51% to Haley’s 47%. But it was a blowout among the bigger group of primary voters without degrees: Trump 74%, Haley 26%.

Anyone who follows sports is familiar with homerism after a loss: “Playing without Anthony Davis and key offseason acquisition Gabe Vincent, the Lakers lost to the Charlotte Hornets 121-103 Sunday…” You expect to see excuses high up in copy written to ease the pain of Lakers fans, but national political outlets do the same now for affluent target audiences. The theme of Haley fighting to a “near-draw” in South Carolina with the right people — She Only Lost by 4 to College Voters! — became a real talking point by the end of the weekend:

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It wasn’t reported on Racket because your fearless author has been bogged down on a longer story, but this past Tuesday saw one of the most unusual occurrences you’ll see in presidential politics. I recall once witnessing a victory of “None of the above” in a Russian election — it might be a drug flashback, and being on a place it’s not easy to check — but I don’t remember anything like Nikki Haley losing 63-30 to “None of these candidates” in the non-binding, non-delegate-conferring primary Tuesday. I’d bet good money this will turn out to be at worst the 150th-most odd episode of the 2024 presidential season, but for right now, hoo boy.

The caucus that counts is tonight and I’ll be at the Trump watch party, which I chose not for any particular reason, but because I’m pretty sure it’s the only electoral game in town tonight. America! Weirder every day…

Reading news on a flight to Las Vegas for tonight’s caucus… The CNN headline: “Supreme Court faces its greatest test yet from Trump.” Oral arguments are being heard in the high court today in Donald Trump’s ballot access case, about which CNN commentator Stephen Collinson seems to have no opinion, apart from being sure Trump’s response to its adjudication will be sociopathic and end human civilization as we know it:

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I asked former Department of Defense official and current Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks if she was involved with the “loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” reported on by NBC News in its January 14th article, “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” Brooks was the co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project profiled in the article, a “loose” group that got a lot of press in the summer of 2020.

One of the only people mentioned by name by NBC as a participant in the new group is Mary McCord, former acting head of the National Security Division at the Justice Department and also a Georgetown academic, serving as director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.

Brooks not only said she was not part of the group reported on by NBC (“Nope”), but added, “I am not sure there even is a ‘group,’ as such — just various people and organizations that occasionally coordinate or at least touch base, but often don’t do either.”

Having mentioned it on the air, I thought I should put that answer in print.

Thanks. Stay tuned for a story on different subject, momentarily.

The fix is in. To “protect democracy,” democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy.” Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.”

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

The group was formed by at least two organizations that have been hyperactive in filing lawsuits against Trump and Trump-related figures over the years: the aforementioned Democracy Forward, chaired by former Perkins Coie and Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, and Protect Democracy, a ubiquitous non-profit run by a phalanx of former Obama administration lawyers like Ian Bassin, and funded at least in part by LinkedIn magnate Reid Hoffman.

The article implied a future Trump presidency will necessitate new forms of external control over the military. It cited Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal’s bill to “clarify” the Insurrection Act, a 1792 law that empowers the president to deploy the military to quell domestic rebellion. Blumenthal’s act would add a requirement that Congress or courts ratify presidential decisions to deploy the military at home, seeking essentially to attach a congressional breathalyzer to the presidential steering wheel.

NBC’s quotes from former high-ranking defense and intelligence officials about possible preemptive mutiny were interesting on their own. However, the really striking twist was that we’d read the story before.

For over a year, the Biden administration and its surrogates have dropped hint after hint that the plan for winning in 2024 — against Donald Trump or anyone else — might involve something other than voting. Lawsuits in multiple states have been filed to remove Trump from the ballot; primaries have been canceled or invalidated; an ominous Washington Post editorial by Robert Kagan, husband to senior State official Victoria Nuland, read like an APB to assassins to head off an “inevitable” Trump dictatorship; and on January 11th of this year, leaders of a third party group called “No Labels” sent an amazing letter to the Department of Justice, complaining of a “conspiracy” to stop alternative votes.

Authored by former NAACP director Ben Chavis, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Iran-Contra Special Counsel Dan Webb, the No Labels letter described a meeting of multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party. In the 80-minute confab, audio of which was obtained by Semafor, a dire warning was issued to anyone considering a third-party run:

Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone — everyone — should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you’re insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.

The Semafor piece offered a rare glimpse into the Zoom-politics culture that’s dominated Washington since the arrival of Covid-19. If this is how Beltway insiders talk about how to keep Joe Lieberman or Ben Chavis out of politics, imagine what they say about Trump?

We don’t have to imagine. Three and a half years ago, in June and July of 2020, an almost exactly similar series of features to the recent NBC story began appearing in media, describing another “loose network” of “bipartisan officials,” also meeting “quietly” to war-game scenarios in case “Trump loses and insists he won,” as the Washington Post put it.

That group, which called itself the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), involved roughly 100 former officials, think-tankers, and journalists who gathered to “wargame” contested election scenarios. The “loose” network included big names like former Michigan governor and current Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and former Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, who in his current role as special advisor to President Joe Biden overseeing the handout of roughly $370 billion in “clean energy” investments is one of the most powerful people in Washington.

The TIP was hyped like the rollout of a blockbuster horror flick: In a second Trump Term, No One Will Hear You Scream… Stories in NPR, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and over a dozen other major outlets outlined apocalyptic predictions about Trump’s unwillingness to leave office, and how this would likely result in mass unrest, even bloodshed. A typical quote was from TIP co-founder, Georgetown law professor, and former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks, who told the Boston Globe that every one of the group’s simulations ended in chaos and violence, because “the law is... almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”

Podesta played Joe Biden in one TIP simulation, and in one round refused to accede to a “clear Trump win,” threatening instead to seize a bloc of West Coast states including California (absurdly dubbed “Cascadia”) and secede. Podesta’s “frankly ridiculous move,” as one TIP participant described it, was so over the top that a player leaked it to media writer Ben Smith of the New York Times.

The latter in Timesian fashion stuck the seeming front-page tale near the bottom of an otherwise breezy August 2nd story titled, called “How The Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong”:

A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat… They cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede...

But Mr. Podesta… shocked the organizers… he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office…

News that Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief rejected a legal election result, even in a hypothetical simulation, was obvious catnip to conservative media, which took about ten minutes to repackage Smith’s story using the same alarmist headline format marking earlier TIP write-ups. Breitbart published “Democrats’ ‘War Game’ for Election Includes West Coast Secession, Possible Civil War,” and a cascade of further red-state freakouts seemed inevitable.

