Cartoon by Darrin Bell
Howie Hawkins, the 2020 presidential candidate of the Green Party of the US, just hasn’t gotten any traction.
Why doesn’t he have at least the same level of support as the 2016 candidate, Jill Stein? Unlike Stein, Hawkins has some credibility as an environmentalist. He was one of the founders of the Clamshell Alliance, an organization that deserves some credit for the halt in construction of nuclear power plants. It disbanded in the 1980’s. Since then, he has run for office 24 times, and lost 24 times. He got almost 184,000 votes when he ran for governor of New York in 2014, but that was only 4.8% of the vote. His high-water mark came in 2013, when he ran for the Syracuse city council and got 40% of the vote.
Well, maybe it’s because there isn’t anything green about the “anarcho-communism” or “libertarian municipalism” that Hawkins advocates. Or the public isn’t ready for the “marketless, moneyless, stateless cooperative commonwealth” that Klein advocates. Or maybe the Russian troll farms that promoted Stein in social media haven’t gotten around to Hawkins yet.
However, if you’re among the people who believe that the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination was rigged by the DNC, or Trump and Biden are both serial rapists, or that there is such a thing as “Obamagate”, or “Hillary’s emails”, there is no need for despair. Kanye West and his running mate, Michelle Tidball, have entered the race.
West is a celebrity, and has a wife who has large breasts and a TV show. He has said that slavery is a choice, and that Harriet Tubman didn’t free slaves. He is not only against abortion; he’s against contraception pills as well. He wants to re-introduce religion into schools. He believes that vaccines are “the mark of the beast”. He was a fan of Trump, visited him in the White House.
So, to Susan Sarandon and like-minded people, Kanye is your guy. He even has the support of Elon Musk. And the great thing about it is, unless you live in Oklahoma, you won’t actually have to go to the trouble of voting for him, because he won’t be on the ballot.