Prisoners of Themselves – by James Howard Kunstler – 6 May 2024

“Ok, let’s be clear. If the intelligence community led by the CIA is not the “deep state,” what is?” — Jeffrey Tucker

You realize, don’t you, that the gross misconduct of government officials from RussiaGate on down to the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan has amounted to one continuous operation against the American people? If it were ever honestly adjudicated, many hundreds of them might go to prison, or worse. Each successive seditious and treasonous action they attempt against their arch-nemesis, Mr. Trump, only compounds their criminal liability — the Steele Dossier, CIA agent Eric Ciaramella’s 2019 impeachment prank, the Covid-19 caper, the George Floyd-BLM hustle, the 2020 election hijinks, the J-6 op and the House J-6 Committee conjured up to spin it, the present battery of farcical court cases — and yet the Golden Golem of Greatness not only remains defiantly at large, but seems to amass ever more electoral mojo.

     The epic failure of these mighty efforts, and the humiliation entailed, has lately driven this vast bureaucratic cabal — collectively styled as “the blob” — to a stage of abject desperation that looks a lot like insanity. They fear for their lives, their fortunes, their chattels, and their families, and they seem ready to wreck the republic to save themselves. They have so far pretty much wrecked American justice with their lawfare tactics — a degenerate campaign to use the vested authority of prosecutors and judges to twist and cheat the law at the cost of the law’s legitimacy. Merrick Garland, Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Christopher Wray, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg have made law the enemy of the people.

      All this becomes more obvious each day, for instance events of the past week in Judge Aileen Cannon’s federal courtroom in Florida where the Mar-a-Lago documents case proceeds. Turns out that Special Counsel Jack Smith has deliberately messed with the evidence, which is patently felonious. Also, turns out that sometime between the “Joe Biden” inauguration and the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in August, 2022, boxes of presidential documents stored by the US General Services Administration were “delivered” to Mr. Trump’s mansion without any proper accounting for what might have been in them. A set-up you suppose? Why not? After everything else the FBI and the DOJ have attempted since 2015?

     Christopher Wray in particular might have wanted some surefire probable cause to get his agents into Mar-a-Lago where, rumor has it, Mr. Trump kept his own dossier of evidence against the FBI and DOJ officials who concocted the “Crossfire Hurricane” chapter of RussiaGate. Even if you assume that Mr. Trump had multiple copies of the thing, FBI Director Wray — in position since 2017 throughout most of RussiaGate — surely wanted to see what Mr. Trump was holding if it would become necessary for current and former FBI / DOJ officials to defend themselves in court against very serious charges.

      You see the desperation, don’t you? And how stupendously amateurish these machinations have been? Planting evidence and then fiddling around with it? I’m waiting for the moment when Judge Cannon summons Jack Smith and announces to his face that she is tossing the case for prosecutorial misconduct. Will she add a criminal referral to that? How will that affect the other case (attempting to overturn the 2020 election) brought against Mr. Trump in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC federal district court? Who will prosecute it if Jack Smith can no longer function as Special Counsel? And since the case was contrived in his name — even if Eisen, McCord, Weissmann, and others are really the authors — does that case blow up, too?

     Letitia James’s real estate case under Judge Arthur Engoron was so idiotic it can’t possibly survive an ultimate appeal, and the Alvin Bragg confection under Judge Merchan is playing out like something that usually only happens in places like Honduras or Liberia. Yet the American Left, the “progressive” Democratic Party, is staking everything on it. It’s all they have left Lawfare-wise, at least for now. Which brings us to the question: Why do the non-governmental elites of this land, the managerial and thinking classes, the college presidents, the cable news producers, the corporate execs, the movie directors, the whole arts establishment. . . why do they feel compelled, for nearly a decade now, to hitch their identity and their self-respect to this fantastic train of Kafka-esque corruption, tyranny, and abuse? How did they get owned by the blob?

     We may never find out, and they may never know either, even after they snap out of the mass formation they’ve been in thrall to. But they have made themselves ridiculous — figures like Sam Harris, Stephen Colbert, and Rob Reiner — yelling about “saving our democracy” while the blob they worship systematically disassembles the US Constitution, and makes American law a global laughingstock.

     Most of my old ex-friends are riding the same ideological bus. You have to wonder: how did the likes of “Joe Biden,” Merrick Garland, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Christopher Wray, Fani Willis, Anthony Fauci, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates become their heroes? Did the Covid vaccines destroy their minds? Are they really avid for central bank digital money and surveillance of their every move? Do they want to be told how to live by the WHO? Things are going south fast now in our country. If these people ever cherished the idea of being free to think their own thoughts and live their own lives, it’s getting late in the game. They will end up prisoners of themselves.