“At that point,” says Nils Gilman, COO and EVP of Programs at the Berggruen Institute think tank, who served alongside Brooks as TIP’s other co-founder, “we decided we needed to be out about having run this exercise, to prevent the allegation that this was a ‘shadowy cabal’ — not that that narrative didn’t take hold anyways.”

The final TIP report was released the next day, August 3rd, 2020. Titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” the full text was, as any person attempting an objective read will grasp, sensational.

The Podesta episode was worse than reported, with the secession proposal coming on “advice from President Obama,” used as leverage to a) secure statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico b) divide California into five states to increase its Senate representation, and c) “eliminate the Electoral College,” among other things. TIP authors also warned Trump’s behavior could “push other actors, including, potentially, some in the Democratic Party, to similarly engage in practices that depart from traditional rule of law norms, out of perceived self-defense.”

More tellingly, there were multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness. TIP authors concluded that “as an incumbent unbounded by norms, President Trump has a huge advantage” in the upcoming election, and chided participants that “planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” They added the key observation that “a reliance on elites observing norms are [sic] not the answer here.”

Asked about that passage, Gilman replied that it was “the right question,” i.e. “Why can’t we just rely on elites to observe/enforce norms?” Noting that two-thirds of the GOP caucus voted not to certify the 2020 election, he went on: “If I had had total confidence in the solidity of the institutions, I wouldn’t have felt the need to run the exercises.”

This answer makes some sense in the abstract, but ignores the years-long campaign of norm-breaking in the other direction leading up to the TIP simulation. In the eight-plus years since Donald Trump entered the national political scene, we’ve seen the same cast of characters appear and reappear in dirty tricks schemes, many of which began before he was even elected (more on that below). The last time we encountered this “loose-knit group” story, the usual suspects were all there, and the public by lucky accident of the Smith leak gained detailed access to Democratic Party thinking about how to steal an election — if necessary, of course, to “protect the democratic process.”

That incident acquires new significance now in light not only of this NBC story, but also the dismal 2024 poll numbers for Biden, a host of unusually candid calls for preemptive action to prevent Trump from taking office, the bold efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in states like Colorado and Maine, and those lesser-publicized, but equally important campaigns to keep third party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy from gaining ballot access in key states.

The grim reality of Campaign 2024 is that both sides appear convinced the other will violate “norms” first, with Democrats in particular seeming to believe extreme advance action is needed to head off a Trump dictatorship. Such elevated levels of paranoia virtually guarantee that someone is going to cheat before Election Day in November, at which point the court of public opinion will come into play. The key question will be, who abandoned democracy first?

The TIP report provided an answer. It contained long lists of theoretical Trump abuses that sounded suspiciously more like the extralegal maneuvers already deployed against Trump dating back to mid-2016, particularly during the failed effort to prosecute him for collusion with Russia. Interpreted by some as a literal plan to overturn a legal Trump victory, its greater significance was as a historical document, since it read like a year-by-year synopsis of all the home team rule-breaking. In other words, the TIP read like a Team Clinton playbook, only with hero and villain reversed.

Bearing in mind that many of the people involved were also Russiagate actors, here’s a abbreviated list of abuses the TIP authors supposedly feared Trump would commit:

“The President’s ability… to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents.”

It’s true a president so inclined can do these things, and possible a re-elected Trump might, but they were clearly done first to Trump in this case. The FBI’s road-to-nowhere Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russian collusion, which made use of illegally obtained FISA surveillance authority, began on July 31, 2016. Trump opponents have been “launching investigations” really without interruption ever since, with many (including especially the recent Frankensteinian hush-money prosecution) obviously politicized.

Likewise, the office of the Director of National Intelligence published an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017, again before Trump’s inauguration, that used information from the bogus Steele dossier to conclude that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” If that isn’t using intelligence agencies to “cast doubt on election results,” what is? Worse, the trick would be repeated, over and over:

“The President and key members of his administration can also reference classified documents without releasing them, manipulate classified information, or selectively release classified documents for political purposes, fueling manufactured rumors.”

This phenomenon also began before Trump’s election, notably with the story leaked on January 10, 2017, about four “intel chiefs,” including FBI Director James Comey, who presented then-President-elect Trump with “claims of Russian efforts to compromise him,” including the infamous pee tape. “Selective” release of “classified documents” then continued through the Trump presidency. Other incidents involved the “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story (February 2017), a Washington Post story about Jeff Sessions speaking to the Russian ambassador (March 2017), the (incorrect) story about Trump lawyer Michael Cohen being in Prague (April 2018), the infamous “Russian bounty” story (June 2020), and many, many, others.

Podesta himself participated in one of the first and most damaging “manufactured rumor” episodes, beginning in late 2016, involving the use of the Elias-commissioned Steele dossier to illegally obtain a FISA warrant on former Trump aide Carter Page. Podesta, who of course knew the real source of the story, reacted to it as if it was news generated by government investigators and publicly derided Page as a Russian cutout, before adding that the 2016 election “was distorted by the Russian intervention.” This was a textbook example of using “manufactured rumors” from intelligence agencies to “cast doubt” on election results as you’ll find.

“Additional presidential powers subject to misuse include… his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”

As for restricting internet communications “in the name of national security,” Racket pauses to laugh. The growth of state-aided censorship initiatives like the ones we studied all last year in the Twitter Files began well before Trump’s election, for instance with the creation in Barack Obama’s last year of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which later worked with Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership to focus heavily on posts deemed to be attempts at “delegitimization” in the 2020 election. Stanford’s group even flagged a story about the TIP in its final report as “conspiracy theory.”

Not to say that these bureaucracies couldn’t be abused by a second Trump administration, but so far they’ve been a near-exclusive fixation of Democratic politicians and security officials. There’s a reason Joe Biden is the only candidate slated to enjoy a censorship-free campaign season, while Trump and third-party challenger Robert F. Kennedy have been repeatedly removed or de-amplified from various platforms.

“There is considerable room to use foreign interference, real or invented, as a pretext to cast doubt on the election results or more generally to create uncertainty about the legitimacy of the election.”

