Political connoisseurs might recall this iconic moment from the 2015-16 GOP primary season when Chris Christie dismantled “Little” Marco Rubio, who seemingly glitched out on stage and repeated the same “dispel with this fiction/notion” line over and over.
Chris Christie called him out on this “memorized 25-second speech,” to which Rubio had no response both because it was true and because he, fittingly per Christie’s criticism, had no pre-programmed talking point to rebut it with.
It was essentially the end of Rubio’s campaign, to the extent it was ever viable to begin with. What made it so memorable is that it laid bare the reality that the vast majority of politicians are empty suits whose heads are filled with consultants’ talking points.
There’s no there there, which is also incidentally what made Trump so attractive to voters in the base then and now. Whatever one might say about Trump, he doesn’t speak in pre-packaged soundbites.
Unfortunately, politicians in the mainstream have seemingly not fully absorbed the lesson of the “teachable moment,” as Obama might say, offered by Rubio’s on-stage implosion.
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So it is even with the nominally dissident candidate Cornel West, who during an interview yesterday with Jimmy Dore offered a Rubio-esque performance, repeating over and over the “white supremacy” talking point, opposition to which is apparently a centerpiece of his campaign.
Dore repeatedly tries to get West back onto a viable message, explaining to him that class is both more important to focus on and a more viable focal point of a third-party candidacy.
Whatever one thinks of class warfare, the elite do believe in class warfare and wage it brutally, as I explained in the context of billionaire technocrat Charlie Munger’s war on the middle and working classes.
The other issue, not from a moral perspective but a politicking one, is that if Cornel West is going to make his entire candidacy about something called “white supremacy,” which to non-lobotomized, non-MSNBC-watching voters has lost whatever meaning it ever had due to overuse and misuse, there is nothing in it that would separate him from the Democrat Party.
“White supremacy,” “transphobia,” etc. are all that Democrat candidates talk about because it’s all they have. There is no affirmative vision they are offering — only mindless culture-war division to scare propagandized minorities, Zoomers, and suburban wine moms to the polls. If Cornel West is going to market himself as Social Justice™-lite, why not just vote for the real thing?
Finally, there’s the delicious irony that, should Cornel West ever be perceived as a legitimate threat to Joe Biden, the corporate state media will accuse him of advancing the interests of White Supremacy™. Indeed, that smear campaign has already begun.
MSNBC has accused Cornel West’s campaign of having “right-wing DNA” — a skip and a hop away from the next smear, which is that he’s a Nazi.
We’ve already learned that the corporate state media has no issue with smearing non-whites with the “white supremacist,” label, as they have done recently to Vivek Ramaswamy.
So Cornel West is digging his own grave here by playing into the “white supremacy” narrative. It’s not appealing to anyone with common sense outside of a very narrow sliver of the electorate, but more importantly, it’s a vicious lie propagated by technocrats to keep the population forever divided while the ruling class slips out of the back door with all of the cash.
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