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RFK Jr. is all over conservative media. Trump’s camp is concerned. (Politico) May 2024

POLITICO – Story by Natalie Allison, Alex Isenstadt and Brittany Gibson

RFK Jr says Biden is ‘worse’ for democracy than Trump

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s increasingly frequent appearances on conservative media platforms are beginning to raise alarms at Mar-a-Lago.

It’s another sign of the rising threat that Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate, poses to Trump.

In recent months, Kennedy has become a regular on Fox News and Newsmax, and he is now a staple on the conservative podcast circuit — being interviewed by the likes of Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly. While railing against President Joe Biden, Kennedy is actively courting an audience with the young listeners of bro podcasters and conservative-coded YouTubers that skew anti-“woke.”

That’s squarely on Trump’s turf, not Biden’s.

“It is concerning and beyond logic,” said Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager, “that there are some conservative platforms that continue to give a voice to someone that has called the NRA a terrorist group, who believes in eliminating gas powered engines, believes in a 70% tax bracket and generally subscribes to the same school of thought as Karl Marx.”

Two other senior Republicans close to Trump’s campaign and granted anonymity to speak freely similarly expressed frustration about Kennedy’s appearances on conservative airwaves.

Though Kennedy has been popular with conservative media since he initially launched his candidacy as a Democrat, his frequent appearances on Trump-aligned platforms now come as he runs as an independent candidate who could cut into Trump’s support. The former president this past weekend went on multiple tirades about Kennedy on his Truth Social site, declaring him a “Democrat ‘Plant’” and “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.” And he said “A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE.”

Kennedy, meanwhile, is talking to millions of right-leaning voters on traditional conservative platforms. A POLITICO analysis of Kennedy’s 69 media appearances since January, as listed on his campaign’s website, found a plurality of them — nearly half — were with conservative, libertarian-leaning, or openly anti-”woke” hosts, with the remaining interviews divided between liberal, politically neutral, and spiritual or environmentalist hosts.

“They see an opening, they see a robust ecosystem on the right that they can pull votes from,” said Matt Gorman, a former communications adviser for Sen. Tim Scott’s presidential campaign, referring to Kennedy. “I think sometimes, Republicans tend to lull ourselves into believing, ‘Oh, he’s just taking votes from Biden.’ No, he’s going after everybody.”

Kennedy has also taken on championing one of Trump’s top policy issues: closing the U.S. border. That’s in addition to questioning the legitimacy of the charges brought against rioters at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, a cohort who Trump has praised and suggested he would pardon.

In a statement to POLITICO, Shapiro, one of the conservative hosts who has interviewed Kennedy, described him as a “fascinating figure” worth interviewing.

“RFK Jr is the highest polling third-party candidate since Ross Perot,” Shapiro said. “He’s a fascinating figure and I regularly interview newsworthy people across the political spectrum on my show. With that said, I’ve made clear that I support President Trump’s reelection effort, and have even co-hosted a campaign event for him.”

While polling averages show Trump with a slight lead over Biden in most swing states, Kennedy is currently averaging 8 to 10 percent of the vote in those states, drawing about evenly from both major-party candidates.

A Monmouth poll released this week shows 17 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump — sometimes referred to as “double haters” — and tend to be younger. Among voters under 35 years old, 27 percent fall into that category, the poll found, while Kennedy’s overall favorability rating has gone up by double digits among both independents and Republicans since December.

And a survey of under-30 voters conducted in April for Snapchat by SocialSphere, which is owned by Harvard pollster John Della Volpe, found that 52 percent of those young voters were at least considering a vote for Kennedy.

If Kennedy’s appearances on conservative media are frustrating to Trump’s campaign, Kennedy’s supporters are reveling in the increased attention that Trump’s broadsides against the candidate have given him.

“No one is worried that Kennedy is on Trump’s radar,” a person familiar with the Kennedy campaign said, adding it’s seen as free advertising.

One Republican strategist speaking on condition of anonymity noted that Kennedy seems to be following a strategy employed by a number of GOP candidates in recent years trying to drive up their name recognition among conservatives — not just going on conservative television channels like Fox News and Newsmax, but taking advantage of the proliferation of right-leaning podcasts and other programming.

“In a way Kennedy’s taken the tack of a B-level Republican Senate candidate,” the GOP strategist said.

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RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

Cornel West chooses Black Lives Matter activist Melina Abdullah as his vp – by Brittany Gibson (Politico) 10 April 2024

Cornel West tapped university professor and prominent Black Lives Matter activist Melina Abdullah to be his running mate on his long-shot presidential bid.

Abdullah has never run for political office before and is the former chair of the Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles.

Melina Abdullah

“I wanted to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said.

He announced his pick on Wednesday’s episode of the Tavis Smiley Radio Show on KBLA radio.