This may have been the most amazing line in the TIP report, given that the entire Trump presidency was marked by stories like “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump” (New Yorker) “Did Russia Affect the 2016 Election? It’s Now Undeniable” (Wired), “Russia ‘turned’ election for Trump, Clapper believes” (PBS), “Yes, Russian Election Sabotage Helped Trump Win” (Bloomberg), and a personal favorite, “CIA Director Wrongly Says U.S. Found Russia Didn't Affect Election Result” (NBC). There was so much “Russia hacked the election” messaging between 2016 and 2020, in fact, that our Matt Orfalea made two movies about it. Here’s one:

In the 2018 midterm elections, officials warned that Russia was going to “attack” the congressional vote. Stories like “U.S. 2018 elections ‘under attack’ by Russia” (Reuters) and “Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections” (New York Times) were constants, until the Democrats retook the House in a “blue wave,” at which point headlines began saying the opposite (“Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says” from the Times was a typical take). The TIP was written during a repeat version, as stories like “Lawmakers are Warned that Russia is Meddling to Re-Elect Trump” (New York Times) were near-daily fixtures in 2020 pre-election coverage. After Biden won, headlines like “Putin Failed to Mount Major Election Interference Activities in 2020” again became fixtures in papers like the Washington Post.

This brings us to the last and most controversial angle on the TIP report. When the original TIP text came out, Michael Brendan Daugherty in National Review wrote in an offhand tone that he got the feeling “some progressives are steeling themselves for a Color Revolution in the United States,” because winning a normal election “just isn’t cathartic enough.”

To this day, the color revolution idea makes TIP organizers laugh.

“The idea that some rando in Los Angeles,” Gilman says, referring to himself, “was secretly planning a color revolution (which he published a report about months in advance, which you gotta admit is a pretty weird move for a guy allegedly plotting a revolution) is a textbook example of Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style.”

Brooks is also incredulous, saying the color revolution thesis is a “profound misunderstanding” of the TIP report. “They aren’t plans or predictions, they’re efforts to understand how things might play out,” she wrote, adding that the TIP participants were merely asking, “What could go wrong?”

They may have asked that. Still, the group’s final report contained a string of references to “plans and predictions,” with entries like “Plan for a contested election,” “Plan for large-scale protests,” and “Make plans now for how to respond in the event of a crisis.” As for the “profound misunderstanding,” Brooks gave a friendly interview to a New York Times writer who was apparently laboring under the same “profound” delusion.

Weeks after the National Review piece, Michelle Goldberg in the Times wrote of Daugherty: “He’s right, but not in the way he thinks.” She explained that Democrats don’t relish the thought of an uprising, but look upon it as something to be dreaded, that “must nonetheless be considered.”

She then quoted Brooks. The Georgetown professor, who in her most recent book about life in the Defense Department described getting “a coveted intelligence community ‘blue badge’” to pass into “the sacred precincts of the CIA,” told Goldberg that in the event of a Trump power grab, “the only thing left is what pro-democracy movements and human rights movements around the world have always done, which is sustained, mass peaceful demonstrations.”

That did sound like a description of the Eastern European color revolutions, which generally involved mass street actions, sustained negative press pressure, and calls by NGOs and outside countries for the disfavored leader to step down. A major reason the “color revolution” theme struck commentators in connection with TIP had to do with the presence in the TIP simulation of Barack Obama’s former chief ethics lawyer, Norm Eisen. Eisen wrote a manual called The Democracy Playbook for the Brookings Institution that is often referred to as the unofficial how-to guide for America-backed regime-change operations abroad. Anyone who’s been forced to read a lot of “democracy promotion” literature, as I had to in Russia, will recognize familiar themes in the TIP report.

One of the controversial features of “color revolution” episodes is that the U.S. has at times supported ousters of perhaps unsavory, but legally elected, leaders. Was the TIP group contemplating the “sustained” protest scenario only in the event of Trump stealing an election, or if he merely won in an unpleasant way, i.e. via the Electoral College with a popular vote deficit? Brooks at first indicated she didn’t understand the reference.

“I am not sure what the question is?” she wrote. “Peaceful protests, mass or otherwise, are constitutionally protected.”

I referred back to the Times piece and the “movements around the world” quote, noting that while those outcomes might arguably have been desirable, it’d be hard to call them strictly democratic.

“I am not an expert on the color revolutions,” she replied. “It is certainly true that on both left and right, in both the US and abroad, there are nearly always... I guess I’d say spoilers, or violence entrepreneurs — who try to hijack peaceful protest movements.”

Lastly: one TIP simulation also predicted, with something like remarkable anti-clairvoyance, that Trump would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of “insurrection” for protesting a “clear Trump win”:

The Trump Campaign planted agent provocateurs into the protests throughout the country to ensure these protests turned violent and helped further the narrative of a violent insurrection against a lawfully elected president.

That passage was published on August 3, 2020, long before most Americans knew or cared that the word “insurrection” had political significance. We’d be instructed in its use within hours of the riots, when Joe Biden said, “It’s not protest. It’s insurrection,” and everyone from Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell to media talking heads to the authors of the articles of impeachment like Jamie Raskin fixated on the word. Still, not until December 2021 did a public figure explain how the 14th Amendment might be deployed strategically in the post-January 6th world. The insight came from Elias, who has since deleted the tweet:

We’re of course now seeing that litigation, notably in the form of a Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, which was handed down after complaints filed citing the 14th Amendment provision alluded to by Elias.

All this is laid out as background for the coming nine months of campaign chaos, if we even end up having a traditional campaign season. Revolt of the Public author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri summed up the situation in a piece for The Free Press titled “Trump. Again. The Question is Why?” The money quotes:

The malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks… The implications are clear. Not only Trump, but the nearly 75 million Americans who voted for him, must be silenced and crushed. To save democracy, it must be modified by a possessive: “our democracy.”

The Biden campaign, stuck in a seemingly irreversible poll freefall, has put all its rhetorical chips on the theme of “protecting democracy.” Biden mentions Trump’s “assault on democracy” at every opportunity, and even recently resorted to Apollo Creed-style imagery, campaigning at Valley Forge flanked by a dozen American flags and red, white, and blue lights. (Red-and-white striped trunks can’t be far off.) The DNC’s daily “talkers” memos for months have asked blue-party pols and friendly reporters to stress “the existential threat to freedom and democracy that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans represent,” while pointing to stories like Vanity Fair’s, “There Is No ‘Both Sides’ to Donald Trump’s Threat to Democracy,” in its CONTENT TO AMPLIFY section.

