https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/paid-operatives-gop-firm-helping-cornel-west-arizona-ballot-rcna159675
After Republican operatives were discovered working for West in North Carolina, someone is paying to help get the progressive candidate on the ballot in another battleground state.
What, you mean those guys that looked at Bernie Sanders and Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker, and said naw we want the guy with the crazy hair who is absolutely guaranteed to be unacceptable to the American electorate, to be the spokesman of the Left and specifically in this presidential election and we want people to take the world’s most bizarre strategy on his behalf which will NOT cause him to win or advance any leftist cause but MIGHT get Trump elected and destroy any large number of leftist causes
And, also, are totally uninterested in any leftist causes more strategic or logical than this weird and counterproductive single quixotic stand in this general election
You mean those guys WEREN’T trying to win the election for leftist causes, like they said they were?
That’s nuts man
And, also, are totally uninterested in any leftist causes more strategic or logical than this weird and counterproductive single quixotic stand in this general election
Can you give me an example of a strategic or logical leftist cause?
Stop climate change, stop killing Palestinians, economic justice for working people
There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but "let Trump come to power" is not a real good solution to any of them, to me. "Stop supporting the Democrats until they suddenly decide to start supporting them" also seems weird to me and unlikely to succeed. People have been not caring about politics (with every righteous reason) for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem to have made the politics or the level of leftism progress in the equation any higher, to me.
There are a significant subset of leftists who explicitly believe that democracy is not a path forward because it's co-opted by capital and they're not even all Marxists.
Of course they have no interest in supporting Cornel West.
Yeah. Those guys I'm fine with. I was around in the 90s, man; you don't have to tell me that the Democrats don't have my back.
My point is that that subset doesn't spend all their time on political forums picking on the DNC. Their time on the internet in my experience is spent in anarchist / activist forums or just on other, non political things; their not caring about electoral politics is a lot more universal and they don't get all amped up talking about it or want to spend all their time on it (and specifically spend all their time on criticisms of only one of the parties, a lot of which are sort of made up and weird if you look at them closely.)
There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but "let Trump come to power" is not a real good solution to any of them, to me.
Probably not. I don't know what the right strategies are, assuming they exist at all, but, yeah, that's probably not it.
Well, that's because Trump was a softball candidate who stood no chance at winning and only acted as a spoiler candidate in relation to other, actual potential Republican candidates.
What’s frustrating is that Mrs Clinton was always a disliked candidate, but then a well liked politician. Her poking before her senate election was bad, then great once elected.
The Democratic Party was too stupid to recognize that they need a popular Candidate not just a popular politician.
Same thing is happening with Biden to some extent. He’s gotten a lot done (even with the split congress), but if he can’t get people fired up to vote we’re in danger of getting fucked again.
The issue is also that he's gotten a lot done that people do not like or not done enough in some ways. They don't think he pushed for enough support for Ukraine. Or they don't like how he handled the late 2022 railway workers strike. Or they don't like how he's handling Israel's invasion of Palestine. And then there's the fact that he's the face of mainstream, neoliberal Democrats, who are just generally disliked by more progressive members of the party for seeming to never get things done (like codifying Roe v. Wade into law when they had the chance) and for being so arrogant that they fumble the ball constantly (like with the DNC and Clinton thinking Trump was a fucking pushover and then letting him get elected and functionally give the RNC the Supreme Court for the next 30 years). People are frustrated with Biden because they're frustrated with the party, and Biden is the party in a very real way.
He’s by far done more good than bad. Even the railway workers were resolved in the end (without a shutdown that would have fucked the inflation greed economy even more).
Congress is behind the rest of your points, and Israel/Palestine is a no-win situation for the election. There’s a good chance it was manufactured by a combination of Russia->Iran->Hamas triggering i, then Netanyahu being a bigger dick when he found out the cruel IDF reaction makes Biden look bad too.
I know it’s a total conspiracy theory, but the Israel/Palestine war has had an awful lot of shady boosting in social media and is having an outsized part of the conversation on the left when you consider the far more cruel shit a Trump win would inflict.
He’s by far done more good than bad. Even the railway workers were resolved in the end (without a shutdown that would have fucked the inflation greed economy even more).
The issue is that by doing this he showed his hand. A strike has two sides to it: the side of the workers and the side of the bosses. Biden's interference, by executive order, shows which side he's on. It's very telling to me that we live in a country where Biden can make it illegal for thousands of people to go on strike, but he doesn't have the power to force a single corporation to take the deal that's on the table from their employees. Or if he does, he elects not to do that. Either way, a union has one single recourse against the company it works for: striking. If that's suddenly off the table, you are effectively toothless in negotiations. Also, it's fascinating you can say to thousands of people "oh, you don't want to work anymore? Well, guess what? You have to." Last time I checked, that's functionally indentured servitude, if not outright slavery.
There’s a good chance it was manufactured by a combination of Russia->Iran->Hamas triggering i
Not every single thing is a plan by Russia to destabilize the Western world. This conflict had been ongoing for decades. Is this particular escalation of it bad timing? Sure, but it was also a ticking clock.
wait you mean the "nato aggression" guy is backed by guys who have those opinions due to the money and the connections and the shared goals, I find this deeply unbelievable there must be an alternative explanation
I didn’t even know about this
I watched one of his speeches at random just to see what the guy was about and TL;DR I wasn’t impressed and I would not be at all surprised to learn that the Republicans are trying to trick leftists into getting behind him. But I hadn’t heard that he also dislikes NATO. That seems like a weirdly specific and incongruous stance for him to take, given how extraordinarily nonspecific was a lot of the stuff he was saying when I watched him.
One could make an argument that NATO is a continuation of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about. But Cornell West just saying "I oppose NATO" without making that argument is pretty weird.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A dozen paid operatives registered with Arizona’s secretary of state on Sunday to collect signatures on behalf of left-wing presidential candidate Cornel West, listing their employer as a Republican-leaning firm that recently worked for GOP House candidate Blake Masters.
“They falsely claim we’re aiding Trump to discredit us, but we stand with poor and working people,” he added.
NBC News recently uncovered Republican-linked operatives secretly collecting signatures for West in North Carolina, another key swing state.
Last week, the Democratic majority on North Carolina’s State Board of Elections voted against giving initial ballot access to West via a new political party started on his behalf, citing the NBC News report and other concerns.
Wells Marketing collected signatures earlier this year for several Arizona Republican candidates, including Masters, state Rep. Justin Heap and GOP Senate candidate Elizabeth Jean Reye, according to the secretary of state’s records.
Some prominent Republicans have promoted West’s left-wing candidacy as a way to “take away votes from Joe Biden.” West is a famed Black academic and racial justice activist who has made a central focus of his campaign the plight of Gazans suffering during Israel’s war on Hamas.
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They are trying the thing the Democrats did with getting maga nuts into contested areas so their candidate had a better chance with the centrist voters. If a Dem finds out they are in place because of conservative machinations, they should drop out