West is running as an independent candidate and faces significant challenges in his campaign for the White House. West’s fundraising has lagged behind his opponents, raising less than $1 million since launching his bid last summer.

Since getting in the race, West has switched parties twice, leaving the People’s Party and the Green Party to ultimately run as an independent. The switch mandates an expensive and difficult process to get his name on the ballot in 50 states and Washington, DC. Officially choosing his vice president allows him to start collecting petition signatures to get on the ballot in about 20 states.

“Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,” Abdullah said of their ticket. “We can be expansive and imaginative … we enter this really as faithful people who are not more pragmatists than we are faithful.”

Through partnerships with existing third parties, West is already on the ballot in three states. But this method was not successful in California, one of the hardest states to gain ballot access, as West lost the Peace and Freedom Party’s primary to the Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate in March.

(Party For Socialism and Liberation candidates for US President and VP)

Abdullah, who is also an organizer of grassroots and local Black Lives Matter chapters, said she “was not expecting the phone call that I got last week at all, like it was the furthest thing from my mind. And then he and his wife Annahita [Mahdavi West] asked and immediately my heart just soared.”

Black Lives Matter doesn’t endorse candidates, she said, but individuals involved with the organization may endorse her separately. Abdullah, who is also a Howard University graduate and member of the AKA sorority, said she would not step away from her work organizing with the grassroots local chapters.

West also said there wouldn’t be any political “burden” being associated Black Lives Matter, which has called for defunding the police and was alleged to be associated with property destruction at civil rights demonstrations in 2020.

As a practicing Muslim, Abdullah also spoke of the auspiciousness of her announcement on Eid, the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramandan. She talked openly about her faith, using a similar approach to West’s on the campaign trail. West is a Christian and the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary.

“I’m running for Jesus. She’s running for Allah. That’s a beautiful thing,” West said.

The announcement was a major milestone for West’s campaign but was not without issue. A technical difficulty affecting West’s audio input cut him out from their joint interview for almost 10 minutes.

Democrats were swift to criticize West’s announcement. “Despite Cornel West announcing a running mate, our view remains the same: only two candidates have a path to 270 electoral votes, President Biden and Donald Trump,” said DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni. “The stakes are high, and we know this is going to be a close election — that’s why a vote for any third party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.”

On the morning of West’s announcement, the New York Times reported that Trump allies view third-party candidates as advantageous for Trump’s reelection chances. One ally, Scott Presler, has messaged both West and the Green Party’s Jill Stein about helping them get on the ballot on social media.

West co-campaign manager Ceyanna Dent said, “Scott Presler has not worked with the campaign in any capacity.” Though Dent added that the campaign staff was briefed on his overtures.

West was asked by Smiley about being a possible spoiler in 2024, and said, “No politician owns a vote. We stand for what we stand for. If you go with us, then come with us and change the world.”

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US Election 2024 – RFKjr Supported By ‘Young Turk’ Radical Liberal Cenk Uygur – by Gabriel Hays (Fox) 5 April 2024

#News#RFKjr Wins Radical Liberal Support – Prominent independent pundit stuns co-host by saying he’s considering RFK Jr. for president – by Gabriel Hays (Fox) During a recent episode of political web show “The Young Turks,” co-host Cenk Uygur admitted that he is considering voting for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slamming President Biden and the Democratic Party for being anti-democracy.

Prior to his announcement, Uygur discussed why he agreed with the candidate’s recent headline-grabbing claims insisting that it could be argued that Biden is a “much worse” threat to democracy than former President Trump.

Kennedy claimed that the Biden administration is “worse” than Trump because it has pushed social media companies to censor certain opinions, especially during the pandemic, among other reasons.

Uygur supported this notion, though he claimed Biden and the DNC were anti-Democratic for reasons different than Kennedy gave, saying that Biden and his party members “love to rig” elections.

“He’s right to be concerned about Biden being a threat to democracy himself, maybe not for the reasons that he’s stating, but Biden did, you know, support anti-Democratic movements within the primary,” Uygur said.

He continued, “The Democratic Party canceled the election in Florida. They tried to keep out every candidate in North Carolina, Tennessee, et cetera. So, they love to rig elections.”

Slamming the media, he added, “Yes, I used the word rigged, OK? So, you can go cry about it if you’re mainstream media. How about you do your job and talk about how they canceled an election in Florida in the primary and just declared Biden the winner.”

Uygur also claimed that the “establishment in a of lot ways has killed democracy long before Donald Trump tried to,” explaining that this has happened through wealthy donors influencing most of the policy in America.” He also slammed both major parties for using “fear” to get votes.

He was critical of Kennedy, too, accusing him of trying to pander to both Republicans and Democrats in his campaign, but went on to say he’s currently considering voting for the independent.