This messaging would likely have worked after January 6th, when Trump’s post-electoral conduct rankled voters, as evidenced by an exit approval rating of 34%. It can’t now, since the word “democracy” has been appropriated to refer exclusively to the party that declared its New Hampshire primary “non-binding” and “meaningless,” canceled its Florida primary, is preparing mass technical challenges against third-party challengers like No Labels or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (and has a rich history in that area; see accompanying Nader piece), is seeking to kick the GOP front-runner off the ballot, has mass-filed bar complaints against attorneys who represented that candidate, and has piled criminal counts atop its main electoral opposition.

Many who couldn’t stand Trump, would never vote for him, and have been willing consumers of the awesome amount of propaganda published on the Trump subject, now need to face the fact that they’ve been had. Transformed into the avatar of all bad things — a crude domestic combo platter of Saddam, Milosevic, Assad, and Putin — this vision of the über-villain, Trump, has been used to distract mass audiences from the erosion of “norms” at home. “Protecting democracy” in the Trump context will be remembered as having served the same purpose as Saddam’s mythical WMDs, the shots fired in the Gulf of Tonkin, or Gaddafi’s fictional Viagra-enhanced army. Those were carefully crafted political lies, used to rally the public behind illegal campaigns of preemption.

Voters, by voting, “protect democracy.” A politician who claims to be doing the job for us is up to something. The group in the current White House is trying to steal for themselves a word that belongs to you. Don’t let them.

In the summer of 2004 Theresa Amato, campaign manager of presidential candidate Ralph Nader, took out a notebook in preparation for an important phone conference.

Her candidate, Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it distorts the entire election.”

Now, Amato’s candidate was set to talk with Democratic National Committee chairman (and future Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe. A high-energy, Clintonesque schmoozer in public, McAuliffe in private was curt and to the point: he didn’t mind Nader running in noncompetitive places, but had an “issue” with 19 states where “a vote for you is a vote for [George] Bush.” He shifted with impressive nonchalance to offer a bribe.

“If you stay out of my 19 states,” he said, “I will help with resources in 31 states.” McAuliffe then made a show of pretending to ask an assistant about other ballot challenges against Nader, saying he “supported them” but wasn’t funding them, a statement ultimately contradicted in court testimony by Maine’s State Democratic Party chair. This was just one of countless instances in which Democrats hurled billable hours at anyone deemed a “threat” to votes they considered theirs.

In 2004, a third party needed to collect 634,727 valid signatures in about six and a half months to get on the ballot. If you’ve ever wondered why so few third-party candidates run, it’s because this is an extraordinarily difficult logistical task, and expensive, requiring services of companies that even then charged between $1.00 and $1.50 per signature. (Ross Perot reportedly spent $18 million to get on the ballot in 1992.) The process gets more cumbersome when you’re forced to account for “spoilage,” i.e. how many signatures you’ll lose in the face of challenges from a determined opponent, in Nader’s case from Democrats and affiliated groups.

Nader lost signatures that were allegedly signed in the wrong county (an irony given recent events, as we’ll see), due to “unwritten rules” that a collector’s signature must be legible even if his or her name is printed underneath it, because signatories no longer lived at the addresses where they were registered, because signatures were printed instead of signed, because additional information like the date was included next to signatures, and so on, and so on, and so on.

“We had more than two dozen lawsuits complaints filed against us in a massive effort to disenfranchise the people who wanted to see him on the ballot,” Amato says now.

Amato later wrote a book, Grand Illusion, documenting the Democrats’ plan to keep Nader’s meager resources “tied up mentally, emotionally, and financially in courtroom after courtroom,” violating rules themselves while using the press to smear Nader as the cheat. “I wrote a whole book precisely because I didn’t want the history to be lost, of what the Nader campaigns went through,” she says now.

A subtext of Grand Illusion is how Democrats showed great creativity when seeking ways to keep Nader off the ballot, but almost none when it came to examining possible reasons it might be underperforming. Kerry in 2004 was fatally flawed because he had no position on this central issue of the campaign, the Iraq war. He tried simultaneously to be against it (“Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions”) and for it (pledging to “hunt down and kill the terrorists”), while running all year from the fact that he voted for Bush’s war resolution.

This complex non-position not only created a clear rationale for a third-party run in a year when support for the war dropped as low as 45%, it was a major factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 general election loss, when Donald Trump won 57% of military households vs Clinton’s 39%. Had the party shown a fraction of the backbone on the Iraq issue during the crucial October 2002 vote that it showed in bollocking Nader all through the 2004 cycle, it’s possible Trump never would have been president.

Twenty years and multiple political upheavals later, the Democrats are taking the sabotage game it played in 2004 up a notch or ten. It’s taken the position that all of Joe Biden’s potential challengers within the party and without are, in effect, new Naders, whose presences are “distorting” the real election. The major difference between 2004 and now is that thanks to major changes in both the Democratic and Republican parties, current Democrats have the money and institutional capacity to attempt a legal campaign to “Naderize” even the likely GOP nominee, Trump, essentially seeking to ballot-block their way to victory.

Democrats first disenfranchised internal party challengers like Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, and (initially) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. through tactics like declaring the New Hampshire primary “non-compliant” and “meaningless” and canceling the Florida primary. Then, when Dr. Cornel West, Kennedy, and a new party called “No Labels” decided to seek third-party ballot access, money from LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, former “Right-wing hit man” turned Clintonian organizational assassin David Brock, and a group fronted by former presidential candidate Dick Gephardt was quickly deployed, leading to a meeting of Biden advocacy groups in which one of the participants warned potential third party entrants, “If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find.”

Lieberman on January 16th sent a separate letter to his former Senate colleague Biden, saying, “I respectfully ask you to help put an end to this shameful attempt to silence voters and prevent choice and competition in the upcoming election.” Obviously, this fell on deaf ears. Two days later word came out that American Bridge hired former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias to help “thwart” third-party bids.

In essence, Democrats first prevented politicians or interest groups from attempting to influence their platform by running in primaries, then used scorched-earth tactics to head off potential third-party runs, leaving only the Republicans an alternative —except of course they’re using Death Star tactics to try to disqualify that party’s candidate, too.

