Efforts to Stop Third Parties Would be a Major Story in Any Other Presidential Election- if Candidates Weren't Getting Shot at. [Transcript]

Lee Camp is the former host and head writer of Redacted Tonight, the host of the podcast Moment of Clarity, and The Lee Camp Show as well as co-host of Government Secrets with Graham Elwood, and Common Censored with Eleanor Goldfield. Camp is the author of titles such as Moment of Clarity, Bullet Points and Punch Lines, and most recently Dangerous Ideas. He co-manages the news platform RadIndieMedia.com, and his newest show America Inc. with Lee Camp is on Breakthrough News. Camp had a wide-ranging conversation with Plea for the Fifth, that will be published in four parts. The third in our series focuses on the 2024 presidential election, and the current state of our democracy. Watch the video of this segment here, and the rest in our series with Lee Camp here.

Sean Ghazala: Fans of your comedy might know you're the manager of the Yard Rock 2024 campaign, and Yard Rock has a strong platform.

Yard Rock has

• Never supported or defended Israel's genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
• Never supported a war (and never will)
• Never supported an increase in pentagon spending (and never will)
• Did not support the global war on terror that's killed roughly 6 million

.. and much more. And as an aside, I think I may have run into Yard Rock on the campaign trail in my local forest, but you know, when we look at the 2024 race, we have incumbent President Biden with increasingly obvious cognitive decline. We have the former President's fascism-on-steroids after surviving his assassination attempt. We have RFK Jr, pro-genocide and has had a brain worm. But there are third party candidates like Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Claudia de la Cruz, that are speaking out against status quo politics, including being against this mass murder. So I wanted you to share what has struck you about this election cycle or what you're keeping your eye on over the next three, four months.

Lee Camp : I mean, in a lot of, in a lot of ways, this election cycle is utterly insane. But at the same time, I guess it's not that different from the insanity that the US political theatrics has become. Yeah, the fact that I even as cynical as I am, I never thought we'd see a day where we'd see a debate between one guy who can't say a whole sentence without just lying. But lying in such a - it's not like he says, I did pretty well on helping Americans - he'll say, I helped Americans more than anyone has ever helped Americans, it's totally ridiculous lies. So that's one guy. And then the other guy literally can't complete a whole sentence without getting confused and falling asleep halfway through. So I never thought we'd see that.

But it is a lot of the similar things in terms of the military industrial complex runs the same, the big oil runs the same, big banks run the same. Capitalism continues to gut our environment and destroy the world around us. And all of that continues pretty similarly, no matter what these two clowns say. We are seeing continued efforts, successful efforts to make sure that no third parties can have much influence on at least the voting results, I think third parties can have an influence on the issues that are brought up. But many, many of the issues that you or I might support that the Democrats have kind of gotten behind, or at least talked about, came from the Green Party, you know, if you're talking about universal health, universal health care, or Medicare for all, if you're talking about green New Deal $15 minimum wage, many of these things were first supported by the Green Party, and then the Democrats, you know, latched on to them, and then bastardized them. But the efforts to stop third parties are - in any other cycle where you know, the presidential candidates aren't getting shot at and stuff - it would be a major story that, you know, RFK Jr, who I will not support as long as he loves genocide. But he absolutely should have been on that debate stage, if you just look at the rule, what the rules used to be. The rules used to be if you're on a certain number of ballots, and you have if you're polling above a certain percent, which he easily was. Instead, they changed, they moved the debates much earlier. And they made it so that, you got to be on some crazy number of states' ballots. But many of those states have Democratic governments that are refusing basically to count the signatures and put them on the ballot. So, they're refusing to tell RFK he's on the ballot, because that would allow him to get on the debate stage. So, they have a million techniques to make sure no one's on these debate stages. Back when I lived in New York, I performed at a Jill Stein event in 2012. She then tried to attend the debate between Obama and is that McCain, Mitt Romney or McCain can't remember, but she was arrested for just trying to attend and just trying to be on the debate stage like and she didn't rush the stage, she was trying to go into the venue. And they arrested her she was on the ballot 85% of the country, and yet she was locked in a room handcuffed to a chair for eight hours until they released her without a charge. I mean, that's Democracy in America. That's, the free and fair democracy we get.