Uygur declared, “The most surprising thing is, for the first time today, I’m now considering RFK, Jr.”

Co-host Ana Kasparian appeared stunned by the announcement, exclaiming, “What?!” on air.

Uygur attempted to explain it to her, granting that the candidate is “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs on vaccines. And on several other things where he believes in conspiratorial theories that I don’t believe in at all.”

“So why on God’s green Earth would I consider RFK, Jr.?” he asked, and then said, “But I thought about it, Ana, and Trump I would never support in a million years, Biden is now funding a genocide and is an awful choice, has been corrupt his whole life. A totally — you’re never going to get anything but corruption from Joe Biden.”

His main rationale was that he doesn’t believe Kennedy would be worse than Biden on major issues.

“So am I positive RFK Jr. would be worse?” Uygur asked, adding, “He would probably — on health and science, definitely he would be worse… But on everything else, like anti-establishment, money out of politics… I’m not positive RFK Jr. would be worse than Biden.”

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RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to America Will be Christian Fascism – by Chris Hedges – 17 March 2024

• 1,500 WORDS • 

Onward Christian Fascism – by Mr. Fish

The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.

Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.

The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”

Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.

Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.

Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:

[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.

But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.

The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.

He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.

Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.

“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”

The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.

The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.

There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.

Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.

The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.

Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.

They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?

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(Republished from Scheerpost)

US Presidential Primary – Tens of Thousands of Massachusetts Voters ‘No Preference’ for ‘Genocide Joe’ – by Lila Hempel-Edgers – 5 March 2024

Massachusetts voters who picked ‘no preference’ hope to send a message to “Genocide Joe” Biden – by Lila Hempel-Edgers

Supporters of the Vote No Preference campaign gathered at Andala Coffee House, a Middle Eastern restaurant, to watch the numbers roll in on Super Tuesday in hopes that enough “no preference” ballots were cast to send a message to President Biden.

Garnering 83 percent of the vote, Biden won a decisive victory in Massachusetts over author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who were also on the Democratic ballot. As results continued to come in Tuesday, “no preference” was winning an even bigger slice of the vote than either Williamson or Phillips, in an indication of dissatisfaction with the president among liberal voters.
Around 9:30 p.m., the crowd cheered for over 11,000 ballots cast for no preference. “Not bad for a five day turnaround,” said Sara Halawa, one of the campaign’s organizers. By 10:45 p.m., the group had garnered over 27,000 votes, and they felt the momentum.

“It looks like it’s going to be something like 50,000 or 60,000 [votes] based on how things are going,” Nathan Foster, 27, of Medford, said at around 10:30 p.m., long after Biden was declared the winner. “This is so many votes for no preference, I’m really happy and satisfied with it.”

Omar Siddiqi, a 41-year old resident of Brighton, said the numbers exceeded his expectations.

“We had no clue that we were going to do this, even a week ago,” said Siddiqi. “So I think, given the speed with which this came together, this is exceeding expectations. We would have been happy with 10,000 votes.”

Aly Madan, a 32-year-old from Roxbury, who started the Vote No Preference instagram page for Massachusetts last Wednesday, was also pleased.

“At first I thought ‘I’ll get like 100 of my friends to do this, maybe a thousand.’ Now, we have hundreds of volunteers and thousands of phone calls and texts being made,” said Madan. “I’m just so excited that people are engaged and are aligned and are doing what they can.”

The Massachusetts Vote No Preference effort mirrored a similar movement in Michigan, the Uncommitted Campaign, that amassed over 101,000 “uncommitted” votes during the state’s Democratic Primary last Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

Many Democratic voters are angry at Biden’s support for Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas that has led to the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians living in Gaza since October.

“When we saw what happened in Michigan last Tuesday, we realized we absolutely have to mobilize here in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday,” said Halawa. “And in the days that followed, we reached out to all of the different people we knew that cared about this, and a coalition came together.”

Over 300 volunteers spent the past three days advising thousands of Massachusetts voters, through phone calls, protests, and over 220,000 text messages, to vote “no preference.” The group gathered in front of several major polling sites across the state on Tuesday morning to suggest people cast their vote in protest of President Biden on their Democratic ballots.

“Over the last four days, we’ve had hundreds of volunteers working with us,” said Cicia Lee, a 31-year-old resident of Jamaica Plain who helped mobilize the coalition.

Some attendees at Tuesday night’s watch party were hopeful that their campaign might motivate Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Merrie Najimy, a Watertown resident and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said that ending the genocide is completely within the the president’s control.

“In the 80s, Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and called Menachem Begin, who was then the prime minister of Israel, and told him to stop the bombing of Southern Lebanon. In 20 minutes, it was over,” said Najimi. “If Biden is saying he doesn’t have that power, then why would we elect him?”

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