Amato’s Grand Illusion described the evolving hypocrisy, cynicism, and ruthlessness of the Democratic Party a dozen years before Trump. It’s a story to which we should have paid more attention, because the Sun Tzu tactics unveiled against Ralph Nader are now clearly the strategic model for the whole party. Had the Republicans not suffered a major intramural collapse in 2016, Grand Illusion today might read like a cautionary tale about the anti-democratic tendencies baked into the two-party system. The Republicans, after all, have their own history of ballot-pruning tactics, for example working behind the scenes to suppress the candidacy of Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2012.

But since Trump steamrolled the GOP clown car in 2016, establishment politics has increasingly consolidated under the umbrella of the one party that (just barely) succeeded in fighting off its populist challenger, the Democrats. The return to the Democratic tent of once-hated neocons like Bill Kristol (who was reportedly in attendance at the anti-No Labels meeting described by Semafor) has helped revamp the blue-party institutional space into something like a permanent Washington-against-the-world war council, fueled by an aristocratic contempt whose intensity is almost beyond comprehension.

These people reordered the geography of the world, blithely moved whole manufacturing sectors from one continent to another, started moronic wars that pointlessly killed millions and created millions more refugees, bailed out corrupt banks while whole regions went into foreclosure, and failed to accomplish much but a growing sense of foreboding and decline despite decades of promises to the contrary. Still, they feel sincere rage at the idea that they should have to earn votes.

The special anger Nader inspired came from his refusal to just “send a message,” saying things like “Isn’t that what candidates try to do to one another—take votes?” when Democrats suggested he stop “taking” votes from Al Gore or John Kerry, and run in “safe” states only. Again, never mind that they could have altered their own fortunes easily by prioritizing voters over donors just a little more. In their minds, this was not Nader’s call to make. In the minds of early 2000s Democrats, voters never elected Republicans. Ralph Nader did.

Headlines like “Ralph Nader Was Indispensable To The Republican Party” (HuffingtonPost) and “Ralph Nader Still Refuses to Admit He Elected Bush” (the indispensable Jon Chait of New York, who recently insisted Joe Biden’s 2020 election inspired the “greatest outpouring of joy since V-J day”) still trickle out, as reminders that such grudges are never forgotten. The hyper-combative, winning-is-everything mindset of the new “lawfare” era was probably born in that 2000 loss, a “direct outcome of the 2000 Nader campaign,” as Amato puts it. This is true even though, as Amato notes, there were eight minor candidates on the 2000 Florida ballot, and all eight got more than the infamous “margin of difference” of 537 votes.

In the age of Nader, the rage was directed at anyone who suggested the Democrats should have to face competition from more than one direction. The updated idea in the Trump era is that they should not have to face competition at all.

Back in 2016, when I disliked Trump enough to write Insane Clown President, I was still naive enough to puzzled by the stream of headlines describing his win as a “failure of democracy.” It was anything but. The presidency had long been stage-managed to absurdity, with candidates needing the backing of one of the two parties, the press, and corporate donors to gain the White House. The whole idea of this oligarchical ADT system was to guarantee the president arrived in the Oval Office a political debtor, while keeping anyone with aspirations to independence out. This was the clear lesson of the Nader episode.

Trump broke through all these barriers as an unapproved “fringe” candidate, making his win an extraordinary blow for democracy, or so I thought, even though I couldn’t stand him. If he could win, anyone could, and this was good news for those of us who thought the system’s corrupt features might never be fixed.

Looking back, it’s clear Trump’s unsanctioned run and win were the violations of “norms” Washington insiders were most furious about. Now, when politicians talk about protecting “democracy,” what they really mean is restoring those old barriers of entry. The problem is, voters are wise to the game now, forcing insiders to resort to ever-cruder mechanisms of control, like the ten million criminal indictments and the recent ballot disqualification attempts.

If those efforts fail, even more extreme action is surely coming, and “protecting democracy” is the pitch they’ll use to sell it. All of this is will be justifed based on the idea that the Trump threat is so grave that taking so much as one vote from Democrats is criminal irresponsibility, not really morally different from marching for Hitler.

Everything is permitted in the fight against Hitler, which is why the aforementioned Hoffman is the quintessential modern Democratic backer: loaded, thin-skinned, and eager to color outside lines. Vox in 2020 profiled him:

Myopically focused on collecting the 270 electoral votes needed to defeat Trump… to win those votes, critics feel, Hoffman is willing to play dirty. Hoffman’s defenders see this agitation as worth it — and if Democrats win, it could validate a more provocative form of political combat.

Of course no one goes into politics to lose, but if you don’t believe in letting voters decide, and winning becomes about something other than making the best argument or boasting the best record, you got lost somewhere along the line. We cheat when we think we deserve to win, no matter what, and our leaders have spent decades now talking themselves into this frame of mind. The entitlement disease was there all along. We should have seen the chaos of this year coming.

Governor DeSanctimonious, we hardly knew ye.

In a surprise move that recalled the last-minute machinations before Super Tuesday on the Democratic side last election cycle, Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination, leaving Donald Trump and Nikki Haley squared off in a mano-a-mano battle in tonight’s New Hampshire primary. DeSantis was no doubt influenced by a 30-point blowout loss in the Iowa caucus, a result so bad that Trump was complimentary of his departed rival, calling DeSantis a “really terrific person.”

The clear hope of corporate donors is that with decks cleared, Haley can compete with Trump, particularly in a state where she’s polled well at times. We’ll see. Results in New Hampshire started coming in at around 7:30 p.m. in the loony 2020 primary, but unless it’s another early call like Iowa, this one will likely take at least a little while to sort out. Walter Kirn and I will be watching the returns beginning at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. Please join us!

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See you tonight, Racket.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Getting late in the day on Saturday in Freedom Plaza, where attendees of a massive Free Palestine rally are stomping feet from Protest Cold. That’s when the thermostat number doesn’t look bad when you leave home, but starts numbing bones many hours and thirty or forty speeches later. The condition is more pronounced on the progressive side.

Author, philosopher and presidential candidate Dr. Cornel West is the big speaking draw and therefore has been held until the end. By the time he takes the stage in trademark shades and black suit, you can almost hear teeth rattling. “Let the word go forth… It’s in the name of truth,” he says. “And the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.”

