Elon Musk has stepped back from his efforts to launch a new political party and is instead signaling that he will direct his financial support toward Vice President JD Vance’s expected 2028 presidential campaign, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Musk, who previously announced plans for the “America Party,” has reportedly decided to turn his attention back to his companies and avoid further clashes with Republicans.
Musk polled X users whether there should be a new party “that actually represents the 80% in the middle.” The results were an overwhelming “yes,” after over five million votes.
After the poll, Musk wrote, “The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree,” with a laughing emoji
The tech billionaire concluded, “This is fate.”
Last night, three people who know they’re not going to be president but are running for the office anyway took the stage in Los Angeles for a spirited third-party debate.
At the debate hosted by Free and Equal, Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Randal Terry of the Constitution Party argued about whether the government should get much smaller, much larger, or be totally reoriented toward Judeo-Christian values.
Being the ideological gadflies that they are, the third-party candidates all made refreshingly undistilled cases for their contrasting visions of government.
Oliver did an admirable job laying out the basics of libertarianism and then applying them to individual cases.
“If you’re not harming other people with your behavior, your behavior is perfectly acceptable and should not be regulated by the government or any other entity,” he said last night, arguing that we should eliminate zoning laws to make housing affordable, cut spending, sell federal land to bring down the debt, and stay out of foreign wars.
The other two candidates offered some fresh perspectives that were at least interesting to hear, even if they are not all necessarily advisable.
Terry argued we should build a wall on the northern border to keep the Canadians out, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to pay off the national debt, and eat raw broccoli to cure cancer.
Stein said building a wall on the southern border wouldn’t stop drugs getting in from legal “portals of entry” but would devastate wildlife and natural ecosystems along the U.S.–Mexico border. She also perceptively argued we’re stumbling into a wider war in the Middle East without any real acknowledgment or discussion.
The fact that everyone on stage knew they’re not going to the White House opened up some room for productive agreement, particularly between Oliver and his two debate opponents.
The Libertarian nominee actively agreed with Stein that we should cut off foreign aid to Israel and nodded along to Terry’s stirring anti–property tax rants.
One might think that the appeal of watching gadflies say wild things in a debate format would be diminished in a day and age when Donald Trump (who skipped last night’s debate) is the Republican nominee.
Hardly. Last night’s third-party debate managed to provide its own unique and refreshing brand of weird.
Vice President Kamala Harris appears to fear that Jill Stein could spoil her chances of winning ten electoral votes in Wisconsin.
Stein, who is the Green Party’s nominee for president, received more votes in the three “blue wall” states than the margin by which two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. In Wisconsin, for example, Stein won 31,072 votes, while Clinton lost by a 22,748-vote margin.
Harris is determined to not lose Wisconsin like Clinton did and has begun running ads in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, attacking Stein by linking her to KKK leader David Duke and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Harris is flush with cash and can likely afford to attack Stein.
Harris appears to be essentially tied in Wisconsin with former President Donald Trump, with Stein receiving about one percent of the vote, a recent Marquette poll found. Stein’s one percent could be enough to spoil Harris’s chances of winning the Badger State’s ten Electoral College votes.
The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.
The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.
Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election.
This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.
For the next eight months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at persuading them that:
Incredible, isn’t it, that in a country of more than 330 million people, we are given only two choices for president?
The system is rigged, of course.
Forcing the citizenry to choose between two candidates who are equally unfit for office does not in any way translate to having some say in how the government is run.
Indeed, no matter what names are on the presidential ballot, once you step away from the cult of personality politics, you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.
The candidate who wins the White House has already made a Faustian bargain to keep the police state in power.
We’ve been down this road before.
Barack Obama campaigned on a message of hope, change and transparency, and promised an end to war and surveillance. Yet under Obama, government whistleblowers were routinely prosecuted, U.S. arms sales skyrocketed, police militarization accelerated, and surveillance became widespread.
Donald Trump swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.
We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.
Joe Biden has been no different. If his job was to keep the Deep State in power, he’s been a resounding success.
Follow the money. It always points the way.
With each new president, we’ve been subjected to more government surveillance, more police abuse, more SWAT team raids, more roadside strip searches, more censorship, more prison time, more egregious laws, more endless wars, more invasive technology, more militarization, more injustice, more corruption, more cronyism, more graft, more lies, and more of everything that has turned the American dream into the American nightmare.
“Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.”—Gene Sharp, political science professor
The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.
The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.
Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election.
This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.
For the next eight months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at persuading them that 1) their votes count, 2) the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president, and 3) electing the right candidate will fix everything that is wrong with this country.
Incredible, isn’t it, that in a country of more than 330 million people, we are given only two choices for president?
The system is rigged, of course.
Forcing the citizenry to choose between two candidates who are equally unfit for office does not in any way translate to having some say in how the government is run.
Indeed, no matter what names are on the presidential ballot, once you step away from the cult of personality politics, you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.
The candidate who wins the White House has already made a Faustian bargain to keep the police state in power.
We’ve been down this road before.
Many things that everyone knows, are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely-believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true, but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true.
Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly declares, without bothering to cite evidence because its obviousness rises to the level of self-evident, that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election (not true) and Jill Stein sucked away enough Democratic votes from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House (also not true).
Let us, for the purpose of this essay, set aside the usual counterarguments to the claim that you shouldn’t vote Green they’re just spoilers: no presidential election is decided by a single vote so you can’t possibly individually change any outcome, people who don’t live in swing states really have no reason to worry about tipping an election, parties ought to have to earn votes, voting for a lesser evil is still voting for evil, a little party will never become bigger until we stop overthinking our tactical voting and simply support that candidate and the party we like best.
But—are small parties really electoral succubi? First, a look at Republican losers who blamed third parties for their losses.
Running as a Progressive in 1912, a vengeful Teddy Roosevelt out to punish his former protege for deviating from progressive Republicanism is alleged to have sucked away votes from William Howard Taft. We did wind up with President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat—a result cited as the ultimate example of a third-party candidate splitting a party.
But historians forget to mention that it was a four-way race. Wilson faced his own “spoiler,” from his left: Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, who got six percent of the popular vote. Taft was such a weak candidate that neither Teddy nor Debs made a difference; Wilson would have won no matter what.
Pundits say Ross Perot created a big enough sucking sound of votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992 to hand the race to Bill Clinton. Pundits are mistaken: Perot pulled equally from the Democrats and the Republicans. Libertarian Gary Johnson is unfairly blamed for contributing to Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Similarly, left-leaning third-parties—since 2000, this has meant the Greens—have never poached from Democrats in big enough numbers to change the outcome. Green Party supporters tend to be leftists like me, who would otherwise not vote at all. If the only two parties on the ballot were the Democrats and Republicans, we’d sit on our hands.
Hellbound and Down 
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