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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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I have a policy of not telling anyone who I actually voted for. That said, here are my notes for the rest of the third-party candidates:

Cladia De la Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation)

  • Single-payer healthcare
  • Pro-reparations (too left wing)
  • "seize the forgive all student debt", "Fight for a socialist future" (going to destroy the economy)
  • "cut military budget 90%" (going to destroy the Empire) and "lift sanctions" on "Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, North Korea and Iran" (going to lead to nuclear proliferation)
  • Take over fossil fuel companies (might actually solve climate change, but good luck doing that without a military.)
  • No mentions of freedom or freedom of speech, but I could get behind "disband the NSA"
  • Claims on her website that US median income is $31,000, which is a good 50% lower than the actual number given by the US census bureau in 2022.

Cornel West (Justice For All party)

  • '"Free Speech and Whistleblower Protections"
  • Making voting day a national holiday is great, but vote by mail and nothing about voter ID means coercion is going to be more rampant.
  • Nothing about nuclear or AI in platform
  • Green new deal: nationalizing fossil fuel industry, end new oil drilling (would take a cut out of climate change, but doesn't address foreign emissions)
  • Moratorium on False [climate] Solutions might address foreign emissions, but I doubt it.
  • Nothing about monopolies on platform
  • Streamlining legal pathways for immigration would help my family.
  • Abolishing ICE, demilitarizing the border, upholding asylum laws, and demilitarizing the police/criminal justice reform would probably harm my family

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (We The People party)

  • "dismantle the censorship-industrial complex"
  • "We will return the intelligence agencies to their proper role as protectors not violators of liberty."
  • "Install honest, competent leadership throughout the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency"
  • "replace corporate-friendly agency leaders with reformers and whistleblowers"
  • "Make the agencies transparent to public view"
  • Removing corporate influence from government hits pretty much all my major issues.
  • "Make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy" (the only serious proposal that I have seen for student debt that makes any sense)
  • universal public housing
  • term limits in congress
  • break up monopolies, end stock buybacks (good for national competitiveness)
  • equalize school funding
  • focus medical research on chronic disease prevention
  • "Protect our Environment from Corporate Corruption and Contamination"
  • "Dismantling US Imperialism", "unwinding empire" (would destroy international trade, probably send us into another dark age.)