He looks out over the crowd. Freedom Plaza is named after Martin Luther King, Jr., who’s said to have written the “I Have a Dream” speech in the nearby Willard Hotel. West, whose love of “Brother Martin” is such that he seldom gets through an appearance without invoking his name, opens by reminding the audience of time and place.

“Yes, it’s indeed true that brother Martin Luther King Jr. would’ve been 95 years old on Mon-dayyy…”

The crowd roars. They’d have cheered anything, but looks of relief were washing over many faces even before West took the stage. The Gaza issue is of course deathly serious, but the preceding hours of hyper-earnest speechifying featured addresses that were too long, too oddly religious given the Mundo Obrero politics, or so leaden that words landed like tent spikes driven through the ear. There was also spoken-word poetry of almost supernatural cringe levels, as if someone mated Kimberlé Crenshaw with Dr. Seuss: You announce: Gaza terrorist attack/But when it comes to the murder of Palestinians, your facts are all wack…

Bush-era antiwar protests sometimes featured too much levity, with a clear overpopulation especially of dudes on stilts, but this generation’s left/ANSWER Coalition-style protests tend in tone to be ascetic and self-mortifying to the extreme, as if one off-message microsecond is thoughtcrime. West’s jazzlike verbal improv represents the far edge of allowable looseness in this brand of activism, which is likely why he mostly has the crowd won a few sentences into his address. He went on:

“Don’t let anyone lie on you and say that we here in the name of hatred,” he says. “They could be on the chocolate side of Washington, DC. They could be Dalits in India, they could be landless peasants in Brazil, they can be indigenous peoples, they can be Iranians, they can be Iraqis. Anybody. This is a human thing we’re here for.”

He goes on, frequently returning to comparisons of Gaza to Jim Crow, noting for instance musician and football star Paul Robeson’s famous “We charge genocide” petition to the United Nations in 1951. He adds: “It is consistent to be in solidarity with South Africa,” the nation that just charged Israel with the same thing in the International Court of Justice.

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not there’s a real parallel between the black American experience and the current situation in Gaza — it seems a complicated case to this Gen-X white reporter, but what do I know? — West’s stump technique stands out. Had he gone into politics early instead of academia, he could easily be in high office already, as he has a skill set that ham-and-egger speakers like John Kerry or Mitt Romney will only ever experience in dreams.

As an orator West has things in common with his late friend and musical partner, Prince, who to the uninitiated also sometimes came across as derivative at first blush. There was so much Hendrix, James Brown, and Curtis Mayfield in Prince that at times he felt like a tribute act, but listen just a little and you heard the synthesis into something very original. West has the hair of Frederick Douglass, the lyricism of King, and at times, the surgical anger of Malcolm X. But the sum is uniquely him, which might be his problem, politically.

From a literary standpoint West is arguably superior to all his heroes — his ability to rattle off mellifluous sentences extemporaneously is unique in American popular culture — but his default temperament is sunny, ingratiating, and forgiving, maybe to a fault. All great politicians have a streak of P.T. Barnum in them, an instinct for calculation and (if needed) ruthlessness that never leaves them. Surely this is an exhausting type of person to be, but they’re all wired that way. Dr. West is a nice man.

Back to the stage. West is still talking about Gaza.

“What kind of world are we living in, America? What kind of country? What kind of empire? All of that barbarity, all of that bestiality?” (He pronounces barbarity with the last syllables stretched out, like King’s “long night of captivity.”) “When I think of Biden and Harris and Austin and Blinken, and Sullivan and Kirby” — booo! comes the rising sentiment from the crowd — “I say personally to Biden and company… You oughtta be shamed!”

The crowd roars again. Standing to the side of the stage, I can’t see its end. It was hard also to avoid seeing the awesome quantity of anti-Biden signage in the crowd. A Code Pink group was toting a BIDEN BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS canvas, while GENOCIDE JOE was heavily represented in chants and in at least one fat red sign periodically seen in the crowd’s dead center. A campaign reportedly begun by the National Conference of Swing State Muslim Leaders last month created an impressively ubiquitous call to ABANDON BIDEN, with holders of such signs scattered all over, departing from the modern American-left strategy of toothless protest, i.e. making noise without electoral punishment. This crowd isn’t trying to send a message. It wants Biden ridden from office.

All this creates an opportunity for West, or would, absent other factors. Again, whatever your feelings about the crisis that exploded to new dimensions on October 7th last year, Israel and Gaza have already dramatically altered the 2024 presidential race. Nearly 50% of Democrats disapprove of Biden’s policies, and support of Israel is particularly unpopular with the youngest voting Democrats. Polls now show either a dead heat or Biden slightly behind Donald Trump in a theoretical national contest.

With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. forcefully taking Israel’s side and other Democratic primary challengers effectively boxed out by internal machinations, the natural destination for this potentially sizable, even election-shifting bloc of votes would be West, who’s shown as much as 6% support in the few national polls that included him heading into this year. West drawing even four or five percent in a general election would make winning outright a tough proposition for Biden. But there’s a catch.

“It will be very hard for Cornel to get on the ballot,” says Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, who also spoke at the event. “He’s on one state.”

As of now, West is on the ballot in Alaska only. He announced his run in June and soon was the presumptive Green Party candidate, with virtually guaranteed wide ballot access. The Greens already had access to 18 states sewn up by July and historically have nearly always given candidates a solid theoretical chance to win, reaching a ballot high of 45 states (and a possible 480 electoral votes) in 2016.

The Greens should have been delighted to have a candidate whose very name inspired Beltway sack-shrinkage — West’s announcement led to a spate of transparent hit pieces, with Democrats horrified by visions of progressive and black voter defections — but the reality of party politics, even Green Party politics, is almost unimaginably complicated for rookies. West in October bailed on the Greens, apparently exhausted by bureaucratic requirements and the need to, as Politico put it, “kiss ass.”

“There are so many different factions within the party, and each faction has its own hoops that you’ve got to jump through, that it makes it tough,” says Tyrel Ventura, whose father Jesse flirted with a Green run in 2020.

West recently raised $100,000 in California, but he’ll need a lot more than that to be a factor in November. Worse, failure to hustle signatures or make enough deals (“There’s a chance that we might be able to connect with some other parties too,” West says) to be a candidate at all is a powerful argument against one’s executive fitness. West seems aware of this.

“We on the move. We on the move,” he said, after the event. “We should be on about fifteen states by the Ides of March. We’re on Alaska already, and nearly in Utah and Oregon.” He smiles a little, then concedes: “It’s going to be an uphill battle.”

If not to West, to whom do these votes go? Please remember this is a campaign story, not one making judgments about Israel or Palestine, and the extraordinary electoral angle on these Palestine protests is the sheer quantity of disaffected voters the crowds represent. If one assumes Joe Biden won’t be a choice for this demographic, that likely leaves Stein, West, RFK, Jr, and Trump, and Trump is shockingly no longer the absolute non-option he once was in crowds like this.

“I voted for Biden in the last election. There’s no chance I’m voting for this guy in the upcoming election, because of this,” says Faisal Siddiqi. “There’s still a chance I could vote for Trump, because to me he’s not an ideologue. There’s still a chance we can work with him.” His strategic calculation: “It’s a democracy, right? You have to earn my vote. I'm not going to give you my vote for no reason.”

“There are many people with real integrity who are turning to Trump as the only option,” says Stein. “We’ve seen that in the Palestine support community as well, there’s the Abandon Biden movement coming from this, and initially, many of them are turning to Trump as a way to punch back.”

It’s not that big of a surprise. Close your eyes and the rhetoric overlaps with those at MAGA rallies. It’s “endless wars” instead of “forever wars,” “Genocide Joe” instead of “Crooked Joe,” “lying corporate media” instead of “failing fake news media,” and so on. One speaker even talked about how “people are doing their own research” and “waking up” to the “convoluted narrative” on TV by communicating with one another on social media.

This is what’s so irritating about all the panic stories about a “horseshoe theory” in which the “radical left” and “radical right” are supposedly plotting to unite and undermine the virtuous center. What actually happens is that ordinary people across the spectrum find themselves screwed over in similar ways, and people of differing political orientations end up saying and feeling the same types of things, organically.

There are so many demographics recoiling from traditional politics now that in a fair electoral fight, Washington consensus would surely lose. This is why, after decades in which third parties were mostly irrelevant at the presidential level (with the exception of Ross Perot’s brief surge in the 1992 cycle), ballot access is suddenly a commodity more prized than gold. Anyone with a pulse who can order a cheeseburger without help will be a serious option for millions, once voters disappear into booths in November. The problem is getting names on ballots.

Republican frontrunner Trump faces myriad legal challenges to remain an every-state option. RFK, Jr., Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson either were or still are being stonewalled in a Democratic primary season dominated by ballot shenanigans, with the blue party refusing to count New Hampshire results or canceling the Florida primary. This is all happening as a free-falling Biden keeps hitting new record approval lows, the latest a gruesome 33%, three points below Lyndon Johnson’s fatal 36% number from 1968. Maybe not since the Jefferson-Adams election of 1800, when a House runoff decided the presidency on the 36th try, has American politics been so rife with uncertainties. Have we seen anything like this chaos?

“History is such a minefield of chaos, brother,” West replies. “You can go back to so many early elections, and you’ve got shootouts, you got people hiding in basements. And so American history, not just American history but human history in general —each moment has its own distinctive form of specific chaos.” He pauses. “But this particular moment of chaos is quite gargantuan now. No doubt about that.”

If the reader can’t tell already, I like Cornel West. He’s something that’s hard for a celebrity to be in modern America, original and true to himself. We imagine intellectuals to be ethereal creatures, with no skills beyond moving words around. A good thinker however is a person of action, converting the idea on the page into a living thing by standing behind it in the physical world. West to me recalls the sadly long tradition of prolific thinkers cast out by friends when they refused to compromise. He’s written about this, pointing to line 24A in Plato’s Apology, which he framed as, “The cause of my unpopularity was my parrhesia, my fearless speech, my frank speech.” West’s heroes like Malcolm X, King, and W.E.B. Du Bois were all castigated by would-be allies for such a habit of parrhesia, and seemingly all were more beset by critics and haters in their lifetimes than history remembers.

Maybe the political issues aren’t quite as severe as the ones King or Du Bois faced, but West’s refusal over decades to bend to the new Clintonian paradigm of “transactional politics” — better known as “selling out” — has made him a pariah in a left-liberal world that once adored him. Trace back far enough and his presidential run seems like the inevitable end result of a long career of refusing to go along to get along. Before the Israel-Palestine conflict made him a threat to “peel off Arab American voters” in a run The Economist says “holds dangers for Joe Biden,” West’s most constant complaints centered around the Democrats’ embrace of the neoliberal economics of Wall Street donors and their failure to halt the expansion of the carceral state. He blames Republicans equally or more, but never having been a Republican, the feelings aren’t as hard.

The grandson of a Baptist minister who grew up in a segregated section of Sacramento, West graduated from Harvard in 1973, gained a doctorate in Philosophy from Princeton in 1980, and started an academic career that would see repeated clashes with administrators. While a Harvard professor in the early 2000s, president Larry Summers called him in for a talk after he made headlines for working on political campaigns (for Bill Bradley, for instance) and for putting out a rap album. Summers reportedly asked West to report to him about his activities every two to three months. When a New York Times writer asked if it were true that he reported directly to Summers, West seethed, “Professors do not have supervisors, brother… Professors are free agents.”

By 2008 West returned to Princeton and was probably the left’s leading “public intellectual.” He was more telegenic and accessible to the Internet generation than Noam Chomsky, a regular on shows like Real Time With Bill Maher. However, he quickly irritated some in the now blue-controlled capital with his insufficiently ebullient response to Barack Obama’s election. “We’re coming to the end of the epoch of the Southern Strategy. For the first time now, we’ve got some democratic possibilities,” he said in cautious tones, after Obama’s win. “Barack Obama is a symbol, but we’ve got to move from symbol to substance.”

Saying he wanted to be Frederick Douglass pressuring the “progressive Lincoln” he hoped Obama would become, West soon argued with Obama, too. Though some of the arguments sound petty (there was a dispute about inauguration tickets, for instance), the through-line was West’s disappointment with Obama’s courting of donors, Wall Street confidantes, and mainstream (read: white) media celebrities. “Your economic team has little or no concern about poor and working people,” West wrote to Obama, on the first anniversary of his inauguration. “Job creation is an afterthought.”

Soon after the heat dialed up in an NPR interview, when West noted that Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd got White House invites when they were critical of Obama, but “I say the same thing, he talks to me like I’m a Cub Scout.” From there West blasted Obama as a “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” and the press in particular began to turn on the man who had been a go-to quote for ages.

West returned to politics in the 2016 cycle as a confidante and advisor to Bernie Sanders. I frequently saw the two together at campaign events in both 2016 and 2020, and Sanders asked West to be one of five people sent to help write the 2016 Democratic Platform. However, they too eventually had a falling out, from the outside seemingly over the same issue. After West announced his run this summer, he said there were some progressive politicians who “don’t really want to tell the full truth,” being fearful of hurting Biden’s electoral cause. West for instance derided the idea that Biden’s is “the best economy” that we can get.

“Is this the best that we can get? You don’t tell that lie to the people just for Biden to win,” West quipped. Sanders responded by saying there “has to be a unification of progressive people,” given the threat of Donald Trump, “an authoritarian, and a very, very dangerous person.”

Sanders from the start of his presidential run was so fearful of offending the Democratic barons that he never even spoke out loud the clear subtext of his 2016 run, a referendum on Obama’s Wall Street-stroking policies. By 2020, some in the Sanders circle were clearly frustrated by Bernie’s refusal to throw his hard-earned weight around, seething when Bernie rolled over for his old Senate pal, Joe Biden. After effectively sealing the nomination following Super Tuesday in 2020, Biden’s team assumed Sanders would go out and bust his fanny to deliver his constituents for the cause, even as they planned all along to ball-kick him after election with moves like the nomination of noted Sanders-basher Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

West over the years has traveled from Barack Obama’s inner circle to Bernie’s camp to his current status of being pushed outside the club entirely, with running the only means left to express disagreement. I asked West if he was motivated by the party’s treatment of Sanders, with the idea of showing more backbone.

“No, no, the main reason for running is the way they treat poor people and working people,” West replied. “I love Bernie, but that’s not the main one. It would be about number 47.” He laughed. “But I love the man.”

Another quality about West that irks Democratic loyalists is his willingness to engage with conservatives. He rarely agrees with them — his tussles with Sean Hannity in particular make good television, with West dragging Hannity over Trump’s call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five a typical exchange — but doesn’t blanch at talking to red-state audiences and seems to work at being even-handed in his statements. While describing Trump as a “bonafide gangster and neofascist,” he still objected strongly to the Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Trump from the ballot, saying Democrats should “not rely on the courts as a mechanism to circumvent Brother Biden’s anemic poll numbers.”

Some of West’s positions would be a very hard sell to middle America. “Nationalize the fossil fuel industry” is one that stands out, along with reparations, although “end the war on drugs” and free pre-K care might go down easier. Still, my guess is West’s wit and no-bullshit attitude would, with time, go over well enough with most every demographic but the one currently running the country, i.e. upscale white liberals. The latter group simply has no patience for people who’ll talk about their flaws to their faces, and West is the dictionary definition of that. When I told West I’d heard a few Trump supporters in Iowa mention his name along with RFK, Jr. as evidence an electoral fix was in, he talked about trying not to be self-conscious when talking to “Trump country.”

“I don’t approach them in terms of them being stereotyped,” he says. “They’re human beings wrestling with a lot of economic frustration and deprivation. Now, they’ve got some xenophobic sensibilities you got to work with. But one out eight of them voted for my very dear brother Bernie Sanders, and one out of twelve voted for Obama. People are subject to shifts given the fluctuating moments that we live in.” He paused. “You just don’t know. So I will continue to go and talk to them.”

West isn’t for everyone. He will say things that will make the average Trump voter’s head explode, in one minute speaking in campus-intersectionality catch-phrases about “male supremacy” or transphobia, in another talking about the “neofascist moment” that produced Trump. However, as his current presidential run shows, he’s not toeing any party line when he talks. He doesn’t seem capable of it. Even when he tries to align with an institution, it seems in his nature to eventually say the impolitic thing and break with doctrine.

For instance, he’s a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, but ask him about capitalism, and he’s as likely to speak in reply about Christian beliefs or T.S. Eliot’s hollow men as he is to cite Marx. This is a person who doesn’t know how to be boring, and it may be that his fate is to be more America’s Cassandra than its next Lincoln — a terrific talker, warner, and explainer of things, but lacking the iron digestion of an organizational man.

“You can’t do this on the fly, especially if you don't have a team of experienced people,” says Stein, who helped recruit West to the Green Party. “That’s what a political party is. They are flawed animals… It’s people who are aligning around an agreed-upon political agenda. And you work on it.”

That West couldn’t work on it with the Greens is fine. The world needs interesting people, too. It just happens that at this moment, it also desperately needs real political choices. Can West find a new gear to become one?

Racket readers, your mental invalid of an editor posted the wrong link in the previous message about tonight’s America This Week livestream of Iowa caucus results. The actual links:

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See you tonight. Apologies again. Doing pushups in penance. See you in a few.

We’ll see how this works out, but Walter Kirn and I will be watching C-SPAN this evening as the Iowa Caucus results come in this evening. Click here to join us at roughly 8:45 p.m. Caucusing begins at roughly 7 CT/8 ET, and results supposedly will begin trickling in just before the top of the next hour, though we all know how that worked out in the last cycle. Viewers incidentally can click here for NPR’s result count.

I’m looking forward to live Walter Kirn, and also at least vaguely interested in the result, as experience in the last cycle has taught me to expect shenanigans. But perhaps not! In any case, see you tonight as the White House horse race begins.

Today’s story wasn’t about the merits of Donald Trump’s immunity argument or Jack Smith’s “election interference” prosecutions, but an effort to manipulate coverage by attributing to Trump and his legal team something that actually came from a judge.

We’re entering an unprecedented election season in which the fates of several candidates, including some independents to be profiled here, will be decided by legal battles instead of voters. This puts a premium on covering court proceedings accurately, because courts, unfortunately, are likely to be this year’s campaign trail.

Off in the morning, but for those asking about the focus on coverage SNAFUs, that’s why. It’ll be nice to have a tangible result from the GOP caucus in Iowa next week, but it might be bull and narratives all the way down after that. Anyway, more soon… have a good weekend, everyone.

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Reporters keep plunging to bizarre new lows in coverage of Donald Trump. The new jam: his lawyer argued presidents can assassinate rivals. Except he didn’t, at all.

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